The Terrorists Have a Clueless Nawaz by the Tail
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
The statistics speak for themselves, and speak volumes: of the terrorists’ unchallenged ability to strike at will wherever they want, and of a feckless government’s abject inability to check or halt them
Nawaz came to his third innings in power on June 5, last year. Count the days he has been in the saddle (you can do it on your fingers). It comes to exactly 230 days as of the writing of these lines. In these 230 days—as per the officially compiled figures—the terrorists have unleashed 223 attacks through the length and breadth of Pakistan. It simply works out to almost one attack a day.
And there’s no indication of these barbaric attacks likely slowing down any time soon. Quite the contrary of it, the pace is picking up with the onset of the New Year. In 21 days of January, 30 attacks have been launched, right from Peshawar in the north to Karachi in the south; that’s more than one attack a day; call it an exponential increase in acts of terrorism on Nawaz Sharif’s watch.
The casualty toll is high, horrendous, if you will. Including the 26 innocent Shiia pilgrims returning from Iran, whose bus was blown up on January 21—and also counting the 3 polio workers hacked to death in Karachi—the tally stands at 1250 killed in these 223 acts of cowardice and savagery.
In January alone, a whopping number of 128 have been killed in 29 attacks. The bottom line is that there’s no letup in blood-letting—the favourite sport of these 21 st century Pakistani barbarians.
They are becoming ever more daring as their appetite for innocent blood is whetted by the mounting toll. The impotence of the government in the face of this rising tide of mayhem is helping the terrorists in expanding their network of terror with impunity. They have been picking and choosing their targets at will and striking without let or hindrance from government machinery that seems to have become morbid and paralyzed in the face of the terrorist onslaught.
What’s wrong with the government? Why can’t it get its act together and give it back to the terrorists the way they deserve?
For an answer to these questions, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist. Even a layman would tell you the craven Taliban and others of their ilk have been getting bolder and ever more menacing because of the utter incompetence of a government whose woody leader—and he seems to be getting woodier by the day—doesn’t have a clue how to tackle this rising tide of terror which is, now, seriously morphing into an existentialist threat for Pakistan.
Mediocrity is a curse. Any intelligent person would say that. But mediocrity within affordable limits is not so unwelcome or disparaging. Most Western democracies have mediocre leaders, and this fact has been viscerally accepted by the electorate in these countries. But the kind of abysmal mediocrity that Nawaz Sharif’s latest bunch of nincompoops has foisted on Pakistan is certainly becoming intolerable and insufferable.
I’d gladly recommend anyone for the medal of Pride of Performance (though so much abused in the system of spoils, cronyism and crass nepotism so much in vogue in Pakistan) if they were to suggest to me just one name of a brilliant man in Nawaz’ cabinet, including his ‘kitchen cabinet.’ There is none. Zero. They are mostly woodies like their boss and owe their ministries or kitchen cabinet ‘honor’ because they are good at saying, ‘yes, boss.’
Note the reaction of the PM in response to the latest cowardly attack at Rawalpindi’s RA Bazar—in the vicinity of GHQ—in which a truck of servicemen (soldiers of the army) was blown up killing 26 jawans. The PM pompously announced that he was cancelling the plans to travel to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum meeting. He made the announcement as if he were doing a huge favor to a grieving nation by denying himself the delight of a few days in Switzerland. Grateful, Mr. PM, for your great sacrifice; the nation will forever be beholden to you for your concern for Pakistan.
The next day, January 21, he received a delegation of lawmakers from across the political divide. It was, in other words, a full-spectrum bevy of politicians who came calling on him to consort with him in search of the Holy Grail to fight off the Taliban terror.
However, the statement attributed to PM, and issued at the end of the well-reported conclave must go down in the annals of obfuscation as an outstanding example of a clueless leader not knowing how to take on the TTP challenge. The statement quoted NS as saying, “A concerted effort and united stand will enable us to achieve the desired results (sic)”
Now, take your pick trying to make sense out of this verbiage from a feckless leader. A concerted effort! By whom, and why? A united stand! Of whom, and why? And what do you mean by “desired results”? Desired by whom? And what are those desired results you seemed to be hinting at?
What Nawaz can’t get through his mind is what every loyal Pakistan has been expecting of him and desperately pining for: behave like a leader, damn it, and stop being a dithering politician out to score a point over his opponents and rivals. You may still be fixated on out-foxing them but the Taliban may outfox you, if you didn’t come to your senses.
This is no time to dither or dragging your foot, someone should remind Nawaz. The vandals with the Stone-age mentality are knocking at your ramparts. So you have no more wiggle room, Mr PM.
What a mess Nawaz has made of the mandate a confused and befuddled nation blessed him with eight months ago. All the major political parties, and their leaders, gave him a virtual blank check, five months earlier, to act decisively, vis-à-vis the Taliban. They were ready to give dialogue with the hated marauders preference over war, if the vandals would accept the primacy of Pakistan’s Constitution. But Nawaz hasn’t moved, in all these five months, beyond only making the kind of inane jumble of statements, a specimen of which has been cited above.
The Taliban, in the meantime, obviously emboldened by the political setup’s inertia and mental atrophy, have been adding insult to injury. They have been piling on, playing cat-and-mouse with the writ of the state and thumbing their noses at the jurisdiction of the Pakistani law. But Nawaz is still stuck in the bog of indecision—a bog entirely of his own making.
A country so overwhelmingly plagued by the scourge of terrorism—and bleeding profusely in the process—is still without an Anti-terror Authority. How many days, does anyone remember, did it take for the US, in the wake of 9/11, to set up its Department of Homeland Security? It was done in days, not weeks or months. Here, in the case of a terrorist-infested Pakistan it has been years but still no formal state structure or institution to combat the terror onslaught on a war footing.
Nawaz seems to think that making noises is all that he should be doing. The only ‘action’ or initiative that could be laid at his door, so far, is his anointing of Maulana Sami-ul-Haq as the pivot of his government to hold talks with the Taliban.
Maulana Sami-ul-Haq—with a bagful of seedy episodes preceding the man—as Nawaz’ point-man for talks with the Taliban just strains credulity far enough to make the whole thing look like a flight of fancy to nowhere. You can’t be serious, Mr PM? Don’t you know that the Maulana is the godfather of the Taliban? He’s the one whose madrassas (seminaries)—funded so generously in resources by you know who—have been the Taliban hatcheries and nurseries. It would be the height of naivety for anyone to expect the Maulana to act as an honest broker. He can’t. How would a godfather betray his own children and off-springs? He is riding a tiger and is too shrewd to not know that if he dismounts the tiger will devour him, too.
There would be no problem in talking to them if the Taliban were a people of reason, which they aren’t. They know only one language, the language of power. They are daring the government of Pakistan to repay them in their own coins. Nawaz can’t be so denuded of thinking as not to know that the time to use the full power of the state against the TTP is now. Strike them down, for God’s sake, before they strike you down. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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