Mosharraf Zaidi

http://thenews.com.pk/31-08-2010/Opinion/2095.htm

Thursday, August 26, 2010

by Mosharraf Zaidi

There is a lot of criticism of the Pakistani discourse that relates to ideology and identity. If you question drone attacks, there are those that will immediately label you a Taliban-supporter. If you question Pakistan’s need to fight, kill and capture terrorists, there are those that will immediately label you an American stooge. If you spell Ramadan correctly, you’re an Arabist. If you enjoy classical music, you’re a covert Hindu. You want to make a fraaandships with India? RAW agent. You want to honour the dedication with which the Guardians of the Two Holy Mosques care for Makkah and Madinah? Wahabbist fundo.

These labels are great fun. Mostly, they’re the domain of folks that are too busy to discern between the layers of complexity that defines the average person in the 21st century. Multiple identities make these labels rather obsolete. The problem with these cute little games we play is that they obscure from view the very real cancer that is the true bane of the Pakistani discourse. While we argue over these trivialities we miss the most pertinent weakness within the broad conversation about, within and relating to Pakistan. Simply put, the Pakistani discourse is a fact-free zone.

The Pakistani public square is this common and shared space—across our airwaves, in our newspapers, at the chowk and outside our chaardeewaarees. Here your ideology—left, right, center or all over the compass, doesn’t matter. Your faith mantra. Your aqeeda or your qaida. Doesn’t matter. Sure, they matter deeply at the interpersonal level. They matter existentially at the personal level. They matter at the academic level. But in the public discourse, these things are not of primary importance.

What is of central and primary importance is the baseline of facts around which our engagement is constructed—as people, as citizens, as voters, as taxpayers, as sons, and brothers, sisters and daughters, fathers and mothers, and friends and lovers. On this count, it is hard to be anything but deeply worried about the state of our democracy and our humanity. This baseline is a dry and arid desert of facts.

This is dangerous and worrying. It is especially dangerous in the context of a recent public lynching and a newly uncovered sports betting scandal have given new fuel to one of the most archetypal Pakistani national pastimes. It involves a baseball bat, but no ball. It’s the Pakistani sport of self-flaggellation. We seem to relish in taking a baseball bat to ourselves and viciously maul the very idea of being Pakistani. We find every nasty word in the dictionary to debase our collective identity. We’re angry and we want the world to know!

Of course, in the case of what happened in Sialkot and the Shoeless Joe Jackson impression that Salman Butt has been doing in the UK—we have enough facts to be outraged. Enough baseline evidence to ask questions and demand answers.

Too often though, we are so hungry for accountability, so angry at the morally rudderless leadership we elect and appoint, so desperate for some kind of release from what seems to be an endless succession of bad news that we conflate things. I have lost count of how many times a noble and desperate expression of anger about Sialkot or spot fixing has segued into Pakistan’s catastrophic floods.

This conflation creates the cancerous problem of repetitive self-flagellation. The truth is that Pakistan has much to be sober and introspective about. But conflating all our frustration with one aspect of being Pakistani does not naturally, or linearly lend itself to justifying a similar frustration with all aspects of being Pakistani. For decent and reasonable people, this should be clear as day. But in addition to being decent and reasonable, I suspect most of us are passionately patriotic. Love is blindness and we are blinded by our love for this country, to the plain fact that while the roof is on fire, we do have fire extinguishers, right here in Pakistan. There is lots to be panicked about, but there’s plenty to suggest that Armageddon is not quite here, yet.

Flood relief is on-going, even as the floods, now in their second month, continue to ravage Southern Sindh. Truckloads of ordinary Pakistanis, by the thousands, are driving into places that are no vacation. They’re delivering medicines and food and shelter. Not far behind are Pakistan’s array of NGOs, and the international NGOs that support them. Money for both comes from ordinary people around the world, and in Pakistan. It also comes from donors—bilateral and multilateral. The UN system works ‘round the clock, trying to keep up with the frenetic pace and scale of the disaster. Other countries, both those that are maligned here, and those that are loved, are supporting the whole endeavour with money from their taxpayers. Its all a wonderful system of benevolence.

We know this already. So what’s the fact-free part of all this that I want to bring to your notice today? It is what underpins the entire system of relief and recovery, and eventually reconstruction. It the Pakistani government.

Ignorance of the Pakistani civilian structures’ role in all this is dangerous. We have spent so much time and effort, hating on Pakistani state structures that we can’t seem to acknowledge the most obvious and simple facts. Without government, almost none of the current pace and scale of relief would be possible. Even if we leave the military out of this, and just look at the civilian administration cross-country.

Pakistani government schools are the backbone of relief efforts in most locations. Pakistani government officers, like the many DMG officers that serve as District Coordination Officers, are the sharp end of the Pakistani response to the floods. Their subordinates, both within the provincial services and below in the cadres that are district specific, have risked their lives in many cases to do what government should do—to serve and protect Pakistanis. Are they getting some help from donors? Of course they are. Who are they talking to and coordinating with? It’s the government, stupid.

Is the military a central part of the response to these floods? Of course it is. The jawaans that serve and protect their entire careers have flashed into action. What is the military? It too, is the government, stupid.

The National Disaster Management Authority is a new organization, operating in a new post-18th Amendment administrative environment, and deeply political environment. It is far from perfect, but the politicians, the donors and the international organizations trust the NDMA, because it has credible leadership. What is the NDMA? It’s the government, stupid.

Pakistan needs massive amounts of humanitarian relief that is best delivered by NGOs—Pakistani and international. And it will need massive funds to reconstruction. But the thing Pakistan will need most desperately as we go forward is government. Doesn’t matter what family’s prince and princesses we elect. The actual operational business of government will be done by the same people doing it now. It might be a good idea to stop demonizing the civil servants and public employees that keep this place ticking. They are the government, stupid.

http://thenews.com.pk/26-08-2010/opinion/1300.htm

Thursday, August 26, 2010

by Mosharraf Zaidi

If the global reaction to the most devastating floods in modern world history has not been a wake up call for Pakistanis, then perhaps the brutality of the Sialkot lynchings should. Inside and out, there’s something broken about us. And we didn’t really need these floods or the Sialkot incident to tell us that.

So how do we fix it? How do we build something that is so broken? One way to proceed is to dive into an honest and forthright assessment of the ailments that plague us collectively. It seems we have every moral disease on the planet available here. Religious discrimination, apparently, doesn’t even take a break during a flood. Nor does petty corruption and rent-seeking by cops and administrators. Nor does political opportunism by the military. Nor does terrorism by Takfiri religious extremists. Nor does theft and dacoity and banditry. These are real problems, and they are not incidental.

Take Sialkot, mix it up with Balochistan, sprinkle in some Model Town, wrap it up in Data Darbar and FATA, roast what remains in the fires of Gojra, and then smoke it. Inhale deeply. How does it feel?

Does it feel good to intoxicate ourselves with the failures and misery that we are defined routinely, as a people, by ourselves, and quite understandably, by others?

It can’t possibly feel good. But how it feels is secondary. The question is, does it make a difference? Does it create a more functional society, a more effective state, a more capable government, more responsive institutions, or more accountable leaders? It doesn’t at all. In fact, more often than not, the perpetual obsession to zone in and focus on individual stories like the horror in Sialkot is not a sign of our desire to effect change. It is infinitely more reflective of our gluttonous appetite for the most outrageous and scandalous images. So in the truest tradition of a national discourse that is almost entirely irrational, and almost entirely dependent on emotions, it isn’t surprising that while Pakistan continues to drown in floodwaters that have still not stopped threatening Sindh, there is now a full-blown national introspection about the barbarity of Pakistani society. All 180 million of us, according to many, have collective guilt.

Maybe that is true. And maybe it is the exaggerated sentiment of people whose eyes watched what their minds and hearts could not bear. That is why I have yet to watch the video, and why I will never watch it.

What is certain is that the family of the two kids that were lynched by that crazed mob needs justice. That family deserves justice. The memory of those two boys on the other hand, deserves an outcome that protects this country’s citizens from these kinds of attacks–everywhere.

That is a very tall order. The moral outrage we feel today is not new. In Gojra last summer, a mob went on a rampage and murdered eight innocent Pakistani citizens. It was too easy for the mainstream to make it a minority issue. It was a minority issue–those folks were targeted because they were Christian. But it was a larger public policy issue. In fact, if you are interested in solving these kinds of problems, it was, like Sialkot is, a purely public policy issue.

And in this, there is, I am afraid, no room for emotion. No room for sentimentality, or for self-righteousness, or for moral codes. There is only room for facts and the actions that those facts dictate. This is important.

If the country is feeling emotional about these atrocities, it is on the right track. Sooner or later, when the accumulated emotions of sixty-three years really begin to matter, we will need to convert those emotions into actionable intelligence. This is not the kind of intelligence that foreign correspondents find interesting. At some point, our own obsession with how we are viewed outside Pakistan, will have to be replaced with an obsession about how we are–period.

We’re not well. Not good. Our self-inflicted wounds, the wounds inflicted by nature, and the wounds inflicted by the mortal enemies of the country–the TTP today, a country yesterday, another acronym tomorrow — these wounds are bleeding. Everywhere you turn there is reason to despair–but the despair, in the absence of data, of knowledge and of commitment for change–is about as sinful as the crimes and misdemeanours that generate the despair in the first place.

The Sialkot lynching, and the mob violence and pyromania on display in Gojra on August 1 last year are the products of a legal system that tolerates the most rabid violations of human dignity for the sake of keeping the peace and political expediency. Even with all the blasphemy laws, and the problems that Zia’s era infected the Constitution with in place, there is no possible legal space for vigilantism, or for violence in the name of morality, faith or any other kind of value or ethic. Yet every so often these incidents flare up our collective gluttony for scandal, and our genuine remorse, sorrow and anger.

Violence against minorities is not conducted by the Pakistani state. It is conducted by individuals who are jacked up on religious fervour, thanks to the cancerous oratory of the mullahs. In Sialkot, the kids may not have been from a minority sect, and the instigators, may not have been mullahs–but the formula remains the same. Once you ignite a fire in a mob there are two certainties. First, no one, including the state, will take on the mob. Second, that when all is said and done, the mob will have created a precedent for the next mob–a positive incentive to let its anger loose on whatever grates their sensibility at that time. The reason that precedent exists is simple. Nobody ever gets hanged for being part of a murderous mob.

Of course, murder is just the most extreme kind of a crime. Pakistani politicians frequently use the mullah paradigm to whip up a frenzy of ethnic fear and anger– —like Pakhtun and Mohajir politicians are doing right now in Karachi in Karachi and like they’ve done in Balochistan for decades. When Shaheed Mohtarma was murdered mobs went berserk, burning stores, banks and private property at will. When Shaheed Raza Haider was murdered, the same mobs, with different accents, did the same things.

The anger of mourning political workers, the anger of self-righteous Muslims, and the anger of ordinary Sialkotis is not morally equivalent. Of course it is not. But it is the same disease, the same cancer. They are all malignant because they expose the disability of the Pakistani people to construct state institutions that ensure punitive outcomes for criminals. To build Pakistan, criminals must face the consequences of their crimes.

A hyperactive cocktail

Tuesday, August 10, 2010
by Mosharraf Zaidi

The devastating floods across the country, the lethal violence in Karachi and the agony associated with President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to Europe, all seem to have been rolled up into a hyperactive cocktail–a lethal intoxicant that dulls the senses while it kills us. We’re all drinking this strange “Rooh Afza.” Since the holy month of Ramazan is upon us, let’s put the glass down. Just for a few minutes.

Sure, the floods are a natural catastrophe that no government could have prepared for. Governments should, however, respond in a timely manner. Sure the military is heavily involved in the relief operations. When is there ever a natural disaster in the world that doesn’t require the military? Still, why is the military leadership (that means Gen Kayani) acting like politicians?

Sure the violence in Karachi may be terrorism, or it may be ethnic warfare, or it may be engineered chaos, or it may be all of those things at once. But where is the police? And where are the leaders of the MQM and the ANP? And where are the leaders of mosques, the imams and the ulema? Why aren’t they taking bold decisions to diffuse this time-bomb that keeps going off, with warning, without warning–it hardly seems to make a difference.

And sure President Zardari seems totally detached from reality. The president’s inner circle, to a man and woman, was against this visit. Still he went. The mood in the UK and here was against making any mention of the word storm. Still he fell over himself to reinforce how close the UK and Pakistan are, by saying, the relationship will endure, while “storms will come, and storms will go.” But what idiot would mistake the president for his wife, Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto? Those expecting Churchillian timing, Obama-esque rhetoric or Manmohan-istic wisdom from President Zardari should pause. Really? Seriously?

The floods are killing us. The government is either doing everything it can, or nothing at all. The military is perfect, or it is evil incarnate. Mohajir blood-lust is epic. Pakhtun blood-lust is epic. Shias are victims. Sunnis are victims. And the TTP and Al-Qaeda are behind every goblin in Pakistan. President Zardari should have stayed, or he should have gone. And all of this is on repeat mode. Over and over and over again. The same mind-numbingly ineffectual conversation. So, perhaps, it really is time to take a moment to pause and ponder, what’s really happening here? As crass as it may be to try to reduce complex social, political and economic phenomena to small digestible bits of information, it’s important to single out the key drivers of the problems Pakistan is currently enduring.

The impact of the floods can be captured by the word confidence. Or, rather, lack thereof. Within government, the NDMA doesn’t enjoy the confidence of Interior, which doesn’t enjoy the confidence of the GHQ, which doesn’t enjoy the confidence of the KP provincial government. The people don’t have any confidence in government–no matter what turf issues they might have. International donors don’t have any confidence in the federal government, and little confidence in the provinces. The provinces don’t have the confidence to deal independently with the international donors, or the INGOs. They also don’t have the confidence to cede a reasonable degree of their executive authority to the NDMA.

Disasters are the worst possible place to begin to get into jurisdictional turf wars. This flooding disaster has hit just as Pakistan has entered the most intense turf war–exacerbated and energised by the 18th Amendment–ever to have hit centre-province relations. Civil society, including, but far from limited to, elements that pose a clear and present danger to Pakistan’s standing in the world, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba spin-offs, confidently deliver aid to flood-affected people. Meanwhile, the government’s and the military’s lack of confidence makes them seem even more incompetent and cold than they really are. And their overconfident assertions to journalists and in front of cameras seal the deal.

The solution to the confidence problem is not swagger. It is, in fact, competence. In Pakistan, the government’s competence requires urgent reform of the standard operating procedures that have gone untouched for decades. In a post-18th-Amendment administrative context, clear guidelines establishing the domain of federal authority and delimiting that same authority is an urgent requirement. Failing such reform, Pakistan will continue to seem like a very large platter for the Taliban’s taking. No matter that such depictions are the fantasy of imperial analyses. The truth is that those depictions are rooted in kernels of very scary truths. Transforming both the perception and reality of tomorrow’s Pakistan requires an urgent reconfiguration of the coordination interface between federal and non-federal authority.

The situation in Karachi can similarly be captured in one word: subsidiarity. And this word is inextricably linked to the reform of federal-provincial interactions. While some functions, like the coordination of disaster-relief and reconstruction, need to be centrally managed, most local issues require local solutions.

The principle of subsidiarity is simply that the smallest, most agile and most representative level of a managing structure should be assigned all the functions it is capable of fulfilling, leaving only the big, macro issues to be dealt with by higher levels of management. In plain English, Karachi may well be getting torn into pieces by street-level thugs and gangsters–driven by emotions, by profits and by pride. But those sentiments are rooted in legitimate issues of ethnicity, or economic opportunity and of grievances not unfounded–Pakhtun or Mohajir–Karachiites aren’t crazy.

Genuine subsidiarity in Pakistan would mean directly elected mayors in Pakistan’s cities, and directly elected council members at the gali-mohalla levels. Urban anger needs a seat at the table, and local government is the only way to provide that seat. Pakistan may be lucky to have a decidedly non-extremist MQM ruling Karachi–but in urban Punjab, over the next decade, the absence of that seat will almost certainly be addressed by a right-of-centre political force. How far to the right is anybody’s guess.

Finally, there is the inescapable anger about President Zardari. This is old hat. The real engine that drives the rage of Pakistanis around President Zardari is a little Urdu word called izzat. Pakistan’s urban middle class–disengaged from politics, partly because of the stark absence of local issues in the political discourse–wants their country to be strong and proud, like they are. This moral class in Pakistan will employ both fact and fiction to validate how it sees the world. This is the Pakistan where Jinnah, Nehru, Churchill and Obama are all viewed through one lens: collective national pride. For many, the blind nationalism and religious commitment of the moral class is a problem. It may or may not be, but we know this much. Future economic growth and the future of Pakistani politics are vested deep within this moral class.

One certain way to diffuse the sense of outrage at the nation’s izzat being at stake is to enable the moral class to engage in issues that actually matter. Their streetlights and parks. Their schools. Their hospitals. Their cops. To do that, Pakistan needs local government that genuinely adheres to democratic, administrative and fiscal subsidiarity. An insecure Islamabad (and Pindi) doesn’t have the confidence to cede provinces their rights and responsibilities, therefore the provinces don’t have the confidence to do the same for districts and beyond. And so goes this cycle of tragedy, incompetence and breaches of izzat.