Pakistan: A Country that Lost Its Trigger-Point - II
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“One tragedy more won’t change anything. He will be walking around in black clothes during whole next week, as he always does. Then he will return to normality, just like he always does after sad accidents. He won’t try”. The Trigger Point.
The militants attacked the GHQ; they killed one Lt. General; they targeted the Karachi Naval Base and destroyed the national assets like the surveillance airplanes; they attacked the Kamra Air Base; they killed in broad daylight the workers of the Wah Ordnance Factory; they eliminated the oath-taking cadets at the Kohat Recruiting School; they turned into debris the FIA and police stations; they blew up the girl schools, they massacred the praying believers in the mosques, they destroyed the tombs and market-places, to name only a few instances, and as if it were not enough, our main leadership still kept insisting the terrorists were just reactionaries.
The question is: did the militants ever leave any ambiguity as to who they were when in their statement issued to the Reuter they categorically said, “We have a clear-cut stance, and anyone who takes the side of the government against us will have to die at our hands.” These loonies who govern Pakistan do not know the difference between a law and order situation and a hard core act of treason. The government basically has lost its writ, and its “Monopoly of violence”, as says Dr. Farrukh Salim. In the 1990’s, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo and Rwanda passed through this kind of situation because the State had completely collapsed and would not undertake any proper and meaningful action. It happened the same way in the South American hemisphere in countries like Columbia, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. They are embroiled in civil wars with the writ of the state totally defanged. Is Pakistan any different?
Since the militants’ recent attack on an innocent girl - Malala Yousafzai, they have further beheaded a Superintendent of Police in Peshawar. They act and they take the responsibility by fully disclosing their identity. Our leadership fails even to pass one simple resolution of condemnation in the Parliament against their barbarism, fearing it may not backfire, affecting their chances of success in the elections. Their behavior as well as their statements are an insult to the jawans and officers of all the services who laid down their lives fighting the militants, and such statements are a source of demoralization for those who are engaged in this task. The Economist of October 13, 2012 is right when it sums up the cause of the militants’ strength, “The government of President Asif Ali Zardari, the main opposition party led by Nawaz Sharif and the armed forces have all done little to educate ordinary people about the Pakistan Taliban”.
Which people on earth, if alive, would put up with the kind of carnage taking place in the country and yet manage to sleep well at night? Which people with an iota of conscience would tolerate the killing of innocent children in school buses? Which people with a shred of justice in them would adjust themselves, and keep putting up with people who perpetrate such acts of barbarity? Silence and inaction in such circumstances on the part of those who offer themselves to be “the in-charge of the barns of the country”, is akin to conniving with the terrorists. The current state of masochism in the people of Pakistan - a state in which one begins to relish torture and self-inflicted pain - is a dangerous sign. One more direct and dangerous consequence of this state of mind is cynicism. A remarkable level of tolerance for rot, mayhem and inhuman violence and bloodshed has settled in the minds of people. Love of violence or its tolerance is a sure sign of the decline and destruction of a people or civilization. This is a lesson of history.
Nations like individuals do have their raw-nerves; their trigger-point; a point that would short-circuit them, and that beyond which they would refuse to slide down any further, whatever the consequences. This raw-nerve; this last proverbial straw; this last station of degradation once touched, results in the instant realization that it is time to wake up and act. Saadat Hasan Manto in his two beautiful stories, Hatak and Khushia, explains this psychological phenomenon so well. In Hatak (Insult), a simple “Ooh” of rejection for Saghundhi, the female prostitute, uttered by her customer, is enough to transform her into a woman, conscious of basic entitlement for human dignity.
In Khushia, even a pimp, held low in human estimation because of his profession, all of a sudden begins to realize that he too is a man, gifted with ‘manlihood’, when the prostitute for whom he pimped, inadvertently steps on his raw-nerve, by asking him to come in when she was almost naked. Are the people of Pakistan and their leadership, both military and political, worse off than the Khushia or Sughundhi of Manto? Perhaps they are like the “Sakina”, another famous character of Manto ,in his story, “Khol Do” (Open It), who gets savagely brutalized and raped both by the people of other religions as well as by her own co-religious rescuers.
Pakistan like the poor, traumatized Sakina of Khol Do, appears so keen and so willing, as a result of its repeated brutalization done by both - its own as well as others - that it opens its borders to all, letting all to come and have fun with it. How many more Malalas need to be shot, and how many more attacks on the sensitive installations of Pakistan need to take place? How many more female whippings need to occur, and how many more innocent lives need to be sacrificed before the clueless leaders of Pakistan - military as well as civilian - finally locate the hidden switch, called the raw-nerve of the nation? In this game of intentionally- spread confusion, let it be reminded to all that in Rwanda in 1994, four-hundred thousand Tutsis got butchered in three months and nobody came to their rescue. As Shakespeare would say for such a situation, “Nobody came because nobody ever does.”. In 1992, about 200,000 to 400,000 Bosnians lost their lives before the Americans came to rescue the rest. Pakistan, due to playing a double game, has almost created a similar situation in the world comity for itself. In the above two cases, the point to remember is: in the Rwandan case America forgot to come; and in the Bosnian case, America chose to come late. What will America do in case the story is repeated is anybody’s guess.
The terrorists, as pointed out by Najam Sethi rightly, needed two things to operate: one, a piece of land, a foothold; and second a swath of sympathizers of the ideology they follow. They unfortunately have managed to have both. North and South Waziristan currently, and Malakand and Swat Valley in 2009, have become their fiefdoms, no go areas. As regards their ideology, there are a whole lot of people found in every village of South Punjab, and corner of the country who think, act and behave like them. The tragic part is that the political leadership of all parties, just for the sake of political dividends, has either become the militants’ silent partners, or is too scared to go against them. In either case, it is the militancy that is winning. In the words of Asma Jehangir, “Political parties have no solution to offer, nor do they have any desire to have one ... it is not a question of the American presence; it is a matter that relates to our own protection”.
What has further strengthened the Islamic extremists is the poor condition of the economy and the inflation, and the corruption and the criminal bad governance of the ruling party. All these factors have become the rallying cry, which the clever extremists are exploiting by exposing the widespread corruption and waste of the leaders on one hand, and the issue of rich versus poor on the other hand, leading to the conclusion that the Islamic way of sharing wealth is the best against the dependence on loans from the West. It is another matter, that in order to finance their ideology, they have generated a whole reign of terror, by initiating a spate of kidnappings, bank lootings, target killings etc. The practice has delivered to them rich dividends: it has struck the Mongolian-kind fear in the population, leaving them with no choice but to either think like them, or keep their lips zipped. No institution of the country, including that of the armed forces, is without the Taliban inroads in them. Who let this happen? Perhaps all.
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