| December 08, 2006 | Friday | Ziqa'ad 16, 1427 |
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Disconnected subjects
NOT much festive about this particular season. Thanks to the wages of death distributed by the most stupid president ever elected to the American presidency, this is about as gloomy as it gets. What a mess he and his bunch of incompetents have got the United States and our region into.
The Iraq Study Group — doling out wisdom sure to be too little, too late — suggests it is time for America to pull out of Iraq. What it should really have called for is Bush’s impeachment, and the drawing and quartering of all the armchair bullies responsible for this mayhem.
The group calls upon Iraq to stand on its own feet, which is wonderful advice. You first break someone’s limbs, fracture his spine and whack his skull and then when he is down and out you snarl at him and say ‘get on your feet’. This essentially is what the US is now expecting of the Iraqi government.
The Study Group has no statutory role, meaning thereby that its recommendations are not binding on anyone, Congress or administration. But what it proposes reflects thinking now current and widespread in Washington. No one is calling it cut-and-run but stripped of camouflage that is what most Americans want: just get the hell out of Iraq.
The standard mantra now is that the emphasis should be on training the Iraqi army so that it can pick up from where the Americans leave. Precisely what was said when the Americans were abandoning South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army was beefed up but when the North launched its final offensive in 1975, it just disintegrated.
The Americans can inject as much steroid as they like into the ragtag Iraqi army and the al-Maliki government. But the writing is on the wall. When they abandon ship, as all the signs suggest they are going to do, it is foolish to expect that their puppets would hold on. The only option for the Americans now is retreat. The only question is under what cover-up or fig leaf.
And, since wonders will never cease, the group speaks unequivocally of the need to engage Syria and Iran. This is a measure of the straits to which America is reduced, the “rogue states” of yesterday now being expected to help pull America’s chestnuts out of the fire. No admission of defeat could be completer than this.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, Max Rodenbeck, the Economist’s Mideast correspondent, quotes Charles Pena, a Washington analyst, as saying: “‘Instead of recognising that the threat posed by Al Qaeda required changing how the administration thought about the problem, it changed the problem to fit its thinking.’”
Rodenbeck’s tries to explain this shift: “One might surmise, for instance, that the attraction of marketing a wartime president proved irresistible to Bush handlers such as Karl Rove. Sheer bureaucratic entropy, or the Pentagon’s desire to play with its costly toys, might have been among the other reasons. The influence of neo-conservatives, and of the pro-Israeli lobby, perceiving a chance to set a superpower on Israel’s enemies, was certainly another.”
In other words, obtuseness, political expediency and sheer arrogance led the Bush administration down the path of international gangsterism.
But let us not despair. Under its military tutors Pakistan remains in a class of its own. American plans may be going up in smoke elsewhere, but these tutors remain loyally committed to the US. True, they show occasional signs of independence but, by and large, they march to America’s tune because American support is crucial for their domestic survival.
While Afghanistan is no more ‘doable’ than Iraq — it will be some time before this realisation sinks into American minds — Pakistan will come under more pressure to pick up America’s burden in Afghanistan. When things go wrong, as they are bound to, Pakistan will be blamed. Collaborators always get a raw deal in the end. This is one of history’s unwritten laws. Why is this lesson lost on our military tutors?
Next door to us is Iran with whom we have long-standing historical and cultural ties. Can’t we learn any lessons from that quarter? Look at the president of Iran, a diminutive figure, hardly five feet and a few inches tall, dressed in clothes a hick like me would not wear. But what authority and dignity he exudes.
More than physical attributes, charisma is a function of personality. Because of what he stands for, rather than how he looks, Mahmood Ahmedinejad radiates charisma. He doesn’t speak loudly, he has no need to, but his words carry conviction and they resonate with the Iranian people. Iran has looked America in the eye and it is America which has had to turn its gaze away.
Contrast Ahmedinejad’s simplicity with the opulence of our rulers. An entire factory of tailors would seem to be working overtime to keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed (after their rise to power and glory, be it noted). Yet who looks the giant and who the pygmies?
The lands making up Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and Pakistan always have been, since the dawn of civilisation, one of the great crossroads of history. Our lack of soul and excess of timidity does no honour to this legacy.
We need to pass an urgent law to excise the poetry of Iqbal from our collective consciousness.
What business do we have with him and his endless invocations to keep self-respect (khudi) inviolate? The search for a new national poet, more in keeping with the paths pursued by our leaders — whom, as God is our witness, we have had no hand in choosing — must begin at once.
No primer on leadership applauds out-of-season eloquence. “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence,” said de Gaulle, a lesson lost on our present leadership which seems to have made a cult of verbosity.
The result is periodic diplomatic disaster. Hasty and ill-considered off-the-cuff remarks have belittled our stand on Kashmir. We are ready to move beyond the UN resolutions on Kashmir, said the Pakistani president not long ago. And if that wasn’t enough he has said afresh that Pakistan would be prepared to give up its claim on Kashmir provided India also modified its position.
India has chosen not to say a word about any of these frantic suggestions. All this frenzy is one-sided and the only thing it has achieved is to discourage Kashmiri aspirations for freedom or self-determination.
After a few lost wars and many strategic blunders, Kashmir may look like a lost cause but why negate the position we have held for the last fiftyeight years? We may not be able to do much for the people of Kashmir and indeed if they want a change in the status quo, the impulse and the effort for that should come from them. But at the same time, we have no right to betray them or say and do things damaging to their cause and playing to India’s advantage.
If a civilian leader had said a tenth of what Musharraf has said on Kashmir, there would have been dark mutterings in Pakistan’s cantonments while in Army Headquarters, now more a centre of politics than defence or war, plans would be in place for another takeover.
Even retired generals, whose courage comes into its own only when a civilian leader is in command, would have joined in the outcry. But over this tribe at the moment rules the calm and quiet of the graveyard.
There is bearded hypocrisy and there is uniformed hypocrisy and it is hard to decide which has had the more serious consequences.
Tailpiece: Senior colleague Khalid Hasan points out from Washington that my remarks about my friends, Abida Hussain and Fakhr Imam, last week were in poor taste. If so, and on reflection I think they were, I sincerely apologise. For genuine mistakes there can be excuses, for questionable taste none.
chakwal1@chk.wol.net.pk
