Is Nawaz Slipping?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
No, I’m not one of those eager-beavers rushing to judgment prematurely. A verdict on Nawaz Sharif’s third term in office must wait—and for quite a while. The jury on him is out, for the moment.
However, there are disturbing signs that he may be losing his grip on things before he has had a chance to fully understand and appreciate the challenges confronting his government. Or, putting it the cynical way, he is increasingly looking clean bowled by the enormity of the task before him as Pakistan’s man of destiny.
In any analysis of Nawaz as leader one should start from a reality check, which is that Nawaz is a man of average intelligence ( some of my whiz-kid peers may still accuse me of being too charitable on this account).
Well, that isn’t such a big handicap—or anything out of sync—given the disquieting fact that among the motley crowd of autocrats and democrats of the post-ZAB era—a full 40-year period—that has lorded over Pakistan we can’t think of one being in the category of viscerally bright and intelligent people.
But it doesn’t take a genius to have their priorities right. Nawaz, regrettably, is adding on to his problems by not getting his priorities right. In fact, he seems to be mixing them, which has started hurting him, already, and will haunt him, increasingly, in the long run if he remained as clueless as he is, now.
What he clearly doesn’t seem to grasp is that his biggest challenge comes from rampant and snowballing terrorism, and combating it should be his priority number one.
Yes, the people—or the masses, in our feudal parlance—may be pestering him to end the nightmare of persistent power shortage and menacingly-long power outages and blackouts. But even the same people value life over electricity. They will be more than happy to spend a few more weeks, over even months, with 12-hour blackouts, if in the bargain they can get the blood-thirsty terrorists off their backs.
Nawaz and his cronies—and rest assured that cronyism is back with vengeance under him—may talk with a brave face and tell the nation that they’re all keyed up to tackle this ‘war against terrorism’ in Pakistan. But there is no plan, as yet, how they intend to slay the monster. Never mind the talk of a national consensus or of an All Parties Conference—which has been regularly bandied the past three months but hasn’t materialised, as yet—to hammer out a grand design to roll back the wave of terrorism. But as of now it’s only so much thunder and no rain.
In the absence of a national blue-print to face down the terrorists, they have been growing bolder and more menacing, by the day. They seem to be daring the government to take up the cudgels with them. The spate of terrorist attacks of the past two months is the Taliban’s way of reminding the government that they’re there to cross swords and are not going to be cowed down in the face of mere posturing or inane bombastic from stalwarts of the new team in Islamabad.
From KP to Quetta to Karachi the terrorists are the one dictating the script. The daring raid on the jail in Dera Ismail Khan, the brutal murder of 30 police officers in Quetta on the eve of Eid, and the spike in Bhatta (protection money or ransom) demands in Karachi are the terrorists’ way of letting the Pakistani people know that they are in charge of the ‘Land of the Pure’ and not their clueless government.
What inference, other than accepting the terrorist message, should the people of Pakistan draw from these bloody and provocative incidents when they can see that their PM runs away to the Holy Land to seek the cachet of a pious and observant Muslim, instead of performing the job the nation has tasked him with? Our leaders’ penchant for religious zealotry is, apparently, unbounded even when it may verge on bigotry.
The crying demand of the time is a firm, resolute and well-calibrated response to the terrorist daring. That, per se, necessitates that the government come up without further ado with a national blue-print of security response to the scourge of terrorism. More than 350 innocent Pakistanis have been killed in 60 terrorist attacks since the Nawaz government has taken power. How many more lives would it take to jog the rulers into action and when would they crack the long-awaited whip against the murderers?
Imran is right; the government has primary obligation to formulate policy, especially a policy of this magnitude and importance. Policies are not formulated at this or that All Parties Conference. Conferences are for debate, not policy making—and that, too, involving Pakistani politicos whose primary agenda is point-scoring, even in a moment of national calamity.
So Nawaz has this bonded duty to chalk up a broad-based and concerted policy to tackle the menace of terrorism and take the perpetrators of it head-long. Yes, do get all the major political actors hawking and parading their stuff on the national stage at a conference and seek their approbation for it. That, in the truest sense of the term, would filter out a ‘national consensus.’ Armed with it, Nawaz should get the armed forces behind his policy and crack down on militancy and terrorism until these demons are subdued.
What Nawaz seems to be shy of is using force to respond to the monster of terrorism. He’d floated the idea of negotiations with the Taliban when he was into the election campaign. Imran Khan, too, had hawked the same.
However, what the Taliban have been doing since Nawaz came to power is the anti-thesis of negotiations. They are reminding all the real or posturing peaceniks that they don’t believe in negotiations. Murder and terror is the language of the Pakistani Taliban and the government’s response has to be in the same language—the only one these vile and vicious marauders understand.
This scribe has been arguing for a long time in his regular Urdu column—read all over North America and beyond—that these Taliban are the 21 st century re-incarnation of the 7 th century Kharajittes who plagued the Islamic landscape with the Taliban-like bloodlust during the reign of Imam Ali, the 4 th of the Guided Caliphs. There can be no better guiding light for us than what Ali did and how he dealt with the Kharajittes murderers. He didn’t negotiate with them; he used force to slay the demons of his time.
Nawaz has no alternative, under the circumstances, than using force to deal with the Taliban terror, and the sooner he did this the better would it be for him and Pakistan.
The use of measured and responsible force is nowhere as urgently required as in Karachi, which, for reasons best known to him, Nawaz has been keeping at arm’s length.
It’s eerie, it’s blatantly naïve, of him and his advisers—old cronies and mostly ‘yes-men’—to think they can postpone tackling the scourge of urban-based militancy and lawlessness in the mega-polis which holds the key to any plans that Nawaz may have for economic recovery and revival.
Nawaz is clearly stumbling in Karachi, and poorly at that. One is at a loss to appreciate his motive, or reason, for courting MQM—the lawless mafia that’s one of the principal causes of all that’s wrong with Karachi and is part of the problem.
Nawaz’ designated for President of Pakistan—the little-known Mamnoon Hussain—would have won the contest without MQM. So what earthly compulsion there was on Nawaz to embrace the MQM which was on the back-foot and reeling under the heat put on its London-based Don by the Scotland Yard and London’s Metropolitan Police?
MQM latched on to the life-line thrown by Nawaz’ weird generosity; it was as good as a god-send for them to bounce back. The fallout of it is now there for all to see. The spike in targeted murders is MQM’s way of saying ‘thank you.’ Demands for bhatta have sky-rocketed in step with the blessings of Ramadan.
Karachi’s business community is, once again, under intense siege, and the harassed traders and industrialists don’t know where to seek succour from. They have stopped looking at the door of the imbecile Sindh government where the same rogues and poltroons are back in the saddle that were the problem of the city and its denizens in the past five years. Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah is an affront and insult to whatever goes under the name of a leader. The province’s governor is a votary and tribune of the London Don and answerable only to him.
FPCCI (Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry) is the highest body of Pakistani businessmen and industrialists. In a categorical demand made on August 12, it has called on the federal government, headed by Nawaz Sharif, to hand over Karachi to the armed forces for at least six weeks, if not more, so they may crack down upon those who seem to have bottled up Karachi in their venal grip.
This is a demand that Nawaz would only be ignoring at his own peril. Karachi, the motor that pumps life-blood into the sinews of Pakistan’s economy is on the verge of a nervous break-down. The goons and terrorists have taken over Pakistan’s largest city. Only the most hopeless of optimists would expect the Sindh government to bail the beleaguered city out of the clutches of the mafias ruling the roost there.
That takes us back to where we started the debate. Nawaz is showing all the sad symptoms of a man who can’t make up his mind on the order of priorities on his list—if there’s a list. What he and the motley crowd of old and new sycophants around him ought not to ignore is that time is of the essence. The marauders—the Taliban, other militants and Karachi’s Bhatta mafia —are knocking at the ramparts of power. Their agenda is to bring them down. The question is, does Nawaz have any sense of the gravity of what he’s up against, and does he have a coherent plan to deal with it?
The longevity, or otherwise, of his third stint in power hinges on how quickly and firmly he deals with the scourge of terrorism and lawlessness. His well-wishers—and those of Pakistan—will be keeping their fingers crossed and hoping that he doesn’t fumble.
Post script: As these lines were being written, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali has spoken up at a press briefing to mark the Independence Day, August 14. He has, briefly, dilated on prospects of both war and peace—a full scale war against the terrorists, if necessary. That’s a positive development. However, he still insists that a policy in favour of either of the two options, war and peace, will be hammered out at the putative APC. That’s bad news. It’s shirking the government’s responsibility to frame policy. Diffidence is clearly still swaying the rulers. Old habits die hard. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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