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The state that wouldn’t fail
By Cyril
Almeida
How many
more challenges can we afford to put off till the last possible
second? - AFP/File photo.
PAKISTAN is
the country that just won’t fail. It threatens to, seemingly always
on the brink, always giving the world a collective migraine, always
on the verge of chaos, but just when you think we’re done for, when
all hope is lost, when it seems nothing can save it from itself,
somehow we end up doing just enough of the right thing to keep the
country afloat, to live another day to drift into another crisis.
And so it is this time with the operation in Malakand division. The
government wants you to believe that it had a plan all along, that
the Nizam-i-Adl was a way of stripping away the last vestiges of
justification for the militancy in Swat, that the negotiations with
the TNSM were a necessary charade to expose the motives of Maulana
Fazlullah and his band of savages.
Would that the illusion of a government with a plan in hand were the
truth. The fact is, the government, and us, the people, by
extension, got lucky. If the ANP government in NWFP and the PPP
government in Islamabad had their way, Sufi Mohammad would still
quietly be rearranging society in Malakand to his liking, with the
TTP the stick with which Sufi would enforce his law in his
bailiwick. And thus, with one problem confined to one area, the
governments in Peshawar and Islamabad could
go about their business of pretending to govern the other areas
under their control.
But two things happened to spoil the plan, and while both were
always likely to have occurred, it would be charitable in the
extreme to argue that the provincial and federal governments
anticipated them and had factored them into their plans for Malakand.
First, the militants in Swat, freed from fighting in the district,
set forth and began to spread their seed in neighbouring districts.
We can know the government didn’t expect this because it installed a
pro-Taliban commissioner in Malakand and didn’t do anything to try
and stop the militants from slipping into Buner, Lower
Dir and Shangla and
setting up shop for business.
Fact is, if the government’s plan always was to eventually fight the
militants it would have acted to limit the theatre in which the
militants were to be fought. But now, even weeks after trying to
retake even a small mountain village like Pir Baba in Buner, the
army is struggling. What could have been nipped in the bud by local
police and administrative action, has become a full-fledged military
operation.
Second, Sufi Mohammad reverted to his kooky ideas publicly. Neither
the ANP nor the PPP expected it — in fact they planned for something
quite the contrary. The massive gathering on that scenic grassy
field in Mingora was arranged by the government to give Sufi a grand
stage from which to denounce Fazlullah and declare a fatwa against
his intransigent militants. But when Sufi got up on the stage, he
became giddy at the sight of all those thousands gathered to listen
to him and thought, ‘Heck with it, this is my moment. I’ll speak
from the heart.’
And so he did, declaring everybody and everything in Pakistan un-Islamic.
The cameras focused on the wild applause of the audience, but if
they had looked elsewhere they would have captured the stricken
faces of government officials. Things had most definitely not gone
according to plan.
So, once the original plan — if it can even be called a plan — had
failed, the government had to come up with something else; and by
then the only option left was the military option. Criticism of the
government at this stage may seem churlish, given that so rarely
does a Pakistani government do the right thing even after all the
wrong options have been exhausted.
But the story of how this government arrived at the military option
in Malakand is important because it is not the final stop in the
fight against militancy — there is a long road ahead, and it weaves
through Fata and Punjab and Pakistan’s
cities. The point is, if the road ahead is navigated with a similar
mix of lucky breaks and nonsense planning, a fortuitous result is
far more unlikely than likely.
Steering blindfolded may yet get the government around another bend
or two and burnish the legend of Pakistan being
the state that just won’t fail, but it won’t affect the inexorable
logic of failure in the long run — you can only get away with
mismanagement of a country for so long in the face of a violent
threat. If not tomorrow or next year, then five, 10, 15 years down
the road, at some point our luck will run out. That isn’t abject
cynicism, it is a logical certainty.
But for all the sins of omission and commission, the failures of the
government of today — or even the one of tomorrow — are only part of
the problem. At the root of the problem of militancy is the security
establishment — essentially the Pakistan Army
high command with sections of the intelligence apparatus and retired
officers as its instruments of policy implementation.
It is that group which sets the parameters of what the state can or
cannot do against the militants, and it still cleaves to the
distinction between good and bad militants. There is no reason to
believe that it is not serious about eliminating the militants in
Malakand this time. The militants there have proved intractable and
of no utility to the state — in fact, they are a threat to it and
therefore are being taken on.
But there is every reason to believe that the security establishment
is serious about maintaining that distinction elsewhere. And that is
especially problematic when it comes to dealing with Ground Zero of
militancy — the Waziristan agencies.
Separating good from bad is tactically possible when the good and
bad militants are spatially separated, in small numbers and not in
control of territory. So in Punjab and
the cities the state can go after Al Qaeda militants — the bad ones
— while turning a blind eye to the good ones, our home-grown jihadi
networks.
But in the Waziristan agencies
the good and the bad are intertwined, exist in larger numbers and
control the territory. Trying to whack the bad militants there while
avoiding trampling the good ones is a non-starter. To succeed there
— and there is no doubt that militancy in Pakistan cannot
be defeated without success there — the good/bad distinction would
need to be abandoned first.
And if we don’t drop that distinction soon, the legend of the state
that just wouldn’t fail may eventually prove untrue.
Dawn:Friday ,May 22,2009
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