PERISCOPE ON PAKISTAN : PATHOLOGY OF SELF DESTRUCTION

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PERISCOPE ON PAKISTAN : PATHOLOGY OF SELF DESTRUCTION

Author : Bureau | .

Posted on : Monday, July 16, 2012

Pakistan has once again become caught up in the whirlpool in which the Pakistan Army is Pakistan and anything that denigrates this institution denigrates Pakistan. The Pakistan Supreme Court, itself a victim of military dictatorship, has been asked to adjudicate what has come to be called “Memogate”. If it goes by the evidence collected by the Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence Chief Lt Gen Sujha Pasha to discredit the democratically elected civilian government and not the history of Pakistan it will willy-nilly contribute to the destruction of Pakistan.

Bassam Javed in NATION (26/12/12): “Pakistan continues to confront venomous propaganda against its armed forces and the ISI coming from the foreign and local media. They have joined together in efforts to discredit the guardians of Pakistan’s ideological and geographical borders. The base of the current heinous propaganda and instigations against the ISI and the army is a memo that was sent to former US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen on May 10 through the then US National Security Advisor General James Jones by a US businessman of Pakistani origin. Mansoor Ijaz. He says that he wrote the memo at the alleged behest of Pakistan Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani who has since resigned from his post. The memo passed to Admiral Mullen after US raid in Abbottabad on May 2 requested US backing for a proposal to install a new, Washington friendly civilian security team to assert tighter control over Pakistan’s military that would also end ISI’s relations with Haqqani network and that the memo had the approval of the ‘boss’.

“The issue however came to full light in an op-ed written by Mansoor Ijaz in ‘Financial Times’ of London on October 10 revealing that the memo was indeed delivered to Admiral Mullen. The contents of the memo were certainly outrageous and tantamount to conspiring against Pakistan Army the ISI and national security, besides having a great moral dimension on its population.

“The incessant anti Pakistan voices seem to have found a new lease of life in harping on the memogate scandal wherein the security establishment continues to be demonized to achieve their agendas.

“Nevertheless, to trace out the perpetrators of the memo that incidentally has a serious implication for our national security, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has been approached to determine the same. ‘There is a need to fully examine the facts and circumstances leading to the conception and issuance of the memo’, so has said the Chief of the Army Staff on the memo issue. The spirit behind writing and passing on the memo to US CJCS needs to be dispassionately investigated. Whatever the truth that comes out of the investigations, it may have the potential to push Pakistan and the US towards a dangerous confrontation. So instead of casting reckless aspersions on the Pakistan’s security establishment it would be better for opinionmakers to wait for the Supreme Court’s verdict on the real authors of the memogate affair.”

Khaled Ahmed in FRIDAY TIMES (23-29/12/12): “The fall of East Pakistan contained some early symptoms of what was to follow: the gradual decline of the state through isolation and dysfunction. The first symptom appeared in 1970 when the uprising started in East Pakistan. The state reacted by manifesting the following pathology: 1) it went into denial; 2) it developed a 'national consensus' around this denial; 3) it isolated itself in the international community; and 4) it developed the self-damaging etiology of externalising internal contradictions on to external factors.

“When the war in East Pakistan started, the world took notice of the mass movement behind the resistance to the Pakistan Army. A vast population started escaping into India - 9 million - but the numbers were denied by Pakistan in an obviously incredible 'military estimate'. Then West Pakistan drummed up nationalism and showed that the nation was 'united' against the uprising. Then it condemned the world for siding with India that had 'caused the uprising through a conspiracy'. Pakistani textbooks still say India was never reconciled to the creation of Pakistan and broke it up through an invasion in 1971.

“Isolationism is bad for all states and puts them morally in the wrong even if the cause is noble. Even superpowers cannot bear the pressure of international isolation. Pakistan today is internally united -- against the US plus the world -- and this benefits the Army as it goes into another war of impossible odds. Pakistan is still externalising its internal conflict and blaming it on America, India, and for good measure, Israel. The Army is taking it down another road of disaster fighting two powers it cannot win against, India and the US. East Pakistan is happening all over again. Today there is no Cold War to rescue us. (In 1971, even Cold War netted us no backers, except for the US, which warned off India from a coup de grace strike on West Pakistan.)

“The Army is repeating the same mistakes: undermining democracy at home, favouring terrorism and ignoring the global suspicion of its complicity with its non state actors.

“Al Qaeda in Pakistan is sensitive to its resource base and constantly kidnaps rich people for ransom and robs banks through its Punjabi Taliban proxies. But Pakistan's strategy is wedded to an unrealistic mission statement because the kind of material support it needs is not there. The 'epochal' war with India, begun in 1947 and still going on, adds to the pressures that the state has to bear to merely survive. If the state is relatively small it must carefully determine who the enemy is and how 'conquerable' it is, given the resources of the state. If the status quo is not to the liking of the state with a limited resource-base, then anti-status quo policies have to be politically framed, not militarily.

“The Army has based its strategy on ghairat which it conflates with sovereignty. The nation follows the Army's lead - which reminds us of East Pakistan. The Army put the world at risk through jihad and its consequence: international terrorism. Jihad has virtually destroyed Pakistan's internal sovereignty by conceding con-dominion to the jihadi militias fighting India and its new ally the US in Afghanistan. Pakistan's external sovereignty has also been destroyed by the tendency of jihad to farm out the formulation of strategy to its commanders in the field. Pakistan's strategy towards Iran, Central Asia and Russia was effectively formulated after 1996 by the Taliban commanders. It is happening once again.

“Today Pakistan's internal sovereignty is under challenge by Al Qaeda. Its external sovereignty is at risk from the isolationism embraced by the Army and the 'national consensus'. As outlined in Mark Duffield'sGlobal Governance and the new War, the 'liberal' world dominion today links development to security and finds in the process of exclusion - (through language policy in East Pakistan and Blasphemy Law in Pakistan) - under nationalism a cause of internal chaos and external war.

“What happened in East Pakistan was caused by this process of 'exclusion', which first produced internal chaos, then triggered war with India. One must keep in mind that General Yahya's action in East Pakistan was 'propelled', if not 'forced', by nationalism in West Pakistan. That nationalism is still alive and has become complicated by jihad and its global outreach in total negation of the nation-state. The state has become dysfunctional and, once again unmindful of the narrowing resource-base, Pakistan is faced with wars it cannot win.

“Pakistan has taken on America today because of its flawed view of India as an eternal enemy. Without a strategy that could be understood and supported by the world, Pakistan wants Afghanistan left open to a repetition of what it did there after the exit of Soviet Union in 1991. The world could not understand the strategy of the Pakistan Army in 1971 and abandoned it. It is today worried about Pakistan's path-dependent syndrome of plunging into wars but is compelled to focus on the global threat of Al Qaeda embedded in Pakistan with its variety of affiliates whom Pakistan says it will not fight 'because they are our brothers'.

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