14
THE month-long snooze, we can hope, is almost upon us again, so let’s catch our breaths and have a look at the lie of the land instead.
Political stability — we’re back into normal-ish mode. Panama isn’t dead, but the frenzy has subsided.
You can’t kill off your opponent politically while he’s laid up in hospital — the average Pakistani won’t stand for it, hence the cries of surgery fraud by Nawaz’s political enemies.
From here, there’s one of three ways Panama can be re-energised: something new pops up, the boys decide to pull the plug or the Nawaz team screws up the ToR negotiations.
Panama was a bolt from the blue, so you can’t rule out something new. You know there are more skeletons and closets.
But don’t bet on them tumbling out. Nawaz seems to have learned the Zardari way —— don’t get caught with your hand in the cookie jar; make sure it’s someone else’s.
There’s a reason the London apartments are still, two decades on, the main public symbol of Nawaz’s misdeeds.
The boys pulling the plug — there is a disdain among them for Nawaz that is different to the one felt for Zardari, but the same in its intensity. It is strange.
If it were just the older lot, it would make a kind of sense. The older lot saw Nawaz 1.0 and that forever shaped how they feel about him.
But the younger lot having the same disdain is curious — there is little of the scandal and none of the conflict this time round to feed the anger. But it’s there all right.
Still, through this Panama business, there hasn’t been a systematic, determined and sustained attempt by the boys to turn the screws.
Sure, there’s no sympathy for Nawaz — see above — and if he drowns himself, you know they’ll let him.
But if Panama is to be re-energised, it doesn’t look like it’ll come through the boys.
There’s a reason the London apartments are still, two decades on, the main public symbol of Nawaz’s misdeeds.
The ToR negotiations — this one’s tricky because there’re so many moving parts involved. And egos and personalities.
But the N-League does have a strategy: insist that Nawaz is willing to face whatever scrutiny wanted by whomever; simultaneously argue it’s only fair others face the same scrutiny; and indicate that the party is willing to go into campaign mode.
That openness-cum-aggressiveness makes it hard to keep the focus on Nawaz alone and as soon as the net gets widened, the game is up. No frenzy — no ouster. No focus — no ouster. Onwards it would be to 2018.
Internal security: the chief has given us the only clue that matters — Zarb-i-Azb is winding down. The details can be argued over — what about Punjab? And the anti-India lot! Will the anti-Pak lot regroup? — but there are two new realities.
First, fewer things are going to go boom. That matters because things going boom and TV screens flashing with carnage and gore is the one thing that injects true systemic instability.
Because it gnaws at the position and the image of the boys — of themselves and the one everyone else has of them. Too much pressure can make for choices — and mistakes — by the boys that everyone else has to pay for.
Second, even if something big does go boom now, the threat of the civilians taking advantage is gone. You can’t claw back civ-mil space when you’re on the ropes in the political arena.
Raheel or no Raheel, the boys unambiguously control the security narrative once again and where they can’t control what the militants do, they’ll control the state response.
Either way, they boys will eventually get their way in Punjab.
External stuff — we’re back where we started and where the boys have always wanted us to be: India is at the centre of all of that we see and do. Things are normal again.
How the hell is this normal, you may be thinking: we’re sniping with Iran; the Afghans are mad at us; the Americans are bullying us; the Indians are trying to isolate us; and only China, dear, dear China, is standing by us.
But go through each of that. The US is in election mania — it’s not going to do something crazy with us. Not now.
The Afghan government isn’t hoping for talks anytime soon and the US has indicated it won’t let the Taliban overrun the Afghan state this year — that adds up to time.
India? India is hardly going to declare war on us and it can try all it likes to diplomatically isolate us or militarily intimidate us — it’s not like it’s going to work. See above.
And China, slow pace of CPEC or not, isn’t going anywhere because we’re the best thing it’s got in this neighbourhood.
Sure, opportunities galore may be passing us by — but that’s not the point.
With India at the centre of all that we say and do, the point is about fending off threats, not seizing nation-altering opportunities.
And if you take all of that together — political stability, internal stability, external stability — we get the problem that is Pakistan:
Instability brings with it the possibility of change, while stability reasserts old patterns; but, in our stability-instability cycles, we get from instability to stability too quickly for change — of the good kind — to manifest itself.
Then again, this is Pakistan — the next spell of instability, and with it the possibility of change, can’t be too far off.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @cyalm
Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2016
