Gen Hamid Gul and his legacy
The General in His Labyrinth was the title of another masterly piece of fiction by the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The route that Marquez, that great storyteller, took was both unorthodox and risky. For this particular work of his is centred on the fictionalised last days of the great liberator Simon Bolivar of Latin America.
General Hamid Gul, may the Almighty bless his soul, was to me a general in his labyrinth. I pray for his departed soul and I sincerely do so, without a faint hint of any irony or cynicism. He may have been a patriot and a staunch believer, I am no one to hold him accountable on both the counts for I truly believe those two are very high, lofty virtues left at best to be decided by, in the case of the former, collective conscience and wisdom and the later a higher, supreme authority, God. What I can hold him accountable for as enshrined in my rights as enunciated by the constitution of the land are his acts of omission and commission in the service of the state of Pakistan. I am neither committing an act of treason and am within my legal and moral limits in doing so.
General Hamid Gul violated his oath on which he had sworn to serve his nation even if it meant laying his life for the country by actively indulging in politics. Not only did he do politics but did so aggressively by pandering to the right in his obsessive quest to undo forces of the left which he ‘thought’ had the active support and backing of his nemesis, the West and a Soviet Union on the brink of dismemberment. He did so without sufficient evidence and in doing so ensured that the mandate of his countrymen was trampled upon in favour of an engineered victory for the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, a rightist force he had nurtured.
This only further alienated the people from their belief in bringing and changing their representatives through the ballot box, a tendency that continues till date. This firmly put Pakistan on a rightist pedestal after the disastrous Zia dictatorship that unabashedly manipulated religion for its survival. The fashion of cobbling coalitions by buying, exchanging loyalties and an assortment of the political and militant right is but General Gul’s legacy. He should have either apologised or stood trial for these acts. It would not have been entirely incorrect to remind General Gul that the very countries at the centre of his tirades, the US, Israel and India, are strong democracies and such adventures in these countries would have meant certain chastisement and accountability. But for the General was in his labyrinth.
In his detailed graphic and grotesque account of the Mazar-e-Sharif battle for his seminal work on the Taliban, Ahmed Rashid writes of how hundreds of corpses lay upon each other, some even alive while others charred beyond recognition, and as to how stray dogs and animals fed on these remains for days. General Gul’s legacy of fostering the Taliban and looking the other way during the development of a nexus between the Taliban and local militant groups is another misdeed for which he should have either apologised or held accountable. The blend of this variety has come back to haunt Pakistan and shaken our very foundations, killing our innocent young and old, unsparing of even our school children.
In the face of his abject failure of the Jalalabad operation, General Gul was at the forefront in his incessant patronage of the mujahideen who had just been routed by the Afghan National Army. By undertaking such a path, General Gul, sadly, sowed the seeds of hatred and detestation in the eyes of ordinary Afghans against Pakistan and everything Pakistani. Those seeds have become a tree today and continue to gradually stretch out its firm branches and cast its shade over the future of our relations with Afghanistan. But for the General was in his labyrinth.
Another of General Gul’s damning legacies is his fanatical calls to the believers for jihad and destruction of the West. General Hamid Gul practically ensured that the fervent calls for jihad are answered by millions of the most poor and destitute of his countrymen. The anatomy of jihad that has come to be one of the most prominent features of our national psyche and foreign, strategic outlook for the past few decades, has brought a promising country to near international isolation and enormous social, economic and political decline. I had wished that both of General Hamid’s own sons had answered the call of the faithful rather than living and earning their livelihood in the United States. But for the General was in his labyrinth.
General Hamid Gul and his conduct in office weakened the cause of a democratic and vibrant Pakistan and its political culture. His fanatical desires diluted civil authority and tipped the balance of power towards the military in the civil-military equation. His defiance of civil authority did not make him a better Pakistani, a law abiding citizen or a better soldier too. At a time when the country needed a strong democratic polity after the end of the disastrous Zia years, General Gul could have made his place in history by strengthening democratic culture and practices, rule of law and democratic institutions. However, his assertions, bizarre comments and conspiracy theories have only made the common man more delusional and distrustful of politics and politicians. In doing his bidding, he might have accomplished this short term objective but aborted with his own doing the longer term objective of a strong, prosperous and democratic Pakistan as envisaged by its founding fathers.
But for the General was in his labyrinth and that has come to cost his motherland much, too much. A motherland, General Gul swore allegiance of his unflinching love and loyalty too.