Though our economic team is busy mending the torn deal with the IMF and the military and political leaderships are busy with their US counterparts to reset the button of the Pak-US cooperation shut by the Abbottabad operation, a well-calibrated nationalist fever has touched new heights. The joint parliamentary resolution talks of cutting off NATO/ISAF supplies; the Punjab government has denounced foreign aid, of course without explaining how it would run the foreign-funded projects given the poor health of its finances; the ‘patriotic’ brigade is calling for ending relations with the US and opting for China; and Imran Khan is out staging dharnas (sit-in protests) against the Pak-US alliance on the war on terror. Yet no one has come up with a blueprint of our national policy dealing with the war on terror and the myriad socio-political crises, using the ‘rare’ national unity that has come about in the wake of the US Abbottabad operation. The same old trick is being played upon us that the monarchs, generals and populists have played in history: using nationalist sentiments to hide rather than resolve national crises. We must avoid this trap because nationalism could be both a reality and an artefact. Let us pick up a few lessons of history to make this point. Unpopular rulers cannot hide behind hollow nationalist gestures. In September 1915 the unpopular Czar Nicolas II left his capital St Petersburg (Petrograd, as it is called by nationalist Russians) to ‘join’ the badly battered Russian army. He expected this ‘heroic’ gesture would earn him national acclaim, but that proved to be his blunder as he was blamed for all the Russian military’s debacles though he was only a nominal commander-in-chief. Moreover, his absence from the capital turned Petrograd into a hotbed of revolutionary activities. Eventually, he lost his centuries-old Romanov Empire in early 1917 and later Russia became a socialist republic in the wake of the October Revolution. Appealing to nationalism could be fatal for a multinational state/empire. In the same war, the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, also tinkered with German national consciousness to seek a ‘place in the sun’. But he failed to distinguish the historical process of Germanisation (which Bismarck had harnessed to unify Germany) from his German imperialism that sought more markets, raw materials, cheap labour and lands, denying the right of self-determination to other nationalities that were subjugated by the imperial powers. At the end, the Kaiser lost the war and as many as five imperial powers — Austria, Germany, Russia, Italy and the Ottoman — crumbled, releasing a host of new nation states. Patriotism could also be fickle. Winston Churchill’s heroic defeat of Nazi Germany should have earned him a safe victory in the post-war elections in Britain. Instead, he lost the election to a ‘non-descript’ Labour leader, Clement Richard Atlee. The new Labour government packed up the crumbing British Empire, to the chagrin of the imperialist Winston Churchill, and set off a welfare state movement in Britain and elsewhere in the West. Nationalism could also be an artefact of gaining popularity. In initiating the war against India in 1965, President Ayub expected to bolster his flagging popularity, of course, on the back of well-orchestrated propaganda. But the ‘stalemate’ in the war and the diplomatic ‘fiasco’ at Tashkent stirred the popular wrath against his authoritarian rule and the lopsided laissez-faire agenda, giving rise to a new political culture. In the western wing, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto caught the people’s imagination by tossing a populist slogan — roti, kapra aur makan (food, clothing and shelter) and in the eastern wing, Mujibur Rehman won over the masses on a quasi-secessionist agenda. Even defeats do not dent the image of true patriots. Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged on the Arab scene as a great Arab nationalist in the early 1950s. He valiantly faced a combined Anglo-French-Israeli aggression in 1956 in response to his nationalisation of the Anglo-French owned Suez Canal. Undaunted, he fought another, though disastrous, war with Israel in 1967. His successor, Anwar Sadaat, also had a near-successful war with Israel in 1973 but he ended up in a ‘disgraceful’ peace treaty with Israel in 1979. However, a discomfited but defiant Nasser remained an Arab hero. Why? Because his nationalism was not an artefact, it was in consonance with the Egypt’s, rather the entire Middle East’s, organic need to shake off external domination. Like Mazzini, Tipu Sultan and Bismarck, his endeavour was to reconnect Egypt’s broken national thread with the glory of the time when Muhammad Ali Pasha rebelled against the Ottomans and founded modern Egypt in the 19th century. Culture could be more permeating than narrow nationalism. The US is now discovering, as did the then USSR, that crushing a nationalist resistance rooted in the religio-cultural ethos of a traditional but fiercely independent Afghan society is extremely difficult. No wonder, in the rural Pak-Afghan life there are few takers of the ongoing western discourse on building modern institutions. Contrarily, the reaction to the discourse is manifestly cultural. The jihadis are destroying the symbols of modernity: schools, theatres, video shops, barbershops, internet cafés, markets and the like. That is why the wily General Ziaul Haq waged a cultural war against the Soviets. He particularly attacked gender equality and rewarded the observance of religio-cultural manifestations: keeping beards, baring ankles, wearing hijab (headscarf) and banning public eating during Ramzan. Through this public exhibit of ‘piety’, he marshalled the cultural sensibilities of the conservative tribal society, the breeding ground of the dogs of war, against the ‘godless’ Soviets. To conclude, it must be said that nationalism is no alternative to national policies in the modern state. We fought six wars — 1948, 1965, 1971, 1984, 1979, 1999 — and the seventh one is going on, but with every new conflagration we lost more national cohesion, if not territory and sovereignty. We remained blind to the fact that nationalism is premised upon a nation and a nation constitutes varied socio-cultural and political diversities and conflicts, constantly requiring national policies, rights and reforms. As a result, we lost half the state territory in 1971 and the other half is threatened by varied internal and external threats. But our state policy continues to reflect the same old duality: employing the security apparatus and building the artefacts of nationalism. The purpose is to protect the security state and its time-tested business, landed, political and media allies. The people, the fountainhead of power, are left to bear the internal, regional and international brunt of this policy. And then we expect them to rise against the ‘enemy’ attacking our national sovereignty. The writer is a lawyer and academic. He can be reached at shahabusto@hotmail.com