July 19, 2008

THE picture couldn’t be more dismal and disturbing, even to a casual observer of the national scene in Pakistan.

The writ of the government, especially in the prickly tribal belt of the NWFP, is more conspicuous by its absence at this critical juncture than it ever was. The militants are becoming a law-unto-themselves blowing up forts of the Frontier Constabulary (FC), gunning down the FC jawans by the dozen, taking scores of them prisoners, collecting huge cache of weapons as the booty for their intransigence and, to rub salt into the wounds of the state apparatchiks, setting up their own courts to enforce their archaic and nihilistic brand of Sharia.

Flexing their own muscles, vis-à-vis a paralytic state of Pakistan, the Taliban of Swat, digging their heels where Alexander the Great couldn’t, have brazenly announced the suspension of their dialogue with the government because, in their version of events, it has failed to honour the agreement of last May 21 with the provincial government.The economy of the country is stagnating, to put it very mildly, with a free-falling rupee-dollar parity, resource-starved industries padlocking themselves behind walls of fright erected by total loss of faith in the ability of the government to turn the economy around, a rapidly shrinking foreign currency reserve, and a whopping $20 billion balance of trade deficit.

The chickens are coming home to roost in foreign affairs, too. India has put an all-too-obtrusive damper on the process of normalisation with its traditional adversary and is, now, pointing the finger at its notorious intelligence apparatus for being the trigger for the suicide blast outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul last week. The national security adviser of India, raising the ante, is calling for the liquidation of ISI, in particular. In short, relations with India are, putting the best possible spin on it, on hold, if not sliding into haemorrhage.

Even an obsequious Hamid Karzai, with his own writ in tatters and serving masters in both Washington and Delhi, is mutating his squeak into a roar — virtually like a mouse-turned-lion — and warning Pakistan of dire consequences. The mouse seems to have been injected with a lot of iron by its keepers and is becoming menacing.

But, perhaps, the unkindest cut of all is the exacerbating jingoism and sabre-rattling of its chief ‘ally’ and mentor, Washington. The neocon minions of George W. Bush are getting desperate in their quest to give a trophy of war to their soon-to-depart mentor and see bright prospects of it in Pakistan’s tribal belt along Afghanistan. Since these warmongers know of no other policy option than shooting-from-the-hip, they are assembling a large force on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, just in case they could smell high-value booty on our side of the Durand Line. The latest news filtering out of the tribal thicket is that of this force moving ever closer to the Pak-Afghan boundary in a threatening posture.

The man in the street is alarmed that Uncle Sam, ever so trigger-happy on George W. Bush’s watch, is getting into stride to launch a major military offensive against its nemeses in Fata. The mealy-mouthed pundits and mandarins of our Foreign Office may denounce this popular angst as unwarranted but there are, increasingly, few takers of what these puffed up spokesmen regard as the fruit of their expertise. Washington has long been suspected by a layman in Pakistan as being the greatest threat to its integrity and the knee-jerk military build-up, under the Nato flag to serve as the fig-leaf, is proving the naysayer right.

With war clouds threatening to burst open in the country’s troubled north — and the ground virtually disappearing from under the feet of a moribund economy — one would have thought the establishment in Islamabad would become truly electrified. But the reality is just the opposite of it. It looks like the centre in Islamabad has got jammed into auto-pilot, with the plane in a nosedive.

The establishment, in an astonishing, ostrich-like, move has shifted itself, bag-and-baggage to a more salubrious Dubai, where there’s definitely far greater room for its free-wheeling-and-dealing than in a crisis-plagued Islamabad.

The rulers of Pakistan may have none of the vision of the Sultans of Delhi but have been trying their best to emulate their habit of taking the capital to wherever their fancy so dictated. Ayub Khan had moved the capital to Islamabad from Karachi because its hills provided him a more secure and safe ambience to lodge his ruling apparatus in.

The new kingmaker of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, feels more at home in Dubai with its worldly cosmopolitanism and where everything seems to just go. He may not have any blueprint for reviving the fortunes of Pakistan but may well lay a claim on reviving the kingly style of the Sultans of Delhi by summoning Islamabad’s establishment to Dubai at his whim, and they go running up to him like indentured slaves.

Escaping from a discomforting reality is not a trait exclusive to Zardari, in our pantheon of ‘leaders,’ past and present. But the lackadaisical performance of this set of putative leaders of Pakistan is, no doubt, setting a new standard of damn-the-people, damn-the-country.

In the process, that so-called mandate the people of Pakistan had given the PPP, last February 18, has fallen by the wayside or, to be closer to reality, somewhere in the deep blue waters of the Arabian Sea separating Pakistan from Dubai.

The February 18 mandate wasn’t so much a carte blanche to Mr Zardari to cash it in favour of putting the problems of Pakistan in a deep freeze and just count his blessings in the cool of his air-conditioned abode in Dubai, or wherever. That vote was a plea to get rid of the old order and the old guards standing on their watch to preserve and perpetuate it.

But Zardari’s antics have merely helped the status quo to gain longevity, for want of a better description. Pervez Musharraf, who epitomised the old order, is still there, comfortably cooling his heels in the Presidency while the country burns and his countrymen sweating without the ‘luxury’ of a cooling fan because they have been denied the privilege of electric ‘power.’ He is, in fact, in an enviable state of political comfort: he can’t be blamed for the melt-down of the country any longer because it’s not his hands on the wheel, though he could well be manipulating things from the comfort of his station, but isn’t being seen doing that.

The first order of business for Zardari and his team, having got the people’s mandate, should have been to act in concert with the likes of Nawaz Sharif to get rid of Musharraf and his ancien regime. But that option was never given the priority because he is in a symbiotic relationship with Musharraf. Both owe fealty to the same foreign ‘sponsor’ or master, one directly, and the other indirectly.

A natural corollary to Musharraf’s lease given an indefinite prolongation is that the other popular demand, i.e. the restoration of the judiciary has not been honoured at all. The demise of the old order and restoration of pre-November 3 judiciary were two faces of the same coin. So inaction on one has automatically stymied progress in regard to the other.

The restoration of judges dethroned by Musharraf is no longer making the headlines, even in the supposedly-independent news media because the PPP hierarchy has been quietly turning the screws on it. Mr Zardari’s frequent and mysterious sojourns in Dubai have a lot to do with the gagging of the non-governmental news machinery in a style closely resembling the Mafioso arm-twisting.

The torpor of the democratic government, in these circumstances, in Islamabad is well understood. Gilani cuts a pathetic figure as a rubber stamp prime minister totally subservient to his party co-chairman who is inclined to give him no latitude or leeway. Never before in the history of Pakistan, not even under Musharraf, has a PM been so handicapped as Gilani. The man is there simply to keep the seat warm. Who is he keeping the seat warm for, is a million dollar question at this stage.

Where do we go from here is an obvious question to ask but tough to answer. There’s virtually no light at the end of the tunnel to keep optimism in a quick turnaround alive.

The writ of the state in the tribal areas of the NWFP and Swat is unlikely to be enforced any time soon. Coupled with this dilemma is a real threat of erosion of sovereignty at the hands of a belligerent US getting out of control on its perceived threat from Al Qaeda’s regrouping and the Taliban’s resurgence. Obama’s foreign policy discourse from Washington on July 15 shows he is determined to make ‘finishing off Al Qaeda and the Taliban,’ with or without Pakistani help (emphasis added). What could have been dismissed as his campaign rhetoric is now a policy plank that shouldn’t be brushed aside with ease.

PPP’s mendacity on Musharraf and the judges is so jarring and obvious that no amount of spin or sophistry could justify it as mere posturing. But this time-tested and failed policy of trying to fool too many people at one time is not only eroding the centre and trust in its ability to halt the country’s slide into an abyss, but is also threatening to split the party right down the middle. The old guards of the party may, eventually, rally around the sidelined Makhdoom Amin Faheem to challenge Zardari’s monopoly of party leadership.

An economic melt-down looks increasingly real, especially with no obvious signs of any new availability of resources—such as an expanded taxation base, among others — or hefty doses of foreign assistance to shore up a really sick economy. There’s, likewise, little relief in sight on the oil prices front, unless Saudi Arabia and some other wealthy Gulf sheikhdoms took pity to Pakistan’s plight and favoured it with large supplies of oil on deferred payment basis.

Gloom is what pervades the Pakistani landscape from all around. No political pundit likes to be typecast as a Jeremiah by choice. But such is the mushrooming of problems and crises in, and for, Pakistan that any effort to seek a silver lining somewhere on the dark clouds hovering over our horizon threatens to end like looking for a needle in a hay stack.

The writer is a former ambassador.