Calling them out

In her book, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the then Chicago Tribune and now ProPublica reporter Kim Barker may have painted him in colours most lurid, but Mian Nawaz Sharif at this most critical point when Pakistan’s political class is uncomfortably shuffling around has come up with a response that is considered, correct, subtle and, yes, statesmanlike.

Under him, the PML(N) took nine days to give a policy statement on the US raid to decimate OBL, but its unambiguity must be lauded. Rejecting the eyewash of an in-house army inquiry that the PM had announced, it has demanded a judicial commission instead to probe the failure in detecting both OBL and the US Special Forces helicopters and to fix responsibility.

Given the recent political developments, the alliance-making which is likely to marginalise his party even in the Punjab in the weeks and months to come, the temptation to go for the government and give a wide berth to the fount of real power in the country must have been enormously tempting to him. Yet brushing aside the hawks in his own party, like younger sibling Shahbaz and Nisar Ali Khan who wanted to go gunning after the government, specifically at M/s. Zardari and Gilani, Nawaz chose to rise above the fray and call a spade a spade.

One may have reservations about his previous disappearing acts, most often to London’s cooler climes, whenever in the last three years a vital national issue cried for him to take a position. And even on the way Nawaz desires to man his commission, or its timeframe, but the idea is spot-on and the clarity is most welcome.

It is true that the PPP and its leadership has to make do with the pressure of its government’s survival, and with allies like the Quislings and the MQM, has always to keep looking over its shoulder. That said, being the quintessential anti-establishment party, such a standpoint was once associated with the PPP. But given the leadership that had cowered from taking on the murderous mullahs when one of its oldest members and the Governor Punjab Salmaan Taseer and its federal minister Shahbaz Bhatti were both slain, the flim-flam and fudging such as Gilani’s speech in the NA that pleased none was not really surprising.

One has to grant that not being encumbered with the trappings of power unlike the PPP, it was easier for Nawaz to take the stance that he did. And to be fair to Zardari and Gilani, they must have shuddered at remembering what happened to those prime ministers who had thrown the gauntlet of a probe at the army. Not to go too far behind in time, both Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Mohammad Khan Junejo had to pay for their indiscretions. The former was banished from power and hanged while the latter was only made to part with power. And that for unpublished probes of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission on the secession of East Pakistan and the Ojhri Camp incident which had rained such hell on Rawalpindi and Islamabad in early 1988.

This is the sort of instinctive response you get from the self-appointed guardians of national interest if you dare to show them up even when they have messed up on such a colossal scale.

Nawaz’s clarion call notwithstanding, the closing of ranks of the powers-that-be is now quite visible. Shell-shocked as they were in the aftermath of the SEALs sortie and the impossible-to-live-down kind of global embarrassment that it caused, it has taken them some time to recover. But after deafening silence at first and then some days of perplexed looks, pregnant pauses and puzzled responses, they have recovered enough to show some coherence. Having failed to deflect responsibility towards the government, the buffing up of the army’s image was the next resort. They looked like lost sheep in the aftermath, but now certain anchors and vernacular columnists have found their voice, a too obvious newspaper advertisement followed by an even cruder attempt at rent-a-protest in Islamabad has taken place.

For all intents and purposes, this is aimed not at hoodwinking the US, but the hapless people of this country.

Needless to say this stress on somehow wriggling out of a tight spot, sticking to the old ways and evading reform is not the right approach. Our forces have for long, as long as six decades, done the US’ bidding. Most of it was not in our national interest, and has caused us irreparable harm. That includes the first Afghan War of the twentieth century, in the 1980s. But this once, when the Americans are trying to shove down our throats action against the Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and that self-inflicted blight in the form of our own militant jaishs and lashkars, it indeed is in our interest to go after them.

The Americans, of course, are not being altruistic. It is in their self-interest that they are so vehement about it, but this once their interests and our interests have found convergence like never before.

If anything, the happenings in the first decade of this new millennium, the relentless bloodletting that we have suffered, the colossal financial losses that we have undergone, and above all the battering that our image as a nation has taken for using terror as a tool and harbouring terrorists, should make it obvious: a U-turn in state policy cannot and should not be put off a moment longer, for it will be tantamount to wading into waters even more dangerous and uncharted.

The writer is Sports and Magazines Editor, Pakistan Today.