Sunday, April 26, 2009
Ghazi Salahuddin
Gradually, it seems, our rulers are struggling to wake up to the threat that the Taliban have posed in Swat and elsewhere. Perhaps the alarm bells that are ringing in Washington and London have penetrated their uneasy slumber, the state in which the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation 2009 was rushed through the National Assembly on April 13. But hasn't this waiting game made the situation more difficult to handle?
According to reports published on Saturday – yesterday – Chief of Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has rejected the notion that the peace deal through Sufi Mohammad amounted to a giving any "concession" to the armed Islamists. More significantly, he declared that not only the army had the resolve to take on the militants but "victory against terror and militancy will be achieved at all costs". At all costs?
Anyhow, I have quoted this observation to also underline the major role that Sufi Mohammad is playing in the nation's affairs. It is he who negotiated the peace deal, taking responsibility for the Taliban. One headline on Saturday, in this newspaper, said: "Sufi takes back Taliban to Swat". You see, Sufi or his representatives can come to our rescue when the Taliban take control of Buner, a district adjoining Swat.
And what does Sufi stand for? In the first place, he wants Sharia to be enforced – a dispensation that can only be described as theocracy. In addition, he looks at democracy and the parliament as 'kufr'. Naturally, one would think about what Pakistan was meant to be in the light of the vision of its founder, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. There has been an unresolved debate on whether Jinnah wanted a secular Pakistan, as his August 11, 1947, speech would suggest, or a state rooted in Islamic precepts, as some of his other speeches proposed.
What is certain, however, is that Jinnah was forthrightly opposed to Pakistan being a theocracy. After all, we cannot uncouple the idea of Pakistan from the person that Jinnah was, in terms of the life he led and the values he cherished. Consider, in this perspective, where Jinnah would belong in today's Pakistan. In many ways, a reference to our struggle for freedom and the leadership that Jinnah had provided can serve as a measure of what has gone wrong in this country over the years.
Now, I have not invoked Jinnah's name only in a symbolic sense to accentuate the waywardness of our polity. On Monday, The Jinnah Society launched the second edition of the Jinnah Anthology in a largely attended function in Karachi. On this occasion, the Jinnah Award for 2006 was conferred upon former Air Force chief Asghar Khan and the same award for 2007 was conferred posthumously upon Ahmed Ali Khan, former chief editor of Dawn and my role model in journalism.
The keynote speaker was also a journalist, Najam Sethi. The current situation, particularly the resistible rise of the Taliban, would, of course, be at the heart of any discourse on Jinnah and his vision of Pakistan. Hence, Najam Sethi talked about "two surrender documents": the fall of Dhaka and the Swat deal of this year. He thought that these surrenders were probably making the founder of Pakistan turn in his grave.
One important point that should not be avoided in an analysis of today's Pakistan in the context of its founder's vision is Jinnah's deep admiration for Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey. We know that Turkey is constitutionally a secular state and is also a leading Muslim country we can look up to. Sethi explored this connection and said that the mixing of religion and politics was a great betrayal and it started with 1948's Objectives Resolution.
I was able to attend this function that was co-sponsored by the Oxford University Press. It was a representative gathering of the city's intelligentsia and the mood that reflected in fleeting conversations was one of gloom and anxiety. There is little doubt that those who seek to promote Jinnah's vision are on the defensive. Sufi Mohammad's brigades are trampling over our aspirations for a democratic and progressive Pakistan. Before 1947, Jinnah had triumphed over such orthodox religious elements, the ones who had called him a 'kafir'.
So, what can we now expect from the army's latest resolve, a reiteration of what it has promised a number of times, that victory against "terror and militancy" (why not the Taliban?) will be achieved "at all costs". Our rulers, including the military leadership, do know that the costs continue to rise when you do not attend to an urgent crisis. Even for the peace deal, they waited until the Taliban had bombed not just a few but more than 150 girls schools in Swat. They waited when the Taliban beheaded their enemies and bodies were left hanging from trees. It went on for an excruciating long time.
Meanwhile, the alarm bells that are ringing are about to acquire the pitch of a death knell. Indeed, we are hearing these warnings for quite some time. On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Pakistan is now beginning to recognise the severity of the threat posed by growing insurgency that is encroaching on key urban areas. A day earlier, on Wednesday, she said that Pakistan's government had abdicated to the Taliban by agreeing to the Islamic law in part of the country and that the nuclear-armed nation posed a 'mortal threat' to world security.
One scary question that reverberated this week in many statements is: how far are the Taliban from Islamabad? Our own Maulana Fazlur Rehman said on the floor of the National Assembly on Wednesday that the Taliban had reached near Mansehra and may soon reach Tarbela Dam. "They will soon be knocking at the doors of Islamabad", he added.
In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "I think the news over the past several days is very disturbing, the administration is extremely concerned." We are informed that the issue was taking up a significant amount of President Barack Obama's time. Top US military commander Admiral Michael Mullen arrived in Islamabad on Wednesday, for the second time in just two weeks.
All these developments suggest that some headline-making moves are imminent. If the crisis of Pakistan is taking up so much time of the American president, we can assume that our rulers, too, have some time to think about these matters. Yes, there is this photograph of a meeting held at the presidency in Pakistan on Friday night, attended by the president, the prime minister, the foreign minister, the ANP chief and the chief of the Army Staff. One wonders if their deliberation had any sense of what Jinnah had wanted Pakistan to be and how religious extremism has tempered with that vision.
The writer is a staff member. Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com
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