Daily Times

It was inevitable. Declaring a global health emergency, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended restrictions on travellers from Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon. What else could have been the logical outcome of appeasing those who have waged a relentless war on the polio vaccination teams and killed scores of healthcare workers? WHO recommended that the citizens and long-term residents of these countries should be required to get vaccinated and carry an internationally recognisable certificate of such inoculation before travel abroad. Dr Bruce Aylward of WHO’s polio eradication programme has called Pakistan a notable exporter of the polio various. WHO has asked these countries to officially declare at the head of the state or government level that the interruption of poliovirus transmission is a national public health emergency.
From nuclear proliferation to spreading the jihadist pox to now making it to the top of the polio exporters’ pack, Pakistan keeps spiralling down the abyss without apparently an iota of concern. The Pakistani response of setting up vaccination checkpoints at the airports — and quite outrageously at the entry points to Punjab province — will do nothing to eliminate the polio reservoir in the areas under the jihadists’ sway. The polio tragedy is likely to be drowned in the jingoistic chorus already being ratcheted up in the country. Pakistan’s religio-political Wehrmacht is in overdrive, raising a brouhaha against the private media house that employs the anchor-journalist Hamid Mir, who recently survived an assassination attempt. The hyper-nationalists of all shades are tilting at the US-Indo-Zionist windmills yet again. The Muridke-based Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a reincarnation of the banned Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), has been holding rallies in support of the military and the ISI. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) chief, Imran Khan, and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek head, Dr Tahirul Qadri, have separately called for protests on May 11 against alleged electoral rigging and a ‘flawed’ electoral system, respectively. Mischief, thou art afoot, again!
A country that cannot control a vaccine-preventable disease in the 21st century can do diddlysquat to the world and regional powers that these rabble-rousers are ranting against. The agenda seems to be domestic. This cast of characters has always been fielded to turn the political narrative dial to the far right and build pressure from the street against the incumbent political dispensation. Whether these groups are programmed when they come off the assembly line to automatically respond this way, spring into action on demand or some combination thereof, they always seem to parrot the security establishment’s line. At any juncture, when the establishment seems to be losing ground to the civilians, these zombies appear en masse to help create circumstances where the space lost can be recaptured.
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was hounded by these hyper-nationalist hordes intermittently in its 2008 to 2013 stint to the extent that it virtually abdicated the national security and foreign policies to the military. The security establishment pushed back against the PPP’s measly attempt to rein in the ISI and then the Kerry-Lugar-Berman (KLB) Act 2009. Interestingly, the original version of the KLB Act, then called the Biden-Lugar Bill, said, “The FATA, parts of the NWFP, Quetta in Balochistan and Muridke in Punjab remain a sanctuary for al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Tehreek-e-Taliban and affiliated groups from which these groups organise terrorist actions against Pakistan and other countries.” The words Muridke and Punjab were removed, among other things, from the bill that eventually went into effect. Perhaps the Pakistani security establishment may wish to thank the much-maligned former ambassador, Professor Husain Haqqani for getting that verbiage out.
Is it a surprise then that the same stooges, acting upon an all too familiar script, are confronting the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) now? The hordes from Muridke are dutifully picking sides in the squabble between the security establishment and the PML-N that has been brewing for some time now. The Mr Late of Pakistani politics, Imran Khan, has suddenly woken up to the electoral rigging from a year ago. To paraphrase an old Persian adage, if one thinks of a punch after the fight is over, one better hit oneself with it. Imran Khan, however, may be on to something more than just trying to catch the bus he missed last year. The PML-N and its leader are too comfortable in both parliament and their home province for some people’s comfort. Mian Nawaz Sharif had been propped up in 1988 to upend the PPP, not the security establishment. Over the years, he has developed a significant power base among the masses to extricate himself from the straightjacket that the establishment likes politicians to remain shackled in. Imran Khan, with one provincial government under his belt, is to Mian sahib what the latter was to Benazir Bhutto in 1988.
While Imran Khan and Dr Tahirul Qadri cannot even come close to toppling an elected government in just one year of its inauguration, they can put it on the defensive. The public disgruntlement about the power outages could provide some impetus to the ruckus the odd couple is pledging to raise come May 11 but the approaching Ramzan fasting and sweltering heat will certainly put a damper on their designs. Almost no mass movement has ever succeeded in Pakistan in the summer months and certainly not on issues like load shedding, which the people pretty much take as a fact of life now. The game about to begin in Islamabad is not much more than a crapshoot but, apparently, the hope is that it may snowball into something substantial, usually as a result of forced or unforced error in crowd handling by the government.
One would think that with massive internal problems like recrudescent diseases, ravaging poverty and the recalcitrant jihadism, the Pakistani establishment would refrain from knocking over democracy every opportunity it gets. The reality, however, seems to be that even being on the verge of a man-made public health disaster –a direct consequence of grooming jihadists for decades — has not tempered their recklessness one bit.
The KLB Act may not mention Muridke by name any longer but it still does require the US secretary of state to certify that in addition to making a concerted effort to curb al Qaeda and associated groups, including the LeT and Jaish-e-Muhammad, the “security forces of Pakistan are not materially interfering in the political or judicial processes of Pakistan.” The establishment can try its hand all it wants but chances are that it would not be able to handle the domestic consequences of upending a democratic order or facing an international quarantine.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki