Grandiose egos, inverted priorities

The prospect of a self-righteous and obduracy-driven approach

The spectre of violence is both present and incisive, but the remedy being forwarded by various stakeholders fails in offering a sustainable solution that would free the country of its tentacles and cure it of its short- and long-term effects.

Even before taking oath as prime minister, Nawaz Sharif has extended an olive branch to the Taliban. Offering dialogue to the militant outfits, he reasoned: “Forty-thousand precious lives have been lost and the national economy is suffering a loss of billions of dollars. Why shouldn’t we sit for a dialogue to restore peace?” He went on to state: “It is the best available option.”

Simultaneously, inviting the Taliban to initiate peace talks, the PTI CM-designate in the volatile Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) has said: “We have no enmity with the Taliban”. Stating that the Taliban were also Pakistanis, he requested the militant groups in a patently apologetic manner to hold talks for establishing peace in the region.

These two statements are in sharp contrast with the Chief of Army Staff’s proclamation on the Martyrs Day (Yuam-e-Shuhada) when he embraced the war on terror unequivocally: “The menace of terrorism and extremism has claimed thousands of lives. However, despite all this bloodshed, certain quarters still want to remain embroiled in the debate concerning the causes of this war and who imposed it on us. If a small faction wants to impose its distorted ideology over the entire nation by taking up arms and, for this purpose, defies the constitution of Pakistan and the democratic process and considers all forms of bloodshed justified, then does the fight against this enemy of the state constitute someone else’s war?” The COAS reiterated this unambiguous perception of the militant mindset in his address at the International Symposium on Countering Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) on May 20 in Rawalpindi: “In these elections, people of Pakistan not only courageously withstood the threat of terrorism, they also defied unfounded dictates of an insignificant and misguided minority”.

So, the gnawing question is how are these two seemingly contrasting positions going to be reconciled and what would be the shape and thrust of any national anti-terrorism policy that eluded the full five years of the previous ‘democratic’ government? While the victorious political leaderships at the centre and in the restive KPK have come out strongly advocating the policy of engagement with the militants who have inflicted grievous damage in men and material on the country in the last ten years, the military mindset seems fully convinced not to compromise with the spectre of militancy in the country. It would also be interesting to see how would an anti-terror policy based on negotiations with the militants, symbolising the current mindset of the political leaderships, assuage the sentiments of those families, in the civil and the military who have paid the ultimate price in the national fight against a morbid approach that uses terror as a principal weapon to advance its obscurantist agenda?

Add to this the barbarity of another kind that has been consistently unleashed on Karachi resulting in the elimination of thousands of innocent people at the hands of extortionists and ransom-seekers. The killing spree has only escalated with the passage of time and no one is safe from these criminal bandits. Seemingly, there is irrefutable evidence available with the administrative and security agencies of the country regarding the involvement of the militant wings of political parties in this unceasing murderous spree, but no one is quite willing to confront the onslaught for fear of their own lives. Imagine the family of Zahra Shahid Hussain refusing to register an FIR because they had received threats of elimination if they dared do so. The whole city comes to a standstill ever so frequently on the call of the leadership of a political party and the writ of the state is nowhere to be seen. The city has been forfeited to the mercy of these criminal mafias which operate with gleeful abandon while the security apparatus of the province is either too ill-equipped to offer any meaningful resistance, or is wantonly complicit in the gory orgies inflicted upon a hapless people with murderous consistency and frequency. The whole city is perpetually trapped in the tentacles of fear.

The twin-problem encompassing external militancy and internal bloodletting offers the gravest challenge to the yet-to-be inducted governments at the centre and in the provinces. The policy to combat these existential challenges should not suffer from any ambiguities or contradictions: the civil and the military mindsets should be in perfect harmony on the need to eliminate the menace of terrorism and militancy by formulating a comprehensive policy and an effective operational mechanism. Any conflict in perception and approach could be fatal.

With the potential of the KPK government yet to be gauged, the confrontational past of the prime-ministerial hopeful and his unbending infatuation with accumulating and exercising princely dictatorial prerogatives could be a monumental negative at the outset. Much may seem to have changed and one may be at the receiving end of sweet-sounding invocations, but, in essence, it remains a mindset that is dogged with an inherent paucity of intelligence and even-headedness and a lack of capacity to engage conflicting viewpoints to help evolve sustainable strategies and policies that would suit the national security paradigm. The approach, by and large, is likely to remain self-righteous and obduracy-driven concentrating on advancing agendas that are centric to satiating petulant whims and proclivities rather than the need of defining a meaningful national roadmap to effectively address the menace of militancy and escalating internal strife. Political compromises are likely to be made in the name of forging ‘national consensus’ which would gravely dent the institutional ability to confront the patrons and manipulators of criminal mafias in the country. The principal objective would be to further advance the Machiavellian understanding with other stakeholders of taking turns to deprive the country of its resources and purge it of its resolve. Consequently, the next five years would be mostly pock-marked by debilitating compromises to further perpetuate the hold of the forces of the status-quo. Owing to the largesse of its patrons, the new administration may even be able to show some cosmetic improvements, but, predominantly, and notwithstanding the array of slaves it may have at its command from a servile and highly politicised bureaucracy, it would be a rule of indescribable mediocrity signifying grandiose egos, but afflicted with paucity of vision and inverted priorities.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected]