STRAIGHT TALK
Who is Testing Nawaz Sharif?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Like everything else, even old adages are losing out in Pakistan.
It’s not only commonly said but also universally accepted that victory brings sweet rewards for the winner. But not so for the latest, big time, winner of national sweep stakes in Pakistan, Mian Nawaz Sharif.
Nawaz Sharif has lost his smile, even after sweeping the electoral decks clean off his opponents and adversaries. Never known for his smile, he used to exude a happy and cheerful demeanour on television before the May 11 elections. But electoral triumph has curiously robbed him of his charming visage. Instead, he comes out, on the tele-screen, as a deeply worried leader with furrows visibly embedded. His admirers are missing the old Nawaz.
In a quirk of fate, the man he thoroughly beat into political oblivion—the much-despised Asif Ali Zardari—is literally laughing up to his bank—his bank, or banks, in Switzerland.
Nawaz may have driven his obnoxious and infuriating rival to the back waters of rural Sindh—where the money-drooling carpet-bagger sprang from, in the first place—but that doesn’t seem to bother Zardari a bit.
With the help of elaborate political foot-dragging and brazen chicanery, Zardari has managed to secure the hundreds of millions of dollars he looted from Pakistan, because his cases in Swiss courts have become time-barred. That’s what he’d aimed at from the day he entered the Presidency in Islamabad, and that’s what he has pulled through. Let history write whatever verdict it may about him but as far as he’s concerned he has proven to the world that a thief with guile can hoodwink a nation of 180 million people—idiots and poltroons, cynics might bemoan—and is home, free, with his loot tucked safely under his belt.
Forget about the customary honeymoon that every victor to an elected office is supposed to have. But poor man, Nawaz, hasn’t even been blessed with any respite from the moment he crossed the finish line ahead of everyone else at the polls.
The burden of office, the sage would say, sobers even the most convivial of leaders, and Nawaz never was in the galaxy band of jovial or convivial leaders. But what seems to be crushing him under its weight is the enormity of the task he suddenly has woken up to on the morning after his sweet electoral triumph.
A grim reminder of the Himalayan challenge before Nawaz of Pakistan’s snowballing scourge of terrorism has come from the foot hills of Nanga Parbat, Pakistan’s second-tallest peak in the Karakoram Range. The heinous murder of 11 mountaineers at Diamer, 4,000 meters up in the lap of the frosty mountains, is the Pakistani Taliban’s stinging rebuke to Nawaz Sharif’s initiative to engage them in a peace dialogue.
Nawaz had announced his peace initiative, vis-à-vis the Taliban, before entering the electoral race. He hasn’t recanted that initiative. However, the predator terrorists seem to be poking fun at him and telling it to his face that they are more interested in testing his resolve and resilience and see if he’d blink or muster guts to take them on at their own game.
The gory Nanga Parbat episode should be a wake-up call for Nawaz. He’ll have to get into action, sooner than later, and give it back to the terrorists in the language of force they understand best.
None would grudge Nawaz, or anybody else for that matter, the option of peace parleys. However, the Pakistani Taliban have misread the peace option as a sign of the Pakistani state’s weakness. And jaded political pundits would tell you—as they should Nawaz, too—that an adversary as lustful of blood as the Taliban, can’t, and shouldn’t, be engaged from a position of weakness.
Nawaz may be a firm votary of the old adage that discretion is the better part of valour. It might well be so. However, carrots should best be offered to a beaten and humiliated adversary after the big stick has been effectively wielded.
So Nawaz has little choice but to use the stick against the murderers who have no regard even for those engaged in the harmless pursuit of mountaineering.
The butchery of foreign mountaineers, including those from our most helpful neighbour, China, now effectively closes the last avenue of what went by the name of international tourism in Pakistan. Foreign tourists that used to flock to Pakistan’s northern ‘paradise’ in droves before 9/11—and took in its spectacular scenic charms aplenty—have studiously stayed away in the past decade for reasons well known. Mountaineers were, however, still braving the elements because of Pakistan’s unique stature in the world of mountaineering. That niche will also be lost, now, for good.
The terrorists will have won if the Nawaz government still doesn’t use the thick end of the stick against them, in the wake of their dastardly crime.
Nawaz is also, apparently, being tested by Pakistan’s much-touted security agencies.
They are testing him before they start working for or against him. They would like to know if he has what it takes for a resolute and effective leader to command respect and ensure implementation of his command. Our security apparatus in Pakistan is teeming with military personnel and esprit de corps. Nawaz, to his dismay, hasn’t had a smooth ride with them in his previous stints. So, much as the political culture of Pakistan may have changed already, or changing fast, old habits of those used to having their way with politicians—by swagger or suave—haven’t exactly died.
In this battle of nerves, Nawaz will have to show more grit than what his critics and naysayers are inclined to associate with him. Pakistan’s critical security situation demands, at the helm of the statecraft, a man of cool nerves and steely resolve. It’s Nawaz’ call to prove the Jeremiahs wrong and assert himself, without wasting a moment, as the man of the moment and man of destiny of a bleeding and haemorrhaging Pakistan.
The enormity of Nawaz’ call or challenge before him couldn’t be more emphasised, especially in the backdrop of the virtual siege of Karachi by terrorists of all persuasions and stripes, including political mafias flaunting their credentials as guardians of this or that ethnic community.
As these lines were being written, word has just filtered through the news channels of an early morning terrorist attack against the security convoy of a judge of the Sindh High Court. Not that it would make the cowardly crime any more serious, the judge concerned, Justice Maqbool Baqar Jafri, happens to be a cousin of my wife’s. Thank God that he has escaped with only minor injuries. But his driver and others in his security convoy lost out to the barbaric murderers.
That rapacious murderers and terrorists can strike at will, and with obvious impunity, in the heart of Karachi, is as palpable a failure of the security apparatus of Pakistan as the murder of 11 mountaineers in Nanga Parbat, with its daunting and forbidding terrain.
A poor and struggling Pakistan—with its economy in the pits, thanks to the rapacity of Zardari & Co. during the past five years—has been making huge sacrifices—in health, education and civic development—to keep the country’s defenders well groomed and amply endowed. If this is what the nation can still end up with, at the hands of incorrigible murderers, at the end of the day then there can only be one inference: that the pampered and over-fed ‘defenders’ could only be snoozing at their watch to allow stealth beasts to sneak through their security cordon.
This is what Nawaz is up against at the threshold of his latest crack at the citadel of power in Pakistan. He’d better tone up and prove to a befuddled nation that the people of Pakistan haven’t erred in reposing their faith in him, notwithstanding his previous track record. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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