Daily Times

The participation of Milli Muslim League (MML) and Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP)’s candidates in the by election of NA-120 indicates our security establishment is going to add another feather to its history of shortsightedness so that the latter comes full circle in the form of Frankenstein. Both the candidates contested the by-election as independents because they were not yet registered as political parties with the Election Commission of Pakistan. However, apparently they belonged to the prohibited organisations and used its slogans. More importantly, the pictures of Hafiz Muhammad Said and Mumtaz Qadri adorned their election banners and posters. The US had announced a bounty of $10 million against Hafiz Said in 2012 while Qadri had been hanged by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in the murder case of Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer.

The aftermath of the United States new strategy for AF-Pak announced by President Trump on August 21, 2017, during his twenty six minutes speech indicates the seriousness of the US regarding our security and foreign policies. Yet such moves can be translated by the international community, particularly by America and its allies as outright defiance which may produce dire consequences for the country as well as for the region.

Although, our security establishment formulated polices in the past with double edge use like the Afghan jihad policy requiring religious extremism as a tool to be a front-line state against the evil empire, those policy measures were also used as an edge in the regional power game as well as for domestic political control which resulted in constant political instability and social — religious polarisation.

If we could not achieve our maximalist objectives in Afghanistan and South Asia in the 1990s, when the West was dazzled by the aura of defeating the evil empire, how is it possible today in such a hostile international and regional environment?

Alas, policy audits, introspection and accountability in the case of policy failures never crossed the mind of overzealous patriots whose mantra of accountability began and ended with selective financial accountability of civilians.

We expect that the world to recognise our strategic fantasies as legitimate policy concerns. Our declared policy in the 1980s was to help the free world in defeating the Communist empire in the form of the Soviet Union that not only posed, according to our narrative, a threat to the free world, but also a dire existential threat to the Muslim Ummah. However, after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, we expected that the western world, particularly the US, would acknowledge our right to use the residue of the Afghan jihad as policy tools.

Is this only a psychological problem preventing our policy makers to come out from the decade of 1990s? Why have we put all our eggs of regional policy in one basket making it a do or die mission? Foreign policy is the most intricate business wherein the state not only deals with its own citizens but with other states and adversaries within it. And therefore, the states are employing more than one option and alternatives to avoid ending up in an impasse.

If we could not achieve our maximalist objectives in Afghanistan and South Asia in the 1990s, when the West was dazzled by the aura of defeating the evil empire, how is it possible today in such a hostile international and regional environment?

Instead of changing our policy tools, realigning policy options and objectives, the policy makers seem to crawl in the same rut that leads them nowhere.

Currently, if the radicals of a certain hue have been provided political legitimacy in the mainstream media, how can the state deny it to other groups tomorrow?

What would be the long term domestic and institutional consequences of a policy that only focusses on short terms domestic political objectives to truncate assertive political forces?

So far, our state and its institutions were trying hard to persuade the world that extremism and radicalisation were not a societal issue but a peripheral ripple effect, along with other social and political costs of our efforts for Afghan Jihad, the majority of Pakistan’s population was moderate. Their voting for mainstream secular political parties has been presented as evidence of moderation. In case the MML takes electoral roots, like the MMA benefiting from the expertise of election engineering of our institutions, with their political outlook and slogans, what is the guarantee that mainstream politics would not get radicalised and what would be our explanation to the world? How, can the state prevent the MML not to become a political umbrella for other radicals like Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesperson for the Taliban?

On the other hand, we are working hard to remind the world to acknowledge our sacrifices, though why and how the sacrifices were made had never been debated either in the parliament or media. But how can we expect the world to listen to us any more on the subject if we mainstream the elements and ideology against whom we portrayed as an existential threat and fight them? Such schemes of mainstreaming political inclusion and exclusion can promote sectional interests and certain institutional control over the polity but at a huge cost to the state in the long run.

The writer is a political analyst hailing from Swat. Tweets @MirSwat

Published in Daily Times, September 28^th 2017.