Here we are, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Defence Day of Pakistan. Clarification is awaited though as to what we defended during the 1965 war. Was it Pakistan or its respect in the comity of nations by sending discreet messages to the US, USSR and China to get us out of the mess we had created? In case the ceasefire agreement had not been brokered, our tanks would have been stranded because of low fuel. We had not only run out of fuel but other war machinery as well. A sort of romance has been associated with the 1965 war, with tales of young soldiers wearing bombs on their body laying flat on the battleground to attack the enemy while the Sufis (Mystics) long dead emerged from nowhere to receive and plunge the bombs fired by India into the Ravi River or into the pockets of their long cloaks.
For many years September 6 was celebrated as a national holiday, then sanity prevailed, we still do not know of what nature, and the day began to be counted just like any other day. Most of our national holidays are either associated with some religious fervour or with the legacy of the partition, especially those where India could be portrayed the right, the only and the first-hand enemy of Pakistan. I have no reason to doubt that India does things that could only be expected from an enemy. However, I doubt that India could frame its strategy with perfection without Pakistan providing the right environment.
Every day, since the National Action Plan (NAP) has been envisaged and a noose tightened around the MQM neck, we hear about the involvement of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s premier intelligence agency, in disturbing Pakistan’s apple cart. We are told that from Balochistan to Karachi and into the tribal areas, it is RAW and nothing else. The jihadists we created to install so-called strategic depth in Afghanistan have also been cloned into Indian spies, especially the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that unleashed war inside the country after the Lal Masjid fiasco. Back then, the red mosque had worn an audacious attitude because of years of patronage by the government and its oversight over the activities of the students of the mosque’s seminary. The morality brigade that emerged from this seminary behaved like a state-within-the-state. The stick wielding burqa-clad women and the sling throwing male students would take hostage and intimidate anyone or attack anywhere they deemed immoral or un-Islamic. As the news about the piles of ammunition inside the mosque and seminaries made headlines, suspicion arose as to how an activity of such a wide scale could remain unchecked by the authorities, especially when the mosque and the General Head Quarters shared a common path and vicinity. Supposedly, a well guarded area.
Since jihad and Pakistan had become synonyms, especially in the context of the war on terror, the Musharraf regime thought it wise to scapegoat the mosque for its own survival. The mosque was eventually purged of the bad people through a siege. Unfortunately, the philosophy of its self-styled jihad and the patronage of the government to the mosque remain intact to date. The Khateeb (head cleric) of the red mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz, of late had been found defending the Islamic State and welcomed its arrival in Pakistan. Government’s slumber on this clarion call was broken by civil society and hurriedly an FIR was lodged against the cleric. Beyond this, nothing has happened so far.
After the killing of the innocent children at the Army Public School on December 16 and the subsequent NAP, more indications began to emerge, showing India’s footprint in the mayhem Pakistan has been suffering in the name of terrorism. Since 2001, when the Towers fell and the onus of its destruction was laid on al Qaeda, whose leader was then hiding in Afghanistan, we have been taking the direct assault of terror-related activities from the jihadists, who had felt betrayed by Pakistan joining hands with the US as its frontline ally. Betrayal is a highly loaded word. Why would the jihadists fighting in Afghanistan feel wronged by Pakistan unless they had been in a reciprocal relationship? Even then, we tried to hide behind RAW by shouting at the top of our lungs about the mushroom growth of Indian Consulates on the Pak-Afghan border. Stranger still is the fact that when Pakistan was being bombed right left and centre, and the TTP and its affiliates were claiming responsibility, the army, the police and the rest of the security institutions remained in a state of limbo. No action was taken accept condemnations. If we had long known that India was involved in making Pakistan a failed state, why did we allow it to happen, at least for the last 15 years? Karachi was bleeding, its people were robbed, mugged and killed in broad daylight. The MQM, as we know now with more clarity, was behind 90 percent of these crimes. Why was it allowed to play the bloody game for so many years? If India had made Karachi a hostage of its dirty game, what were our intelligence agencies, especially the ISI, doing? If the state was silent and that includes the army for its share of governing the country, what should one understand from this silence: giving a free hand to the so-called enemy, in this case India, to ruin the country?
Ever since Pakistan came into being, we are told that it is either the US or India trying to make the country weaker each day. Nowhere do we find the state taking the responsibility of going wrong in managing its affairs. The truth however, is that we have used India and the US for political expediency and now when the chickens have came home to roost, we have started to feel the pinch where it hurts most. The truth is that our boys have used the security paradigm, with India at its centre, as a ploy to build their empire and milk the donors. The truth is that until recently we had lacked the courage to defend the country.
Therefore, will we stop gathering support using the fallacies surrounding Indian hegemony and do something real to make this country proud of itself? With NAP around, a silver lining has appeared though, but more is needed to prove we are worth being called the defenders of this country.
The writer is a copywriter and freelance journalist with an academic background in public policy and governance. She can be reached at [email protected]