The enemy within

Operation Zarb-e-Azb has completed its first year, bringing with it some promising numbers: 2,763 terrorists killed. This is no small achievement, especially considering the challenges such operations entail, along with the concomitant political intricacies — the satanic intertwining of the militias with mainstream political groups — in a ‘hard country’ like Pakistan. But with good cheer comes melancholia; the tragic realisation that we are a country at war — with itself. Newspapers and social media offer little relief, yielding the familiar bounty of terrors with terrifying regularity. The arresting visuals of the maimed and broken, the internally displaced and eternally scarred, and of death performing its lurid dance appear everywhere, from bodies of mutilated schoolchildren to hanging corpses — this, and a lot more, is the canvas upon which tragedy paints its own image.

When confronted with this harrowing portrait, many argue that Operation Zarb-e-Azb is an existential necessity. They have a point. Sometimes our moral calculus, perforce, yields the most stringent of prescriptions conceivable, demanding armed and organised action against a people who are so rigorously programmed with years of indoctrinated hate that such action alone remains the final separation between our survival and theirs. But we also understand, or so one would hope, that bullets and bombs are only effective to the degree they thwart an imminent existential threat from an enemy that has retained his humanity only in appearance. They will not, indeed cannot, kill the mindscape from which such an enemy emerges. It takes no philosophical profundity to recognise that culling poisonous plants from a landscape primed for poisonous harvest can go only as far as to yield short-term relief before the poison begins to sprout forth once again. For a permanent solution, the landscape must change.

Fortunately, our government recognises as much. This is why Operation Zarb-e-Azab was supplemented with the National Action Plan (NAP), a 20-point strategy to counter terrorism through means beyond military. While successful on some fronts, the NAP has struggled on others. The fact that a minister had to recently retract an honest observation, in fear of violent reprisal, uttered in candid good faith against a madrassa system that many legitimately regard as the principal cause of our militant malaise is evidence of how some of the NAP’s proposals remain nice-sounding jingles, powerful on paper but impotent in practice. But to criticise the state for failing to speedily implement the NAP is part of a larger problem. A problem which is quite easily the mother lode of all our other problems, dangerously combining two distinct and equally potent pathologies: 1) to externalise all our problems with total suspension of self-accountability; and 2) to anxiously await the arrival of a messiah who in one rescuing sweep will solve all our earthly problems.

In other words, while progressive societies take matters in their own hands across the spectrum, we Pakistanis have little time for such trivia, far easier as it is to pass the moral buck with deranged consistency till that most awaited masterstroke from our long anticipated saviour delivers us to our promised terminus — a magical kingdom where everything stands resolved not by force of our determination or introspective action, but by, well, magic.

This mindset, above all, remains the source of our travails. Consider: we harp about our law enforcement’s lack of efficacy in keeping us safe from frothing terrorists, yet we — the citizens — are its most committed violators. Wherever there is even the slightest presence of due process or protocol, we masterfully engineer ways to bypass it. We slam radicals for killing those they consider apostates, but we — the citizens — exercise the same exclusionary, if not always lethal, thinking in daily life. Most people will never drink from the same glass used by a Hindu or Christian. An Ahmadi who has loudly proclaimed his faith in a crowded bazaar could only have done so if he were too lazy to step in front of an approaching train to get it over with.

Yes, we express legitimate horror over the treatment of Rohingya Muslims at the hands of crazed Burmese monks but remain relatively mute on Saudi Arabia’s actions in Yemen. We justifiably fumed over an airline denying a Muslim chaplain an unopened can of coke (an instance of escalating anti-Muslim bigotry), choking social media with our angry protestations and proclamations of ‘enough is enough!’, but secular blogger Raif Badawi’s captivity and flogging in Saudi Arabia — for the crime of blogging! — has scarcely ever caught our attention. Surely, pain must take precedence over palate. Not so, apparently, in our subverted moral calculus. We are right to be appalled at Israel mowing the lawn in Palestine, but lose little sleep over Assad’s Syrian genocide. We lap up history, or versions of it, that favour us. In our minds, Muhammad Bin Qasim discovered a chronologically misplaced Pakistan in the 7^th century. But come the question of Malala’s Nobel peace prize, and we happily indulge in scholarly prevarications.

The issue is this: ours is a selective morality. We condemn radicalism — only when it hurts us. We want effective law enforcement — so long as it applies to others. We begrudge politicians for corruption but will bribe our way around in service of our own ends — anything to bypass due process. Politicians begrudge the citizenry for brain-drain while their kids comfortably study abroad. Contradictions and double-speak, a bizarre Orwellian twilight zone is what we have become. Truth be told, we are the soil from which sprouts the poisonous fruit we then want culled. We are a rare confluence of poor school curricula, stratified thinking, stultifying cultural atavisms, divisive dogma, and a range of radicalising myths and memes; these are the makings of a perfect storm which destroys much in its wake.

While Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the NAP and various other state-conceived concoctions are good, nay necessary, let us not forget that the enemy we seek breathes closer to us than we may like to believe.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 19^th,  2015.

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