The so-called nationalists maintain Drone attacks are damaging the sovereignty of Pakistan.
These nationalists include Rightists of various hues such as Jamat-e-Islami to Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Islam (F), and other somewhat liberal elements as well. They know that Pakistan is a declared ally of the US in the war against terror, and in that case, it’s of no significance whose Drones they are and whose territory they are targeting. Also, Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars and WikiLeaks establish Pakistan’s tacit approval of the Drone attacks.
Sure, the nationalists’ anti-American stance and dubbing the present government as US-backed validate their argument. Indeed, by way of inference also, most of these nationalists lean toward the Taliban who are openly attacking the sovereignty of Pakistan. But it seems they have no idea of internal sovereignty, but are concerned only about guarding the external sovereignty of Pakistan which is in no danger by the Drone attacks.
Is a country merely a piece of land whose sovereignty consists only in its territoriality? It could have been so in the olden times when principalities existed. Presently, sovereignty is a function of legality and constitutionality. When a new country emerges, its first urge is to attain legal constitutional status.
In today’s world, territorial sovereignty is just one part of the legal constitutional status of a country that endows it with its real sovereignty. This sovereignty is an internal phenomenon which gives a tract of land and a population of individual persons inhabiting that tract an identity and the status of a country. Internally this sovereignty is a collection of sovereign individuals whose life, property and rights/freedoms are ensured by the legal and constitutional arrangement of that country.
Externally this sovereignty embodies in its territorial boundaries defined by the same legal and constitutional arrangement. Thus, sovereignty requires safeguarding of the physical borders from the external invaders not as an end in-it-self but as a means to protecting life, property and rights/freedoms of the sovereign individuals who live inside those physical borders.
Ironically, their focus is on the collateral damage of life and property done by Drone attacks, but they are blind to the same damage of far greater magnitude done by the Taliban. By their logic, if some criminals take a family inside their home hostage, and if police come to this family’s rescue, and as a result of police’s action one or two innocent persons lose their life, then it is police which is to be blamed, not the criminals. Common sense defies this nationalism.
Let these nationalists exalt the criminals. It is their doing. But it is for the sovereign individuals to realize what that nationalism means and what it has in store for their sovereignty and Pakistan’s as well.
DR KHALIL AHMAD
Lahore