Davis-ed by ourselves

The military should understand and accept civilian supremacy, the civilians should understand their responsibility.

A month-and-half, four dead bodies, tens of thousands of tweets and Facebook messages, a foreign minister and millions of rupees in blood money later, Raymond Davis, the former US Special Forces sergeant, has left Pakistan. He had killed two Pakistani boys, shooting them seven times with a Glock 17 pistol. Another boy was run over by the vehicle Davis was protecting and which tried to get away after the shooting. Later, the widow of one of the murdered boys committed suicide, saying she didn’t expect justice would be done, justice being Davis hanged by the neck until he died.

She was right. Her husband, as also the other boy and the unconcerned pedestrian, was caught in a major drama involving states and powerful intelligence agencies. When that happens, people become expendable.

So, what happened? Some of it is now known. What is unknown will, sooner or later, become known. Davis was part of a cell in Lahore, primarily surveilling Jamaat-ud-Dawa and, as one report puts it, “perhaps [attempting to] eliminate associates of Lashkar-e-Taiba”. That has come out. But he was also in contact, according to sources, with Punjabi Taliban groups. According to Christine Fair’s account, “Davis reportedly did security and surveillance activities for the case managers of that cell”. That may be so, given that when he shot to kill those boys he was in a protective mode. The question of why he might have eliminated them at the time and in the place he did, remains unanswered.

But he was no diplomat; neither did he have ‘blanket immunity’. Whatever be the political motives of former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, he was right in asserting the Foreign Office’s assessment about the man’s dubious status. Reports suggest Davis was contracted by the US Central Intelligence Agency. But he could also have been part of a JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) operation. If so, that will, at some point, also become known.

The debate is now focusing on whether blood money was paid according to the law; whether Davis should have been allowed to walk away, diyat or no diyat; whether the Supreme Court (SC) should take suo motu notice of the circumstances in which the diyat transaction took place; whether there’s an element of coercion involved in it; whether we are a sovereign nation; who takes decisions here etc.

Some of these questions are academic. For instance, what would happen even if the SC were to take suo motu notice of this? Davis is already gone. If the SC were to determine that procedures were not followed, how would the government get Davis back to stand trial again? How would it pin down those responsible for getting Davis out? The Punjab government may have been the face of the court drama, but the settlement happened after the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate settled the matter with the CIA. Would the SC ask the director-general of the ISI to come to court and explain the details of the settlement and the deal?

Highly desirable, but possible? Would parties agitating the matter leave the diplomatic enclave and protest before the ISI headquarters; or for that matter, the GHQ? That is the real issue and throws up the question of how decisions are made in this country and by whom. It is important to move away from symptoms to the real causes.

So the interior ministry allowed some dubious Americans to come to Pakistan, who then set up cells here, an activity that was not vetted and approved by the ISI? Why? And where was the Foreign Office in all this? Why should the various organisations be driving in different lanes? That, surely, is not an American problem; it is our problem. Also, if the ISI was tailing the cell of which Davis was a part, why were these people not declared persona non grata and thrown out after it became clear that they were up to no good? Why did we wait for this accident to happen?

It is not enough to talk about hostile agencies, as we are wont to do. Important also is the fact of why the hostile agencies may be operating here and what fissures they might be working to exploit. Fissures are never caused by foreign elements, but where they exist, they will be exploited. They will be exploited also because Pakistan, as a state, believes in realpolitik and it should be ready to face the application of realpolitik by other interested actors — and, in the case of the US, with a heavy dose of machtpolitik.

It is a matter of record that Pakistan, despite what I just said about its being heavy on realpolitik, has never tried to work out a national security strategy. A terrible irony this, but Pakistan is never low on ironies. Add to this the civil-military imbalance that has dogged us almost from our inception and we have a military strategy that determines the national security strategy rather than the other way round. The spin-off of that is that the security policy has come to determine the foreign policy instead of being its subset. Corollary: We are screwed.

None of this has to do with foreign powers or hostile agencies. All of this is our doing and relates to our structural problems. In walks Davis, but only as a metaphor. Matters are kept secret because decisions are not made according to institutional rules. No one is prepared to talk about the fact that if the world is ganging up on us, it is because we worry the world; and we worry the world because we have cold war warriors who refuse to heed that the world around us may be changing — and that it is changing against us because we continue to perpetuate the original folly.

And now, we are agitating the issue for all the wrong reasons. We should agitate for institutional harmony which we don’t have. We should agitate for balance between civil and military relations; that means the military should understand and accept civilian supremacy, but it also means that the civilians should understand the responsibility which comes with the exercise of that supremacy. Neither has done so far what both are required to do.

And if that is not going to happen, we shall continue to be Davis-ed — not by Davises — but by ourselves.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2011.