The fall of the neutral umpire

While the security establishment had played footsie with domestic, regional and transnational jihadists for decades, it threw the decision to act against them in the PM’s lap

• Dr Mohammad Taqi
• September 04, 2014
• Daily Times, Pakistan 
•  http://bit.ly/1w7r3YS 

The so-called neutral umpire that the chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) Imran Khan had been looking up to for a decision was neither neutral nor an umpire and now has fallen flat on its face. None other than the veteran politician and the elected president of the PTI, Mr Javed Hashmi, took the wind out of Imran Khan and his umpire’s sails. Mr Hashmi vented his spleen not just about the dictatorial tendencies of Imran Khan but also ripped apart the PTI’s ‘clean politics’ facade. The maverick from Multan flayed to shreds the sordid collusion between certain leaders in the PTI, its fellow travellers and the establishment. What Mr Hashmi, popularly known as the baghi (rebel) for bucking both the civil and military demigods, said has been known since at least this past April. The original plan was to unfold right after Ramzan but was delayed due to the military operation in North Waziristan. However, hearing it from the horse’s mouth vindicates everyone who has suspected that Imran Khan was merely the establishment’s 12th man who had been fielded to do its dirty work.

The whispering campaign against the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) started when elected Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif refused to give the former military dictator General Pervez Musharraf a free pass in the treason trial. The PM, appointing Khawaja Muhammad Asif, a man that the security establishment has despised for his clear anti-dictatorship stance, did not go down well with the boots. Attitudes hardened when the PM made peace overtures at his Indian counterpart’s inauguration. The tipping point, however, was PM Sharif’s courtesy visit to the wounded television anchor-journalist Hamid Mir who had implicated an intelligence agency in the attack that he narrowly survived. The battle lines were thus drawn. It was more about the security establishment losing face due to General Musharraf’s trial and ceding domestic political space to the civilian PM in appointments such as that of the defence minister than just about foreign policy. A decision seemed to have been made then that PM Nawaz Sharif had to be reined in. The PML-N’s comfortable parliamentary majority and former President Asif Ali Zardari’s judicious decision to divest the president of his powers to dissolve the National Assembly, made undermining the PM ‘constitutionally’ impossible.

A smear campaign then started in earnest about how Mian sahib was an unforgiving, stubborn man who was overreaching way too early in his term. While the security establishment had played footsie with domestic, regional and transnational jihadists for decades, it threw the decision to act against them in the PM’s lap. Interestingly, the most vocal opponents of the military operation in Waziristan were the military-friendly Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Imran Khan, not PM Sharif. Piggybacked on this was the time tested establishment mantra to berate civilians for corruption and poor governance. The PML-N government has not delivered the stars and moon but its economic performance has not been any worse than past governments at a similar stage and is certainly better in its home province of Punjab. The chatter was gradually ratcheted up that the PM must be restrained or replaced. Rumours about the so-called minus-one formula through which the PM would be replaced by his brother or another PML-N stalwart were rife. In tandem with this rumour mongering, the private media group that the establishment perceived to be a thorn in its side was relentlessly targeted and neutered. The pro-establishment media was thus enabled to peddle a vicious anti-democracy narrative virtually unchecked.

None of these gimmicks and speculations alone could topple PM Sharif however. Pawns were needed to actually create enough political turbulence where the powers that be could step in on the pretext of steadying the helm. Sitting and former servicemen, as Mr Javed Hashmi has now revealed, reportedly psyched Imran Khan up that he had until October this year to upstage PM Nawaz Sharif unless he wanted to wait another 10 years. The Barelvi firebrand of the Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT), Allama Dr Tahirul Qadri, and certain other Barelvi and Shia outfits were enlisted through the ruse that the establishment had had a change of heart and it no longer backed the Takfiri jihadists. The idea was to amass a good 100,000 protestors in Islamabad to squeeze a resignation out of PM Nawaz Sharif. The neutrality of at least sections of the military appeared moot when the communiqués from the Inter-Services Public Relations’ (ISPR’s) August 19 tweet calling for “patience, wisdom and sagacity from all stakeholders to resolve prevailing impasse through meaningful dialogue” effectively acknowledged even Dr Qadri as an equal party. Under the thin veneer of neutrality was lurking a desire to reprimand the government.

PM Nawaz Sharif almost fell into the trap when he sought the establishment’s help to intercede with the protestors, who by that time were at parliament’s gates. However, as luck would have it, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif called Imran Khan and Dr Qadri to meet him under the full glare of the television cameras. The optics of those meetings backfired and even those sceptical of the whole dharna (sit-in) being an orchestrated manoeuvre shook their heads in disgust over the blatant interference. Mr Javed Hashmi’s press conference was the coup de grâce for the dharna and effectively shut the door on an imminent overt or subtle military intervention. Mian Nawaz Sharif seemed to have regained his nerve by then and quickly mustered parliamentary support across party lines. The unprecedented marathon joint session of the Pakistani parliament underway now is effectively the civilian leadership’s way of telling the boots that the parliamentarians would have to be dragged out of that august house if the establishment were still inclined to intervene. The opposition leader Syed Khurshid Shah’s speech, a fine piece of oratory and political defiance, appears to have gone a long way to buttress Mian Nawaz Sharif’s resolve to say no to the calls or diktat for his resignation. Mian sahib has done a wonderful job of rallying parliament but he must now take the people who have elected it on board too.

As we go to press, the rioters, their numbers dwindling though, are still outside parliament and the Imran Khan-Qadri duo — now together as predicted by most — is still calling for the government to go. However, the mood inside parliament is buoyant and its resolve steely. Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations that are still underway with the PTI and PAT, the so-called neutral umpire they were seeking help from has fallen from grace before it could lift its finger. The first privatized coup d'état is fizzling out now. All hail parliament!

 The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki

Church attack: when state offers the other cheek

Church attack: when state offers the other cheek

By Dr. Mohammad Taqi

Daily Times

September 25, 2013

Terror unleashed on yet another bloody Sunday in Pakistan and yet another round of apologetics for the mass murderers ensued. My city, Peshawar, has grown used to the death inflicted on it consistently by the religious zealots. But even by Peshawar standards the havoc unleashed this September 22^ndis particularly brutal as it targeted one of the smallest, weakest and most peaceful communities of the city. Over eighty Christian worshipers were slaughtered in a double suicide bombing when they had gathered for the Sunday mass at the All Saints Memorial Church, Kohati Gate. We have come a long way from when the All Saints first opened its doors in 1883, to when the local elders and tribal Pashtun chiefs attended the service there with one of its pioneer missionaries Thomas Patrick Hughes, to this carnage.

Reverend Hughes had written in his 1885 monograph, “This Memorial Church now stands in an Oriental dress. It is an attempt to adapt Saracenic (Islamic) architecture to the purposes of Christian worship, the whole building having been constructed by a native architect under the superintendence of the Missionaries”. All Saints Church or the “Girja”, as they have always called it, has been a landmark for generations of Peshawaris. It stood as a serene structure through most turbulent of times next door to the Edwardes Church Mission High School – the province’s oldest school – built in 1855 by another early priest, Robert Clarke with help from the Commissioner of Peshawar, Sir Herbert Edwardes. I must have strolled pass by it hundreds of times without once fearing that those buildings or the hustle and bustle around mid-day Sundays endangered my faith or political beliefs. But those who soaked the peaceful white building in the innocent blood of the martyred worshipers must have thought otherwise. Perhaps we would never be able to look at the snowy façade of the All Saints Church – and the white strip in the Pakistani flag representing minorities - the same way again.

But the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) – the ruling party in the Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa province- wants the public to quickly ignore the blood splatters and the dozens of Christian caskets and hop back on to the peace talk bandwagon. The PTI leader Mr. Imran Khan, its spokesmen and cadres are out full force with their callous confabulations about some mysterious forces trying to sabotage the peace with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). By Mr. Khan’s immediate response after the Peshawar carnage it would seem that the outgoing Awami National Party (ANP) and not the TTP is to blame for the massacre. Thankfully, Mr. Khan stopped short of directly blaming the Christians for bringing it upon themselves as he had done with Benazir Bhutto after the Karsaz bombing. Mr. Khan keeps invoking ANP’s actions to justify his inaction. He forgets that nothing exposes a government and its leader more than their dithering. In their protests the battered and grieving Christian community showed more political maturity than everyone else. The mourners could see through Mr. Khan bending over backwards to justify every atrocity the jihadists have perpetrated including this tragedy. By agitating against Mr. Imran Khan specifically, the tiny Christian community has underscored the most important fact that it is not merely the TTP that is an existential threat to society but also those leaders that afford the jihadists an ideological space to thrive in.

Mr. Imran Khan claims that others like the ANP are doing politics in a time of grief. That coming from a man who has literally made his political career out of cheerleading for the jihadists at every turn is quite disingenuous. From the so-called drone march to anti-NATO sit-in to his malignant and foul-mouthed bashing of the anti-Taliban intelligentsia and politicians, Mr. Khan is the personification of playing politics over the corpses. Even that might be overlooked if the man had a plan to act on what he has been professing for years. But unfortunately, Mr. Khan neither has a strategy nor the intention it seems to develop one on the go. As the one championing talks, Mr. Khan could have done some spadework and opened channels to the TTP affiliates that might be amenable to talks. But he clearly wants to gain political mileage out of the situation by blaming everything on the present federal government and the past dispensation(s).

The Prime Minister Mr. Nawaz Sharif has already conceded way too much in the All Parties Conference to both the PTI and the TTP. Mr. Sharif can rely on the only legitimate fighting force that any state has i.e. the army and paramilitaries to respond to the TTP as the latter, through continued violence, keeps bolstering its position vis-à-vis the state. The opinion within the army is broadly divided into three sections: a) a smaller old guard that considers TTP a menace and wishes to fight it but not the Afghan Taliban; b) an ascendant ISI mindset that wants the good Taliban preserved for the Afghan‘endgame’ and at the most contain the bad ones to the tribal ‘badlands’; and c) a delusional section that seriously thinks that the TTP suicide bombers are somehow US-Indo-Zionist proxies. The last bunch’s weightage counts towards the ISI coterie. Any action by the Pakistani state against the TTP will ultimately depend on whether the ‘traditionalists’ or the ‘adventurists’ prevail within the army. In the end analysis Pakistan army always acts in unison and the opinion divided no matter how widely, will not translate into an open rift.

Mr. Imran Khan’s rhetoric, which blames foreign elements for sabotaging dialogue while also calling ironically to make peace with them, creates a milieu highly favorable to the dominant sections of the army dragging their feet on acting against the TTP. Mr. Khan and his ilk have virtually paralyzed a state that has already kept second-guessing its own campaign against terrorism. Confusion is the name of Mr. Khan’s game and in this chaos the TTP or Jundullah or Junud-al-Hafsah, continues to regroup, plan and kill with impunity. Mr. Nawaz Sharif appears to have missed the window of opportunity he had after the martyrdom of General Sanaullah Niazi and the All Saints Church massacre to wrestle back the narrative from Mr. Khan and his rowdy hordes. Going by the fact that the National Assembly could only come up with condolences and condemnation of the Church attack, it seems that the Pakistani state has offered the other cheek to the TTP.

(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.comand he tweets @mazdaki)