Daily Times

Mankind has always been fighting for freedom, but what exactly is freedom? Is it freedom from a yoke or the liberty to do anything one wants?

I first read the American Declaration of Independence in my early teens. Although even then, I was struck by it, but I did not appreciate its profundity. My second and third reading followed in quick succession in my early twenties and was awed by its profound wisdom. It begins with:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

And the next paragraph reads:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”

Today’s purists talk of freedom of thought, of expression, of action, and every imaginable freedom one can think of but Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” actually put freedom in perspective. Mankind has certain inalienable rights which, when denied, it must seek to shed the yoke.

But freedom is not absolute and, neither can, or ever will be. First, mankind needs to be governed and the liberty of each individual is contained by the liberty of every other individual.  If I was asked to name one inalienable right that is the cornerstone of liberty, I would say it is the right to justice. In my opinion, justice is all encompassing and every socio-politico-economic ill stems from it. If we look at any political, social or economic ill anywhere, it is caused by its own form of corruption.

Mankind needs to be governed and the liberty of each individual is contained by the liberty of every other individual

Sarah Chayes, an American journalist who moved on to an NGO in Afghanistan and later became an Adviser on corruption to ISAF and the American force commander in Afghanistan authored a book. And it reads like a case study on Afghanistan and includes Iraq; intending to prove her thesis i.e. that systemic corruption in countries like the two named above, is at the root of bad governance and the spread of religious extremism.

This is what she has to say, “Globally, the three most important desiderata of our age — security, resilience and poverty reduction — are consistently being hollowed out by structural theft on a much larger scale, operating across corporations, governments, military establishments and civil services.”

Most of her study is focused on Hamid Karzai and his siblings. She cites names and events to prove her case, and suggests that US and ISAF espoused and promoted corruption.

Her reasoning has merit. However, I think she had another rung of this ladder to descend. It is impossible for systemic corruption to exist anywhere unless systemic injustice precedes corruption. And injustice has to be all pervasive for corruption to become rampant and the corrupt to thrive fearlessly in it.

Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of UK in WW II, has many tales attributed to him. The famous Blitz of constant air attacks by the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, in 1940/41 almost brought Britain to its knees. During its zenith, a journalist is said to have asked Churchill whether government was still functional. Churchill countered by inquiring, “Are courts still meting out justice?”

When the puzzled journalist replied in the affirmative, Churchill stated that “in that case, it is still functioning”. Whether true or not, this tale tends to agree with my contention.

So long as justice prevails, governance is functional. Only the absence of justice can create an environment wherein all socio-politico-economic ills prevail. The absence of justice is the absence of liberty and freedom. When mankind has fought for freedom; it actually fought against prevalence of systemic injustice.

We, Pakistanis have been living in a similar environment. Over the years, the country has become increasingly unjust and the hapless citizens who began to ‘live with’ it, slowly became increasingly tolerant, then inured, and now hopeless of any improvement.

If a military takeover is not an option, existence in this environment of pervading injustice is our foreseeable future. In which case, if Chayes’ thesis is correct and, I think it is, religious extremism will continue to grow.

If it does, the day that we are ruled by extremists is inevitable. Unless preempted by the kind of bloody revolution brought by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey.

The writer is a retired brigadier. He is also former vice president and founder of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI)

Published in Daily Times, July 9^th , 2017.