Comedy of errors

Spin in the time of s**t hitting the fan

Two years on, one thinks it would have been funny, had it not been so embarrassing as a Pakistani. No, not the actual event of Bin Laden’s capture from Abbottabad but the media management that followed. All three services chiefs gave strange statements within three weeks of each other.

(1) First, the army chief, through the Corps Commanders’ meeting. As per a press release, the generals said, to paraphrase, that the incident would not be allowed again. This led the simpler amongst us to ask whether by this, the generals meant that the Americans will not be allowed to kill Osama again?

(2) Then, the air chief, who said the Americans helicopters were not detected because the air-force’s radars were turned off. All this precious equipment, paid for by the military budget, which is the pound of flesh the polity feeds our protectors and for what? To gather dust? The next time an air-force officer doesn’t agree with you on any issue, even personal ones, do ask him whether his radar has been turned off.

(3) Not directly related to the OBL incident, but thrown our way by fate for purposes of conceptual symmetry, the naval chief – after attackers completely destroyed two of the five of the Navy’s elite Orion aircraft and killed 18 personnel at PNS Mehran – thanked Allah that the attackers weren’t successful in their mission. Only Allah knows what the admiral calls a success.

But this is not to disparage only the military leadership either. After the PNS Mehran incident, the interior minister had, quite bizarrely, described the attackers as being dressed as Star Wars characters.

And the Foreign Secretary, feeling that the OBL incident was too big to be handled merely by the Foreign Office spokesperson, had decided to address the press conference himself. Woefully inarticulate, this conference was a series of mumbles, more akin to the sleepy ramblings of an elderly uncle after a heavy Sunday morning brunch. (Trivia: the FS happened to be the brother of the naval chief.)

It was a bizarre comedy of errors. But it could serve to illustrate one important point. Don’t talk to the media. When the proverbial hits the fan and you’re up the creek without a pedal, don’t talk to the media and instead, think very, very carefully about what your first words are going to be. Don’t let any services’ chief say anything and don’t even let the PM’s office break radio silence. The PM secretariat, working in tandem with the FO, should prepare a statement and then let the FO Spokesperson do his/her thing. There should be a crisis plan for all eventualities ready beforehand, including this one. True, who in their wildest imaginations, in their most creative of PR war games would have believed Bin Laden would eventually be captured from the garrison town? But still, a modified version of the Mullah-Omar’s-in-Quetta Hypothesis could have been used.

To segue to the present: the Abbottabad commission’s report has been leaked to the press. There is no need to respond to it at all. Pakistanis are disappointed by the report. The western media establishments, surprisingly, are not. They call it scathing self-criticism and all that. Whereas we, correctly, wanted names to be named and for heads to roll.

One issue that obviously raises its head when discussing the whole issue is that of incompetence. More important than how our forces could let US military choppers come deep into Pakistani territory while their fighter jets provided cover overhead is how our intelligence apparatus, otherwise so feared by journalists and politicians across the country, could not detect the world’s most wanted man living in peace in Abbottabad.

So if incompetence indeed is the central question, how about commenting on the professional competence of Kashif Abbasi (Off the Record, ARY, 9th July)? In particular, his inability to even attempt to rein in Dr Shahid Masood, who was being extremely rude to the other panelists. First the good doctor started saying that he was caught between the views of the ISI (Gen Hamid Gul) and the CIA (Kamran Shafi and Asma Jehangir). Then there was his use of the words pitthu and tattu, first for the strawmen who let the OBL incident happen and then, strangely, for Kamran Shafi himself.

The man who an alleged pitthu made Chairman PTV only simmered down when given a dose by Asma Jehangir herself. Kashif Abbasi himself seemed uninterested, much like a high-society auntie who has the maid change the kids’ diapers.