When art doesn’t mimic life
CONTEMPORARY Western television action-political-drama scripts represent an interesting cocktail of outright fiction, biases and even a bit of reality, but if the thriller happens to be themed around Pakistan then expect these ingredients to produce an outrageously explosive mix.
I recently watched Season 4 of the US TV thriller series Homeland, where several episodes are woven around the supposed US embassy in Islamabad and its CIA station. Predictably, terrorism and its alleged nexus with the Pakistan security services received a lot of attention.
It reflected every bias that one sees in the foreign media about the country and its security establishment. If the attire, the spoken language and, most of all, the locale (and architecture) were indicators one could say the plot was as far from reality as it could have been.
One of the final episodes of the season shows the US embassy attacked by the Haqqani-led Taliban fighters, using a secret tunnel whose location was betrayed by a (blackmailed) traitor who happens to be the ambassador’s husband.
This results in the death of many diplomats and CIA personnel, and ends with Washington evacuating its staff from Pakistan and breaking off diplomatic relations with Islamabad. But not before the show also makes the damning revelation of a link between the Haqqanis and the CIA as elements in the agency wish to hedge their bets about the possible future rulers of Afghanistan.
Many episodes of ‘Homeland’ reflect every bias that one sees in the foreign media about Pakistan and its security establishment.
One of the major characters of the fictional plot of the Pakistan episodes was the young, beautiful and headstrong chief of the ‘Section S’ of the ISI, a woman called Tasneem Qureshi, who works in close coordination with the Haqqani network head and often directs his operations to give ‘the US a taste of its own medicine’.
This ‘Section S’ head feeds the ‘misinformation’ to the CIA Islamabad station chief that leads to a drone strike targeting a wedding and dozens of innocent deaths. She later orchestrates the ‘outing’ and lynching of the same CIA official in the Pakistani capital. This seemed to be an apology for drone strikes gone sour.
That the ISI is not known to have any women in such senior positions was of no concern to the writers. The reality is that there have been barely two or three instances of women being used for ‘sting’ operations as lower-level, ‘freelance’ field operatives.
Here Tasneem Qureshi is involved in a high-flying spy vs spy struggle with the Islamabad CIA station chief Carrie Mathison, another woman and one of the protagonists of Homeland, who in her last posting as station chief Kabul earns the sobriquet ‘drone queen’ for being responsible for ordering drone strikes to tick off names on the agency’s kill list.
From the word go, it is obvious that Tasneem Qureshi is playing a duplicitous game and has the support of the top brass, because at one point the intense, handsome and proud head of the CT or ‘counterterrorism section’ Col Khan concedes to Carrie that he had been kept out of the loop in the planning of a major operation.
This operation was a prisoner swap where key Haqqani commanders in US custody are exchanged by the Americans for the release of a former director of CIA, who falls victim to a kidnap plot hatched by the intriguingly lethal Tasneem and is handed over to the Haqqani-led Taliban.
After this swap, as the American convoy with their freed man is returning to the embassy, it is ambushed. The Pakistanis delay responding to the US SOS as Tasneem forbids Khan from ordering his troops to the scene. American officials are forced to send all Marines assigned to protect the mission to the rescue. The embassy is left unprotected and is attacked via the secret tunnel.
The end of the Pakistan episodes appears to deliver the message that ISI is a top intelligence agency as even the CIA is helpless before it. However, that it was insinuated that the supposed ‘Section S’ has precedence over all others including ‘CT’ was ludicrous.
Of course the script writers, who seem keen to weave their thriller’s plot to make as close a representation of the reality as creatively possible, failed here. A country facing the sort of terrorism Pakistan does would be suicidal in reality not to give total freedom of action to the head of its premier agency’s CT section.
Towards the end of this season Tasneem is also shown appearing on TV as a ‘Foreign Office’ spokesperson to defend Pakistan’s position in the face of international criticism and condemnation for the attack on the embassy in which some 35 US personnel were killed. This was strange, as it suggested an overlap of roles between the intelligence agency and the FO.
The intrigue, action and suspense needed for a fast-paced thriller to succeed were there but the script, which is pegged to the current state of play with Taliban and the militant Islamic State group and seems to have pretensions of mirroring reality, left one feeling a bit short-changed.
As I reflect on the series a few days after having watched the end of that particular season, I must concede that I got sucked into it quite completely; it would be foolhardy to draw too many conclusions from a purely fictional production aimed at the entertainment market.
But then even if fiction writers are not able to see Pakistan’s point of view and mimic what Western officials and media often say, isn’t our failure to present and project our standpoint and policies rather complete?
These very writers didn’t seem to have any issues depicting more or less the reality of all other sides in the show whether they are Russian, German or American. Even the Taliban and IS, and their cunning and effective brutality, are captured rather well.
One of my friends, who also watched the series, asked me what if the fiction here mimicked reality. I told him I didn’t think so; couldn’t even consider the possibility. And thank God for that.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2017