Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing

Our elected politicians are made of an entirely different stuff, they love to act soft and humane.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) cadres seldom mourn the loss of their high-profile commanders with loud moans and sobs. As battled-hardened types, they would rather leave no time to reconcile with such deaths and focus more on finding means to stage retaliatory strikes.

Our elected politicians are made of an entirely different stuff. As “peoples’ representatives”, they love to act soft and humane. Some weeks ago, they had held an all parties conference. Cutting across the party divide, each politician presented in that conference declared the Taliban as enraged stakeholders of our society and state, who deserved to be engaged in talks and listened to with an open mind.

Some hawkish faction of the ‘enraged and alienated stakeholders’ refused to trust the mainstream politicians. We rather endured a series of deadly acts of terrorism from their ranks immediately after holding of the APC.

The Taliban-appeasing government did not lose hope and Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan diligently kept building bridges to the TTP leaders. He was about to approach them formally, but the Americans decided to kill Hakimullah Mehsud with a drone-driven missile on October 31. The interior minister had to feel let down and went public to express his ire. Imran Khan fully backed the aggressive reaction by Nisar and began putting pressure for blocking supplies to Nato troops in Afghanistan.

The government and Imran Khan have yet to find appropriate means to getting back to America. As if to help them out in finding such means, the National Assembly has now abandoned all legislative business. Speaker after speaker from all sides of the house is getting the floor to flaunt his or her pearls of wisdom for dealing with post-Mehsud mess and chaos. Only a fool should expect worthwhile thoughts from such debate, which sounds more like declamation contests that you endure during school days.

I was still all ears when Maulana Fazlur Rehman took the floor. Maulana is definitely associated with a religious-based outfit of the political right that most TTP commanders respect as the ultimate source of their ideas. Since coming to active politics in the early 1980s, however, he continued to cultivate friends and admirers from amongst the so-called secular and liberal politicians and commentators. In chaste Urdu, he displays the tremendous capacity to present his thoughts with a cheerful hope. Delivering a long speech in the National Assembly on Tuesday, the same Maulana seemed to have lost “it,” though. He seemed hopelessly confused and visibly helpless to offer anything substantive to manage “the drift,” which Maulana kept claiming had taken over the Pashtun-majority areas of Pakistan “for the past 30 years.”

Lamenting over the drift, he admitted that during ‘in camera briefings for politicians,” responsible representatives of various national security outfits sincerely concede that they have lost all tools to exercise the writ of a state in tribal areas of Pakistan. The religious scholars used to command more respect and authority in these areas. But with a hurt heart, Maulana Fazlur Rehman named a large number of some leading Ulema who were killed by the ‘enraged stakeholders.’ Yet, while conceding such a huge vacuum of any authority and control in the Afghanistan-neighboring areas, the JUI (F) leader kept condemning the drone attacks as violating our “national honour and sovereignty.”

Often, he also tried to make us realise that overwhelming numbers of Pashtuns found themselves miserably caught in a vicious war between the state of Pakistan and the TTP, but the only way out remained to appease and win over the enraged stakeholders. He never cared to explain about how to do this appeasing and what constituted ‘the minimum’ in this context.

Dr Faooq Sattar of the MQM made half-hearted attempts to spin a counter narrative. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, as usual, was neither here nor there and speaking for the self-pronounced “liberal and enlightened Pakistan Peoples Party,” Syed Khurshid Shah sounded equally clueless.

The PML-N benches maintained a deliberate low profile throughout this futile sounding exercise, although I have it from two highly reliable sources that the prime minister felt good and pleased with the aggressive posturing of his interior minister, a day after the killing of Mehsud. He and many of his ministers strongly believe that through his talking tough on Friday evening, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had managed to prevent a massive backlash in all the major cities, especially of Punjab, “where dedicated sleepers have been waiting for the cues to go for retaliatory strikes in one go”. In the process, however, Washington has now begun conveying its discomfort over “the way Pakistan has reacted to the killing of Mehsud.” Ishaq Dar, Sartaj Aziz and Tariq Fatmi are now desperately trying to find ways to stage the “balancing act” with dry throats and insomnia-red eyes.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 6^th, 2013.