Daily Times

Our national leadership is showing all the familiar signs of cracking up under mounting pressure. This conduct failure appears to be the persistent bane of their make up whenever it comes to delivering on governance since the beginning of their ill-fated political venture in the early 1980s. As a rule, they show a lot of valour but typically fail to clear the bar every time it is set, just like the well-groomed horse that makes a magnificent run up but shies away from the log jump at the last moment. This ingrained reflex eventually brings them crashing down quite unceremoniously. In difficult situations they have been found to resort to tricks rather than rise to the occasion, which not only exposes them but also tends to confirm certain unsavoury generalities attached to them in the ongoing public discourse.

Much more significantly, when in a tight bind, they tend to quickly run out of options and then begin to block options for the remaining players in the game, thus detonating a collective collapse of the system. These are also the occasions when their street smart but incredibly iodine-deficient advisors get the better of them, lead them by the ear over the imaginary garden path and hasten the outfit’s dissolution. As also, they invariably omit to see the approaching sandstorm from the frightened flight of the finches around them. As a result they are routed lock, stock and barrel, repeatedly.

Once again, there is a similar situation shaping up and unmistakably they seem to be on the same old page of their quick fix handbook. Their fixation with the embedded grouses has ominously screened them off almost completely from the fact that the game has changed dramatically in the last decade or so and the competing participants are qualitatively more suave and appreciably dexterous. Therefore they are likely to serve back the same volley with which they are sought to be defeated. The regional and global environment has drastically altered and pet nesting places may no longer be available as they have either vanished or are seriously threatened. Similarly, within the country, the security, political and judicial paradigms are fast evolving, not necessarily in sync. The social media and a hyperactive civil society have effectively ripped open official privilege, privacy, and for that matter awe of power. The good old days of the 1970s and 1980s are gone, when the excesses of the powerful were little known and unfashionable to talk about. It is no more possible to fake public concern, tamper with the ballot or swindle public money and get away with it for long.

Having said that, what we are witnessing is yet another spectacle of self-cremation being predictably enacted on the national political pyre. It has all the elements of tragic miscalculation and mindless rigidity coming together in an equation of guaranteed destruction. Things began to happen in quick succession after the May 11, 2013 general elections, which badly bruised the Election Commission as also winners and losers alike. An ill-timed victory speech followed by strong public protests against alleged rigging and inexplicable reluctance to open a few constituencies to scrutiny set in motion a wave of indignation among the voters. The unholy haste with which a high court stay order was sought against reopening the contested ballot bags and the vehemence with which it was defended by the ruling party fed suspicions of wrongdoing. Soon the indignation turned into a nationwide hurt writ large on the faces of committed looking protesters from Karachi to Islamabad.

The alarm bells began to ring in earnest after the unprecedented indiscretion by a renowned media house with the head of the country’s premier intelligence agency and, by proxy, with the army itself. The leadership once again committed a blunder by appearing to be partisan rather than neutral. Along with an otherwise tainted regulatory apparatus, queerly it appeared to quite peremptorily side with the media house and needlessly persists in that position. Swallowing their hurt and pride, the intelligence agency and the army played by the rules and lodged a statutory complaint, which, in the process, has exposed the thin façade of official fairness in detail — a rather dismal but largely damaging performance. It set the stage for the chilling of interaction and created room for rumours and mischief. The superior judiciary, still groggy from its galloping activism and historic judicial overreach, failed to grasp the significance of the moment. It not only rubbished its own code of ethics but also appeared strangely partisan when the case was referred to it for adjudication. They slammed the door in the face of the aggrieved petitioners with imperial unconcern, belittled themselves in the popular sentiment that they like to play to and added to the free-floating angst. The result has been unsightly media exposure of their intimate dealings and public outbursts amounting to no confidence in their ability to deliver justice. They too seem to persist in their error.

In the process, the army has gained considerably in popular esteem and the corresponding loss of the ruling party is still to be assessed. Unfortunately, this is not how the deck should have been laid but this is one of the consequences of an inadequately articulated leadership. While all that was happening, the government’s gamble of peace talks with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) failed — as predicted — vindicating the army’s unspoken stance that it would be so. All the loss of life and destruction of property caused by TTP attacks and bombings fell into place to make sense of the military offensive against their North Waziristan stronghold. The horrors and the massive means of murder and blackmail that are being recovered from captured localities in Miranshah and Mir Ali by the troops is sufficient evidence to validate the GHQ’s original assessment.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com