On one plane, the all-parties conclave was an impressive show of national unity in the face of threats coming out to us from the outside. Quite a host of political and religious parties participated. The Baloch political leaders’ boycott is really unfortunate. Instead, they should have come and made their say. That would have served better the Balochs’ interest. And it is dismaying that nationalists were not invited. Whatever their ideologies, they are part of us and our political life’s. Their participation would have made the conclave more inclusive and more impressive, giving a stronger message of our unity to the world. But this much definitely cannot be said of the conclave’s message. The charter it has drawn up to face up to the challenges confronting the nation so direly, both internally and externally, is all bare bones and very little meat. It is all generalities, no specifics which indeed were the imperative need of the hour. Even this omnibus message was dented with the motivated leaks by some eminences while the conclave was still in session. One leak reported an eminence having clamoured in the hall that if the world was making so much of noise against Pakistan there must be some reason to it. His gibe’s thrust and target is not hard to discern. But if his memory is not so short, he would know in the run-up to Iraq’s invasion, the Bush administration, together with its likeminded foreign allies and collusive western media and commentariat, dished up such a deafening shrill about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links that it downed all dissenting voices. Even the two top UN inspectors’, with the one on nuclear weapons stating categorically of having stumbled on no smoking gun while the other on chemical weapons saying the same, though with circumlocution. Subsequent events proved them right and the Bush war gang sinfully criminal. Perhaps our eminence could have held back on inflicting his own personal grouse on the conclave’s discourse when the issues under its deliberations were so urgent and important to the nation’s security and stability. And so could have eschewed another grandee from his drivel rooted in his self-serving fixations. He statedly asserted if it so desired the ISI could restore peace to Afghanistan within a month; with this, demonstrating himself a dude absolutely ignorant of the rabid domestic ethnicities and big power games in play in that country. But certain eminences swaggering on the national political landscape are congenitally so self-centred irredeemably that national imperatives’ niceties do not come any compellingly at all to them even in the nation’s gravest hours; it is the self that drives them overridingly even in such conditions. But let that pass. For the moment, it is the conclave’s charter that matters. Bluntly, the people had expected that the leaders would come up with roadmaps, action plans and specific measures to pull the nation out of the quagmire it is stuck up so irretrievably. But on that score they have disappointed the people dismayingly. Their charter is long on pious vows but very short on actionable ideas. They have spoken wisely, for instance, for negotiating peace with our own people in our tribal areas, for which they have called for putting in place a mechanism, whereas they should have themselves spelled out this mechanism, keeping in view the experiences of the peace accords that the state struck with the militants in Swat, Malakand and South Waziristan, each coming apart in the end, primarily for the militants’ intransigence. They indeed should have laid down the parameters for this negotiating process in rather detail. The same goes for their covenant to make Pakistan comprehensively self-reliant economically. Unarguably, they should have been very elaborative on this point, as a nation dependent on others even for budgetary support cannot even contemplate self-reliance, what to speak of achieving it. Given the complexity of the issue that the neglect of national economy and lifting it up from the broken state it has been in over the past so may years, they should have done a hard brainstorming how to fix it and evolved a roadmap meticulously to this purpose. They have not. And yet they want a parliamentary committee to oversee the implementation of this charter and the earlier resolutions, which too were rich in verbosity and destitute in action plans. So what has the committee to supervise? Mere slogans? At least, the leaders could have outlined the level of the committee’s authority, its functional purview and mechanisms at its command to discharge its responsibility. They have not. They have not set even a deadline for its formation. Indeed, they appear to have been swayed by a craze for sloganeering. So much so, they have gone for the charming slogan of giving peace a chance, apparently without understanding the project’s enormity, when the plug cannot be in some sole hand, particularly in the inter-state relations where the other party is very much an active and no lesser decisive actor. Still one hopes some good from this charter. The nation is really in urgent need of salvage.
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