Between Murderers and Knaves: Pakistan’s Twin Tragedy
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

The savagery and sheer barbarity of the Taliban’s murderous spree against innocent children of Peshawar’s Army School, last December 16, shocked the whole world and traumatized Pakistan’s 180 million people; but obviously not a laid-back and lackadaisical PM Nawaz Sharif.
Of course the corpulent leader of Pakistan has never been known for flashes of genius. But few would’ve believed—before the Peshawar trauma caught us all in its jaws and started bleeding us profusely—that the glutton in him had dulled his senses irredeemably, to the extent that he wouldn’t mind cracking jokes, publicly, while the whole nation was in mourning.
I’d problem believing my eyes when I watched the glutton, live on television, making his crude pitch to enliven the proceedings of the APC with banal banter the day after the great tragedy. Could the man be so insensitive to the collective shock and trauma of the nation? Has he lost all sense of proportion to not know that you don’t crack jokes at what was, clearly, a nation’s wake at the dirge of its precious children slain by the vandals? Did nobody ever tell him that you don’t make merry at funerals?
And what has been his response so far, now that it has been exactly a week since the butchering of our kids, to give a befitting response to the savages who had the gall to slaughter them?
All that the incorrigible glutton has done is presided over the APC and—for his ‘great’ achievement—set up a committee to suggest a national response. We’re a nation fed up with these inane ‘committees’ whose members don’t know what is expected of them—besides they being proven non-achievers—and, consequently, are not known to have come up, ever, with gems of wisdom.
Was this all that a grieving and bleeding nation expected of their pompous and puffed-up leader? No; not at all.
Even those who are so keenly conscious of the three-stint PM’s visceral and intellectual limitations expected him—as a far-away wish of theirs—to rise to the dictates of the national calamity. They hoped, against hope that for once the man would act like a national leader and not the CEO of a family-limited corporation.
The least he could have done to meet the basic demands of the mini-Holocaust visiting his traumatised country was to have addressed the nation—that very evening of December 16—from Peshawar or Islamabad, or wherever, and announced a national response to cowardly attack of the barbarians. He should’ve given the outlines of his government’s plans to go after the vile murderers. He should’ve told them, ‘murderers run for your life, for I’m going to come after you, no matter where you are. I’ll hunt you down to the farthest corner of Pakistan. I’ll spare no effort to cleanse this great homeland of ours from your pestilence. I’ll redeem the honor of my nation that you’ve so brazenly tried to violate. And I’ll avenge, to my last breath, the innocent blood spilled by you in that school of Peshawar. You’ll have no mercy, and you can count on that.’
A traumatised nation licking its deep wounds and sick to its inner core would’ve taken heart from it. A harassed and bemused people would’ve had something to look forward to: they’d—they would’ve said—after all a leader with the courage and resolve to take the beasts by their horns and make them pay for their venal crimes.
But no, the nation didn’t get to hear anything of that sort from their craven and cowering leader. He didn’t even have the decency to visit the ravaged school where the blossoming youths of our nation were slaughtered like sheep; he preferred to remain holed up in the plush Governor’s House. What a shame for a bereaved nation to have an ostrich like Nawaz as their leader.
All that the people of Pakistan ended up with was a committee, presided over by that snooty and arrogant crony of Nawaz, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar, who’s more of a problem than solution. Law and order in Pakistan has been going to the dogs on the watch of this knave who thinks of himself as being knight in the shining armour.
That prompts the obvious question: is this glutton of a man fit to preside over the destiny of a nation fighting for its soul? Is he capable of being the man-of-the-moment the nation needs, in its darkest hour, to lead them to salvation? Does he have any iota of that grit and determination needed to take the battle for Pakistan to the marauding Taliban and wipe off this scourge from the face of the country?
The answer to this question is a resounding no. No, he isn’t the leader Pakistan needs in its hour of grave peril. The nation is in the throes of an existentialist threat from a cabal of murderers whose sole pursuit in life is rapine and plunder. Nawaz doesn’t even have the foggiest of ideas how to answer this monumental threat to the polity of Pakistan.
The man is thoroughly convoluted in his mind. His priorities are skewed in the extreme. He wants to be a Mughal emperor and leave behind a legacy befitting his stature. So, instead of allocating every precious penny to the fight against terrorists and their ilk, he’s squandering 70 billion rupees on his metro bus scheme for Pindi-Islamabad. Like a child the imbecile doesn’t know how valuable the money he’s passing around to contractors and cronies could be in the fight against terror plaguing Pakistan.
If Nawaz were the CEO of a public-limited corporation its share- holders would long have fired him and shown him the door. He deserves the harried people of Pakistan doing this to him. And the time to do it is NOW.
Nawaz will not fight the blood-thirsty Taliban because even if he personally isn’t an aficionado of them he’s heavily surrounded by Taliban-partisans in his close circle of confidants and cronies. His younger sibling, Shehbaz Sharif, is on record pleading with the marauders to spare Punjab, his fief, and pour their wrath elsewhere. That goon, Rana Sanaullah, is known to keep their company. And even the pharaoh at the Interior Ministry, the insufferable Chaudhry Nisar, has a soft corner for the murderers and their fellow-travellers.
For this reason Nisar wouldn’t move a finger against that cowardly cleric of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid, Abdul Aziz who remains unrepentant in his espousal of the Taliban agenda even in the wake of Peshawar’s colossal tragedy. Kudos aplenty to Islamabad’s civil society for its move to have this hate-monger dislodged from his pedestal that he has been using to spread terror.
Nawaz’ shenanigans call for only one inference to be drawn: the man is unfit to be in the saddle of power where an accident of history has landed him to the utter dismay of the people of Pakistan. He deserves to be given the boot and without further ado.
Nawaz doesn’t have what it takes to be a leader and the sooner this was conveyed to him the better for Pakistan.
This scribe stuck his neck out in a previous column for this paper that the gravity of the crisis spawned by barbarous Peshawar carnage demanded the formation of a government of national unity headed, ideally, by Imran Khan, the only untainted and corruption-free leader in today’s Pakistan.
The time is now for the Army Chief, General Raheel Sharif, to march into the PM Palace and tell its nincompoop denizen to vacate. The general has moved with commendable alacrity to let the terrorists of Taliban and other outfits sharing their nihilistic agenda for Pakistan know that he’d be coming after them and give them no quarters, anywhere. Nawaz, in contrast, has done nothing to be given credit for.
Under General Raheel Sharif’s watch, those convicts awaiting the gallows have been quickly despatched to their fate. On the civilian side, meanwhile, an incompetent administration ably assisted by corrupt courts is still dragging its feet on meting out to the terrorists the ignominious death they deserved. Take your pick, folks, which’s serving Pakistan and which isn’t.
The khakis should stand four-square behind this government of national unity and go after the terrorists and their sleeper cells in cities, towns and villages of Pakistan in a fully co-ordinated countrywide campaign. It may be a long and arduous campaign but its outcome will be totally worth the effort. That’s what a bleeding nation expects of its leadership in its most trying moment. God speed ahead to what will truly be a jihad in the strict sense of the term; and good riddance of knaves and scoundrels whose fluffy backbones have brought nothing but untold suffering, tears and toil to the people of Pakistan.
If we can do it, those martyrs of Peshawar will be resting in peace in Heaven, happy and contented that their heroic sacrifices weren’t in vain. K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)