The march of error

Like lumbering fools, we are always late to the most important realisations. Many voices warned us throughout the 1990s that the monster of extremism that we were busy cultivating could one day turn its fangs on us. Throughout those years, I vividly recall the flaccid response such warnings always met — a casual shrug and a fatalistic ‘nothing will happen, don’t worry.’

It’s this attitude that gets us all killed again and again. Of course, the militant underground that we nurtured in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan did eventually turn against us, because, unbeknownst to its puppet-masters, a visceral opposition, ejected from Arab countries, had lodged itself inside this scene.

I remember the first operation that the Pakistani government launched against the ‘Arab Afghans’, as they were known in those days. It was in 1991, and some Egyptian uniforms had arrived to participate in the operation and carry away those captured in its course. The operation was conducted in Peshawar, and a few alleys were indeed vacated of Arab influence as a result, and a few foot soldiers of the jihad were handed over.

But there ended the effort. Throughout the 1990s, as Pakistan ramped up its covert action in Kashmir and Afghanistan descended into endless warring anarchy, the khaki masters of error and folly leaned increasingly on the jihadi underground to compete with the rising defence budgets of India, and to project influence and create a force for order in Afghanistan.

Everybody who followed this scene will recall 1996 as a key turning point. That was the year the Taliban began their sweep through Afghanistan, the year Ayman al-Zawahiri arrived in our neighbourhood and sealed an alliance with Osama bin Laden by sending a truck bomb into the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, killing more than 60 people. It was also the year the jihadis broadened the scope of their targets in India to include civilians, labourers and pilgrims, taking the insurgency there to a new level.

As India escalated its defence expenditures throughout that decade, a sanctioned and isolated Pakistan could only respond by fanning the passions of large sections of its illiterate population and forging out of them a deadly brew of trained killers and bomb-laden cannon fodder. Throughout the decade, error was compounded by folly. What a colossal mistake it was for the United States to so completely and cleanly sever its relationship with Pakistan, after having attained its objectives in Afghanistan! What a mistake it was on the part of Pakistan’s security establishment to get into an arms race with India, when there was abundant evidence that India’s strategic rivalry was not with us, but with China! What a failing on the part of India’s various foreign policy teams — who went through the revolving door of Indian politics — to fail to respond to the myriad attempts to talk, and to de-escalate, that every civilian government of Pakistan tried to launch from 1988 till 1998!

Throughout the 1990s, Pakistan lacked both the realisation that patronising extremism was suicidal, and the decision-making apparatus with which to unwind this insane gambit. The civilian governments of that time were largely powerless before the invisible machine of covert war that the Americans had left behind. Following 9/11, when the realisation finally arrived, it snagged on a defect within the decision-making apparatus: the ruler tasked with rolling back the jihadi machine had severe legitimacy issues that nagged his efforts like a stone in his shoe.

This entire history, sketched here so imperfectly, played itself out through my mind on January 18 as I stood and listened to speaker after speaker denounce the assassination of Salmaan Taseer at an event held in honour of his memory and his sacrifice. What an infernal timeline we have traversed to arrive at this moment, when the play of folly and error, like two mirrors that reflect each other to infinity, have deformed our lives beyond all measure. What a complicated mess we find ourselves in today, what a sacrifice of blood and tears it will take to pull back from this brink. But don’t worry, nothing will happen.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2011.