The Unholy Alliance

The recent merger of MQM and PML-N is a classic example of politics of opportunism.
Two marginal parties, lacking a national constituency, are forming an alliance against the PPP not because they wish to offer a credible opposition to the PPP, but because they sense an incentive for for more political distractions.

If the idea is force an early election, it is a misplaced idea and both parties will serve the cause of democracy better in Pakistan by waiting for the next elections scheduled in Feb. 2013.

Unwarranted Absence

It has been a while since I last blogged. Hopefully, I will be more regular than in the past.

Drunk On The Bus

There has to be a law that only people, who can handle alcohol should be allowed to drink. People should know their limits and they need to stop drinking before they empty the contents of their stomachs on to the floor. There is nothing as disjusting as smell of an alcoholic vomit and that too, cheap alcoholic vomit!

The Mess in North Africa

The situation in North Africa is turning into a classical nightmare. The idea of an international led military intervention in Libya was not only legally, in the sense of international law, wrong but it was unrealistic. Military interventions, without a clarity of purpose, which is clearly defined and its objectives clearly understood, is a road to disaster. No military intervention or invasion or act can exist without its political rationale and in the case of Libya, the reason for intervention was not humanitrian but to seek a regime change itself.

This was a mistake. The conflict inside Libya was a revolutionary war, a war marked by a struggle for political power within a nation, and the world by picking sides in that war has effectively become a partisan in the Libyan civil war itself. The west, notably the United States, has a habit of misreading the political intentions of conflicts in far away lands and seeing them through the narrow prisms of its own interests and it will pay, along with the world, the price for this misadventure of folly.

Also, but more importantly, the United Nations by allowing the military intervention into Libya has just annulled nearly 500 years of international law and treaty precedents and has effectively destroyed the Treaty of Westphalia, which laid the foundations for international law and the independence of state sovereignty.

The Treaty of Westphalia established the principle for non-intervention by state in the affairs of another state and the United Nations, which was founded on the idea of preventing one state from invading another state, has created an international legal precedent that allows any nation to invade any other nation and has, in fact and deed, mooted its own raison d' etre.

The day United Nations Resolution 1973 was passed, was the day when the United Nations itself ceased to exist as an organization dedicated towards maintaining global peace and for upholding the rights of nations from invasion and foreign interventions and in doing so, it went against its own charter; which called for states acting in uniformity to prevent one state from intervening in the affairs of another and instead became an organization acting in conformity with other nations to invade a country!

Audacity (A Silent Coup d' Etat in Pakistan)

The pointing finger points to the silence of the Pakistani army towards the murders of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti. Has no one wondered why the security establishment has been so silent on the issue? Can no one hear the loudness of this silence?  When something is too obvious, it is not really obvious and when all other possibilities are eliminated, what is left no matter how improbable is always the truth.

There are serious things presently afoot in Pakistan and the events clearly hint of a massive im

balancing of the scales of political power in Pakistan. There is a silent coup d’ etat underway in Pakistan and Pakistan, as a state, is quickly becoming a state of martial law.  Two events, isolated yet connected, have changed the nature of power in Pakistan and those two events were the extensions given to General Kayani as the Chief of Army Staff and to General Pasha as the head of Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI).

What these extensions imply is that the Pakistani military and the Pakistani military intelligence (ISI) have institutionally merged and the idea of a political power, which was always considered to rest with the chief of the army staff, will now be equally shared between the chief of the army staff and the director-general of the ISI.

This means that the pantomime of a civilian democracy in Pakistan has become irrelevant and the civilian government has become a bonsai government and the Pakistani army, sub voce, has become an autonomous center of power in Pakistan accountable to no one but its own ideological worldview and its own metrics of interest in the Pakistani political system. It also means that interregnum of democracy in Pakistani politics, which started in 2008, may be coming to an end.

In a sense, both Generals Kayani and Pasha had held important positions during General Musharraf’s military rule and with both having secure extensions to their tenures, it can be safely said that Pakistan has reverted to the status quo of February 2008; a state of political reality which had existed in Pakistan before the elections of February 2008.

Also, the military rule that started in 1999, with a lapse of three years from 2008-2011, has been reestablished. It means that the policies of the Musharraf era vis-a-vis Afghanistan, India and towards the United States will be followed faithfully by the dyarchy of Kayani and Pasha. This means that with the end game in Afghanistan fast approaching its point of eventual terminality, there will be resurgence in the Pakistani Army-ISI’s support of jihadi organizations and groups as possible strategic assets to secure its interests in a post-Americanized Afghanistan.

This also means that the military-mullah alliance had to be re -calibrated in view of these newly emerging realities and obstacles to that alliance had to be removed. The murders of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti and the silencing of all liberal dissent against the spread of an intolerant religious ideology have to been seen and understood in the light of this shared consensus between the Pakistani military, ISI and the religious groups in Pakistan.

The Pakistani media’s role is, and has been, the vocalization of this agreement and to facilitate this aim by creating a climate of fear, hostility and insecurity in which no voice can be raised against this development; the cementing of the Pakistani military’s ideological and political view point onto the politics of Pakistan.

This coup d’ etat, by the Pakistani military, is different from the past coups in Pakistani history. Unlike the past coups, this time the military has no wish to share power with the civilian politicians and unlike the past, where it covertly supported the religious parties; it is now overtly supporting the religious parties’ attempts to influence political power by its silence and refusal to condemn their acts of terror and violence in Pakistan.

The glue, which is binding and reinforcing this alliance is the fact that both the military and the religious groups in Pakistan see eye to eye and agree on the key issues of foreign policy, domestic politics, ideological moorings of Pakistan and on their political perceptions on what is the right course of action in Pakistani politics: the move towards an ideologically conservative society, which protects the traditional roles of the military and the religious groups as the defenders of Pakistan’s ideological, geographic and moral frontiers.

It is in this vortex that the story of Raymond Davis starts to make sense and it is this logic which explains the outbreak of the intelligence war between ISI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Once the CIA realized that it could not count on ISI to tackle the problem of jihadi organizations acting against the United States interests, it decided to act unilaterally to deal with the problem and this act of independence by CIA threatened ISI, and Pakistani military’s strategic calculations towards the region (read post- United States’ influenced Afghanistan).

Therefore, CIA and its unilateral policies in Pakistan had to be stopped at all costs and it is within this prism that the murders of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti also make sense. If the politics of Taseer and Bhatti had been allowed to be successful, and the repeals to the Blasphemy Laws had, indeed, been affected, it would have immeasurably strengthened the cause of liberal-secular politics in Pakistan and would have caused untold harm to the military-mullah alliance itself. Both Samaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti were seen as a threat not because they had the political constituencies of support behind them, but because they had the potential to galvanize such a constituency not only within Pakistan, but also internationally and that would have undermined the military’s traditional importance to the United States as the sole interlocutor for the United States’ interests in Pakistani politics.

Frederick the Great of Prussia had once remarked “audace, tojour, audace” on the eve of a battle to his generals telling them that it was audacity, which won battles and not courage. The first rule of a successful coup is not to be losing side and the second rule is to do everything possible to make sure that one comes out on the winning side and this is exactly what has happened in Pakistan.

Faced with the prospect of a defeat and the lessening of its role in Pakistani politics and internationally, the Pakistani military mounted a desperate coup d’etat inside Pakistan to secure its long term interests and the first shots of this coup, which were heard all over the world were fired on January 4^th 2011 and since then, Pakistan has become a different country and because of this, may be, the world has also changed.

A Reply To YLH

Whether it was right or wrong, the fact is that vast majority of the Pakistani population wants Pakistan to be Islamic and ruled under sharia laws. It does not matter what Jinnah thought or Zia-ul-Haq did because the only issue that matters, today, is what does the present generation of Pakistanis want for Pakistan.

Zia-ul-Haq is just a blink of the eye in the narrative and Zia only put the capstone on the work that was started in 1947. In 2011, it really does not matter what was promised in 1947 or what was the reason for Pakistan in 1947. The vast majority of Pakistanis believe that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam and it is their perceptions of Pakistan, which matters and will decide how Pakistan’s future evolves.

This is what the majority of the Pakistanis think and if true democracy is allowed in Pakistan, the majority of the Pakistanis will vote in favor of Islam and sharia. Therefore, true democracy of one person-one vote cannot be allowed to exist in Pakistan. The denial of this demand then creates an emotional and instinctive hatred for the centers of power in Pakistan, which keep proming this eventuality, but do not deliver on it.
The logical outcome of this is a massive sense of alienation between the people and the rulers as their interests in Pakistan and its forms of goverance are diametrically opposed. The electoral dissatisfaction of the Pakistani populace, once it has grown disenchanted of its ruling cadres, automatically sought other alternatives of pursuing their vision of Pakistan.

This vision, then, finds a sense of identity and commonality with the religious parties in Pakistan and thus, the people support the religious parties not because they agree with them, but because the religious parties are seen to be representing the ideas that the people wish to see being implemented.

The ideas in politics are not measured in the grains of reality but in the sands of perception. There are been a silent coup d’ etat in Pakistan and this coup has forever changed the balance of power in Pakistan. This coup has given substance to three new political ideas in Pakistan, which influence the direction of Pakistani politics. These ideas are the people, the mosque and the Pakistani army.

There is a common linkage between these three ideas. The common thread is all of these ideas; the people, the religious right and the army stand for Islam and see Islam as the source of their identities. Not only does this troika see a common purpose between them; they also see any obstacle to this idea as a common threat and they will support each other in order to remove this threat.

Once this new trinty of power is understood in Pakistan, it also explains the fissures in Pakistani society that came to surface in the aftermath of the assassination of Salmaan Taseer and the popular reaction to it. The religious right refused to blame the murder and instead glorified the murderer of Salmaan Taseer and the people cheered their verdict by coming out on the streets in demand for religious laws and army supported all of this by its silence on the matter.

If there was a doubt as to where the Pakistani army’s heart was in the matter, it should have been disspelled by its silence over the killing of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti. There is a duality in the policies of the Pakistani army vis-a-vis the issue of religion and extermism in Pakistan. Pakistani army encourages religious extermism where it suits its interests, as in the case of patronizing certain religious groups, which are seen as strategic assets and it fights religious extermism, as in the case of the Taliban, where such activities are seen as a threat to its ideas of being govering Pakistan and being the defenders of its “ideological and geographic frontiers”.

The day Salmaan Taseer was killed, January 4th 2011, was the day that Jinnah’s Pakistan and any dream or hope associated with it died. It was on that day that the first shots of this coup were fired which changed Pakistan forever. The Pakistan of today, in the aftermath of the murders of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti, is a theocratic state dedicated to the principles of sharia and Islam and it refuses to tolerate any more dissent against those ideas.

Pakistan is not at a cross-roads any more, old friend; it has crossed the Rubicon!

And they all fell down....

The dominoes fall one by one but who will pick up the pieces and clean up the mess? Yemen, Libya, Iran, Bahrain, Jordan and Saudi Arabia? We might be on the cusp of seeing a world in the middle of a change and for that, none of us will be ever be the same again.

A Failure of Imagination

A visitor strolling through halls of the British Imperial War Museum, in London, might not notice that most of the paintings in the museum depict scenes of British military defeats and not the victory of British arms in battle. This is not an oversight on the part of the museum’s curator, but a poignant commentary on the fallacy of conventional wisdom that exists as a contradiction in the realms of political and military logic. Every military academy in the world prepares its students to fight the wars of the future by refighting and winning the lost battles of the last war and teaches them how the defeats in the previous battles could have been turned into victories. It was due to this view that the French Army in the summer of 1940 found itself standing confidently behind the Maginot Line fully expecting the German Army to follow a similar plan of attack as it did in 1914 and that was because the French Army and its officer corps, between the years 1918-1940, were trained to fight the war of 1914.

 

The German philosopher Friedrich von Schiller once remarked that man learns nothing from history except that man learns nothing from history and this comment stands at variance from George Santayana’s observation that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. There is a delicious irony that exists, as a contradiction in these two statements, in how the political and the military mind approaches a problem and tries to resolve it, because they imply two very opposing ideas. It has been generally understood within the context of Santayana’s statement that those who do not heed history’s mistakes are forced to repeat it and that the mistakes of history need to be understood so they might be avoided, but herein exists the contradiction that confounds the problems in both a political and a military sense.
In this sense, Schiller is more on the mark when he suggests that man learns nothing from history, because the implication of Santayana’s statement also suggests though it is a worthwhile act to learn the lessons of the past, understanding the lessons of the past do not mean a solution to the problems of the future. In reality, in terms of pragmatism of policy options and decisions, learning the lessons of the past could have disastrous results for a future policy, as the experience of the French Army proved in 1940, if the wrong lessons are learned, and that those who learn the lessons of the past are, in fact, condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past in the future.

The Nature of War

The modern worlds’ understanding of the phenomena of war and the role of war in a society has dramatically changed since the tragic days of September 11, 2001. The concept of war is as old as the society itself and the narrative of the human history is an epic tale of the organizational successes and failures to prepare for war on the level of society and the state. The basic principle of the human society, throughout history, has been to prepare itself for organized violence from the efforts of early humans to form hunting parties to villagers protecting themselves from other marauding villagers to the nation-states pursuing their political interests through the instrument of armed conflict. This has not been an easy task and those nation-states and societies which successfully confronted this challenge ensured their own longevity and those that did not, simply became footnotes in the various chapters of history.    

The wars of society and the state existed in many forms and methodologies, but it was the codification of the idea of state power in the middle of the seventeenth century, in Europe, that formalized the role of war, defined as organized armed violence in the employment of the state’s sovereign interests, as the final arbiter of the state’s, and its society’s, legitimacy. The modern nation-state is organized around the idea of waging war and its sense of sovereign independence in international relations is directly proportional to its war making powers. The wars of the seventeenth century were merely the extensions of the monarchial arguments of kings and were fought to settle political disputes and were not the wars of annihilation that they would become later in the twentieth century. Wars of the period from 1648 onwards, at least till the time of the French Revolution in 1789, were relatively civilized affairs and their lethality of destruction was limited due to the reason of limited battlefield technology and the costs associated with waging them.

The experience of wars, from 1648 to 1789, was of limited engagements with limited mobility of deployments and the political rationale behind wars was that though wars had to be fought; they had to be limited. There was a very simple explanation behind this idea. It cost vast sums of monies to maintain, train, equip, feed, clothe and pay for a standing army and all of these costs translated into increased taxes, which was never popular with the people who saw every war of the state as another argument for increased taxation. Therefore, the monarchs of the time were forced by the constraints of their societal opinions to limit the wars and the idea of waging wars was not to seek the destruction of the enemies’ forces but to seek and preserve one’s one own forces  from destruction. The militaries of the monarchies of Europe were prized assets and they could not be ruined through war or destroyed because the costs of recreating them would be too prohibitive and the increased taxation, to this purpose, invariably suggested popular agitation against the monarchy itself.

Hence, the monarchs of Europe could not afford wars without an end without risking internal instability within their own societies and therefore, they generally saw wars as the very last resort when all the arguments of diplomacy had failed. It was for this reason, and to amplify this rationale, that the French king Louis XIV had, by an imperial order, a Latin inscription stamped onto the barrels of all the French artillery guns, which said “the final argument of kings”. What changed the nature of warfare and introduced the world to the ideas of modern warfare and the role of societies in a modern war, was the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution changed this equation and converted war, as an idea from an argument between monarchs as it was understood, to that of raison d’ etat: the reason of the state. It was the French Revolution that gave the world its’ first wars of nationalism in support of the state’s policies and in doing so, it created the idea of mobilizing the society in favor of a war and made role and contributions of the society to the waging of a war as an organic aspect of the state’s wars.

The wars of the French Revolution differed from wars of the pre-1789 Europe in a very significant manner. The mobilization of the French society in the defense of the ideals of the French Revolution, in the guise of conscription of all males to the war effort, meant that suddenly the French armies had unlimited reservoirs of manpower and recruits to fill their ranks and could fight wars of annihilation, which the rest of the European monarchies could not do. Secondly, by mobilizing their society to the war effort, the French effectively used nationalism and patriotism of the French Revolution as ideas to subsidize the costs of their wars. Consequently, the idea was germinated in the minds of the French that they had to fight till the very bitter end in order to protect their revolution and there could be no compromise that undermined the reasons for which the revolution was instigated; the very reasons they were defending.

This was a revolutionary concept in the idea of warfare as a means of organized violence for political ends, because the wars of the French Revolution greatly differed from the wars which preceded it. It was the French Revolution, which gave inkling into the idea associated with a revolutionary war and as the experience of the French Revolution showed, a revolutionary war is not a war between states, but a war fought internally within a nation to capture political power. This salient observation needs to be appreciated and understood. Even though the revolutionary armies of France were fighting the coalitions of the European monarchies arrayed against them who were determined to reverse the course of the revolution, the idea behind the fighting was still to preserve the political integrity of the revolution and its attendant political power from both domestic (supporters of the French monarchy) and foreign enemies.

It must be pointed out, at this stage, that a revolutionary war should not be confused with a guerrilla war because the two are very different in their aims and intentions. As mentioned before, a revolutionary war is fought to attain and capture political power within a country or a nation-state and therefore, its overarching aim, or rationale, is purely political, and it uses armed violence to attain a political objective. A guerilla war, on the other hand, is an expression of asymmetrical warfare and it is more reflective of a military strategy against overwhelming odds, by favoring hit and run tactics and avoiding pitched battles with superior forces, and is fought in pursuit of a political aim; of resisting political demands but not necessarily with the idea of capturing political power itself.

A guerilla war can be fought, and it can exist, as a subtext within a revolutionary war at the same time, as the example of Pakistan in the present war on terror proves so brilliantly. Pakistan is fighting elements of the Taliban, in its tribal lands, and this fight is for the equation of political power within the state of Pakistan itself, which would classify it as a revolutionary war, but the tactics of the Taliban are to not capture political power within Pakistan (because that is not a realistic political aim of their resistance against the state of Pakistan as it is commonly understood) but to resist the political demands of the state of Pakistan; the enforcement of the Pakistani writ of sovereignty in the tribal areas, and that would classify their armed resistance t the state of Pakistan as an expression of a guerilla war.

Between 1789 and 1945, the wars of the French Revolution morphed into the wars of European nationalism and this transition, in the idea of the warfare, reached its high watermark in the shape of the two world wars of the last century. As the idea of warfare resumed a more traditional mantle of conflict, between states, the idea of a revolutionary war and its lessons were forgotten. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in 1945, the world experienced a resurgence of revolutionary wars (wars of liberation and wars that resulted due to the European decolonization in Africa and Asia) but these wars and their political nature was misunderstood since these wars were occurring under the umbrella of a cold war ideological struggle, between the United States and the Soviet Union.

For example, the genesis of the Vietnam War was a revolutionary war to gain political power within Vietnam, by the Vietnamese, first from the French and then from the regimes supported by France and the United States. Therefore, the Vietnam War has to be understood in two different contexts. The revolutionary nature of the Vietnam War was to capture political power within Vietnam and the nature of the guerilla warfare, in the Vietnam War, was to fight an asymmetrical political conflict in order to defeat the French and American political-military support to the Vietnamese regimes which were in power and to take political power away from them by denying them the political and military leverage of French and American support.

The political idea and the aim behind the execution of a guerilla war, as in the case of the Vietnam War, is never to defeat a numerically superior force, but to force upon him such political and military costs associated with waging a counter-insurgency campaign that drains the popular political will and lessens the public support for such a war. The overriding and the principle aim of a successful guerilla war campaign is to defeat the military power of an opponent by undermining his political will to wage the war in the first place and this is done by deliberately seeking to prolong the war to such a point, when the civil opinion in the adversary’s own country turns against the war and creates domestic political resistance to war itself.

It was the blinding political rationalisms of the cold war and their devotions to the political dogmas of an ideological confrontation made more rigid by the paranoia of theoretical constructs, such as the Domino Theory and the Iron Curtain, that the nature of revolutionary wars, fought during the cold war, was simply subordinated to the exigencies of the cold war itself and thus, was completely misunderstood. September 11, 2001 helped to end this confusion, but created another misunderstanding. The wars that followed in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States were identified as the wars against terrorism and the whole, collective, military effort to defeat terrorism and those political and military groups identified with it, was called the war against terrorism.

The war on terror is just another nomenclature of the idea behind a revolutionary war; the attainment of a political power within a country or a nation-state. The word “terrorism” was actually coined in the aftermath of the suicide attack on the United States’ Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983. It is pertinent to remember that when the United States deployed its troops into Lebanon as peacekeepers, there was a civil war raging within Lebanon itself and the United States was not seen as a neutral participant. Therefore, the heavily armed truck that struck the United States’ Marine Corps headquarters in a suicide attack was a form of asymmetrical retaliation to the United States’ navy targeting one of the groups fighting in the civil war. Since the attack happened during the height of the Cold War, but did not involve a United States-Soviet Union confrontation, the attack was labeled as “terrorism” as it did not fit into any of the preconceived explanations of the idea of an armed conflict within the understood paradigms of the cold war.

The war against terrorism is, therefore, just another revolutionary war by another name. A critical critique of the war on terrorism and the manner in which it is being waged would strongly suggest that that what the United States is actually fighting is not terrorism or any ideas linked with it but is fighting, as a participant on one side of the issue, in an internal armed struggle to decide the balance of a political power within a country. What is commonly misidentified as a war on terror in Iraq, for example, is nothing less than a traditional revolutionary war being fought between the Sunnis and Shias to decide who controls political power in Iraq and has nothing to do with religion per se. The conflict in Iraq is a secular power struggle for political power and the only religious elements to it are the religious identities of the two main protagonists, but their aims are purely secular: political power.

In a similar sense, the war inside Afghanistan also identified as a war on terror by the United States, is another form of a revolutionary war that is being fought for the sake of political power within Afghanistan. The war inside Afghanistan has a religious color because the Taliban are linked with the idea of a radical Islam, but what the war is really about is an ethnic class-based struggle to demand a share in the distribution of the political power in Afghanistan and this idea is being resisted by the Pushtuns, who have traditionally held power inside Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s misfortune is that its wars have been misunderstood by the outside world but in reality the Taliban may be radical Islamic seminary students, but the misidentification of this revolutionary war within Afghanistan, by the United States, has only alienated the local population and this alienation has found a popular expression of support for the Taliban, not because they are fighting against the United States, but because they are fighting for the cause of the political rights of the Afghan Pushtuns.

If the United States, and its allies, actually hope to win the war on terror, then they will have to remove their political-historic blinkers and make a genuine attempt to understand the political reasons behind the armed resistance being offered to them. The United States and its allies cannot construct an effective strategy to defeat “terror” unless they understand the political motives behind the revolutionary wars inside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and those motives have more to with a demand in the equal share of political power than they have anything to do with religion. What makes the whole situation into a nightmare of absurd proportions is that the United States, as the case in Vietnam, has simply misunderstood the nature of the war and is fighting a wrong war with the wrong tools; both politically and militarily speaking.

The war on terror, as the revolutionary wars inside Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan are called, will finally end in terms of a political settlement reached over the distribution of political power and not as a result of some battlefield victory. These wars are not about the “hearts and minds” of the people involved in it, but they are about a dilemma on how to fashion a political balance of power, within those nations, which satisfies the political demands of those groups that are resisting the United States and its allies in a military sense by waging a campaign of guerilla war against them.

This is a war, pragmatically speaking, that the United States would find very hard to win if not impossible to win. The final outcome of this revolutionary war, mispronounced as the war on terrorism, does not reside in the ability of the United States’ political and military power forcing these groups to negotiating table, but whether its allies inside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are willing to sit at the same proverbial negotiating table with them and agree to share political power with them. Just like any other revolutionary war, these wars will be won and lost not by the United States, but by its allies, with whom it is allied, and how they approach the political problems of this war and how effective they are in resolving the issues amongst themselves.

Therefore, it is for this reason that the nature of wars and their politics have to be clearly understood and it is only once the political nature of a war is truly understood that a right political policy can be crafted, which then influences the military strategy designed to attain the political aims of a particular war. What the last ten years of the war on terrorism have shown is that the United States and its allies have totally failed to understand the real nature of this conflict and in doing so, have approached it with wrong policies with predictably disastrous results.

War and the politics of war is too serious a phenomena not be understood and those, who play with the fires of war and politics without respecting its power, usually find themselves consumed by very fires they have ignited themselves and it is for this reason that the phenomena of war must be studied and understood by those who practice it in the words of Louis XIV, “the final argument of kings”.

A Reply to Caroline

The first thing to do in Pakistan is to bring back the idea of a law and order situation and to enforce an environment of legal accountibility for everyone. The law has to be made supreme and in this sense, I have no hopes in that crossed-eyed idiot who is the chief justice of Pakistan. He is nothing but a lackey of the Sharif brothers. The law in Pakistan has been ripped into shreds due to personal, power based, self-interested exceptions to the extent that it only exists in theory and not in reality.

The first task of such a leader will be impose the rule of law and s/he must be willing to punish all those who disobey the law. No exceptions and to judge such a committment, we need a leader who would willing to hang is own mother and his own family in the public square if they broke the law. Such a leader needs to create a fear of the law that makes it unthinkable for the people to break it or even think about toying with it.
Is there a person like this in Pakistan?

Next step is to get rid of the parliament in Pakistan and the present bunch of expletive deleted morons, who claim to be politcans and who could not even masterbate if they were provided detailed instructions on how to do it. By getting rid of parliament, I do not mean the idea of a legislative assembly but the people in it. The French have a saying, which in English means “for the encouragement of others” and it would be good idea to hang some of these parasites and let their bodies hang and rot in the open so the people get the idea of what it means to disappoint the public trust.

Please observe, I call the Pakistani politicans, with rare exceptions, as parasites and not leeches, because even leeches have a purpose in life. What is the expletive deleted purpose of these expletive deleted morons?

Once a good portion of these parasites are hung and their corpses thrown to the pigs, lets get rid of the present toilet paper known as the constitution of Pakistan. In the new consititution, religion has to pared down to the bare minimum and it should be confined to a person’s own thought process and must be ruthlessly chased out of the public sphere. Just as the Nazis forced the Jews to wear a Yellow Star of David, those who wish to practice religion in Pakistan have to be identified and regulated till that point in time, when the population is mature enough to accept the seperation of state and religion.

Another thing, which a would be leader of Pakistan needs to do is have a bonfire of knowledge and burn all the books that preach about a mytical Pakistan. A new education criteria has to be created, implemented and taught that places an emphasis on the critical thinking skills intead of mere rote learning and this includes the Quran. A person memorizing the Quran is no different than a parrot, because the real question is whether memorization leads to understanding and in the case of religion, understanding is imperative towards questioning the basic fundlementals of religion and even offering critiques of the Prophet Muhummad.

Will the world end, if Muhummad’s life is put under a microscope warts and all? Such an education system, with the political power of a leader committed to change the very nature of a civic-political discourse in Pakistan, needs to demystify Muhummad’s status as a demi-god and make people realize that he was only a human being, with all the flaws and handicaps of a human being.

In Pakistan, unfortunately, Muhummad is revered as an idol and not seen as man. In Pakistan, you can joke and make fun of Allah, but not of Muhummad. Why? Pakistan, and the people who preach religion there, have created a narrative of idolatory around Muhummad and that is why, Pakistan is not a country created in the name of a religion as much as it has a religion created in the name of a country.

This is why I said that Pakistan does not require retired army generals to rule it and guide it to the nearest port of salvation, but a philosopher-king. We need a leader who combines an understanding of the all contradictions, which exist in our society and has a will to lead without compromising. Pakistan does not need a vision; vision is for utopians who are clueless as to what they want, because if the idea is to save Pakistan, then it must be done at the cost of overcoming all resistence.

Consider the situation as one based on the Code of Hammurabi govered by Draco. In such a case, democracy is disaster and we should admit to ourselves that though democracy might be the best of the worst alternatives, we are not mature enough to ply a democratic goverance because we as a society cannot develop a consensus.

In the rest of the world, the ideas of nationalism unites and in Pakistan, what values we hold as common divides us and in many aspects, the would be leader has to forge a sense of country first in Pakistan let alone rule it. Such a leader has to literally create the concept of a social justice that ensures equality of certain rights in the economic sense and such a leader must erdicate the scourage of feudalim and if the feudals resist, such a leader should not shy away from wiping out the feudal in a genocidial pogram, if that is what is required.
I say, let us bury the expletive deleted feudals in the expletive deleted land they love so much.

It would be a good idea, for such a leader, to start a tradition of public hangings after Friday prayers in all the towns and cities of Pakistan and to hang a dozen or so people each week; nothing motivates people more than to see someone dying kicking, dirtying themselves with their own excrement.

Now, let us turn to the military and let us have a would be leader of Pakistan purge it of all the minds, which exist in it and place it at a higher level than the importance of the state itself.

I must emphasis this point very clearly and forcefully. In order for Pakistan to have a functioning democracy and a representive government, with liberity and justice for its people, a would be leader of Pakistan would have to demolish all the intelligence services that exist within Pakistan.

The existence of an intelligence service, unless it is subservient to the law and is subordinate to the elected representatives and is held accountable by them, will always be a threat to the individual liberities of the people (in any country of the world).

The military in Pakistan has to made, by hook or crook, empathic to the understanding that it exists under the rubric of a state’s interests and it is not the job of the military to weave fantasies as to what are the interests of the state. The purpose of a soldier is to die for the country and it is the purpose of the leader to tell that solider how to die for his country and this needs to be made clear to the military mind in Pakistan.
Qualifications of a leader? The qualifications are not as important as the desire to institute a positive change in Pakistan and not to brook dissent to that change.

Edmund Burke once said a true leader is that person, who when he realizes that what the people want is wrong, acts in the best interests of the people by disobeying them and doing what he knows to be the best for them!

Pakistan must be allowed to be burned, to the third degree, with the fires of its self-created intolerances and it must be allowed to sink, deeper, into the hopelessness of a rule of jungle and life must be allowed to become so uncertain that the average mind of a Pakistani understands what it means to live in a lawless society and why laws are need and more crucially, why laws must be respected and this repect must be for man made law and not God’s laws, which will only create, and do create, exceptions to the rule of law and actually undermine it.

Religion must be allowed to kill in Pakistan until that point in time, when the people themselves understand that religion is a man made doctrine for propagating an intolerant brand of moral terroism and they are so fed up with religion and its hypocrisy, that they themselves seek to distence themselves from its rituals and commandments and intentions.

A would be leader must be willing to watch the death of Pakistan, in its present form, and must be willing to re-create a new reality by the force of sheer ruthlessness and will power.

I only see a stubborn refusal to compromise with the conventional wisdom and a desire to take Pakistan by the horns and make it yield to progress and change as a solution, because at the present state of affairs, the idea of a national consensus is a wet dream in Pakistan, because our present leadership has the minds of a spoiled child and is selfish to the core.

The reason corruption is such a death knell for Pakistan is not because of corruption itself, but because it is a selfish corruption that exists in Pakistan, and which traces its roots to the sustainment of a life style that cannot be afforded through legal and normal means. The idea of corruption and its impetus in Pakistan comes from living a life style beyond a person’s means and to bridge the gap, between the costs of that life style and to pay for it, corruption is the mode of expediency meet the needs of that life style, because we all have expectations to live beyond our means.

Corruption in Pakistan will only end when Pakistanis are made to live within their financial limits. Period.
All of the problems in Pakistan, from A to Z, can be solved, but the question still waits for an answer if there is a will to solve them?

Therefore, I favor a philopher-king, who understands the problems of Pakistan, understands the vunerabilities of the people of Pakistan and their intellectual insecurities and knows the solution and is not afraid to impose a reign of tryanny and is not unafriad of being hated and disliked.

The problem with military rulers is that they always wish to be liked and wish to have popular legitimacy and it is this Achilles’ Heel of their own flawed perceptions, which gives them their destined tragic character flaws assuring their eventual failures. Same thing with the civilian politicans; they too have a sense of a personal narcissistic streak and for its sake, will not make difficult choices.

No; what Pakistan needs is a person, as a leader, capable of unimaginable will power and the first test of this will power has to be such a leader’s personal rejection of everything which Pakistan presently stands for, because it is wrong and then, the capacity to change it regardless of the sacrifice needed.
Pakistan needs a philosopher-king, who understand the irony of doing evil in the name of good; who understands that in order to create, you must destroy.

I am being pragmatic and if I had wished to be idealistic, I would have continued to harp about Jinnah and trying to force the future existence of my country according to the expectations of a dead man.
Is there a person in Pakistan, who can reject the role of Islam in Pakistani politics and also reject the memory of Jinnah and has the will to move forward, for the sake of Pakistan, without the need to justify the future of Pakistan on the basis of Islam and Jinnah?

In Response to Rabia Mughal, Express Tribune

Rabia, the only hardline stance now left in Pakistan is the total rejection of religion. Can you do this? This is the only hardline stance left now in Pakistan! How long will you appease religion in Pakistan and hope that it will leave you alone? How long will we play the osterich and pretend that danger does not exist? Religion is a problem in Pakistan and Pakistan has reached a stage of its existence, where every Pakistani has to ask: Islam or Pakistan? They have to make a choice. If you decide for Pakistan, you will have to remove Islam and religion from every aspect of the society and if you wish to keep Islam in Pakistan, then be prepared to see the end of Pakistan.

This is the only stance left and the frog died a long time ago. The frog died when all this was happening and no one said anything and this rot started in 1949, with the Objectives Resolution, which was the death certificate of Jinnah’s Pakistan. Pakistan’s death at the hands of religion was well documented in the Munir-Kiyani Report (please read that if you wish to understand the role of a political religion in destroying a state). Then came General Ayub Khan and his witch hunts of communists and leftists and liberals, which only opened up the political space for the religious right. Then came Z. A. Bhutto appeasing the clerics and declaring Pakistanis as non-Muslims and passing constitutional amendments to legalize religious discrimination. Bhutto set the stage of General Zia-ul-Haq and by this time, the clerical right in Pakistan was so emboldened and Zia so desperate for political legitimacy, that Pakistan was turned into a theocracy by an agreement of mutual understanding. After Zia, no one dared to stand up to the monster that was created and even Pervaiz Musharaf, retreated before the wrath of the religious right.

Can you dare to draw the line in the sand against Islam, as a self-confessed Muslim, and stand up against it? This is the only last hardline stance that will matter now and if you are not prepared for this, then be prepared to live in a Pakistan where you and your ideas will not be welcomed; where you will be judged as a Muslim according to the defination of someone who decides whether you are or you are not a Muslim worthy of living in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Is this acceptable to you?

To Sardar Khan

Why do you drag religion into every issue to promote your hatred? You say Islam is a religion of peace and yet, you kill those who disagree with you. Pakistan is not an Islamic state. Pakistan, under your version of Islam, is an Islamic despotism, where a person is judged by man-made laws and not the laws of God.

The majority of the people in Pakistan may be Muslims, but that does not mean in any sense of the word that they are right. The majority of the Germans also supported Hitler and his policies of Nazism. Did that make Hitler and his Nazism right for Germany? Should the Germans have simply accepted his rule and not challenged it? When Hitler and his Nazi cohorts passsed the Nuremberg laws in 1934, was that right?

The decision of a majority, if not balanced with the rights of a minority, is a legal justification for trynny. Pakistan may be an Islamic republic today, but what happens tomorrow if there is a change in the Pakistani opinion and the majority votes for a secular Pakistan? Will you then accept the decision of the majority? What makes you believe that Pakistan will always be an Islamic republic? Have you seen the end of time that you can make such a claim?

All Muslims honor Prophet Muhummad (PBUH). The question is who gave you and your ilk the right to decide how other Muslims should honor Prophet Muhummad (PBUH) and force them to honor him only in the manner prescribed by you? Who gave you the right to tell other Muslims how to follow their religion?
You say that our will not change anything, but then when have you and your band of killers have ever bothered to listen to the will of those, who have dissented from your version of Islam? You have killed all those you have disagreed with you, because you have no arguments against their reason and so, you silence them with bullets and threats and lies. You and your bunch of religious thugs have denied the right to others to express their will and then you have the incredible audacity to come and inform that our will will not change anything?

For the last 64 years, you have tried and failed to impose your fanatical Islam upon us and the reason why you have failed is because it is our will that is resisting you and it is a will that will keep telling us to resist you, because this is not your Pakistan and we do not want your Pakistan forced down our throats. Our will, even in the darkest times of dispair, is firmly rooted in the dream of a tolerant and a progressive Pakistan as envisioned by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and you may kill us as much as you wish in a physical sense, but you can never kill the dream and the idea of that dream in our hearts and minds.

Who gave you the right and the courage to tell us to be “good Muslims”? Who gave you the authority to judge us as Muslims? Who gave you the power to define who is and who is not a Muslim? When you and Muslims like you kill other Muslims in the very name of religion you and people like you profess, what makes you believe that you are a good Muslim yourself?

When in your actions, deeds and thoughts, you stand for everything which the religion you claim to represent rejects in its teachings, what makes you think you are good a Muslim and better than all other Muslims in the world?

Then, once more, in a brazen act of arrogance you lecture us to find peace by becoming a good Muslim. There can be no peace and there can be no good Muslims when narrow minded, bigoted, intolerant, rejectionist and morally nihilistic people like you and your blood thirsty supporters kill anyone who does not agree with you and your interpretations of Islam.

For Muslims to find peace and be considered as good, people like you and your intolerant mindsets have to be learn to be tolerant to the voices of dissent within Islam. It is people like you with insecure minds that are preventing Muslims from living in peace and as long as illiterates like you judge Muslims, there can be no good Muslim in this world because the real blasphemers are you and your compartiots who profane the religion by judging who is and who is not a Muslim.

Blasphemy laws are man made laws and they will be changed and they can and will be repealed, because they are imperfect, unjust and open to misuse and abuse by people like you and those who support views like yours.

Only a person, steeped in their own self-righteous sense of arrogance, ignorance and disdain will ask others to campaign for their proper implementation, but then encourage others to kill the very people who want to implement them in a proper way and prevent these laws from being abused.

The real blasphemers are people like you who use the blasphemy laws not to protect the honor and dignity of Prophet Muhummad (PBUH), but to protect your own political Machiavellianism justified in the name of Islam.

A Reply

The course of the battle, so to speak, will only work if there is a real realization in Pakistani middle classes that there is a need for change and that before it is too late, a course correction is sorely needed.

In a way, your comments are more instructive than the debate, because they do offer a tangible positive prove of how change can be implmented in Pakistan. The idea of change itself is only a small part of the problem in Pakistan. The bigger problem is that there is no clear idea as to how this change will be achieved? The more, ingrained, and more entrenched problem in Pakistan is not the lack of leadership, but the complete ignorance as to what is the idea of a leadership; a process of what is a leadership and by which a leadership is understood and what is the purpose of a leadership?

Leadership, and to be a leader, does not mean to simply lead the people. The role of a leader within the idea of a leadership is more complex than just being at the head of a movement or sitting on top of a pryamid of a hierarchy. The real challenge of the leadeship is not to lead the people, the organization or any such entity, which a person commands in any particular direction, but to personally believe in the course of action itself and to make others believe in it too, to the the point that they start to identify with those aims as their own and start to believe in those ideas as their very own.

Pakistan has no geninue leadership in general let alone in times of crisis and Pakistan will never have a leadership worthy of the moment. The leadership of Pakistan does not believe in Pakistan and it still thinks that Pakistan will not last as a country; it does not believe in the idea of Pakistan. It is this reason and the lack of faith in the durability of Pakistan, which prompts the people in power to financially milk Pakistan and horde their investments outside of Pakistan. If the leadership of Pakistan, of all shades and hues, really believed in the longevity of Pakistan as a nation, they would not be having foreign bank accounts or be in the procession of dual nationalities.

The idea of Pakistan, to a Pakistani leadership, can be judged in the opportunity that it presents and that opportunity is to secure their future and the future of their children while they have the means; the right to power and influence within Pakistan.

It is for this reason that you have corruption, embezzlement, nepotism, disregard for laws, an economic Hobbesian state of nature, and a general prevailing sense of despondency and dispair about the future. It is this reason; the state of Pakistani mind, which dreads the future because it does not believe in the idea of future as one promising hope, that it reverts to the past and rejoices in the safe comfort of the past. The people, who govern and rule Pakistan do not believe in the future of Pakistan and that is why, they see their turns in power as to make the most while the situation is favorable to them and save for a rainy day, when all this “make hay while the sun shines” times will end.

Therefore, the question of a leader or even a leadership navigating Pakistan out of trouble does not even arise, because there is no credible subsitute to the lack of leadership in Pakistan. There is no significant difference between Nawaz Sharif or Asif Ali Zardari or Altaf Hussein or a secular or a religious or a military or an economic leadership in Pakistan as they do not believe in Pakistan and only see Pakistan as a golden chance to a better life for themselves and their progeny.

Hence, and to the point of the your post, who will lead this charge against the enemy and who will stand out from the crowd? A leader, in order to lead the people towards a cause that promises change, has to personally believe in the cause itself.

The idea of opposition for the sake of opposition is not really an opposition as much as it is an admission of not having any viable alternatives to offer as a subsitute to what is being opposed. The above statement, once understood in the context of the Pakistani political system, becomes an insightful explanation to the logic behind the mantra of “a friendly opposition” which is the political expression in vogue in Pakistan and therefore, there is no difference between a government in power and an opposition in Pakistan, because they have no political differences and only see politics as a game to be played; waiting for their turn to make the most while they have a chance and it is because of this reason, that Pakistani politics has been characterized more by policies of an ad-hoc nature (short term) than by any policies of long term planning.

It is this reason, which encouages secular parties to make alliances with the religious parties and for the religious parties to have no qualms of being part of secular politics, because what brings these two different strands of ideology together is the common interest based on the idea of opportunism.

There is no need to debate the issue that Pakistan needs to change and that religion has rotted body politic of Pakistan, but there is a very urgent need to debate the question as to from where will a leadership come to tackle these problems, which believes in the idea of Pakistan itself?

The failure to answer this question or to provide an answer to this quandry will open the situation to a more complex, consequential and a more dangerous element of uncertainity. Most Pakistanis do not even comprehend the seriousness of this situation; of a lack of credible leadership in Pakistan and what it foretells for the future of Pakistan.

It is for this reason, that there will no meaningful change in Pakistan after the murder of Salman Taseer because whereas the moderate elements of the Pakistani society may desire change, they have no clue as to how to articulate the process of that change and like chickens, with their heads cut off, they run in circles wishing for a change and why they will always welcome the man on the horseback that comes promising change.

There will be a new dawn for Pakistan, but for now we must suffer the long night of darkness and it will be only through a most vile, inhumane act of cruelty that we will come to end of our national schadenfreude. Pakistan is presently fighting a religious civil war and it will suffer and it will continue to suffer till the common person in Pakistan makes a wilful decision to change his/her mind and realizes the cause of their common suffering and makes amends to the ideas of the past, which have reaped such a bounty of misery.

The end will come not from alienation of an idea about religion and politics, but from a sense of alienaton based the idea of the role of an individual within a religion. Change, from the old paradigms to a newer one, cannot happen even if there is a leadership to make that change possible, because change can only happen if the old system is weak and is incapable to resist the changes being forced upon it and until the ways of the old in Pakistan and the thinking associated with them are not weakened, change will be remain a chimera in Pakistan.

In end, this question is for the Pakistanis to decide as to what they really want and what are they prepared to sacrifice for the sake of change.

Look at the comments on PTH itself by the so-called liberal, moderate, well educated Pakistanis saying “Pakistan ka Khuda hi Hafiz”! I hope you see the irony! One has to believe in the idea of change and for people in Pakistan to give up on the idea of Pakistan, what is there left to change when you do not believe in Pakistan itself?!?!?

There are a couple of lines from the Broadway play, Les Miserables, which I think are very apt to the times in Pakistan and to the Pakistanis as a question?

Is there a new world you long to see? Will you stand up on the barricades with me and fight for that world; for your right to live in that world?

As said before; every Pakistani has to make a personal choice on which side of the barricades they wish to stand and what do they wish to fight for; a new world and the dawn of a new brighter day or a night of an endless darkness?

They say that when a person comes to the edge of an abyss and looks down, the abyss looks back at him/her and that is when they find their character. Pakistan is at the edge of that proverbial abyss and it is time to find our character and step into the arena and make that which we wish possible.

Happy New Year

In hopes that the year 2011 is much better, peaceful, prosperous, safe and secure than 2010 for all of us.

As usual, my New Year's Resolution, which has remained constant since the last twenty odd years and which I am pleased to stay that I have managed to keep, is not have any New Year's Resolutions!