| 05 September 2003 | Friday | 07 Rajab 1424 |
 |
Is national defence in safe hands?
Not an inappropriate question to ask on the
eve of what, through a process of some self-bluffing, we choose to call
the Defence of Pakistan Day.
The self-bluffing comes from the
fiction that the '65 war was somehow imposed upon us, that a predator
enemy, seeking our destruction, launched a war of aggression which we then
fought back with amazing skill and bravery. While this makes for riveting
if not soul-lifting history, it's not quite how it happened.
We
set off on a small adventure in Kashmir which quickly got out of hand and
saw us dragged into a full-scale war, a war we had neither sought nor
indeed calculated for. We thought the fighting would remain confined to
Kashmir and India would dare not cross the international border.
Unfortunately, India chose not to oblige us and--as a little
common sense, let alone Napoleonic insight, might have forewarned
us--chose a place and time of its choosing to counter our moves in
Kashmir. (Another proof of the adage that wars while easy to start are
harder to finish. Ask the Brits and Americans about their adventure in
Iraq.)
Our jawans and young officers fought well. (So did the
Indian jawans and their young officers.) But that's hardly the point. Our
soldiers fought an unnecessary war brought on by the stupidity of their
warlords.
What led the nation into this fiasco? Simply put,
one-man rule. Ayub Khan was his own commander and his own president. He
had installed a yes-man as army c-in-c but it was Ayub with his field
marshal's baton--something he had bestowed on himself--who called the
shots. When he decided upon the adventure in Kashmir there was no one to
stop him. (It's no use blaming Bhutto or anyone else. The buck stopped at
the president's table.)
The '65 war ended in a draw. There was no
such consolation for us in '71 when the folly of military rule led to
abject defeat and surrender in what was then East Pakistan. What was to
blame for that disaster? A repetition of the Ayub phenomenon: the fact
that the same person was military chief and political ruler.
The
Zia decade distorted the spirit of Pakistan and gave us in ample measure a
culture of sectarian murder and hypocrisy. What led to this? Again,
one-man rule and the destruction of political institutions.As if to prove
that learning from history is not our forte, we are going through a
similar phase again: another military ruler who is his own pope and
Caesar. Echoing the cry of all his military predecessors he says he is
indispensable and must remain president and military chief as long as he
himself deems fit. In his book no bigger heresy exists than to question
this self-proclaimed doctrine of indispensability.
Was national
defence safe in the hands of Ayub, Yahya and Zia? The disasters they
presided over tell us it was not. They were competent enough soldiers but
they exceeded their briefs and stepped outside the circle of their
competence. The results could have been predicted. They proved bad
soldiers and poor leaders. Is there anything exceptional in our present
set of military saviours? What grounds for supposing they can break the
cycle of cause-and-effect?
Four years is a long enough time to
judge anything. Has Pakistan been put on the road to development? Are the
masses shouting for joy? Has military rule delivered better
administration, quicker justice? Has it erected monuments to stability?
On any honest valuation, General Musharraf's government would be
lucky to score 'average' on any performance chart. On its promise to
cleanse the national stables and usher in an era of 'real' democracy it
would probably score 'below average'. Well, everyone knows what these
kinds of grades get you in the army: early retirement. But when you are
your own umpire and examiner and you have the luxury of writing your own
annual report, who's to stop you from proclaiming your performance as
outstanding?
God knows our democrats too have been crying
failures. They had the chance to change national direction, Benazir Bhutto
in 1988, Nawaz Sharif in 1997. But they squandered their opportunities and
furnished fresh justifications for the military to re-enter the political
arena. All the same, Pakistan's salvation lies in democracy not
militarism. Democracy can die a hundred deaths, suffer a thousand
failures, but it will yet be the only path for us to follow.
If an
army is defeated you don't disband it or forswear the use of arms. You
raise a fresh army and invest more in weapons and training so that it
fights better the next time there is a call to arms. In similar fashion,
democracy's failure should not mean the disbanding of democracy but rather
the creation of conditions where the chances of going wrong the next time
round are minimised.
France was plagued by political instability
from 1945 to 1958, the period of the so-called Fourth Republic. General de
Gaulle put an end to France's malaise not by discontinuing democracy but
by (1) devising a more stable system and (2) providing leadership to his
country. The Fifth Republic, his legacy to France, survives to this day.
Yes, Pakistan needs leadership and it needs a stable democracy.
But it will get neither the one nor the other from military presidents who
think it their divine right to be embalmed in their uniforms - leaders
whose outstanding talent, as our history tells us, is for repeating the
failed experiments of the past.
Have our military saviours ever
considered that when they remove democracy from the equation, or give the
notion of democracy a self-serving twist, they are erasing the very raison
d'etre of Pakistan? Pakistan came into being on the basis of the right of
self-determination. The Muslims of India, exercizing their free choice,
opted for a separate homeland. In other words, Muslim nationhood found
political expression through democracy. Remove democracy from the
scaffolding and the structure called Pakistan loses both identity and
meaning.
True, Pakistan has not been served well by its governing
class. Its leaders both military and political have largely failed it.
(After Jinnah the only real leader we had was Bhutto. But we hanged him.
And since then we have been groping for leadership.) But the solution lies
not in raising tinpot figures and hoping that they will work miracles but
in returning again and again, no matter how numerous the failures, to
democracy.
Bhutto was a protege of Ayub Khan's but as he moved
along the political scale he became a champion of the masses and the
father of the 1973 Constitution (not to mention the father of the A-bomb,
the pride of our military). Nawaz Sharif was a product of another
dictatorship but in his later incarnation he stood up for himself and
turned the moribund Muslim League into a mass party. Like it or not, this
is how political evolution occurs.
Pervez Musharraf also had a
chance to evolve and write himself more than a minor footnote in history
by holding honest elections and, if he was so desperate to cling to power,
by standing for election as a legitimate president. This would have been
the test of greatness for him, his chance to score 'outstanding' on the
political scorecard. But he flunked it when he opted for a cooked-up
referendum and a comprehensive cooking up of the subsequent elections.
He thought he was taking the safer and shorter route. As many a
strongman before him learnt to his cost, often the longest distance
between any two points is an illegitimate short-cut.
