Let me begin by welcoming Mian Nawaz Sharif and his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, to the hot seat. In the coming days, that seat will become steadily hotter. If Mr Sharif wishes to prosper, he will need to focus on economy, security and foreign policies — three areas requiring serious thought and decisions that cannot flow from optimistic assumptions but must bear in mind cold, hard realities.

The first thing that Sharif needs to do is to adopt a two-track approach to these policy areas. The government has its own organisations that deal with these policies. The functionaries who run these policies and have been running them range from average to outstanding. However, most, if not all, suffer from what is known as bounded rationality.

Decision-making is a difficult process. It is impacted by at least three main factors: no one can have perfect information, people approach issues according to their mental limitations and, in almost all situations, there’s finite time in which to make decisions.

The central problem, however, pertains to limited information. For instance, in foreign policy one is dealing with other state actors and it is not possible to have full information regarding what other actors are thinking or how they will behave. It is also very difficult to figure out intentions, which is why states generally base their foreign policy on the idea of other actors’ capabilities — a factor which is quantifiable.

Another variable here is that it is difficult to assess the optimal choices of state actors because actors very often act intransigently on an issue in order to secure gains on another. In other words, they play for what may be sub-optimal so as they can protect what is optimal.

Optimising decision-making is, therefore, a complex problem. Since the process can never be made fully rational, there is all the more reason to make it secure against emotions and irrationality. Yet another difficulty relates to deciding a course of action after looking at a complex picture. That is the prescriptive side. Decisions force one’s hand into simplifying choices, settling for satisfactory rather than optimal solutions. This approach, to quote Herbert Simon, relies on structures of the environment, the regularity that helps decision-makers feel comfortable.

So, decision-making becomes more a function of perceptions than reality. To put it another way, over a long period of time, the experts dealing with a problem become somewhat immune to changes in the environment in which decisions are to be made and fail to pick up new signals. Even if they do, they would sooner try to fit them into their pre-existing biases than reconfigure their existing templates.

The point is that while civil and military bureaucrats do their job well, they are weighed down by the problem of bounded rationality. This is the other extreme from the unreserved enthusiasm that a politician might want to display in order to solve a problem or get a breakthrough.

The reality lies somewhere in between. It is important for Mr Sharif to be aware of this problem in the three policy areas that I mentioned above.

This is where the second track comes in. There are many experts outside the government. There is no institutional mechanism that I know of which allows the proper participation of these experts in policy formation, the only exception being the recent exercise of getting some to appear before parliamentary committees. But that is not enough and it is sporadic. Mr Sharif needs to create institutional space for outside-the-government experts in various fields to have regular interaction with relevant governmental organisations. I say institutional because this cannot be left to the whims of the bureaucrats.

Lest I be misunderstood, deliberately or unwittingly, let me state clearly that such experts are not to be paid from the government kitty; they are not to be given flag cars. These are people happily employed. The idea is to create another track that can reduce the impact of bounded rationality and optimise decisions in the realm of national security as far as possible, since decisions in no way can be fully optimised.

These experts should come from various fields and this body, whatever it might be called, should have committees and sub-committees. It should be structured such that there is no incentive for people who are part of it to try and resort to the low cut and thrust that is the bane of the government machinery. The modalities of that are outside the scope of this article.

Once this body is formed, let it work out a national security strategy, just like the government should have its own body to do the same. At the end of the exercise, let there be reconciliation between the two documents. It will also help us see, as a nation, how two different groups approach the concept of national security — what are the differences, what similarities.

Such a document is vital since, for once, in our existence, we need to figure out who and what we are, how we perceive our place in the region and beyond, and what route we want to take to get to where we should be. The exercise could either change the determinants, require us to alter some and retain others or, on an off-chance, keep them intact.

Quite apart from the institutional requirement for such a body and its interaction with the governmental structures, it is also important to keep in check Mr Sharif’s default urge to play his hand in matters which require a stay rather than a hit.

Dealing with security means dealing with the security sector; dealing with foreign policy means getting briefings about the ground realities and understanding, given the threats, the link between foreign and security policies before taking a decision and tackling the economy means knowing what is already there and what experts have worked on. The idea is to avoid wild swings; the idea also is to shun the extremes of conservative decision-making and going unnecessarily radical.

Good sentiments do not make good policies. The American critic and writer HL Mencken said that poetry has done enough when it charms … [but] prose must also convince. That’s the difference between wishes and is-es. Mr Sharif needs to first understand the environment in which he will be required to make decisions before playing his hand.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2013.

Some days ago, at the Islamabad Literary Festival — yes, literature has finally reached the Margallas — I chanced to sit through a session dubbed “Nuclear Pakistan: An Overview of the Strategic Dimensions”. It was a monumental disappointment.

There was nothing “strategic” about the session. It wasn’t even a poor rehash of an introductory class on nuclear strategy and the trajectory older nuclear powers took, and which was found wanting in almost all its facets.

The first problem always is the old and stale debate between deterrence optimists and pessimists. Nuclear weapons are good. They secure states. They are a cheaper option. No, they are bad. They can be stolen. They don’t secure anything. The United States and the Soviet Union lost wars despite nuclear weapons. In the case of Pakistan, there’s greater danger of their falling in the hands of the terrorists, blah, blah.

These are not strategic assertions. These are polemical positions. Like most polemical positions, they select their own facts and ignore the rest.

The fact is that nuclear weapons are bad, as are all weapons or anything that can be turned into a weapon. But nuclear weapons can cause mass destruction, unlike most other weapons, regardless of the fact that conventional gravity bombing killed more civilians in World War II than the two atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And those bombs were nothing compared to what the nuclear-weapon states possess now.

So, we have a problem and that problem is not just Pakistan-specific. It relates to all the states that have nuclear arsenals.

So, why do we have nuclear weapons? Do they help in winning wars? No. You do not take a knife to a gunfight and you don’t take a nuclear weapon to an irregular war. A pistol can’t perform the function of a sniper rifle and vice versa. The function of nuclear weapons has then to be placed properly.

If a war does happen, despite nuclear weapons, then the weapons have already failed. Their only use is to prevent wars. They are not war-fighting weapons. This is why the concept of tactical nuclear weapons is bollocks. The United States, during the Bush era, had begun talking about ‘forward deterrence’, which meant using tiny yields in areas of actual fighting. It was and remains a stupid theory not only because it strikes a blow to the normative standard that a nuclear-weapon state will never use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear one, but because such use is useless even operationally. Laying an area waste can be good revenge but it doesn’t translate into a strategic victory.

Deterrence is the primary and only function of nuclear weapons. And in that, the best mode is counter-value targeting. Adversaries know that both or all can kill millions in a city and, therefore, none will come to blows. One speaker at the session advised Pakistan to have offensive deterrence and talked about counter-force targeting and TNWs. It surprises me that some of us are still flaunting ideas that have been debated and buried in the West. Counter-force targeting relied on the argument that nuclear weapons could actually be used against enemy forces selectively, which would pressure the enemy into showing the same restraint. Developed by Robert McNamara as a supplement to the broader, three-phased Flexible Response doctrine, this came to be called the No-Cities doctrine.

Today, no one takes this seriously. Even McNamara offered a mea culpa, much before his death. In any case, this kind of targeting strategy would demand a developed and deployed second strike capability. That has immense cost. Also, counter-force targeting relies on offence rather than defence.

Speakers in Pakistan are also fond of citing the stability-instability paradox, another concept that has no physical and psychological space in the context of South Asia. The paradox relied on the fact that the Centre will hold (Germany, which was to be the main battle ground) while the periphery can remain unstable. In other words, while the rest of the world fights the proxy, ideological wars between the United States and the Soviet Union, central Europe will remain stable.

How does this work in South Asia? The only argument that proponents can come up with is that Pakistan and India can fight sub-conventional wars. Kargil is cited as an example. (It’s a bad example but that’s another topic.)

After the Kargil conflict, India began its own studies of how to punish Pakistan without escalating a conflict. Later, after the 2001-02 stand-off fiasco in which India lost over 700 soldiers without fighting a war with Pakistan and realised it couldn’t gain any advantage, it started developing the Cold Start Doctrine (CSD): combining the twin features of fast surgical strikes with forward deployment of self-sustained Independent Battle Groups (IBGs).

While we make much of CSD, it’s more a wish than reality. There’s no space for the “famed” stability-instability paradox in South Asia except to keep conferences alive. Neither sub-conventional war nor surgical strikes is a strategic option. Neither can, if at all, go beyond tactical gains that can only accumulate strategic losses.

Quite apart from our inability to develop a doctrine for the placement of nuclear capability as one component of state policy, which essentially means we don’t know what the hell to do with them apart from arguing for them in and through dead theories, we have also shown an utter lack of thought apropos of the changing nature of war itself.

Cyber-war is a reality. It means the keyboard and the internet. It means the issue of safety and security of nuclear weapons is not just about someone stealing a weapon or nuclear materials or even attacking a facility. Those possibilities are largely passé. The new threat is someone getting into the command and control systems. That’s the new game. I am not sure we — or any of the nuclear-weapon states — are prepared for that. Nothing can be foolproof. As someone said, for every proof there’s always a fool. There’s also the issue of technologies that can neutralise the adversary from the air, even from space.

Finally, as Charles Perrow noted in his seminal work, accidents and incidents are inevitable in high risk technologies. And disasters are not just man-made. They can also be natural. Fukushima is a good example.

The idea should be to debate these issues objectively and without acting as polemicists. Nuclear weapons were important and will remain so for some time to come. But is there a cut-off point for that?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 7^th, 2013.

Why is the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacking the political interests of three parties, namely the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM)? What does the TTP hope to gain out of this policy?

We have an answer to the first question from the TTP itself. These three parties are being attacked because they have a liberal-secular outlook, which makes them the bête-noire of the TTP. Second, they were part of the coalition government under whose watch the military operations against the Taliban were conducted. Is it then part ideological and part revenge?

No. That would be too simplistic and linear. While ideology and revenge play an important role as markers to motivate the heavy lifters, the foot soldiers, they are a means to an end. The end, the strategic mosaic, is bigger than the small, tactical pieces that make it up. Also, to think that the Taliban are merely uncouth fighters or their planners do not understand the sophisticated concepts of strategy will be a big mistake. There is reason to believe, and there is empirical evidence of it, that they are fully versed in the art of war, both its purpose and its aim — the first denoting the political objective, the second concerned with the actual conduct of battles.

Seen from this perspective, the violence the TTP is generating is not gratuitous. It is purposive. These are small-scale multiple attacks with a huge psychological cumulative impact; easy to manage, little cost, disproportionate gains.

So, what is the purpose? This is where matters become diabolically interesting.

The TTP knows it cannot capture political power directly. It is also too early for it to expect, despite the denominational conservatism of an average Pakistani, to have him or her reject the idea of elections or democracy. The average Pakistani may do abominable things on certain issues of religion, including murder, but is not unidimensional.

So, if elections cannot be prevented at this stage in the game, what’s the best alternative? It is to ensure that those parties whose presence in the socioeconomic and political life of Pakistan is threatening to the Taliban ideology must be pushed to the sidelines.

The strategy then becomes twofold. On the one hand, the TTP will use terror tactics to instill fear in the parties that it wants out of the game, and on the other, despite its opposition to the institutional mechanisms that define Pakistan today, support those political elements that it thinks will be more amenable to negotiating with it. Within this, there is a third minor strand too — parties like the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jama’at (ASWJ), which are primarily the political face of terrorist groups affiliated with the TTP.

These parties, more like groupings, link up with the right-of-centre and right-wing parties to capture enough political space to become useful in pushing for legislation that is regressive. Of course, there are local compulsions that both restrict and facilitate their operations, but that is in the nature of the game which, as noted earlier, is far from linear.

The TTP has one thing going in its favour — the fear factor. It knows that the state, despite multiple operations, has not been able to either make it irrelevant or dislocate it from the context that strengthens it. It has also played on the great confusion that runs through Pakistani society: is this our war? While it is possible to criticise American policies in the region and yet be anti-Taliban, this being a desirable course of action in fact, the problem is that the Pakistanis, for the most part, have chosen to lull themselves into thinking that with the Americans gone from here, the TTP will automatically demobilise and accept the writ of the state.

This is certainly the view of Imran Khan and has filtered down to his party leaders and supporters. One could perhaps laugh it off for its naiveté if the consequences of this linearity weren’t so threatening. Be that as it may, the TTP knows that this confusion plays to its advantage. At the minimum, it has precluded the state from developing a proper response to the TTP threat. Military operations in general and counterterrorism strategies in specific cannot be fully successful without a public buy-in, and the public’s acceptance of what the state must do is heavily contingent upon a clear understanding of the threat.

Of course, there is the matter of how successful the state has been. There is, for instance, the example of the ANP choosing to talk to the Taliban. The ANP did this because it realised that it is alone and the state cannot secure it. To that extent, the ANP’s reluctant decision to call an All Party Conference to this end is not the same thing as when the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam (Fazl) calls for one.

We will be remiss if we did not mention another important factor: governance. The out-gone coalition didn’t cover itself in glory on that count. That factor, in an election campaign and quite apart from TTP attacks, is also playing to its disadvantage and, by that logic, to the advantage of the very parties the TTP has given an open playing field to. It will be difficult to assess, in any meaningful or even acceptable way, whether — if they do — they lost out to other parties because of this threat or their poor performance. They have already said that because they cannot reach their voters, the election will not be free. And if it isn’t free, it can’t be fair.

If a situation arises in which these parties refuse to accept the election results, the gains will again be the TTP’s.

Finally, while this is the TTP’s long-term strategy, the conglomeration controls the tap from whence violence flows out. They will resort to it to supplement the broader strategy of pressuring the incoming government. Talking is never bad but talking from a position of weakness is always disastrous. Secondly, any talk about talks must keep in mind that while states negotiate with insurgent groups, they don’t with terrorists. If the TTP can get the state to accept its legitimacy as a negotiating partner, that would be a major plus for the TTP.

That is the mid-term strategy in the TTP’s march towards controlling Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2013.

I am happy that Yaqoob Khan Bangash has noted that we are increasingly a people that set little store by ideas; indeed, as I have seen, most of us abhor, downright, the idea of dealing with and in ideas. That Bangash noted this while speaking at the International Judicial Conference and not in a less august gathering or on his Twitter timeline, only adds to the irony, besides showing us the extent of our poverty.

Bangash wants us to have our own idea of justice, one grounded in the multiple identities that we have inherited, Islamic and non-Islamic. I agree. Yet, that’s precisely the point at which our troubles begin. As a people, regardless of which ideological camp we belong to, we look for purity, whether it is ideological, ethnic, linguistic, or denominational and religious.

It begins with anxiety and disquiet, to quote Amartya Sen. But it doesn’t stop there. Its passivity, given other circumstances, can, and does, turn aggressive. It can become a political course of action and when that happens, the idea of multiple identities coming together in a single human being to create its own complexity, where the sum is more than the parts, succumbs to the importance of a group identity — whether that group identity is based on shared history and a longing for it or is guided by other factors.

As a historian, I am certain that the irony of a deep anxiety for shared history is not lost on Bangash because it usually begins and ends with ahistorical attitudes. Going back in time to find oneself, as opposed to studying the past, requires that the march of history be stopped. Add to that ahistoricism ideological millenarianism and we get an explosive mix that doesn’t deal with ideas and multiple identities but with purity.

Purity does not allow for Sen’s multiple identities: one cannot be an Asian or an Indian, a heterosexual or a defender of gay and lesbian rights, religious or non-religious et cetera, all at the same time. That a man can carry multiple identities and “belong to each one of the membership groups” is a function of ideas, not ideologies.

Only a few days ago, I was reading about the English translation of Albert Camus’ Chroniques algériennes (Algerian Chronicles), a work that depicts the agony of Camus and subsumed in his self multiple identities at a time when circumstances forced one, even the intellectuals, to take sides. That’s never an easy choice to make; it requires a man who has the courage to walk alone.

Ideas are about freedom; ideologies are about binds, -isms. But let not another irony be lost on anyone. Ideologies always begin with ideas: the ideas of some, leading to mass ideologies. So, yes, not all ideas are benign and some, to go by Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of the French Revolution in The Old Regime and the Revolution, are either misunderstood, appear in a society not ready for them or simply fall victim to the paradox.

We allow ourselves to be bound every day in social sciences. The great thinkers use inductive logic to arrive at theories; those are what we call the big books. Others, even scholars, deduce from those frameworks. We call it domain restriction. It’s important for structured thought but it has its flip side. The restriction is both necessary and confining. I call it the paradox.

The history of ideas is replete with paradox. But what is important, and what Bangash implies, correctly, is that grappling with ideas generally leads one to understand that there are no final solutions. The quest for that state of bliss, as history tells us, has led to much bloodshed and ideologies that promise the utopia through purges and mass killings. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth to his own question, “Will we recover?”, “Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”

Camus didn’t believe in that. He lived with, to quote Sartre, the “tension which makes the life of the mind”, much like his Sisyphus that rolled the rock up only to see it roll down, but never losing the integrity in the measured steps that Sisyphus takes as he walks down the hill. Camus was his own Absurd hero.

Can we live with the tension, stay on the dizzying crest, grapple with ideas without taking the plunge into ideologies? I don’t think so. The life of the mind requires doubts, inquiry, an appreciation of multiplicity, a respect for the paradox, an appreciation of its own limitations. It also requires the ability to connect dots, find affinities, as William Wordsworth said, in objects where no brotherhood exists to common minds.

It betokens an environment conducive to thinking, a culture that rewards ideas and, going by Berlin’s definition of the philosophical, seeks questions that cannot fit into either the empirical basket or the formal one, “questions … distinguished by being general and by dealing with matters of principle; and others, (which) while not themselves general, very readily raise or lead to questions of principles.”

There’s much literature on why we are where we are today. But so faithfully entrenched we are in our idiocy that to expect any kind of change would be a folly second only in its greatness to our collective grotesquery. There are modern reasons for our anxiety and there’s the historical baggage. Both sets of reasons can be found in The Great Theft and The Long Divergence, among other works.

Finally, I must thank Bangash for saving me from writing yet another cold piece and getting me in the mood to indulge myself. It’s particularly refreshing also after the dumb discourse one has to deal with on television, given the requirement of TRPs wedded to the general inability of our politicos to say anything meaningful. Equally, a warning is in order. No one reads this stuff. Ideas and words are lost to, and on, us, just like we have lost the distinction between Character and 140 characters.

Add to our inability to think the modern tools of communication, and we have tech-savvy morons far more dangerous than the proverbial monkey with a razor in his hands. The Lord be praised!

Published in The Express Tribune, April 24^th, 2013.

Finally, former General-President Pervez Musharraf has told the CNN that he had cut a secret deal with the Bush administration on drone strikes. Nothing surprising, though this is the first “official” acceptance of such a deal.

I wrote as far back as 2008 that Islamabad (note that I don’t use the term “government”) had a covert arrangement on the strikes and was using a strategy that was likely to wilt under the weight of its own contradiction. Covert action relies on a fundamental necessity: plausible deniability. While there has been much denying, there hasn’t been much plausibility.

In fact, Musharraf is still being mealy-mouthed. The deal was about more than “maybe two or three” strikes. Musharraf has used the classic tactic of letting some truth out to hide the full extent of it. He should know that when you get into bed with the Americans, you are either caught in flagrante delicto or after the act.

But let it be said: while Musharraf set this policy, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government and the military leadership that succeeded Musharraf made no effort — until the Raymond Davis episode — to change it. In fact, as I have written elsewhere, when I argued some years ago with a couple of PPP federal ministers about the need to come clean on this policy, they told me it was neither possible nor politic to do so.

My argument was — based on knowing the “chatter” in Washington DC and the increasing tactical efficacy of the platform — that because Washington will ramp up the use of drones, it will become increasingly difficult for Islamabad to keep up the facade of rejecting such strikes publicly while agreeing to them privately. That’s exactly what has happened.

That said, let’s make one clear distinction between how the strikes originally began and what they have degenerated into. The original deal was about “personality strikes”, hitting those who were known to be making trouble. Of course, the problem of legality remained — and remains — even when specific people are targeted. But then the Americans entered murkier waters: signature strikes based, as we now know, on what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) calls the “disposition matrix”.

Increasing unilateralism by Washington, which resulted in creating a spy network in Pakistan, the movement from personality to signature strikes that kept Pakistan out of the loop or merely informed Islamabad of an incoming strike, and deteriorating US-Pakistan relations, owed to these and other factors, were reasons for Pakistan to start genuine agitation over these attacks.

Pakistan’s condemnation of drone strikes and America’s continuation of them has become the central plank, in many ways, of US-Pakistan relations. And that has to do with Islamabad’s changed policy since March 2011 and the fact that such attacks, unilateral as they are, hurt Pakistan’s sovereignty. Much has already been written about this from a legal perspective as also about the internal debates within the Obama Administration. At least one US ambassador, Cameron Munter, had to leave because he knew and refused to accept that the CIA station chief in Islamabad was to act as the plenipotentiary rather than Munter himself.

This, if nothing else, should inform us of the direction the US war took, pushing the tactical to a higher rung at the expense of strategy and, in the process, losing the war in Afghanistan despite killing many Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and fighters. This is what happens when the conduct of wars is given away to intelligence agencies. Between the CIA and the ISI, this region has become the nightmare of a policymaker. But that’s another debate.

An important point to note here is that I have not sought to go into the legality of these strikes. It should be obvious that the degree of difficulty in legitimising these strikes increases tremendously as we move from the concept of taking out a particular person to killing whole groups of people on the basis of some “disposition matrix” that can be applied to a range of people. Even in the case of particular targets, while operationally the platform provides a good option, killing thus, without due process, is problematic. But then, there can be no due process in a war and courts can’t sentence people in absentia.

But quite apart from drones and secret deals, there’s another issue that I have written about before but which needs to be flagged again. Officials and politicians in this country, whether serving or retired, civil or military, happily give access to foreigners but put up this great charade of secrecy with analysts at home.

In January 2009, in a piece for the Daily Times, under the caption, “Kalas, no; goras, yes”, this is what I wrote:

“Why is it considered essential to give access to foreign writers, analysts and media representatives when similar access is denied to writers, researchers, analysts and journalists from Pakistan?

“It is a very serious matter and one on which I have seen no debate in this country. This article is an attempt to start this debate.

“I can quote a number of works and reports over the years to flag this point — Stephen Cohen’s book The Pakistan Army; Emma Duncan’s Breaking the Curfew; Christina Lamb’s Waiting for Allah and a host of short and long newspaper and journal reports … ”

The trend continues and the article failed to generate any debate (this will, too). The list of names above is not exhaustive at all. Even the ISI “patriots” jump at the opportunity to speak with foreigners while keeping a faux stiff upper-lip with and appropriate distance from kala writers. And now Musharraf goes and blabbers to the CNN.

There’s a double-whammy here. First, the Pakistani tin-pot leaders, military and civil, make secret deals which are leaked to the press in the West by officials in the know, and then they allow access to the same press to corroborate sheepishly, partially or wholly, what happened or didn’t. There’s some kind of masochism involved in this exercise. Whatever the reasons, it is shameful and the point should be constantly agitated.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2013. 

For days running, Ansar Abbasi of The News has been ardently defending the Constitution of Pakistan in writing and by making appearances on news channels. In his reading of Articles 31, 62 and 63, as they must be applied to the potential people’s representatives during the process of scrutiny by the Election Commission of Pakistan, Abbasi has been more forthright — given the letter of the Constitution — than those opposing his views on how the State of Pakistan must be configured.

His view is simple. The Constitution refers to Islam and Islamic injunctions and stipulates, inter alia, that people may be qualified or disqualified to contest for public office depending on whether they are good Muslims. As with the Constitution, Abbasi’s views on what or who constitutes a good Muslim are problematic. But first the Constitution.

Before Articles 31 and some provisions of 62 and 63, let’s begin with the very preamble:

Whereas sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust …

Wherein the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice, as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed;

Wherein the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and Sunnah;

Note my italics in the text. Let’s move to Article 19, dealing with the Freedom of Speech, etc: “Every citizen shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression, and there shall be freedom of the press, subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interest of the glory of Islam or the integrity, security or defence of Pakistan or any part thereof …”

Further, Article 31, Islamic way of life. (1) Steps shall be taken to enable the Muslims of Pakistan, individually and collectively, to order their lives in accordance with the fundamental principles and basic concepts of Islam and to provide facilities whereby they may be enabled to understand the meaning of life according to the Holy Quran and Sunnah.

(2) The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan —

(a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language…;

(b) to promote unity and the observance of the Islamic moral standards; and

(c) to secure the proper organisation of Zakat …

Given the paucity of space, this would suffice to show that the letter of the Constitution stands as Abbasi claims. Sadly, the arguments on our side have been less than convincing. Why?

Firstly, the secular-liberal is weighed down by a contradiction. On the one hand he defends the Constitution because it is the basic document and the most fundamental provision against coups d’état or any other extra-constitutional effort to hurt democracy. On the other, this basic document is riddled with vague clichés and references to Islamic injunctions without any acknowledgment of the obvious fact that the question of who is (or is not) a good Muslim is, and has been, a matter of bloody dispute throughout the history of Islam.

Take Article 31. It even talks about the absurdity of encouraging and facilitating the learning of the Arabic language, not as an exercise in language acquisition but for reasons of religious practice.

The same Article tells us that the State shall “promote unity and the observance of the Islamic moral standards”. What does that mean? At the minimum, it is an acceptance that there is no unity in the observance of Islamic injunctions, including the rituals. That being so, how will the State promote unity without weighing in on the side of one or the other way of practising Islam?

Clause ‘c’ of the article dealing with securing the proper organisation of zakat is a case in point, though not the only one. [NB: The Munir Report is the most poignant example of denominational differences.]

Another meaningless and very problematic reference in the Preamble reads: Wherein adequate provision shall be made for the minorities freely to profess and practice their religions and develop their cultures.

Given our practice, we know this to be bollocks. In fact, better and more vociferous Muslims than Abbasi are already at work to ensure denominational purity within Islam; to think they give a damn about minority rights is a joke.

Abbasi is welcome to retort that he considers sectarian to be against the practice of Islam. If so, he only rubbishes the foundation of his own argument and tries to be ahistorical. He will also then be most welcome to preach to those who are even less apologetic than him about the fact that even this Constitution is not Islamic enough and democracy is a satanic system.

Secondly, the secular-liberal needs to contextualise how, when and under what circumstances these provisions entered the Constitution. And they aren’t just the doing of the hated Ziaul Haq. They begin with the Constituent Assembly and bear the heavy footprints of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

This, again, is a topic needing separate treatment. But two points are important. One, the Constitution is a document bristling with contradictions. Two, accepting that the Constitution contains unenforceable provisions is not an unconstitutional exercise. Finally, the secular-liberal has to stand up with the same conviction as displayed by Abbasi and demand that the Constitution be purged of these provisions. It won’t be easy because Abbasi and his tribe will refer to democracy and the numbers in favour of these provisions. They are good at playing democracy when it suits them.

However, it’s not a hopeless situation. What I have gleaned from my learned friend Feisal Naqvi, Article 31 (one of the “Principles of Policy”) as per Articles 29(2) and 30 is pretty much expressly recognised as being useless. Second, the parsing of the Constitution into operative and clichéd provisions has already been done to a certain extent by the judiciary (e.g., the neutering of the Objectives Resolution). This needs to be done for Articles 62 and 63 also.

That is precisely the battle.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 10^th, 2013.

There are wish-assumptions and there are is-assumptions, that which ought to be and that which is. The differential between the two betokens what is doable as opposed to what is desirable. Often, we oscillate between the desirable and the “existent”, refusing to believe that the existent determines what is doable and restricts the movement towards the desirable.

The issue here is the desire by the Supreme Court to ensure that the people’s representatives must be scrutinised closely and ruthlessly and disqualified if found to have perjured information. Reason: those who represent the people of Pakistan and legislate must be held to a higher standard of probity and honesty than the people themselves.

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this desire. One is unlikely to find a person who would, in theory, object to having honest, hardworking legislators represent him — or demand that he be represented by a rascal. Yet, in reality, one is not sure if a man imbued with the qualities of head and heart, assuming one could be found, would either be accepted for those traits by the political parties or be acceptable to the people themselves.

Let me put it differently. If the game in town belongs to the rascals, what chance would a man who plays by the rules, have? Not much, I am afraid.

The assumption here is that if the system works to the advantage of the rascal, the honourable judges, despite their good intentions, might mix up what J Frank in Courts on Trial called the “wishes” and the “is-es”.

People generally accept that children should be kept away from guns. As a straight proposition, it sounds good. But as Dr Benjamin Spock argued in Dr Spock’s Baby and Childcare, by denying toy guns to your child, you would be putting him in a difficult situation, especially if all his friends are going around totting guns.

The degrees of 54 of our honourable legislators have been found bogus. Another 189 have been given until April 5 to get their degrees verified from the Higher Education Commission. The issue has been hanging fire while the Election Commission of Pakistan continues to procrastinate. While the degree bar was lifted by the previous parliament, many of the worthies in parliament, given the degree condition in the 2008 elections, had just gone and acquired fake degrees. In the event, to use officialese, they now come under the mischief of articles 62/63 of the Constitution.

True to form, they have, at least privately, been agitating the issue and hold General-President Pervez Musharraf of the faded fame for hanging this shoe around their necks. The not-so-hidden assumption is that the legislators would not have been forced into perjuring if there were no such condition. In other words, working around a problem is what matters, perjury be damned.

At this stage, I realise, that my argument is coming dangerously close to a condemnation of these worthies. That I, too, am about to commit the mistake of “mixing up, ‘I wish this were so’ and ‘It is now so,’” and end up having “to face up to the fact that what [I] want does not now exist — and that it may be impossible to achieve” — at least in the short-term.

Even so, and this is the difficult part, how can I, or anyone, want rascals to represent me. Perjury constitutes obstruction of justice and leads to miscarriage of justice. A perjurer, often in some legal systems a felon, cannot be expected to make laws. Yet, we have to temper the desire to get rid of these characters with the reality of how much, and whether, that is possible.

This is where the problem becomes systemic, rising beyond individuals. Let’s assume that these perjurers are purged. Who will take their place? Either their scions and relatives or degree-holders that, to win the elections, will have to rely heavily on these very characters. Result: the nature of the system will remain unchanged.

There are, of course, several reasons for this and the corpus of theoretical and comparative literature on states and societies is increasing by the day. But one central issue has to deal with captured constituencies and the fact that all politics, in the end, is local and municipal.

Another factor is that the state doesn’t control all the resources in the sense of a large national chain. The people’s daily lives are about small, local chains, often self-sustained and self-perpetuating, which exist outside the workings of the state and very often are helpful in circumventing the state and its working.

In this sense, large parts of the country are ‘tribal’ and people need someone to negotiate with the outside world on their behalf. It helps if that someone belongs to a strong biradari and if his family or clan have been in the business of negotiating for the spoils, political and economic, for a long time. That people should realise that rotating representation will help them have a stronger voice and reduce the clout of entrenched families is an eminently sensible argument but fails to understand how social structures have evolved in certain areas.

This is, of course, the domain of sociologists and I make no claim to understanding the complexity of the issue; nor should this argument be treated as all-encompassing. There’s a multiplicity of factors and social scientists are notorious for arranging their facts and data according to their theoretical frameworks. But whatever the reasons for the system perpetuating itself, the way it is configured puts severe limitations on what can be done to move from “wish postulates” to “programmatic postulates”.

On the plus side, we are evolving — for sure. There is a greater desire, at least among the urban, educated voter to vote on the basis of issues. However, to what extent this can make a real difference is anybody’s guess, especially because this system has no office that is elected directly through countrywide voting and which could be a check on the working of a parliament that seems hopelessly mired in constituency politics.

So, yes, good luck to the monitors.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2013.

Let’s begin with former General-President Pervez Musharraf. He is back — finally. Why he thinks he can make a difference is beyond me. As for a deal orchestrated by Saudi Arabia, since I don’t know anything about it beyond speculation, I shan’t speculate. Not even when people point out that Mian Nawaz Sharif has been surprisingly silent about Musharraf’s homecoming.

Too many people bay for Musharraf’s blood. In this, Musharraf has united many disparate elements, from the abominable Taliban to the foreign-funded Baloch separatists to the gullible liberals.

The video that the Taliban released a day before Musharraf’s arrival was less interesting about their desire to kill him and more fascinating in how the Taliban were reaching out to Baloch separatists, inviting them to conduct a joint operation. Perhaps that says something about the “roots of the Taliban rage” not just in targeting Musharraf but the overall violence they and other groups have unleashed in Pakistan. Murky waters these, and getting murkier while we eat muesli in the morning and think that the world outside is full of seraphim and the serpent crawls on its belly inside.

Musharraf did many stupid things but unless we resort to selective amnesia, he also did some good things. In any case, he is now in the political arena and will have to atone, directly or indirectly, for what he did or didn’t do. What is unacceptable, as it should be to every Pakistani, is that he is now at the mercy of groups that want him dead. The issue of Musharraf’s security, whether we like it or not, is a matter that goes beyond his person. He represented the state and initiated a war against the terrorists groups (though the conduct of that war under him is another story). If they manage to get him, it will be a reflection, yet again, that the state is unable to protect itself and its interests. And we must remember that a crime against any citizen is a crime against the state. That is why all criminal cases are titled as the “State vs XYZ”.

The day before Musharraf’s homecoming, we had the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) rally at Minto Park in Lahore. The detractors have invested much in telling us that the rally was a damp squib while the Insaafians think they massed some half million people at the venue. I think someone needs to, for once, scientifically work out the capacity of all political venues in Pakistan to get the nation out of this guessing game. As for the half-million figure, let’s put that number somewhere so people could see, for once, what that crowd looks like. Incidentally, the Pakistan Army’s total strength is 550,000 men!

Then there was the issue of passion. Was there enough passion; was it more charged than the October 30^th rally etcetera? The answers, again, depend on which side of the divide people stand. I was there and it looked quite passionate to me. The grounds south of Minar-e-Pakistan were full, except for the western stretch (which was sparsely populated). But the questions of numbers and passion are irrelevant. Elections in Pakistan are not about passion; they work on the basis of constituencies and constituencies, for the most part, are very local, municipal affairs.

Constituency politics is why it is difficult to get a median voter in Pakistan; nor, for that reason, does voting depend on issues. So, the relevant question is not how many people could the PTI gather at the Minar or whether there was enough passion. The real question — and challenge — is whether the PTI can translate its supposed numbers and passion into the banality of vote-getting in a political system that is structured to lock out issues — unless there is indeed a tidal wave, as happened in 1970.

This brings the wheel full circle to the (in)famous tsunami: are we about to witness a PTI deluge? More power to them if they can do it. But going by conventional wisdom, and counting out black swans, it doesn’t seem possible. The irony, though, is that while the PTI’s detractors never tire of pointing to the fact that rallies don’t win elections, they, nonetheless, continue to quibble over the questions of numbers and passion displayed in the PTI rallies.

The PTI’s next challenge, if it were to win, would be to tweak the system such that it becomes more responsive to issues than municipal concerns. The thought that a system allowed to run uninterruptedly will, for that very reason, cleanse itself is as optimistic as the charge of the Light Brigade.

Finally, on that note, the issue of making history: this government, we are told, has made history by completing five years. Since making history is not just a function of doing good, as history itself shows us, this government has made history. It successfully kept breathing even after rigor mortis had set in and if that is not remarkable, politically and medically, I don’t know what is. Three cheers to it for that.

We are also told that a milestone has been achieved in working out, constitutionally, a neutral caretaker government. That might be so, except I am not sure a mature political system does indeed need a caretaker government. Far from indicating maturity, it signals a situation where an outgoing government is so distrusted by the political opposition that a fair election can only be conducted by a neutral government. If the reflection of this distrust through a constitutional mechanism to prevent a government from loading the dice against others is an achievement, then it indeed is. But to present such a guarantee as reflecting maturity is a bit of a stretch.

What can, however, be argued — and correctly — is that it is an achievement that not only reflects the immaturity and fragility of the system but also a proactive effort by the politicians to try and address that weakness until there is greater regard on all sides of the normative aspects of politicking. Allah be praised!

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2013.

I will be candid. When Hina Rabbani Khar became the foreign minister in July 2011, I was sceptical. She had already been the minister of state for foreign affairs for roughly five months and I didn’t think that period was enough to have groomed her for the top job. I didn’t doubt her smartness and her articulation — she is very sharp on picking nuances and complexities — but diplomacy is a veritable minefield and 2011 was a particularly difficult time for Pakistan.

Having steered the MFA for a year and eight months before leaving office, let me say what I have known for a long time: she did a wonderful job despite several constraints.

Foreign policy, especially in today’s world, is not made by one person. But the leader must be able to put together what Clausewitz called zweck, the purpose [of war], but which can equally be applied to other areas of leadership. The “purpose” must guide and inform the ziel, the aim or aims that in turn advance the “purpose”, creating an interactive dynamic.

Khar gave that purpose to her team. When I spoke with her for Capital TV on her last day in office, she was clear that the turn in foreign policy was owed to the PPP government, not just to her. In that, she might be right, though I have my doubts, given the policy apathy by the PPP government I witnessed on other scores. Be that as it may, it does seem that much of what she was doing she could push through the cabinet — some, she couldn’t.

Three basic postulates governed the exercise of foreign policy: zero conflict in the region; friendly relations with all neighbours in the region and with states beyond the region; and, by doing so, getting Pakistan to focus on the internal security threats, two of which — terrorism and a dwindling economy — stand out.

For once, it was the foreign policy guiding the security policy rather than the other way round. “The military is a very important part of the government and state and, of course, any government would get their professional input, but they didn’t run the foreign policy and they have no business running it,” Khar told me.

She liked to get external input and to reach out. To that end, she worked the concept of public diplomacy. She got Mosharraf Zaidi to help her and Mosharraf did a brilliant job of it. I say this not because Mosharraf is a friend, which he is and a very dear one at that, but because he really worked hard at his remit. He would constantly think up new things and try and implement them and enabled us and many others to have regular meetings with the FM and the foreign secretary for deep-end background briefings. This was a most useful exercise and helped inform our analysis even when the discussions were based on Chatham House rules.

Mosharraf is no more with the MFA, having left a couple of months before the end of Khar’s tenure, but one hopes that what he did, along with his number one, will become an institutionalised practice at the MFA. Much still needs to be done, which I spoke to the FM about, but changing the strategic culture of an organisation is never easy. It requires concerted effort over a long period of time.

Another important step was to enhance the MFA’s capacity in the area of International Law, another first to Minister Khar. She brought in a very capable IL expert, Sikander Shah, who continues to work at the MFA. One hopes the ministry will develop a larger wing and understand how important it is to have in-house expertise in the area.

Doing new things in the rusty political and bureaucratic environment of Pakistan is always difficult, and while I am not privy to all the internal battles Khar had to fight, my nuts and bolts information tells me it wasn’t a comfortable ride.

She was, of course, supported by a very capable Foreign Office. We have some outstanding diplomats, the current FS is one such, as was the previous FS. Mohammad Sadiq, our ambassador to Afghanistan, is a remarkable diplomat and helped Khar tremendously in dealing with that country after the minister declared Kabul to be the most important capital for Pakistan. Ditto for India. The idea was that either we can feel hemmed in or we can take advantage of the geographical placement.

Khar wanted to take advantage of geography rather than feeling claustrophobic and this despite the fact that it is not easy to either deal with President Hamid Karzai (the Americans should know!) or with the Indians as a general rule.

But she didn’t waver. Though let me put it on record here that while Pakistan has in principle decided to grant India the MFN status, the finalisation and the ratification of that decision had to be postponed because of India’s increasingly intransigent attitude, especially during and after the Line of Control episode.

“I strongly supported it in the cabinet meeting but Indian actions were not helpful and I don’t have the only voice in decision-making,” Khar told me, adding: “But the decision stays; it’s the timing.” The BJP, the Indian military and the Indian TV anchors can take full credit for this.

Even so, Khar is very clear that conflict is no solution and we have to normalise with India, regardless. But while we must stick to our positions, the resolution of disputes must not be a precondition for cooperation in areas of interest.

As for Afghanistan, without stability in that country, Pakistan’s western border cannot be managed; neither can our internal problem of extremism addressed. Relations with the US were another minefield, the details of which require a separate treatment.

There are areas where I disagreed with her and continue to. The government, as a whole, has no real mechanisms for policy formulation and vetting by external experts. That culture has to change. But all said, and considering the structural problems, one must congratulate Khar and her team for playing a good innings at a very difficult time.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2013.

In Book III of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides records the “The Mytilenian Debate”, an event that occurred in 427 BC, roughly a year after the revolt against Athens and its allies by Mytilene and three other city-states on the island of Lesbos. The debate, fraught with questions of survival, politics and ethics, is a text that is as relevant to us today as it was then.

To cut to the chase, the Mytilenians revolted against Athens after being egged on by Sparta. Athens had been alerted to the impending revolt by a faction within Mytilene and they despatched forces to confront the Mytilenians before the latter were fully ready for an armed confrontation. With food supplies depleted, surrounded by Athenian forces, isolated and defeated, the Mytilenians had to surrender to negotiate.

Athens would have none of it; the only concession that could be granted was for Mytilene to send a delegation to Athens to seek mercy and compassion. The Athenian general Paches guaranteed that he would hold his hand until Athens reached a decision. Off go the nearly thousand men, along with Salaethus, the Spartan who had arrived to help Mytilene but had failed. Debate began in Athens on what to do with the Mytilenians. The decision was to decimate the male population and sell women and children into slavery. The Spartan had been executed on arrival but once this decision had been taken, the nearly thousand Mytilenians having come to Athens to seek mercy were also put to the sword. A trireme was despatched to Mytilene to execute the orders of the assembly.

The next day, however, Athens woke up to the brutality of its actions. Another debate ensued with Cleon, the ruthless statesman, taking a position against democracy and chiding people for cherishing doubts rather than focusing on what was required to survive. He was countered by Diodotus, who challenged the idea of butchering people as a means of deterrence and pleaded that compassion is what builds alliances and would help strengthen Athens. For him, the fundamental question in deciding the fate of the Mytilenians was not whether the latter were guilty of revolt but whether Athens was making the correct decision for itself.

The second debate led to the assembly changing its earlier decision.

What brings forth this tale from 428 BC? The answer is that we have long been talking about the crisis of the state. I wonder if it is time to look at the crisis of society, of who we are or more appropriately, what we have become; not just the leaders, both religious and political, but the people. Whether in our avowed love for religion, we have not all but lost the very religion and the compassion it is supposed to instil?

Mobs are mobs. They loot, burn and lynch. They are the same everywhere. The famous scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar about Cinna the poet and Cinna the conspirator has become clichéd. But we also thrive on a big, fat lie: that we are Muslims, the followers of the Prophet (pbuh), and, therefore, a cut above the rest. Well, let this poppycock be buried once and for all. We are as good or bad as the rest and, because we are impotent for the most part in the broader historical scheme that informs the world today, we are worse.

We berate our leaders constantly and much of what we say about them is true. But what about the awam, the average Joes and Janes? The fact is that the awam are as stupid, ungenerous, uncouth and petty liars as the leaders. I have no idea why our discussions about the leaders are conducted in a way that gives the utterly false impression that we, as a people, are angels stuck with an evil leadership.

Where did the mob in Lahore come from? Who is attacking shrines and imambargahs, if not the pious awam? Reports from Karachi talked about an Ahmadi having died in the bomb attack and rescue workers refusing to pick up his body. Now I am assuming that the rescue workers could not have known that one body belonged to an Ahmadi. And if my assumption is correct, based on what a reporter friend said to me, then the local people must have told them so. And if that is correct, and if the mohalla largely belonged to the Shia, then it won’t be wrong to assume that someone from the Shia community identified the person. Or, worse, both the local Shia and Sunni did.

This, then, raises a question that should be obvious: how can a people who have themselves been the target of hate use the same discriminatory approach against another community that has been constitutionally ex-communicated? What kind of people would do this, lose empathy for another despite being under attack themselves; use one argument against the attackers and turn the entire logic of that very argument on its head and exclude another, not just from religion, but from the pale of humanity itself, even in death?

Answer: “normal” people; average Pakistanis; people going about the business of life; you and me.

As Diodotus said millennia ago, the fundamental question is not about someone’s guilt but whether the decisions we take are good for us. Do we serve the ends of justice or revenge? Do our decisions inculcate in us humanity or make us bestial. I don’t have to answer this question.

Finally, look at another irony. There’s a blasphemy law. Much has been said about its flaws and its abuse. Yet, if there is a law, and if someone has been booked under it, what right do people have to take the law into their hands and banish an entire community from their homes? Clearly, as emerging reports indicate, there’s more to the incident than meets the eye. And if those reports are correct, then it’s the mob and the instigators who have blasphemed.

Do we have it in us to have a Mytilenian Debate? I don’t think so.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 13^th, 2013.