The writer is a member of staff.
The writer is a member of staff.

SIXTY-NINE today. Happy birthday to you, me and everyone else who lives here — and to everyone who wishes this land well.

Now, turn away if you’re not up for some unpleasantness.

It’s been a nasty week. The bombing, the aftermath, the wild accusations, the ugly recriminations — our collective nightmare has been the terrorists’ dream.

None of it is easy to make sense of.

Not the target — as if a bunch of lawyers from Quetta were about to shake things up there or anywhere — nor the reactions.

The boys had an insta-narrative: the Afghans and the Indians have teamed up under Americans to disrupt our convergence with China and derail CPEC.


To push back against the broader political purpose of the boys’ narrative, the arch-democrats end up denying even the bits that are plausible.


The arch-democrats had their own: it’s all because of the good Taliban/bad Taliban policy living on; if that distinction had been buried, Quetta wouldn’t be burying so many of its dead.

Neither really made sense.

Good Taliban/bad Taliban doesn’t have much to do with the Quetta carnage. The only ones who’ve come forward so far to claim Quetta are a known TTP splinter and the IS shadow.

Which one of those are the good Taliban, protected by the boys?

In their eagerness to score a broader political point, the arch-democrats missed a narrower attack: why, it should have been asked, are the boys so poor at even fighting the bad Taliban?

TTP splinters, IS — these are the enemies the boys have vowed to crush, against whom the boys have carte blanche. But the avowed enemy seems to have only scattered and morphed.

The failure is therefore prior to, and bigger than, the problem of supporting the good Taliban — we don’t even know how to sort out the bad Taliban not supported by the good Taliban.

The arch-democrats stumbled elsewhere too.

Back to the boys’ claim that the Indians and the Afghans have teamed up under American guidance to disrupt our convergence with China and derail CPEC.

It’s a clever story because it does what the boys do best: combine elements of the truth with a whole lot of duplicity. Kernels of truth wrapped in layers of doublespeak.

But this is what the arch-democrats get wrong: to push back against the broader political purpose of the boys’ narrative, they end up denying even the bits that are plausible.

The instant rejection of any Indian complicity in violence inside Pakistan is as political as the opposite inclination to always blame India for everything.

Several things in recent years have not made sense when it comes to India.

Why, for example, did the Indians keep their links with MQM until recently? No one seriously doubts the accusations anymore. But what were the Indians hoping to achieve?

Back in the day, back in the ’90s, when the MQM went scurrying over to the Indians, it made sense for the Indians to embrace them — why look a gift horse in the mouth?

What though of the recent past? What plausible need do the Indians have of the MQM in Karachi? Unless — destabilisation?

Some of the spells of violence have been curious too.

The stuff happening in KP, and especially Peshawar, right after Imran’s PTI assumed power in 2013 was strange.

Imran was the TTP’s best friend. He was the one political force that could buy them time and space.

From any perspective, it made sense to give him time to find his feet and establish himself as a righteous champion against military operations and for dialogue.

Instead, the PTI’s fledgling government was battered by a wave of attacks that were so wanton and grotesque that Imran became his caricature, Taliban Khan.

Even now, it’s hard to see what advantage the TTP got from that wave or why they’d deliberately destroy their greatest ally.

Unless it was also someone else? Unless — destabilisation?

But then we have the boys and their stories. And what stories they are.

You can see the advantage they get from the story of an India-Afghan-US nexus against CPEC-China and us: the bigger the enemy, the fewer the questions about why true success has been so elusive.

Yet, if they want to play that game, it’s not very difficult to ask the big, hard questions of them in turn.

We were on the winning side of the Cold War, India on the losing side. Yet, somehow India has emerged the winner and us the losers.

How in God’s name do you go from being on the winning side of the biggest contest of the 20th century to being on the losing side before the 21st gets fully under way?

It would, it seems, take a special kind of incompetence.

Or take the more recent past. Before the rise of this purported Afghan-India-US nexus, we had a decade of the Americans being quasi-dependent on us to fight their war in Afghanistan.

How the hell did we not only screw up trying to keep the US onside, but apparently, in the boys’ own telling, push our greatest enemy, the world’s only superpower and our messy neighbour to the west closer together?

What special kind of insanity is that?

Or, instead of positioning ourselves as interlocutors in an emerging superpower competition between the US and China, how the devil have we apparently turned our own backyard into a battleground of an alleged proxy war between the two?

Which part of that is not wanton suicidalism?

We’re not the easiest place to make sense of at the best of times; at the worst, you have to question our collective sanity. Here’s to a different next sixty-nine.

Happy birthday, Pakistan.

The writer is a member of staff.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Twitter: @cyalm

Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2016

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