Daily Times

We have a great deal to learn from our defeats, for only a fool refuses to acknowledge when he has met his match. Who will not learn the how and the why, and will dogmatically follow a losing strategy?

Who exactly is the ‘we’? Who is the ‘enemy’? A fair question. The enemy is nothing less than a madness given flesh, killers of men and women and children, twisters of minds young and old alike. We are the scattered remnants of progressiveness, moderation and perhaps, to use the most besmirched and dangerous moniker of all, secularism. Though our numbers are few and our principles oft corrupted, a tattered flag will do when a shining beacon cannot be found.

Between these camps — neither overlarge in number — lies the battleground, nothing less than the will of the people, that huge and omnipotent mass between the two lines that, for better or for worse, is Pakistan.

And we are losing them, losing them to monsters and maniacs. We cannot, as we are wont to do, blame them for our failures. We are not losing them because they are violent or fundamentalist in nature. We cannot forget that Pakistan has never had a drought of religious parties. Our people have again and again had the option of using their vote to conjoin completely the state and the church. Again and again, they have ‘disappointed. The people have voted for the ANP, the MQM, most tellingly and most overwhelmingly the PPP — deeply flawed parties all, but all secular. The conservative religious parties have never been too palatable to the general public; surely no violent and warped movement acting on the pretext of religion is any more appealing.

Shockingly, for all that they should be impossible to market, they market themselves better than do we. Beyond their brainwashing, they are better at propaganda.

We have adapted their very lexicon. When we say Islamist warriors, when we call them Muslim extremists or radical Muslims, we do them a service and the faith an injury. It makes no matter our disclaimers; once we allow our enemies to place ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ in their name unopposed and undisputed, they immediately tap into an emotional and political reservoir that runs the width of continents and the depth of centuries.

Our enemies offer what we do not: certitude. It is certitude in a perverted shell of an ideology, yes, and in an overarching plan of domination that is nothing short of insane. But certitude will bring unity and dedication behind even the most misguided of causes. And we the progressives and the moderates are uncertain, not because we have no faith in our beliefs, but because a measure of uncertainty is the mark of a sane man. Socrates said, “I know only that I know nothing.” The wisest man in a millennium was then promptly killed by others less wise but far more sure of themselves. We cannot have the rabid certainty of our enemies, but we can project at least the certainty that our way — flawed and doddering that it is — is a better way than their perversions and twisted nightmares. If we cannot be certain about who our friends are, at least we can be certain about who threatens us most. It is not India. It is not the US.

The US may have coined the term ‘winning hearts and minds, but ultimately, the name was their only true achievement in the art of the war on terror. They — and we — are outdone at every turn by the Taliban and their ilk.

Countless US officials, most recently Hillary Clinton, have made public statements about Pakistan, either here or in neighbouring countries. Their stock articulations — they chide us for not doing enough, remind the world that we are their key ally in this war, are always optimistic in the general and agitated in the specifics — make little difference when their visits are mere punctuation to the drone strikes and rising anti-Americanism in the country. Every death in American attacks causes a wave of fury and swells the ranks and coffers of our enemies. Our government dithers and oscillates, and refuses to either stand by the attacks or stop them. In equal turns, they show themselves as either capitulating to foreign pressure, or undecided.

So our people turn, increasingly, to those offering a simple and certain way out: to kill or die on their feet, fighting. We have left them little else. While our enemies perverted our religion and bent others to their will, we consistently showed ourselves to be corrupt, to be aloof, enjoying ourselves in ivory towers no matter how much blood pools around their base.

Long ago, David Hume wrote that “reason is a slave to emotion” and the centuries have not eroded that truth. “Hearts and minds” are not equal. We evolved over long millennia to attend as carefully to the hunger of our souls — for sure answers, for power, for camaraderie, for justice — as we do to the hungers of our flesh.

Our enemies have usurped the Throne of God. Let us cast them from it, not to claim it for ourselves but to guard it so none but He may occupy it again, in our hearts. To defend the pristine nature of faith from the murkiness of politics is one of the functions, after all, of secularism. We will have to steel ourselves against all threats and promote both religion — in its true form — and the state, and ensure that separately both may prevail against extremism.

Even harder, the ruling class will have to take a leading hand in public works and consciously ensure that our well deserved reputation for the abuse of power and privilege begins to abate. We have attacked our people with neglect, and must be the ones to make peace with them against a common foe. The state and its American allies must do — not say, but do — a great deal to win the confidence of the people. No measured public statement, no political document weighing risk and reward will overcome the blinding terror and anger of people whose friends or family or neighbours have been reduced to rubble by an errant strike.

Our way is better. But we, ourselves, must also be better to win back the hearts and minds we have lost.

The writer is a Lahore-based freelance columnist. He can be reached at zaairhussain@gmail.com