A DECLARATION of emergency would have been an unwelcome 60th birthday gift for Pakistan, but perhaps not entirely an inappropriate one, given a post-independence trajectory littered with all manner of exigencies. And it would be unwise to complacently assume that this particular danger has passed.

A belated present is by no means out of the question, particularly if the unusually independent Supreme Court seeks to interfere with the chosen means of perpetuating the existing form of misrule. Apart from providing an excuse for pageantry, national anniversaries are commonly considered appropriate occasions for celebrating the past and looking forward to the future.

Unfortunately, in Pakistan’s case, gazing in either direction can prove to be a painful experience. The historical landscape consists of far too many years of malignant military rule and largely unfruitful civilian interludes. The hybrid at currently on display purports to represent the best of both worlds. That fatuous claim did not, eight years ago, attract the widespread disdain it deserved, not least because the second Nawaz Sharif administration had proved to be even more appalling than the first.

The threatened emergency and hints of more unambiguous military rule are symptomatic of the swelling confusion that has characterised the present year. Partly as a result, the nature of the morrow is shrouded in uncertainty.

The risk of being overrun by the purveyors of an obscurantist ideology may be greatly exaggerated, yet it would only be fair to acknowledge that it has never been greater. The attraction of a return to ostensible civilian supremacy, dim as the prospect may be in the short run, is curtailed by the knowledge that the field of contenders for power hasn’t perceptibly broadened. Benazir Bhutto, as ever, is willing to dance with the devil for a share in power.

Long- or medium-term predictions are generally inadvisable: a wide range of imponderables invariably render them embarrassingly inaccurate. The following, therefore, is articulated as a fear rather than a prophecy: that if the present dispensation is overtaken in the next few months, or years, by popularly mandated civilian rule, a decade or so down the line we’ll find another would-be Napoleon launching a coup in a futile quest for some moderate glory.

I hope I’m wrong, needless to say. But history does have a way of avenging itself on those who turn their backs on it. The tendency towards poorly-grounded optimism was eloquently articulated by Faiz Ahmed Faiz while the nation was still in its infancy. “Hum saada hi aisey thhay, ki yunhi pazeerayee/ Jis baar khizan aayee sumjhe ke bahar aayee.” To offer a prosaic translation: In our innocence, we mistook the advent of autumn for springtime.

Not very many years earlier, another poet discerned little innocence in the task entrusted to Sir Cyril Radcliffe. “Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission/ Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition/ Between two peoples fanatically at odds,/ With their different diets and incompatible gods.”

This isn’t by any means W.H. Auden at his best, but he sums up quite succinctly why Radcliffe’s cartographic endeavours were bound to be found wanting. “The weather was frightfully hot,” continues Auden, “And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,/ But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,/ A continent for better or worse divided.”

For better or worse. Radcliffe’s private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, was in no doubt that the task of splitting the subcontinent was poorly handled by his compatriots. In documents that have only recently come to light, Beaumont blames Lord Mountbatten — not exclusively but primarily — “for the massacres in the Punjab in which 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished”. In his opinion, “the handover of power was done too quickly” and the last viceroy not only rushed things along but also interfered in the delineation process, using his considerable clout to wangle territorial gains for India.

Much of this information isn’t exactly revelatory, but it’s nonetheless interesting to find it recounted by someone who was so closely involved in drawing the fateful lines. It’s worth recalling, after all, that the intensity of the killings increased manifold once the location of the border became clearer. In Punjab, Beaumont notes, “geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment”. And Kashmir, in his opinion, ought to have become a separate country.

Many of the arguments about Punjab could be revisited in the Bengal context. But could any mutually acceptable form of partition have been conceivable without tearing asunder these huge provinces?

More pertinently, would Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah have acted differently — been more accommodating of each other’s concerns — had they foreseen the extent of the bloodshed that would ensue? Furthermore, are there reasonable grounds for assuming that the fratricide would have been more sporadic and the mass migration less disorderly had Mountbatten stuck to his June 1948 deadline?

Writing in The Independent last week, Adrian Hamilton twisted a critique of Britain’s cut-and-run approach in 1947 into an argument against precipitately ending the occupation of Iraq — clearly a case of drawing banal conclusions from a much misunderstood historical tragedy.

A pre-emptive corrective of sorts was offered in Le Monde Diplomatique earlier this month by William Dalrymple, who cited interesting parallels between present-day Iraq and the situation in India not in 1947 but in 1857, including campaigns of vilification and dodgy dossiers aimed at undermining rulers resistant to what he describes as the Project for a New British Century.

“Not only,” concludes Dalrymple, “are westerners again playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by western garrisons, for their own political ends, but more alarmingly the intellectual attitudes sustained by such adventures remain intact. Despite over 25 years of assault by Edward Said and his followers, old-style Orientalism is still alive and kicking...”

Imperialist continuity is a fascinating angle of inquiry that has attracted insufficient attention. Which is not entirely surprising, given that a perusal of the past yields too many inconvenient truths. If the British had heeded the lessons of their post-First World War colonial misadventure in Mesopotamia, they would have thought twice about returning to that battleground under American auspices.

That particular benediction has intermittently been available to Pakistan since the days of Liaquat Ali Khan, but it acquires special overtones during periods of military rule, direct or otherwise.

Rarely can Uncle Sam resist a suitably obsequious man in uniform. Ayub Khan was hailed as the Asian de Gaulle; the thoroughly debauched Yahya Khan may have earned no comparable epithet, but he proved invaluable as a conduit to China and was rewarded with an infamous “tilt towards Pakistan” during the massacres in Bangladesh.

Ziaul Haq’s repressive nods to obscurantism counted for nothing when he was embraced by the Reagan administration in particular as an invaluable ally in the proxy war against the Soviet Union.

Pervez Musharraf falls in a similar category, even though the forces unleashed and encouraged during that war are now the dreaded foe – with no official acknowledgement, mind you, from either Washington or Islamabad that they are reaping the whirlwind. The puppetry tradition remains in vogue. The US has never deemed it necessary to invade Pakistan in order to install an obedient regime. That doesn’t necessarily hold true for the future.

Barack Obama’s ill-considered remarks on military incursions elicited an indignant response, but a similar pronouncement by George W. Bush was greeted with silence — perhaps in part because US forces routinely take aim at targets on Pakistani territory, secure in the knowledge that if they make a mess of it, Islamabad will help to cover up.

Implausible deniability of comparable dimensions can be found across a range of circumstances, past and present. A particularly see-through variety is at work in Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto’s coyness about their rendezvous in Abu Dhabi, for instance; either they reached some sort of an agreement that they are loath to disclose for the time being, or their reluctance to be forthright reflects embarrassment over the failure to strike a deal.

Yes, we’re wallowing in conjecture, a national pastime whose attraction hasn’t diminished over the decades. Elections (will they take place this year?), emergency (was it indeed staved off for the time being by Condoleezza Rice’s 2am call to the president last Thursday?), Musharraf’s attachment to his uniform and his equivocation over the US-sponsored jirga in Kabul all fall in that category. The government’s resort to back-up presidential candidates serves as a reminder that it, too, is not immune to the thrills of uncertainty.

There are, however, areas in which conjecture seems particularly asinine, such as Jinnah’s ideals. He died a disillusioned man long before the nation he founded plunged decisively into a dystopia nearly three decades later. Pakistan has had its ups and downs, and even the most incorrigible optimists would find it hard to deny that fate’s been unkind and the ups have been few.

It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that there is no hope of redemption, even though a nation “at peace within and at peace without” seems like a fantasy at the moment. No, we’re not yet on the road to a place where people take religion in their stride, where popular representation, rather than corruption, is institutionalised, where economic “growth” doesn’t enrich the few at the expense of the many.

It may turn out to be a long and troubled journey, but let’s not abandon all hope of ever embarking on it. Because the alternative is a void of despair, and we’ve already languished in it for far too long.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com