We’ll get there one day

It is too tempting not to think General Aziz waited to say what he knew until he exhausted all his postings and perks?

Exactly two weeks ago, I arrived in Beirut late in the evening after a long and tiring flight from Lahore via Dubai. Let me hasten to add that the service aboard Emirates was second to none, it was just the seven-hour flight and the five-hour long lay over at Dubai which was stressful, and yes, galling.

A little about Emirates: the crew on board my Lahore to Dubai flight spoke Urdu, English, Tagalog, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and German; and that on the Dubai-Beirut sector, French, English, Arabic, Polish, Russian, and Malayalam! Shows just how big this airline has become while ours is now just a regional airline with one or two international routes left to it. Pity.

Since I was overtired, I did not sleep well that night and was lying awake when early in the morning the sweet notes of the most beautiful Azaan I had heard in years floated across downtown Beirut. I got up and went onto the balcony of my room, and listened to the melodious voice of the Imam of the Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque, built by the assassinated prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, in the Martyrs’ Square just across from my hotel.

No matter how intently I listened, there was not a sound of another Azaan competing with this one; not one other call to prayer that I could hear. They must have their mosques spread over the city according to some method; not madly like in our country where the most beautiful Azaans are drowned out by others that are louder and shriller on purpose, issuing from mosques built very near one another.

Mr Hariri, a fabulously wealthy man, built the Al-Amin Mosque with his own funds when he started the reconstruction of the city after the devastating Civil War which all but destroyed Beirut. It is a beautiful, well-proportioned building: a miniature version of the Blue Mosque of Istanbul.

Immediately to one side of the Mosque is the St. George Maronite Cathedral, and on the other, the house of the Archbishop. On Friday, first the church bells rang out and then, an hour later, the Azaan calling the faithful to Juma prayers. While people are a bit wary, Beirut today seems the epitome of tolerance: religions and sects living in complete harmony.

The reconstruction of the Martyrs’ Square and its quite lovely old buildings has been meticulously planned and restoration carried out as near to the original as possible. The shop signs are discreet and the general feeling as one walks about the square and its various streets is one of serenity and peace.

Rafik Hariri and those that died with him in that horrific bombing are buried in the shadow of his Mosque, his grave in one chamber and those of the others in an adjoining one, all under a huge tent propped up by steel girders. It is a temporary structure people say, signifying that Hariri’s murderers are yet to be traced until which time he will not lie in peace.

Beirut is a great mixture of East and West; Muslim and Christian: the people soft-spoken; elegant, and refined. Whilst there is the presence of the orthodox and hard-line Hezbollah in the city itself, women wear what they feel like wearing without fear of being ogled at or harassed otherwise by men staring at them lasciviously as happens in the Land of the Pure which regresses ever further, by the day.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch one more general has blown the whistle on his former colleagues and comrades regarding the fiasco that was Kargil. This time it is Lt Gen Shahid Aziz once DG (Analysis) ISI when the Kargil balloon went up; later CGS and then chairman NAB. Once again the whistle has been blown too late, and many years after the fiasco played itself out and showed us up to the whole world as the dysfunctional people we are.

We already knew much of what Aziz tells us, first from our free-wheeling and juvenile Commando himself when he bad-mouthed a gentlemanly chief of our air force publicly and people began to cast about for the reason of the Commando’s pique. It turned out then, fully eight years ago, that only four or five people knew about Kargil, not even the Corps Commanders, leave alone the other Service Chiefs.

As an aside, reader, this shows how decision-making is done in the “most powerful, most efficient institution in the country”, what. (I mean if this is the state of the “most efficient institution in the country” we are really done for, no?) And then the Commando has the gall to say India ‘over-reacted’ to what he engineered in Kargil! Would India not over-react, dash it all? Wouldn’t we, if we were attacked? Stand up, Humayun Gohar.

But back to Shahid Aziz. Why did he wait 13 years before saying what he knew? Why did he not object when he was in the ISI and first came to know through Indian intercepts that something was afoot up in Kargil, something that he realised at that time would come to no good? Why wait until the damage was done and the opprobrium of the world was our lot?

It is too tempting not to think that Aziz waited until he had exhausted all his postings and the perks and goodies that come a Lt Gen’s way as he progresses up the ladder of seniority. For example, QMG plots in generals’ colonies in cantonments across the country? As another, mayhap an ambassadorial appointment? And God alone knows what else... . Only he can tell us why he waited so long.

Really, we’ve been through so much at the hands of our Rommels and Guderians that it is about time they laid off and let this country’s elected representatives guide its destiny. The elections are upon us; and we have an excellent man as our Chief Election Commissioner. Let him do his duty as best as he knows, and let every political party have a fair shot in the polls.

We’ll get there one day; yes, we will.

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