Media Watch: If you’re going to watch one thing from last week

Mainstream urban Pakistan seems to be taken with the idea that the military has changed tack and is now acting out against Islamist militants everywhere in the country. Which is surprising, since this demographic wasn’t willing, till recently, to admit that the military was playing the good Taliban/bad Taliban game in the first place. All this reads straight out of the Orwellian dystopian novel 1984, where the state machinery shuttled from “We were always at war with Oceania” to “We were never at war with Oceania” with remarkable ease.

Just the way few in the media were questioning the deep state then, few are questioning this supposed paradigm shift that we keep hearing of now. Despite clear, very clear, signs that suggest things are the way they were.

We’ve had the advisor to the prime minister on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, say that the top leadership of the Afghan Taliban was, in fact, inside Pakistan. This made headline news all over the world, but the Pakistani media covered it the way it would have his statement regarding increased trade with France.

We’ve had the Punjab home minister saying actions can’t be taken against Punjab-based organisations like the Jaish-e-Muhammad because the state had been backing them.

We’ve had the federal interior minister, after the Afghan Taliban chief had been found and taken out within Pakistan by a US drone strike, start action against Nadra, not the security forces, for having issued the fellow an identification card. A clearly silly attempt at deflecting attention from the deep state, but really, what other choice did he have? The poor folks over at Nadra can’t really say much now, but those with an interest are talking of a senior Nadra official’s presentation in 2013 (much after the supposed shift) to the Senate standing committee on the interior, where he said that the organisation had blocked 27,000 CNICs over 12 years (again, these figures are from three years ago) and that the blocking reports are sent to the agencies for clearance. These agencies, he said, cleared about 90 per cent of the cases.

But what if the above examples aren’t good enough for you? They’re politicians, you might say, and that you hate them all. Plus, they’re not really clear in their words either, are they? That their hints are a meandering mesh of shuff-shuff, with no shufftalu in sight. What are they trying to say, you, sitting in Karachi, Islamabad or Lahore, might angrily demand.

Well, you’re in luck, sir. Because we have a former general (three stars, no less) doing his thing. And this former ISI chief is not one for subtlety either, which is refreshing. He is extremely articulate and is unequivocal in his speech. All without the shred of an apology.

You might have seen Asad Durrani’s Head-to-Head program with Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hassan at the Oxford Union, where he rationalised his former agency’s policies. He’s at it again, with Mehdi Hassan, but this time, he squares off against another former spymaster, Michael Flinn of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Though this program was still not as much a clear crystallisation of the state’s views as the other one was, it was still fascinating.

The American, cautious not to rile Durrani, nevertheless made no bones about what he thought. Right from the first question that was put to him, about whether the Pakistani army was playing a double game in the war on terror — pretending to support the US but actually supporting the Taliban — Flynn says, “In a short answer, the answer is yes.”

Flynn says that the national security interests of Pakistan have never been aligned with that of the US. Durrani agrees. Says that all nations aresupposed to look out for themselves. Okay, says Mehdi, your national interests are different, but isn’t it then hypocritical of you to keep taking American money? Will you be returning the 18 or so billion dollars that your government has been receiving for this war? Without breaking a sweat, Durrani says no. There are many reasons for the Americans to continue giving money and many for the Pakistanis to keep taking that money, he says.

Flynn had pointed out that when Pakistan supported these groups, they multiplied and grew many times over within Pakistan; he said right about now Pakistan’s stability is a greater concern for him than even Afghanistan’s.

But that takes the conversation to the earlier one at the Oxford union that I had mentioned. Mehdi Hassan had said to Durrani that even in amoral, we’ll-take-your-money-but-will-do-what-we-like paradigm, which didn’t care about the civilian casualties in Afghanistan, surely it was clear now that even Pakistan’s rational self interest had been severely compromised. That militants that are supported by the groups that the Pakistani state supports carry out attacks such as the one on the Army Public School in Peshawar.

Durrani had then replied, spreading a chill across the hall, “collateral damage.”