Nawaz on Rampage against the Army?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Call it as you may by any name, but Nawaz Sharif is on a warpath against the Pakistan army and its haloed establishment.
The blistering, frontal assault, delivered, of course, from his London sanctuary, was intended to create a stir in Pakistan’s already turbulent political scene and did just that. Its reverberations can still be heard in Pakistan’s corridors of power, be they civilian or military.
Why would the three-time PM of Pakistan—who has since been convicted by the highest court of the land and has, lately, become a proclaimed offender—feel the need to take on the military establishment is not rocket science. He’s a fugitive from law, is on the run from Pakistan, where he’s wanted to serve out the jail sentence he was handed out for corruption, but is refusing to return home to face the consequences. He’s a desperate man and like any desperate person he’s tilting at all windmills to rehabilitate himself in Pakistani politics, albeit his status in politics is that of a pariah because of his conviction as a criminal.
It isn’t surprising that in sheer desperation the fugitive, defrocked, politician is training his guns at the very institution that god-fathered his entry into politics four decades ago. All ungrateful men suffer from this syndrome of trying to bite the hand that had fed them and made them into some-body from a virtual non-entity.
Every student of Pakistani politics—even one with cursory and tentative knowledge of it—knows how his mealy-mouthed father, Mian Mohammad Sharif, greased his path to political apprenticeship with the condescending mentoring of General Ghulam Gilani, the then Martial Law Administrator and Governor of Punjab under General Ziaul Haq.
It’s not a joke making the rounds of Pakistan’s arm-chair political pundits but a fact that General Gilani—pleased with the services of elder Sharif—offered to make one of his sons a Minister in his Punjab Cabinet. When asked by the general to name one of his sons, the elder Sharif—canny and business-savvy as he was—is said to have commented that his younger son, Shahbaz, was the intelligent one and was looking after the family business. But the elder son, Nawaz, was happy-go-lucky and churlish and may be given the ministerial task. Thus, began Nawaz Sharif’s inglorious journey in politics, which has proved to be an unmitigated disaster for Pakistan.
But one might say, giving Nawaz the benefit of doubt, that he isn’t in a league of his own, as far as the military establishment’s mentoring or patronage of civilian apprentices is concerned. There are other instances of this ‘experiment’ going horribly skewed and awry.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto is a more illustrious example than Nawaz in the military establishment’s Frankenstein model turning against the inventor and proving disastrous for the country. ZAB was an invention of General, later Field Marshal, Ayub Khan. But what ZAB did to his mentor and Pakistan is history. ZAB’s sky-high political ambitions and his unbridled lust for power was the undoing of Quaid’s Pakistan and its truncation into two.
Nawaz isn’t a patch in intelligence and wit on ZAB. But he has certainly proved to be far more uncouth and undisciplined in the manner of his assault on the military’s rampart than ZAB. Which could be due to his lowly birth and upbringing and his sub-lo intelligence quotient. This scribe has seen both, ZAB and Nawaz, at close quarters and can say, without fear of contradiction that the latter is a gambol compared to live-wire ZAB.
Nawaz has a history of picking up fights with every army chief he dealt with, notwithstanding that he may have appointed the target of his ire, himself. His eclipse at the hands of General Musharraf—the most ambitious of Pakistani Bonapartes but also the one with the lowest intelligence level among all his predecessors in khaki—was a result of his trying to be too smart in his ambition to get rid of Musharraf.
However, this latest perfidy of Nawaz is less to do with his grudge against the military leadership. His tirade was more targeted at Imran Khan. It was a phlegmatic outburst, in utter frustration, against IK because the self-anointed architect of a ‘new Pakistan’ wouldn’t give him and his family of mega thieves a deal to keep their loot and get out of Pakistan safely.
Ever since Nawaz’ conviction, it has been an open secret of Pakistani politics—infested as it is with wholesale corruption and cronyism—that he has been tilting at all windmills to get from the current leadership a type of NRO that had paved his and his then political rival Benazir Bhutto’s re-entry into the inner sanctum of Pakistan.
But IK is no Musharraf. The last Bonaparte of Pakistan, General Musharraf—and let’s fervently hope that he was well and truly the last of the dubious league of men-in-uniform who forced their entry into political power through the barrel of their gun—was a man of unbridled political ambitions. His appetite for power led him into cutting a deal with the blackest of black sheep of Pakistani politics. He may have thought what he was doing, for his self-interest, was smart. However, the tide turned soon against him, as it had against all of his precursors who wanted to be smart like him. He, too, was stung by those he’d pampered.
Nawaz, daughter Maryam—who nurses unabashed ambitions to become BB-Two—and their minions have been tugging at the apron strings of the military establishment to lean on IK so he may grant their wish for an NRO. But they have been frustrated in this campaign because the men in khaki remained unimpressed by their mercy appeals and wouldn’t nudge IK to grant their wish.
But Nawaz’ brutal assault against the military establishment can’t be watered down or ignored because it’s a cry in sheer frustration. His tirade about the Pakistan army running the show from behind the curtain and bringing in Imran Khan as their puppet is, for choice of a better word, treasonous.
It can’t be a coincidence that what Nawaz is firing at the military establishment and IK is precisely the propaganda ammunition used by Pakistan’s mortal enemy, India.
The Indians have, for quite sometimes, been engaged in this hybrid war against Pakistan. Their target is to subvert the faith and trust of the people of Pakistan in their armed forces. This psychological warfare is a tool of hybrid war fought at the level of minds of men, instead of on the battlefield. The Indians have intensified this hybrid warfare against Pakistan since August, 2019, when a power-besotted Narendra Modi got hold of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir by the scruff of its neck and struck away its special status under the Indian Constitution.
With IK’s government robustly denouncing Modi’s treachery, the latter found a tool within the Pakistani political hierarchy to carry forth his agenda. A q
uisling Nawaz and his cohorts and minions—wittingly or unwittingly—have parroted the Indian propaganda garbage against the Pakistani military establishment.
It’s a dangerous path that a dim-witted Nawaz is embarked on. He may think that he can kill two birds with one stone: serve his Indian masters as well as shake the Pakistani people’s trust in their army.
It’s, at the same time, a vicious, dirty and treacherous exercise undertaken, solely, to save his own skin as well as try to blackmail IK government to cut a deal with him. Of course, it isn’t the first time for Nawaz indulging in naked diatribe against the Pakistan army and the state. Last year, he’d brazenly pointed the finger at the ISI for master-minding the November, 2008 Mumbai terrorism drama. It was nothing less than stabbing Pakistan in its back by holding the Pakistani military establishment culpable for the macabre drama in Mumbai.
With Nawaz having played his trump card, that’s about the unkindest thrust from him against Pakistan, the ball is now in the court of the Pakistani civil and military establishments. How are they going to react to the treacherous salvo from a discredited and convicted Pakistani political stalwart who, to the abiding regret of the Pakistanis, held the august office of PM three times. But it also goes to his dubious distinction that he couldn’t complete any of his three innings to conclusion. With the benefit of hind-sight one may be excused for saying that Pakistan was saved, on each occasion, from what further damage this morally-bankrupt man could have caused to the country.
The IK government is giving Nawaz’ cohorts and minions in Pakistan a long rope to hang themselves at the petard of the people they ostensibly want to use against them. That’s sensible, given the low esteem in which the likes of Maulana Fazalur Rehamn (“Mulla Diesel” in popular parlance) and other spent bullets are held by the people. Let them cry themselves hoarse and expose their dubious credentials as ‘saviors’ of democracy under the banal banner of Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM). The people of Pakistan are getting wiser, seeing these political acrobats in their true colors. PDM has quickly been derided in popular discourse as ‘Pakistan Dynastic Movement.’ That’s what it really is. Nawaz and company are a desperate lot running out of options to save their loot and stay at the center of Pakistani politics.
As for the military establishment, they are being wiser in ignoring Nawaz’ cheap shot in a desperate bid to rehabilitate and reinvent himself. Let’s hope that after seeing their past investment in a light-weight political apprentice, like Nawaz, going waste the men in khaki would swear never to repeat it. Their best insurance is with the people of Pakistan who still regard and honor them as the guardians of Pakistan’s territorial integrity. Let’s all fervently hope that the military establishment’s appetite for Bonapartism is over and done with.
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