Absent qualities

Last time Qadri was accommodated. This time a bravura performance is going to bequeath us a rather different outcome.

Watching the shambolic debacle that was the government handling of the Tahirul Qadri affair over the last fortnight, from the murderous night when eight died in Lahore to the blackly comedic events that enveloped his arrival, diversion and eventual disembarkation, I was left gasping for breath.

This was not just sloppy governance, this was incompetence on an epic scale. Pyramids. Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Colossus of Rhodes…you get the picture. It was not just the lack of joined up thinking it was the apparent absence of any cognitive process that was recognisable as governance in action. The tail wagged the dog and the world watched askance sniggering the while.

Why was this allowed to happen as it did? Was it just bumbling confusion on the day or something deeper, more systemic? I suppose it should have dawned on me years ago but never mind, it finally did this week. It is the lack of the skills of statecraft and the qualities that make a statesman at the top of our political trees which have institutionalised mediocrity at the highest level. It is the failure to mature in the bottom draws of the political wardrobe before taking power at the top tier. Statesmanship is learned at a hard school, but here it is a school that is circumvented and our leaders arrive at the top with little of substance behind their rhetoric.

To paraphrase Guergen writing in 1981, statesmanship enables a politician to undertake public enterprises, or influence them in a decisive manner. Those public enterprises advance the common wellbeing of the people. And here is the illuminating difference — for a politician to make the jump to statesman they have to demonstrate an awareness of the difference between a custodial leadership which merely administers the affairs of state, and a leadership that transforms them.

And what of statecraft and its associated skills? We tend to think of statecraft in terms of international activities conducted by diplomats, the economic tools and military might. It is about the ability to identify threats and opportunities, and use that knowledge to promote the interests of the state or protect it. Statecraft is a function not only of having the ‘tools of the trade’ but equally knowing how to use them; being able to identify the right objectives and the right purposes (‘right’ being a matter much open to debate in our purely local context). Ideally statecraft brings together both means and objectives. Anybody who can identify any of the above in play right across the Tahirul Qadri affair deserves a gold star. Form an orderly line at my front gate.

International perceptions of how the current government goes about its business will have been damaged. Our economic interests will have been very poorly served and our external communications even more so — airlines are ‘considering their position’ when it comes to the safety and security of the aircraft they fly into Pakistan and the passengers to whom they have a duty of care.

Passengers have rights, among them the right to sue the carrier if it fails to honour the contract represented by their ticket. The airline that had its operations considerably disrupted by the actions of our government may have a case in international law, and we await developments.

The entire episode was an object lesson in how to turn a drama into a crisis, a crisis that now threatens to plonk itself on the doorstep of a government that increasingly looks like it is in headless-chicken mode. Considering there are major military operations underway, over half a million internally displaced persons and now a confrontation with an enemy that has the capacity to take down a civil airliner at night using ground fire — it might be argued that this was not the best time to add fuel to political fires.

The last time Tahirul Qadri disturbed our slumbers he was accommodated, grudgingly perhaps but accommodated, and went on his way again leaving behind a few ripples and a large sanitation and public-health cleanup bill. This time a bravura performance in the foot-in-mouth and shot-in-both-feet departments is going to bequeath us all a rather different outcome. And it is going to end in tears, it really is.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2014.

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