Mosharraf Zaidi

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=254383

Celebrating our heroism

Tuesday, August 03, 2010
by Mosharraf Zaidi

What is the most important aspect of the terrible and devastating week we’ve had in Pakistan? In the Margalla air crash and its ashes are the dreams of 152 families, destroyed by an accident that may not have been preventable, in any country. In the floods that continue to ravage Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, more than a million Pakistanis are affected, with nearly 1,200 killed, by a natural disaster whose force has been unprecedented in recent memory.

Should we embrace the calamities that befell Airblue Flight 202 and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as inevitable destiny? Both disasters took place under extreme weather conditions. Moreover, life and death, for people of faith all around the world, is in the hands of the Lord—not a pilot, or airline control, or meteorological department or even the government of a province.

Should we instead embrace reason? Flight 202 turned the wrong way, into a mountain it should never have been anywhere near. The floods are a product of nature, but the response to the floods is man-made. And it leaves lots to be desired. If those were our families that suffered at the hands of human error, after all, wouldn’t we want some kind of accountability?

The broad question of being resigned to the fate of the loss of Pakistani lives in these tragedies, as opposed to agitating for answers about the cost of avoidable human error, is perhaps too philosophical. There are other less philosophical questions, too.

The conduct of the electronic media, which includes the biggest news channels and extends right down to the smallest, deserves some scrutiny. I’m quite committed to avoiding blanket criticism of the Pakistani media. In part, this is out of common cause. As a writer, I am a part of this institution. In part, it is because I value the emergence of this institution—it is one of the most positive aspects of Pakistani society we’ve experienced since 1971. Without this media, our freedoms, and our ability to protect those freedoms, would be severely curtailed. Still, what possible explanation can justify having a graphic of a plane flying across a screen, ending in a mock explosion? Urdu-medium or English-medium, that kind of insensitivity is universally deplorable. Every news channel was guilty of the most inane and insensitive coverage.

Then again, we all watched. All of us.

And how can we forget how young our news producers, our anchors, our editors and even our executives are. The first major news event that the new media in Pakistan covered was the 2002 election—the night Geo was born, and quite possibly, Aaj, ARY, Express, Dunya, and a host of others were all conceived. It has only been eight years. After trailblazing for the entire world, the greatest and most powerful news media of the world in the United States has gone from the heights reached by Walter Conkrite and Edward R Murrow to plumbing the depths of exploiting human frailty a la Sean Hannity and Megan Kelly. Pakistan’s news media is young enough to be cut some slack. Of course, the problems in the news media aren’t restricted to insensitivity. The partisanship within and among different media outlets is shocking. Partisan news analysis doesn’t just mimic the political and ethnic divides in the country, it actively helps widen them.

We don’t have to use every tragedy to stick a knife in ourselves and analyse our failings with perpetual intensity. Sometimes, perhaps we can just choose to focus on the positive.

One clear positive is how the reporting of the Margalla air crash, so comprehensive and so detailed, has exposed the myth of the Pakistani government’s competence. For poor Pakistanis this myth has never existed—which is why so many of them, especially in the rural areas, depend instead on individual and family patronage, rather than whatever protections a state should be providing.

For Pakistanis in our cities, who are blessed with a good source of income, of course there is no interaction with state services. Our dependence on bottled water, private schools, gated housing communities, private security guards and frequent trips abroad, but no trips outside our comfort zones within the country, blinds us to how incompetent the Pakistani state really is.

The National Disaster Management Authority is run by a man regarded as one of the most competent in the humanitarian space in Pakistan. Lt Gen (r) Nadeem Ahmad is a miracle-worker since the days when he first took over relief and rehabilitation in the earthquake-affected areas for the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA). But even a miracle-worker cannot single-handedly transform the problem of a series of state agencies and institutions that keep mushrooming, all the while unaware of how they relate to each other. This problem starts right at the constitutional top. There is no defined regime for centre-province coordination. This is not a vertical imbalance in a federal state. This is much worse. This is vertical incongruence and incapacity, in a federation that has spent 63 years operating like a unitary state.

State incompetence, pilot error and media insensitivity are all valid things to be discussed in the face of devastating tragedies. There is something to be said, however, of what takes place on the ground when disaster hits Pakistan.

When we invest the bulk of our efforts in surgically examining every aspect of our failures in the face of disaster, we also invariably end up ignoring the individual and collective heroism of ordinary Pakistanis. This is not only an affront to the spirit of selfless giving and sacrifice of those Pakistanis that step it up in the face of tragedy. It is also the kind of self-defeating and misplaced integrity that dominates so much of our national discourse, in both the mainstream Urdu discourse, and the more self-conscious English-language conversation in Pakistan.

Minutes after the crash of Flight 202, hundreds of ordinary Pakistanis began to scale the Margallas to support search-and-rescue teams. Many watched on television, in the background of the inanity of anchors, and saw individuals that trekked for more than two hours in rain and mud to reach the crash site. The more people saw the scale of the tragedy, the greater the number of Islamabad citizens converged at the foothills to lend their support.

In the flood-affected Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, as the scale and enormity of the devastation began to make itself apparent, Pakistanis began to mobilise support for relief efforts. This is an exercise Pakistanis have become accustomed to since 2005. We braved the earthquake, we braved the ongoing IDP crisis spurred by military action in Swat and FATA, and we are preparing to brave the devastation of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa floods.

Every time we’ve been led in this march of humanity, benevolence and heroism, by the resilience of the people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa—whether they speak Pashto or not. Their Pashtunwali is infectious. No one has braved natural and man-made disaster like the people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

As we continue to watch the carnage of floods and disasters, let us take a minute every day to be thankful for the resilience, heroism and Pashtunwali of our people. When times are bad, we must certainly introspect—but not at the cost of celebrating Pakistani heroism.

http://thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=253154

A Quickie-Leak on Obama’s War

Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Mosharraf Zaidi

Let’s establish the facts about the Wikileaks expose of 75,000 US military documents detailing Obama’s war in Afghanistan.

First, the total number of documents released is 75,000. Another roughly 15,000 have been held back by the Wikileaks people “as part of a harm minimisation process demanded” by the sources that provided these files to Wikileaks in the first place. This means that there may be really damaging and shocking stories embedded in the remaining documents, because thus far, the documents contain nothing more than what we already know.

Second, the time period covered by the Wikileaks expose is January 2004-December 2009. This means it does not cover President Barack Obama’s post-Afghan surge work, but it does cover both President Pervez Musharraf and President Asif Ali Zardari’s time in officer. It also covers COAS Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s time as both head of the ISI and COAS. This means that when we derive broad themes from the documents about Pakistan, we are saying something about the present Pakistani government, the past Pakistani government, and everything in between. But when we take broad messages about the US from these documents, we are saying something only about whatever preceded the current COIN strategy.

Third, Wikileaks’ purpose in releasing these files has nothing to do with Pakistan, or India, or Afghanistan. Its purpose is to expose the incompetence, myopia and failure of the US-led war in Afghanistan. Wikileaks is an anti-war organisation. This means that the expose is not a part of any kind of campaign against Pakistan. If Pakistan looks bad in the crossfire of domestic American politics surrounding the Afghan war, that’s Pakistan’s bad. Contrary to the insatiable appetite for negativity about this country among some media outlets, Pakistan is in fact a bit player in the Wikileaks drama. The release of these documents is designed to influence US public opinion about the war in Afghanistan.

These facts are important. On Day One of its release, the Afghan War Diary 2004-2010 (as the documents have been branded by Wikileaks) discussing the conduct of the US government and military in their prosecution of the Afghan war seemed to be secondary. Instead, questions and conversations about Pakistan’s ISI dominated the initial analysis of the Wikileaks documents.

The ISI is not a new villain in the global conversation about “Af-Pak”. For more than three decades, as the collective intelligence organisation of the Pakistani military, it has planned and prosecuted Pakistan’s secret wars. Pakistanis don’t need any help in understanding the ways in which the ISI has influenced both internal and external political events for the last three decades. The most penetrating, articulate and meaningful criticism of the ISI also happens to come from the work of Pakistanis, from Kamran Shafi’s bold and fearless columns, to human rights activists demanding accountability for missing persons, to Pakistani Ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani’s devastating critique in his book “Pakistan: From Mosque to Military”.

Virtually no serious commentator or analyst anywhere, even those embedded deep in the armpit of the Pakistani establishment, claims that the Pakistani state was not instrumental in the creation, training and sustenance of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. Given the nature of the relationship between the Pakistani state and the Afghan Taliban, one that goes right to the genetic core of the Taliban, it is hard to imagine that all ties can ever be severed. Again, for serious people, this is an issue that is done and dusted. Pakistan’s state, and indeed, its society, had, has and will continue to have linkages with the Afghan Taliban. Moral judgments about these linkages are external to this fact.

These linkages do, however, deserve the scrutiny of the Pakistani parliament. If somehow, Pakistanis are involved in supporting any kind of violence against anyone, that kind of support had better be couched in a clear national security framework that articulates why it is okay for Pakistanis to underwrite such violence. Absent such a framework, the violence is illegal, and the space for speculation and innuendo about Pakistan is virtually infinite. It is that space that Pakistan’s fiercest critics exploit when they generate massive headlines out of small nuggets of insignificant and stale information that implicates Pakistan in anti-US violence in Afghanistan (among other things).

Over time, the space provided by an ineffective Pakistani state has helped the ISI occupy in western minds, what the Mossad and CIA represent in the Muslim world: a convenient red-herring to explain the complexities, difficulties and unpleasantness of war and diplomacy in a post-9/11 world.

Western conspiracy theories about Pakistan’s evil double-cross in Afghanistan don’t need to be rooted in absolute truth, just a scant kernel of the truth will often do. In that way, it is once again eminently clear that talk of a “clash of civilisations” is garbage. It turns out that human beings are the same everywhere.

Pakistan’s obsession with conspiracy theories is well-documented by the western media. This small sampling, for example, took less than five minutes to compile: August 24, 2005, “Pakistan: In the Land of Conspiracy Theories” PBS Frontline. May 12, 2009, “A Grand Conspiracy Theory From Pakistan” NY Times The Lede. November 17, 2009, “Pakistan’s conspiracy theories” Reuters Blog. November 27, 2009, “Pakistan conspiracy theories stifle debate” BBC News. December 24, 2009, “Conspiracy Theories ‘Stamped In DNA’ Of Pakistanis” NPR. February 12, 2010, “Blackwater Conspiracy Theory Thrives in Pakistan” AOL News. February 16, 2010, “Pakistanis See a Vast U.S. Conspiracy Against Them” Time Magazine. April 28, 2010, “Pakistanis just love conspiracy theories” PRI’s The World. May 25, 2010, “U.S. Is a Top Villain in Pakistan’s Conspiracy Talk” NY Times. May 26, 2010, “Times Square bombing conspiracy theory takes hold in Pakistani media” Yahoo News.

This kind of coverage of Pakistan irks some within the Islamic Republic. But it really shouldn’t. It is absolutely true that the current conflict between terrorists and ordinary Pakistanis has been made worse by our national and collective dependence on invisible and indefensible theories about the harm wished on us by other countries. Most of all, conspiracy theories, which tend to be based on small kernels of truth, help us avoid uncomfortable realities. Pakistan has a massive national security problem that is rooted in the violent extremism it once invested in as a strategy in Afghanistan. That is an uncomfortable reality.

The recent ISI and Pakistan obsession of war analysts and correspondents is not some other-worldly phenomenon. It is rooted in the very human need for comfort. There is much comfort in finding Pakistan and the ISI under every rock and IED in Afghanistan. The small kernels of truth that enable ISI conspiracy theories are a matter for Pakistanis to take seriously and address. But they also help the US and its allies in Afghanistan avoid the uncomfortable reality of Obama’s Afghan war. This is a war that does not have a happy ending for anyone. This is a war that has made America, Pakistan, India, Iran and Afghanistan less safe. This is a war that needs to end. That is an uncomfortable reality.

Focusing on the adverse role of the ISI — real and imagined — in Afghanistan is a distraction. Ending Obama’s Afghan war is the true purpose behind the Wikileaks expose. For that it should be celebrated. Not mourned.

http://thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=251833

Cutting Hillary Clinton some slack

Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Mosharraf Zaidi

“Perceptions will change… once they see how their lives have changed” – Shah Mehmood Qureshi

Poor Americans. This is the fellow that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has to stand beside as she tries to squeeze more juice out of a Kerry-Lugar Bill that had its lifeblood squeezed out of it last year by the Pakistani establishment, when it first became US law. The frustration from that reaction still riles the Americans. So much so that Hillary Clinton, who is a role model and an inspiration, can’t seem to let go. On every trip she reproduces a Bin Laden outburst that is militarily and strategically irrelevant for the US, but that serves as an enduring cancerous tumour for America’s public diplomacy goals in Pakistan.

Still. Mrs Clinton needs to be cut some slack. Her tireless advocacy for health care around the world, and her enduring compassion for South Asians — Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Muslims, Hindus, men, children, and most of all, women — is singularly unique among either Democrats or Republicans.

The western media seems as fabulously smitten by Mrs Clinton as I am. The wires, the newspapers and the electronic media all reported Mrs Clinton’s announcement of the allocation of $500 million worth of projects as headline news, when really, it represents the fulfilment of only one-third of Kerry-Lugar-Berman’s sacred covenant with the Pakistani people. One of the most telling things about that covenant? It was signed by the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. It was, in short, a covenant between the US government and the American people, with the US government acting as a proxy for the Pakistani people.

Perhaps now Pakistanis can better understand the frustration of the John Kerrys, the Hillary Clintons and the Richard Holbrookes of the earth. Top US policymakers have fought for over two years to win the Kerry-Lugar Bill. Since then, two things have kept that money from flowing into Pakistan. The first is Mr Holbrooke’s decision to dispense with the Clintonian (Bill, not Hill) model of US aid disbursement through large contracting firms that Americans often refer to as Beltway Bandits. That decision, while long overdue, was rushed and was made in the wrong country, at the wrong time. American development assistance, which is not routed solely through USAID, but often through half a dozen different US departments (or ministries), has been in desperate need of an overhaul for years. But to attempt to reform the instrument of aid delivery in Pakistan, at the climax of Obama’s war in Afghanistan, has been a disastrous decision. The American international aid community is so removed and so distant from the mainstream of western assistance thinking (spearheaded by the OECD and captured in the Paris Declaration) that it doesn’t quite know how to deal with large sums of money without the Beltway Bandits. This has meant that the Kerry-Lugar money has been parked in Washington DC, with a clear destination, but no vehicle to take it there.

The second thing that has kept the Kerry-Lugar money from being spent is the government of Pakistan itself. Pakistan has no clarity whatsoever about what its development priorities are. It required the intervention of the military chief back in March to summon the federal secretaries to begin to articulate a wishlist of pet projects this government would like to see come to fruition. Indecision and the absence of any coherent development strategy within Pakistan have meant that the US government has had to try to figure out what Pakistan wants, kind of on its own. This may seem like comedy noire, but it’s really not funny at all.

The problem with Pakistani government today is that it doesn’t enjoy the competent stability it once used to through the bureaucracy. Today’s Pakistan’s bureaucracy, while made up of individually brilliant officers, is a collection of inward-looking dinosaurs that cannot see beyond their GOR houses, their I-8 plots and their post-retirement benefits. Those officers, in years past, used to be the eyes and ears of oft-changing governments that would seek the guidance of senior bureaucrats in the federal ministries and at the provincial headquarters. While there’s been no discernable change in the quality of governance that democratically elected politicians can render, there has been a severe nosedive in the quality of officers available to either the federal or provincial governments.

Part of the reason for the exodus of top-tier officers during the Musharraf era was the curtailment of powers of district managers, under decentralised local governments. But the decentralisation argument is a red-herring for a much more fundamental shift in Pakistani bureaucracy. While being a CSP or DMG officer was an instrument of social mobility in the 1970s or 1980s, it is now a barrier to the personal and professional growth of officers. Many of Pakistan’s brightest officers can afford to be well-paid UN, World Bank and IMF staffers. Many others can do even better at Wall Street and on Madison Avenue. Still others can be brilliant academics. Across the board, since 1999 we have seen exactly this. An exodus of top-shelf talent that might have been able to deal with rents, with incompetence, and with the heat, but not with the disrespect that the military and political class have for educated Pakistanis in the employ of the government of Pakistan.

So how does all this relate to Mrs Clinton’s troubles in Pakistan? Simple. No matter how democratically legitimate, when the blind lead the blind, there is a problem of vision. Pakistani politicians are so disconnected from any kind of global narrative that it will be a generation before we produce a Chidambaram, a Krishna or a Mukherjee that can win elections without the help of their gaddi (see: Shah Mehmood Qureshi), or the kindness of the Arbab Ghulam Rahims of the world (see: Shaukat Aziz). The nauseating outburst of the foreign minister on Friday was a demonstration that winning an election does not enable you to win an argument. In short, Pakistan’s current political class cannot muster politically legitimate actors that are also competent at statecraft.

Enter the advisory class. This is where the Husain Haqqanis, the Shaukat Tarins and the Dr Hafeez Shaikhs enter the fray. No fake degrees here. Only pedigree. Their problem is of an entirely different nature. They don’t have any stake in Pakistani politics — they enter as unknowns at the thaana kuthchehri and galli-mohalla level, and they leave as unknowns at the thaana kuthchehri and galli-mohalla level. They can talk about all the right kinds of reform, but they can’t deliver. More worryingly, their reform-speak is often deluded, because it is devoid of any political rigour. “Let’s clip military powers by marketing bold ideas in Washington DC, instead of Rawalpindi.” Well. We’ve seen how that has turned out. “Let’s raise taxes!” Sure. Because nobody else has ever thought of that! “Let’s improve education.” Sure. Because it takes genius to figure out that education is a problem. Advice that is anchored in Rubinomics and Bretton Woods theology has been failing Pakistan for the entire duration of Pakistan’s lifetime. This should hardly be a surprise. It never works anywhere.

And that is why Shah Mehmood Qureshi is wrong, again. Perceptions won’t change. $500 million worth of pet projects is a supremely sweet gesture. But even $500 billion worth of aid, delivered through Beltway Bandits, NGOs, budget support or otherwise can’t change the lives of Pakistanis. Only organic reform can achieve such noble goals. When the strategic dialogue in October picks up where this one leaves, Pakistan will still have no CT strategy, no development strategy, an inflated defence budget, no civil service reform, and no hate-speech legislation. All the money in the world can’t change that. And that’s not Hillary Clinton’s fault. That one’s on us.