Mosharraf Zaidi

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=137957

Getting Manmohan, Palin and 9/11 Wrong

Friday, September 26, 2008
by Mosharraf Zaidi

President Asif Ali Zardari is the legitimate leader of a nation of 172 million people. Perhaps this fact is lost on his speech and op-ed writers. The high expectations of the over ten million Pakistanis that voted for the PPP in the February election this year require the president to be well-advised. His trip to the US, and three incidents in particular, demonstrate this is not quite happening.

In New York, the president called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, “the father of modern India”. That’s no way for Pakistan to prepare for a return to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that is set to take place when Rahul Gandhi takes oath as prime minister next year. Manmohan Singh is a nice old man, but he is simply a more capable and credible version of Shaukat Aziz. He’s got no political legitimacy other than what Sonia Gandhi affords him. If anything, it should have been Singh singing President Zardari’s praises, a man whose wife was murdered, who served over 11 years in jail, and who is maligned for unproven corruption charges that still weigh over him like a ton of gold bricks. Singh has no such record to his credit. He’s a decent economist, and an accommodating bureaucrat to the Royal Family of India, a modern munshi at best. President Zardari, blemishes and all, is the head the Royal Family of the Pakistan, Fatima Bhutto’s seething anger notwithstanding. There’s no comparison. More importantly, there is only one father of Modern India, and his name is Jawaharlal Nehru, any insinuation otherwise is an insult to the Indian first family, and more importantly an utter misrepresentation of history. It is bad enough that young Indians have forgotten the debt they owe to Nehru, bad enough that the mass-consumption Bollywood culture has no time, or space to recognize the enormous imprint Nehru has left on the world, and on statesmanship. Pakistanis need not exacerbate things.

Earlier the same day, President Zardari made headlines during a meeting with the utterly disturbing Sarah Palin, calling her “gorgeous”. The fact that the nearly senile John McCain chose her as a running mate is bad enough, but whatever compelled President Zardari, head of a country of 172 million people, to meet with her, head of a state of less than 700,000 people, in the first place? He should have refused to meet her altogether. Such meetings are better left to leaders of small countries like Columbia and imaginary places like Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy expertise. The only reason for meeting Palin would be to provide her ammunition to fight back against Joe Biden at the first vice-presidential debate next week. But with Barack Obama already having started the whole dirty business of cross-border attacks on Pakistani soil, did Pakistan really need to irk the Democratic Party any further? The meeting itself may have been excusable, but President Zardari’s charm offensive on Ms Palin was, well, offensive. The neoconservatives don’t mind being rife with institutional sexism, which is why they continually deny free press access to Ms Sarah Palin–but what excuse does the husband of a global feminist icon have for his faux pas? Imagine what would have happened had President Zardari used the lines he used on Ms Palin, on a real politician, with real credibility, like say Hillary Clinton?

The hyper-effusive praise in meetings with Manmohan Singh, and Sarah Palin, however, pales in comparison to President Zardari’s enthusiasm for prosecuting a war on terror. He and his PPP leadership keep insisting that the Marriott attack was Pakistan’s 9/11. On Thursday, President Zardari wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe insisting the same point yet again. The script writers for Pakistan’s recursive horror film can only wish that was the case. The truth is that while the Marriott attack was indeed a 9/11 for me, for my columnist colleagues who live in Islamabad, for the businesses that used the conferencing facilities of the hotel, and for the diplomatic and development sector buddies that I dined there with on a regular basis, the Marriott’s significance is limited to this miniscule world of Pakistani bling. The loss of life at the Marriott is truly tragic, and its economic impact will be enormous, but the only way an event qualifies as a 9/11 is that it mobilizes a mass tsunami of public opinion that empowers and enables dramatic military action, even if it is reckless and fallacious adventurism (as 9/11 did for Dick Cheney and his administration).

Whoever is interested in having Pakistan dive further into the abyss that is FATA, had better find a different 9/11. The Pakistani people are nowhere nearly as united in their grief about the Marriott as I and my English-speaking urban and expat friends are. And for us, 9/11 itself was Pakistan’s 9/11. Pakistan was perhaps more profoundly affected by the original 9/11 than any other place on the planet. So that’s a redundant PR victory, it was won about seven years ago.

The Pakistani people are, unfortunately, merely shaken by the Marriott explosion, not stirred. There is no yellow ribbon, or wear-red-on-Friday campaigns to support the troops in Bajaur, no USO-type delivery of Eid care packages for the soldiers, no emotional send-offs of Chakwal, Attock and Jehlum’s finest sons to the front-lines of war. Pakistanis are more swayed by the rhetoric of politicians on all sides of the PPP–right, left and center–than they are by President Zardari’s op-eds. The PPP used to be a dirt-under-the-nails gritty party of the people. This op-ed politics and diplomacy is reminiscent of retired Gen Musharraf. The enlightened moderate paid a heavy political price for putting the Beltway establishment above the tandoor wars at home. The PPP’s slow dance with the Washington DC war agenda in Pakistan is costing the party the kind of political capital that the PPP may never be able to renew the way Shaheed Mohtarma did.

The Marriott was no 9/11. The sooner Pakistan’s first legitimately elected government in a decade understands that, the better the country will be able to prosecute the war against terrorists and the enemies of civilization.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=137732

Marriott Blast was no 9/11

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Mosharraf Zaidi

The atrocious attack at the Marriott Hotel should have been Pakistan’s moment to cohere diverse political and regional tensions into a singular, solid and unshakeable national commitment to destroy terrorism. What’s happened since the attack has been a series of comedic missteps and misspeaks that represent the long road ahead for Pakistan, and the even longer road to understanding Pakistan that Barack Obama and John McCain better invest in, fast.

The Prime Minister, beholden to a Presidency that is legally still in dictator-mode, insists the target was parliament and the Prime Minister’s House. The irrepressible Rehman Malik first insisted the target was the Marriott and the perpetrators were the Taliban. Farhatullah Babar apparently thought only lowly paid employees were victims. Sherry Rehman promised “resolve”. A little later, Rehman Malik struck again, insisting that the perpetrators were Al-Qaeda. A little after that, once again, this time insisting that people needed to be patient, how he could know so soon. The latest gem is that the President (and Prime Minister), were set to dine at the Marriott. The obvious implication is that the PPP government succeeded in averting disaster.

Really? Disaster was averted? Someone tell the Czech Ambassador’s grieving family, who probably never wanted him to take up the Islamabad post, but did anyway, rationalizing that Pakistan was too important to be left to second-choice diplomats. Someone tell the martyred security guards’ families, who thought they were joining a premium brand to protect the Ashraf-ul-Pakistaniat, not to serve as cannon fodder for the incompetence with which the global war on terror is being pursued. Someone tell the children that live in G-6 and F-6, who cannot sleep at night, because they have had their childhoods and innocence stained by the horror of flying glass and sonic booms.

Perhaps the light-headedness induced by being Pakistan’s first legitimately elected government in over a decade is too much to take for the PPP. That is why the party’s leadership is everywhere on TV, but nowhere on substance. Surely the poor people of Southern Punjab, and rural Sindh deserve a better articulation of the three most important sentiments that the Pakistani state should be feeling now. What are those sentiments?

Remorse, vengeance, and commitment. The greatest remorse should be for the senseless loss of human life, for the physical and psychological injuries sustained, and for the dramatic economic impact that the Marriott attack will have. There should be another kind of remorse also, remorse for having dropped the ball. If the state “successfully averted disaster” at the PM House and the Presidency, then citizens might be concerned about where lie the priorities of their protectors (that’s what rural politics is about in Pakistan: protection). The most important element of remorse needs to be the deliberate and careful thought that such remorse should feed into a response.

Pakistan’s response needs to be informed by the second sentiment: vengeance. The vengeance needs to be guided by a controlled but resolute and unflinching letting loose of destruction, demolition and termination of terrorists, their financiers, and their facilitators. Vengeance must not be angry, but it must speak clearly and loudly: there is no escaping Pakistan’s ability to defend itself. Currently, Pakistan has no vengeance agenda, leading to more brazen attacks with each new wave of violence.

This brings us to the third guiding sentiment that must drive Pakistan’s response to the Marriott attack: commitment. Pakistan needs to commit itself to the physical and operational rehabilitation of the state, and to the emotional and psychological rehabilitation of the victims of statelessness in FATA and state failure in instances of terror attacks in the settled areas. Pakistan needs to commit itself to purging itself of foreign policy dependence, and to the purging of its mosques and parliaments of war-mongering fanatics and radicals. That’s a lot of commitment.

While the PPP leadership jostles for airtime only to stumble over each other in betraying its incompetence, it is not a hopeless government. The government needs to demonstrate the kind of strong footed confidence (that is the domain of elected governments) in prosecuting the war against those that seek to destroy the Pakistani way of life. Nobody said democracy works perfectly, but it needs to be protected so that it regains its rightful position as the definitive feature of the Pakistani way of life. In the rush for relevance within the PPP perhaps the competence gap was most ably demonstrated by the affable and sometimes brilliant Senator Enver Baig. He was first to declare the Marriott incident as Pakistan’s 9/11.

The Senator is forgiven for speaking in the heat of the moment. This was no 9/11. Forget that 9/11 killed over 2,500 innocent civilians. Forget that it destroyed one of the world’s great monuments to innovation, and to freedom. Forget that it was an attack on NYC, the most economically relevant city in the world. 9/11 mobilized America’s sense of remorse, vengeance and commitment like it had not in over 50 years. That’s the real benchmark of whether an event can be qualified as 9/11 or not. Have the Americans made a mess of the response to 9/11? Absolutely, the war on terror is a total mess. But it is America’s war. Several major political forces in the US were forged in the ashes of 9/11, not least of which was NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani. At least rhetorically, Giuliani spoke for all of America on 9/11.

Unfortunately, not a single member of the legitimacy-stocked but competence-deficient PPP government has that kind of clarity. Since it is democratic, the saving grace here is that the clouded speech and confused finger-pointing is a reflection of a nationally ubiquitous clouded judgment and ambiguous response. This was not Pakistan’s 9/11 because Pakistan cannot respond with remorse, vengeance and commitment. Presidential, elite, urban and expat outrage notwithstanding, this is, simply put, still not Pakistan’s war. If Friday’s Presidential debate at Ole Miss is going to be about Pakistan, Joe Biden better bring rosary beads for McCain and Obama. This war is far from over, and Pakistan is far from ready.