Bonhomie must prevail

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

The tiff between the civilian leadership and the military command must be put paid to at any rate as this is what the supreme national interest demands compulsorily and obligatorily. Any clash between state institutions has never served a nation; it has rather invariably hurt it, often irreparably. And in our given unenviable conditions, a clash would certainly be just disastrous, to say the least. There is no room whatsoever for any sort of intransigence, haughtiness and egotism, so direly are we placed presently quite visibly. In the greater national interest, the past be left behind to look towards the present and the future, particularly when both the civilian leadership and the top brass are no aliens but compatriots, neither definitely wishing their nation ill. Bonhomie must prevail between the two at any cost and stridency must cease to be matched with stridency in any event. Reconciliation must necessarily become their inspirational and guiding light. Harmony between the two must come about imperatively.And, for a change, compulsive cheerleaders and conspiracy-theorists must take rest, stop trying driving wedges between the two leaderships with their fond shenanigans and not add to the woes of the masses feeling so dismayed over the tiff that, in the first place, should not have been there at all. Already, this squabbling has begun exacting a heavy cost on the nation. Although vile militants and terrorists prowling on the land are intrinsically demoniac mercenary killers, given to evil-doing at the behest of their wicked masterminds and financiers, it cannot be ruled out if from this discord they have taken a bigger heart to ply their trade of bloodletting. Over these very days, they have veritably stepped up their terrorist activities, singling out security assets in particular for their murderous assaults.No lesser worrisome are the tricks being played on us by our American friends while our two leaderships are taken up by their own imbroglio. Their ostentatious pious stance about this acrimony will be insane to take at its face value. It has deeper motives. By apparently standing on our civilian leadership’s side, they in reality are enveloping it with an unbridgeable gulf with the military top brass so as to play their end-game in Afghanistan by sidelining Pakistan. Their rhetoric of Pakistan being indispensable for any Afghan peace dispensation is, curiously, no more heard as fervently as in the past. By every indication, Pakistan is not in the loop of the peace dialogue they have initiated with the Afghan Taliban. Notably, over these past ten year, they had been vilifying the Pakistani establishment on every world forum on accusation of harbouring Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his top companions in Quetta, labeling them as Quetta Shura, touting it to at Pakistan army’s and ISI’s beck and call. And now they are planting leaks in their media that Pakistan is not aboard the peace dialogue because the Taliban want Pakistan out of it. But in their own statements confirming their talks with the Americans, the Taliban have expressed no such reservations. Nor have they said they want Pakistan out because they want to conduct their dialogue with the Americans uninfluenced by it. It is the Americans who are saying this. Their real intent could then well be understood from this. They indeed had even kept Afghan President Hamid Karzai in dark on their dialogue with Taliban. He too came to know of it when media reports surfaced that the Taliban were about to open their office in Qatar in connection with their peace talks with the Americans. In a huff, Karzai withdrew his ambassador from that Gulf state. And seemingly the dialogue stalled. It is to be seen if at all Karzai will be on the negotiating table, for the caveat that the Taliban do not want to talk peace with him as they view him simply as a US puppet and hence no plausible peace interlocutor. The Americans are, anyway, promising him to lead the peace dialogue once their talks with Taliban get into greater stride. How would they do it must be known to them. But, to all intent and purposes Pakistan, for the time being at least, is just out. A bickering Pakistani top leadership surely stands them in good stead to perpetuate their ulterior designs in Afghanistan, where we already have been left high and dry in spite of suffering tremendous human, material and multifarious losses by stupidly becoming their Afghanistan adventurism’s part. To India, they have got a strategic partnership pact with Afghanistan, which in time will be of great grief to us. The Iranians too have clinched a defence agreement with Afghanistan. And while we have laid down the lives of some 5,000 security personnel and 35,000 civilians for the sake of Afghanistan’s peace and security, we have been left in the cold to watch others embed there. Our own security concerns in Afghanistan have been given a short shrift. If nothing else, at least this must impel our civilian leadership and the military top brass to set aside their discords, create harmony in their ranks and put up a united front for our security concerns’ redress in Afghanistan. Otherwise, our western border will become as much a permanent security headache for us is the eastern border.