A pyrrhic civilian victory

Gilani & the PPP are like an army that surrenders, then throws a couple of spitballs in the direction of the victors.

Mansoor Ijaz isn’t coming, Husain Haqqani has already gone and the army is staying put. It is not too hard to spin this as a victory for the civilian set-up; for months they have warded off every army and judicial offensive and now, we are back to where we were before Mansoor Ijaz inserted himself into our dreams, Inception-style with his Financial Times op-ed. For now, at least, we can forget that we ever thought it was a good idea to affix the ubiquitous and tiresome suffix ‘gate’ to Ijaz’s infamous memo. All Yousaf Raza Gilani has to do is wait for a favourable Supreme Court verdict or write a letter to the Swiss and the PPP is sitting comfortably for the rest of the year.

A victory for civilians, democracy, the Constitution and whatever else we are supposed to hold dear in this country? Sure, to the extent that drawing the final Test match, in a series in which you are already 4-0 down, is a triumph. The PPP will now get to strut and preen and claim they held the army at bay. It’s great fodder for campaign rallies but don’t mistake it for forward progress.

It would be a bit unfair to claim that in the four years preceding Mansoor Ijaz’s centrality to the future of democracy, the PPP abdicated most of their powers to the military. But they certainly didn’t make any efforts to grab them back. Foreign policy was left as the military’s baby; the army leadership merely had to smash a piñata and extensions came pouring out. So inherent was this assumption that policy on the war on terror couldn’t be made without the top brass of the military. So-much-so, that it was left to the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, to insist that a meeting could be held without the generals present, when she visited Islamabad last year.

The military should have had the good sense to realise it had received the best of all possible outcomes. It had control of policy areas it always considered its fiefdom and its massive, untraceable budgets were approved with a civilian imprimatur, that too by a political party which has always enjoyed playing the martyr card to shore up public sympathy even as it does precious little to challenge the military.

One of the worst analogies I have heard after this civil-military stand-off was that of the army being compared to Napoleon and that it had finally met its Waterloo in Gilani. This comparison assumes that the army has actually had to give up powers other than its ability to launch a coup in the next 72 hours. Gilani and the PPP are more like the army that surrenders and then throws a couple of spitballs in the direction of the victors. It might be emotionally satisfying but it doesn’t change the outcome.

If going on the offensive rather than merely struggling to stay in power was a priority for the PPP, it would not have been so tame after May 2. This was an opportunity to fire someone of relative authority in the military and have the US behind them publicly. Rather, the ambassador to the US chose to get a middleman to make suggestions that would have been completely kosher had they been made publicly. The PPP leadership denies having anything to do with the memo and one wishes this is true since behind-the-scenes scheming with the US is morally and strategically unwise. The true tragedy is that the PPP didn’t give two dozen speeches, making the same points as the memo, and gaining an upper hand in the war that they have now decisively lost.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 3^rd, 2012.