Self-Inflicted Wounds
By Mowahid Hussain Shah

The Trump Presidency has been an unceasing series of one self-generated crisis after another. Indeed, the litany of unforced errors continues to pile up.
Nearly 100 years ago, Lenin had written: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
To cite CBS Evening News of May 22, a key agenda of Trump’s Riyadh visit was to forge “a Saudi-Israeli alliance.” But will it work? Another likely error in an already inflamed Mideast. Essentially, what it does is leave the core Palestinian disinheritance as is, and still festering, while picking and magnifying other peripheral issues as a diversionary tactic.
The late King Faisal, who was the architect of the Islamic Conference, founded in 1969, and of the seminal Islamic Summit at Lahore in February 1974 – chiefly driven by a desire to form a common Muslim platform centered on the Palestinian cause – would be rolling in his grave.
Through proclamations, communiqués, or distracting declarations, core issues cannot be wished away or whisked away. India, too, is learning about it on Kashmir.
The pattern of self-inflicted wounds continues elsewhere, too. The 1971 secession of East Pakistan was largely a self-inflicted wound. Because the self-indicting break-away causes were left undiagnosed, its carcinogenic symptoms of tribalism, provincialism, and sectarianism continue to metastasize. Smart people often choose unwisely. It’s hard to ignore how an over-confident and over-smart Bhutto chose his own hangman.
Causative to Pakistan’s existing predicament are self-inflicted wounds. In 1999, the civilian setup foolishly opted for the circuitous route in firing an Army chief, when a direct chat over a cup of tea may have done the needful. Then, too, the man on horseback who waved the banner of accountability for 10 years ended up showing the white flag and handing over the keys of the federal government to a lot, which he himself had mocked as rotten to the core. At its core, leadership is judgment, and not just occupying the chair and warming it.
The commotion over offshore holdings is yet another pertinent example. How much humiliation will some endure for the false Izzat of hording vast sums?
Examples abound elsewhere. Modi is a self-inflicted wound for India. Having the head of a government whose complicity in mass murders led to his banishing from the US for 10 years ensures that India’s aspirations for global leadership shall remain a Disneyland fantasy. For the Democratic Party to put all its eggs in the basket of the tainted Clinton machine ensured Trump’s path to the Presidency – now acknowledged even by former Vice President Joe Biden, who has said that Hillary was not a good candidate.
Europe is not immune from the self-induced virus. Keeping Turkey out of the EU is unconscionable and self-defeating. Britain’s Brexit vote itself lays the seeds of Scotland’s secession from the UK. Egypt’s murderous crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and its annulment of a legitimately elected government may have stalled the momentum of the Arab Spring, but not quashed it. Ideas cannot be shot dead by bullets.
What then is the preventive remedy to self-inflicted wounds? Not finger-pointing or blame-shifting, but self-examination.