SPY EYES

While it is important to detail the Mansoor Ijaz story – damn good story it is too – it is equally, in fact more, important to not get involved with the trees and miss the forest.

Ijaz’ counter thrust should, by now, leave no doubt about at least the partial veracity of what he wrote in the Financial Times. Even former Admiral Mike Mullen, after the initial memory lapse, seems to recall receiving the memo which Ijaz alleged in his Oct 10 FT op-ed was sent from the Presidency to Mullen. Ijaz has already put out some information from his emails, telephone log and BBM messages, redacting names and numbers etc for now. That has shaken many blokes and helped jog the memories of others.

Much more is likely to come out and the final story promises to be very juicy. Those who stood by Ijaz’s version got it close to the bull’s eye. Those who thought it was codswallop because the Presidency couldn’t be so stupid didn’t remember the tested fact that the two elements most abundant in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. They also ignored the clichéd adage that a drowning man will catch at anything. Finally, as stupidities go, a monumental one still walks around and is called Mian Nawaz Sharif.

So, while the story is juicy, at the level of what this means I almost have no interest in names. Who fathered the idea, who sold it to the President – that is, if it was someone other than the President who came up with this clever-by-half idea – how it was processed etc. Knowing Washington and quite a few people there, I have many names, official and unofficial, who go around to various shops and tell the Americans how important it is for their (US) success in the region and democracy in Pakistan, both presumably interlinked, to ‘defenestrate’ the Pakistani military. This secret memo business is just a more high-level, cloak-and-dagger stuff than those constant efforts.

The common themes that now run through the American and Indian thinking have mostly been culled from the ‘expert’ opinion of Pakistanis. Just take care of the military and Pakistan will be fine. Of course it helps to have a military that has its own impressive list of monumental stupidities.

This saga then, as other episodes of making appeals to official and unofficial America, presents to us all that is rotten in the state of Pakistan. That is what interests me because that is what I have so very often talked about as our biggest threat – we are at war with each other. A state which is at war within doesn’t need to fail. It has failed even when many of its organs seem to function.

This memo business came after the May 2 episode. Of that, at the time I wrote in this newspaper under the caption At war within the following:

“Imagine a scenario. US Special Forces raid a target in India, complete the operation and successfully extricate. What would the discussion be like? Would you have Indians arguing that there is no point in invoking sovereignty against the US because India’s sovereignty has been undermined in every third district by the Naxals every day for decades? I don’t think so.

“Yet, in this country, this very argument has been trotted out by sections of society that are educated and liberal, and by being so are best placed to advance the interests of this country. Why would educated people make such error of conflation?

“Somewhat simple, and here we get into the definitional problem of what is best for this country. These sections do not think that the manner in which the idea of security has been conceptualised traditionally in Pakistan is the right one. They aren’t too wrong in this but given the sharpening of the fault-line(s) they tend to move away entirely from realpolitik.

“But this is not the only problem with their approach. The bigger problem is that even in trying to reclaim the state, even if conceptually, they end up mixing up the concept of the state and how it has to operate in an anarchic world with the ‘establishment’ that remains in occupation of the state and which they oppose for its worldview. And such is this opposition that they are prepared to accept the violation of state sovereignty by another state, putting a moratorium on the fact that sovereignty is a core concept for the very existence of a state entity.”

Such is the civil-military fault-line that, going by this saga, the Presidency, the symbol of the federation of Pakistan, sends a request to a foreign, interested power and promises that “The new national security team will eliminate Section S of the ISI charged with maintaining relations to the Taliban, Haqqani network, etc. This will dramatically improve relations with Afghanistan.”

Can such a state function in any viable, coordinated manner? It cannot. As a realist, I find it appalling that the civilian principals should have appealed to a foreign power. But equally, as a longtime critic of the military I insist that such behaviour, no matter how unacceptable, must be placed in a context: do we now consider the military charged with safeguarding the state as a bigger threat than external actors? Are we prepared to ally with external, interested players to act against our own military because we think, as civilians, that this state cannot be run with this military around?

It does seem to me to be a fair assessment. And therefore the military, as I have argued repeatedly, needs to take a good, hard look at itself and if it believes it knows how to analyse threats, it should realise that, regardless of this or that reason, the civilians now consider it the primary threat to this state. This fact cannot be ignored even if it can be proved that the civilian leaders are corrupt and inefficient and would do anything to save themselves. Today it is the PPP government; yesterday it was the PML(N) government. Something about the military makes civilians very jittery.

Yet, reclaiming space requires honest civilian leadership because the military would not leave unilaterally. The AKP in Turkey is a superb example of how a party can rise from the political sidelines and put a very powerful military in its place. Far from appealing to foreign powers, reclaiming space requires leaders who take pride in being Pakistanis and who will never compromise on the state’s sovereignty. Does this leadership evoke such confidence? No. The result: the principal contradiction persists and the sufferer is Pakistan.