The crucial question

In a talk show on a local television channel held two days after the attack on Malala Yousufzai, the crucial question that everybody is asking was put before a select panel of speakers.

Unlike the talk shows that I have heard, and there haven’t been too many, this moderator broke the glass on emergency ideas and decided to call a spade a spade. “Should the Pakistan Army launch a drastic offensive against the extremists in North Waziristan?” He asked this question in a tone which suggested that he already knew the answer.

A man in a blue striped suit with an Italian silk tie, who apparently represented the leisure class, said they jolly well should. What the Taliban had done was not only reprehensible, but went against the very principles of a religion that encouraged education. An old codger, who was squirming in his seat, said that the military must proceed with caution. After all, the militants were armed to the teeth and a lot of soldiers would perish in the attempt to subdue them. The Italian silk tie wanted to know what the basic function of the military was, if it wasn’t to protect its citizens. A third speaker echoed the views of a religious leader and said that while he condemned the militants’ choice of victim to make a statement, has the nation forgotten the scores of patriotic Pakistanis who have been annihilated in the drone attacks? A fourth speaker said that this was not the correct forum to discuss such a loaded question and the matter should be referred to parliament for a decision. And so it went on and on and at the end, nobody was the wiser.

I would strongly recommend to members of the thinking public two excellent books published in Pakistan during the last two years. The first, Punjabi Taliban by Mujahid Hussain translated by Tanvir Afzaal, is the most detailed and analytical narrative that I have read on the rise of the terrorist groups that operate under different names in our country. After reading the first few pages of this outstanding and highly significant treatise, it became apparent in 2011 that the Pakistan Army would not fight the Taliban and al Qaeda the way the world wants it to. The reason can be found within Punjab. Al Qaeda has been rendered impregnable by the shift of allegiance of Punjab’s non-state actors from the army to al Qaeda. Therefore, any attack on the two main terrorist organisations by the military in the tribal areas will lead to a backlash in the country’s largest province. .

The other volume is The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan, 1947-2008, by history professor Ilhan Niaz. It is a remarkable book, scholarly and deeply researched, balanced and objective. This treatise is an incisive and penetrating analysis of the detail that there has been a marked decline in the ability of the state to govern effectively within its own formal boundaries. The book also provides a detailed study of Pakistan’s experience of behavioural regression since 1947. An argument that the author has advanced is that the ruling elite in Pakistan has gradually and systematically relapsed into a pre-Western colonial form in the way it exercises power. The rulers operate through hierarchical institutions such as the military, bureaucracy and the clergy. They exercise power arbitrarily and due to the official ideology or religion, they are above lawful criticism.

There has been a remarkable continuity in the behaviour of ruling elites since Partition over this period. And the frustration the masses feel is invariably channelled into right-wing militancy.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 21^st, 2012.