Peace and Politics under the Praetorian Shadow — II
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
On October 7, 2011 a mob of more than 60 men, armed with iron rods, descended on a girls’ school in Rawalpindi, ostensibly ‘defending Islam’ by beating up the students and teachers there. That out of more than 500 muhkam ayaat (clear injunctions) of the Holy Qur’an, not one prescribes the veil for the ordinary Muslim women, did not matter to these brave men. It never has, it never will. But that is the dress code that they wanted to impose while ordering the women and girls they brutalized to dress modestly.
This is precisely the fallout of Pakistan’s misadventures in Afghanistan that many have been warning about for over 30 years now. A day before this incident, I had noted in the first part of this column that “those adopting a pugilistic attitude under the long, dark praetorian shadow seem to forget that instead of gaining strategic depth, Pakistan ended up giving ideological depth to the Taliban, putting its own population under house arrest too”. If Mazar Sharif, Kabul, FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been out of sight and out of mind for anyone to worry about, will an incident next door to the GHQ be a clarion call?
If the resolve expressed at the All-Parties Conference (APC) to offer the other cheek to the Taliban is anything to go by, one gets a feeling that it may not. But fight the mean old US they all shall. The Pakistani security forces are spread too thin to do anything meaningful about the Haqqani terrorist network but not that much that they cannot give the US bully a bloody nose. With the Haqqani network — or its ‘political wing’ to be precise — they plan to negotiate. One did not know until the revelation at the APC that the Haqqani network is the 21st century-equivalent of the Irish Republican Army and like Sinn Féin does have a political wing. Is it the law-abiding Haqqani uncles and brothers brokering the so-called peace deals for Kurram, in the federal territory, that might lead the talks? I digress. But as pathetic as the security establishment’s argument has been over the years, what is worse is the civilian leadership’s pliancy to go along with it.
Not that the security establishment has ever let them have a say in it but the politicians’ view seems to be that by totally abdicating foreign policy to the former, they can prevent its interventions at home. Historically, every single time this approach has proved to be flawed. Even when it has worked for a short while, in the long run it has hurt the political forces and, a lot more importantly, Pakistan itself. In a country where long periods of military rule are punctuated by controlled democratic rule, it certainly is difficult for a political dispensation to stand up on its own after such paralysis. But there never is going to be a ‘right’ time to do this.
Under ideal circumstances a constellation of domestic, regional and international events has to happen before the balance of power flips against the praetorian behemoth. The Pakistani civilian leaders and the security establishment (or those echoing its view) both draw comparisons with Turkey albeit with their separate conclusions in terms of the civil-military relationship. In present-day Turkey the balance of power appears to have shifted against its armed forces that held sway over its foreign policy for decades.
The landmark achievement was the Turkish Justice and Development Party (JDP) securing a decisive majority in the 2002 elections that effectively ended the fragmented political mandate that had marred that country for some 20 years. And, of course, the governance and development that followed such mandate enabled the JDP to strengthen its position vis-à-vis a deeply entrenched and privileged praetorian guard. But even before that could happen, the start of the harmonization with the European Union (EU) had set in motion processes that legally stripped the Turkish armed forces of major bureaucratic leverage in foreign policy formulation. An almost simultaneous event was the loss of de facto leverage by the Turkish military. A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this column but suffice it to say that after the change in its position on Cyprus, Turkey has not wielded coercion as a foreign policy instrument. No mindless imposition of strategic depth, military or ‘diplomatic’, upon its neighbors has been the Turkish objective. A former Turkish diplomat, Ambassador Umut Arik, had presciently summarized his country’s nuanced diplomacy, saying: “Turkey is trying to create a balance, an equilibrium. We seek to explain friends to neighbors and neighbors to friends.” Compare and contrast this “zero problem” Turkish foreign policy with Pakistan’s zero-sum, mutually assured destruction approach to its neighbors!
Given the multiple fissures running through Pakistani society and polity, it is highly unlikely that any one political party will be able to secure a parliamentary majority comparable to the Turkish JDP. There is an equally slim likelihood of an EU developing out of the new Silk Road endeavor anytime soon. The worst scenario for Pakistan will be a disastrous event — a 9/11 redux — to happen at home or abroad with comparably serious consequences. Absent any of the game-changers, the political class has only itself to fall back upon. The political leadership can choose to stick together on a minimum common program and build a case for de-praetorization of the Pakistani polity or be routed one by one or worse, collectively.
At every opportunity that has arisen to at least voice a reasonable concern about the direction of Pakistan’s foreign policy, its political leaders have allowed themselves to be used as human shields. Expecting the world powers to take punitive measures when there is not even a whimper from the Pakistani civilian leadership is unrealistic. The world perception so far has been that the Pakistani security establishment has been an unwilling partner in countering the global terror menace. With the political leadership pursuing peace and politics a la APC, they apparently have opted to continue plodding under the praetorian shadow — and being perceived as unreliable partners. (Concluded)
The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki
