Daily Times

It is always a big call when one decides to put one’s house in order. It becomes all the more challenging when it is spoken in the context of a country’s policies that impinge on its very existence.

And if the announcement to the effect is made by the foreign minister of a country in a dire strait like Pakistan one would be perfectly justified in probing the assertion with a lot of scepticism.

Seriously speaking one is not sure if there is enough time left for Pakistan to accomplish the miracle of putting its house in order and escape what certainly looks like an inevitable headlong collision with the global distrust.

And also there is this question of willingness on the part of the nation at large to actually undertake the dangerous task of clearing the house of all those poisonous snakes called non-state actors (NSAs) that it had willingly raised in its backyard over the last nearly 38 years or precisely since the advent of the late General Ziaul Haq.

Take for example the so-called Defence of Pakistan Council (DPC), an umbrella coalition of more than 40 Pakistani political and religious parties (including a number of banned parties) that advocate policies such as closing NATO supplyroutes to Afghanistan and rejects the Pakistani government decision to grant India most-favored nation status.

In any sincere attempt to put Pakistan’s house in order, the very first step would have to be to ban the DPC which has no constitutional or moral right to give calls for Jihad in defence of Pakistan

None of these 40 parties individually or in any kind and type of combination would win even a dozen seats in any national elections, still the umbrella coalition has consistently served as the political arm of the establishment on the streets whenever the mainstream political parties seemingly tended to challenge the hegemony of the establishment in national policy making.

On occasions it had looked like as if the DPC activities were consigning Pakistan to what our enemies would want us to suffer perpetually: regional and global isolation.

The other day during a TV talk-show a retired Lt. General had called Masood Azhar of the banned Jaish-e-Muhammad (JEM) a double agent. So, let us stop testing China’s friendship by having our all-weather friend keep blocking a UN move to ban a globally identified terrorist.

India claims Azhar Masood and his brother had a hand in the 2016 Pathankot incident. Also, those who had investigated the November 2008 Mumbai massacre claim that Pakistan has enough evidence to prove complicity of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders including Hafiz Saeed in the bloody incident.

In any sincere attempt to put Pakistan’s house in order, the very first step would have to be to ban the DPC which has no constitutional or moral right to give calls for Jihad in defence of Pakistan. It is the State and State alone that has the right, the responsibility and the duty to give such a call, as proclaimed by the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), General Qamar Bajwa, the other day.

Next, as long as our foreign policy remains linked to our national pride the country is likely to remain as prone to disasters as it is today.

There is no concept of permanent friends or permanent enemies in foreign relations. Such relations are dictated only by permanent interests.

And it is not in our permanent interests to bottle up our own country regionally and globally by having permanently disturbed relations with our immediate Eastern, Western and North-Western neighbours.

We can win over Afghanistan overnight if we were to offer this war-ravaged country two-way trade-route to India via Pakistan and perhaps also considerably reduce even Indian hostility towards Pakistan if our bigger Eastern neighbour were to be allowed to use land-route via Pakistan to reach Afghanistan and beyond to Central Asian markets.

Perhaps India would be willing to consider a trade-off in Kashmir for a land route to reach Central Asian markets via Pakistan if we were to negotiate a deal with New Delhi while keeping our national fixations and national pride on ice for a while.

Here it would not be out of place tomaintain that India would be too foolish, which indeed it is not, to risk these commercially lucrative routes by using them to unleash sabotage activities inside Pakistan.

Moreover, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) running from Kashgar to Gwadar would doubly discourage India from taking such a risk. In fact, both India and China would benefit greatly if the India-Afghanistan trade route via Pakistan were to be linked to CPEC facilitating India to reach Western China markets and China to reach Northern and North- Western Indian markets.

While putting the house in order we need also to recover the ideological space that we have lost to the NSAs since Zia.

These NSAs have propagated a totally distorted ideology of Islam which has spread like wildfire across the country. An abhorrent combination of Wahabism, Salafism and Takfirism the proponents of this ideology believe in killing all those Muslims who do not subscribe to their version of Islam.

The military’s Zarb-e-Azb and Radd-ul-Fasaad campaigns have taken the sting out of these killers; but in order to win back permanently the space lost to them, those who are planning to put the house in order need to improve governance as a first step towards the goal.

One needs also to understand that these NSAs have flourished on the back of elements who during the Pakistan movement had called the Quaid Kafir-e-Azam and vehemently opposed his demand for partition of the subcontinent on the basis of two-nation theory.

During the Zia regime, these elements had successfully captured both the academic as well as media spaces in the country and have since been using these platforms to convince the succeeding generations that the Quaid did not mean what he said in his August 11, 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly. They have also tried to continuously to suppress the fact Pakistan’s first cabinet had a Hindu as the Law Minister and a Ahmedi as the Foreign Minister.

These elements have even changed the order of Quaid’s famous slogan: Unity, Faith and Discipline to Faith, Unity, and Discipline, and interpreted ‘Faith’ to mean ‘Iman’ rather than ‘Yaqeen-i-Muhkam’.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Islamabad. He served as the Executive Editor of Express Tribune until 2014

Published in Daily Times, September 16^th 2017.