Pakistan - #PeshawarAttack - Leadership in the age of terror

Ayaz Amir

Neville Chamberlain was British prime minister when the Second World War broke out. By the time of Hitler’s attack on France six months later it was clear to the British political class, especially in the House of Commons, that Chamberlain just would not do. And although Winston Churchill was not everyone’s idea of a popular figure – there being those who disliked him intensely – everyone was agreed that in Britain’s hour of peril he was the man to lead it. 

Our world war is the fight against religious extremism even if it has taken the Peshawar carnage to bring this home to most people. Much of the old confusion has melted away and there are no more takers for the nonsense so beloved of the political class that the scourge of religious terrorism was best addressed through talks and the endless holding out of olive branches. Even Taliban sympathisers, of whom there was no shortage in our climate, have had to hold their tongues and their horses.

When even Maulana Fazlur Rehman comes out against the Taliban, when even Imran Khan’s PTI comes out finally into the open against them, when brave women and men gather in front of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad to denounce the Taliban supporter, Maulana Abdul Aziz, when even a Taliban sympathiser like the interior minister Nisar Ali Khan has to change his tune – although for all his new bluster he still can’t come around to throwing Maulana Aziz out of Lal Masjid, who has no business addressing the Friday congregation or leading the prayers there – then we know that something fundamentally has changed.

But the leadership question remains. Does Nawaz Sharif have it in him to lead the nation in war? Can he be an effective war leader? The initial signs are scarcely encouraging. No one could have missed his lost and uncomfortable expression when he visited General Headquarters soon after the Peshawar barbarity. You did not have to be there to feel that the generals were taking the decisions while the war leader was there as a toneless symbol, not comprehending or not liking what was being said. The expression captured by the cameras says it all.

So what we are seeing in the aftermath of Peshawar is a takeover in all but name, the army calling the shots and the government and the other political parties struggling to keep up with the army, almost afraid not to be out of step.

Still, it could not be lost on anyone that while the army without a moment’s hesitation intensified operations against the Taliban, the government and the political class have given themselves a week’s time to think through a ‘national action plan against terrorism’. Were they sleeping all this while? Had they not emerged out of their peace trance? Did it require Peshawar for them to come to their senses? 

I have mentioned this before. Permit me to say it again. I had gone to the Staff College in Lahore to give some kind of a lecture and among the attending trainees was a key prime ministerial aide, by the name of Fawad. The topic was ‘terrorism’ and as at the time – a bit after the elections – the government was loudly proclaiming the preparation of a ‘counterterrorism policy’, Fawad, part of that exercise, was asked about it. Quoting, if I remember correctly, Roosevelt and other authorities, he took at least me by surprise when he said and repeated that while they were preparing a grand plan against terrorism the enemy had yet to be identified. 

With this enlightened frame of mind Nawaz Sharif’s government drifted into the All Parties Conference in September last year, the resolution passed at the end of it reading almost like an apologia for the Taliban. So it is hardly surprising that when the carnage in Peshawar happened, shattering the complacency of the political parties, they were left groping for answers and needed a week’s time to marshal their thoughts. 

Where in the world are decisions taken in this manner? The army went into action right away, without awaiting the wisdom of the political leadership. (Then we go red in the face talking of military-civilian imbalance.) Imagine Bhutto chairing the moot in Peshawar instead of Nawaz Sharif. We would have had an ‘action plan’ there and then…and an impassioned address to the nation into the bargain. There would have been no ducking of responsibility by taking cover behind the need for consultations.

Is this the way to pick up the pieces and defeat the scourge of religious terrorism? Pakistan needs leadership, now more than ever. In other than where his own interest is involved, the prime minister looks bewildered most of the time. Is he the man to provide this leadership?

Who can miss the dichotomy at work here? When it comes to projects close to his heart, to the exercise called ‘mega-projects’, there is no one more alert than Nawaz Sharif…no consultations for the unwanted metro project which has torn Islamabad apart, making parts of it look like a battle zone…no all-parties conference for such brain-testing ideas as a railroad track to Murree and Muzaffarabad.

If for most people Pakistan’s foremost problem is religious extremism, for the prime minister it is the Lahore-Karachi Motorway. And guess with whom the National Highway Authority has signed an MOU for this project? As revealed in a television programme, it is with a Chinese company and a Qatar company headed by ex-Senator Saifur Rehman.

This is rich. For this is the same individual, the same crony, who as head of the National Accountability Bureau during Nawaz Sharif’s last stint as prime minister, 1997-99, earned a reputation for hounding Sharif opponents. He was the one caught on tape talking to Justice Malik Abdul Qayyum – who at the time acted almost as a ‘family judge’ of the Sharifs, all cases pertaining to the family miraculously finding their way to his bench – and asking him to expedite the cases against Benazir Bhutto and her husband. The leaking of this conversation caused all the cases to collapse.

(According to one account, in Gen Musharraf’s time when Asif Zardari and Saifur Rehman came face to face in jail, Saifur Rehman did a bit of grovelling and asked his pardon. He later went to Qatar.)

Anyone could have been forgiven for thinking that after all this exposure and high drama we had seen the last of this colourful character. But old ties are thicker than water. He is back with more than a bang, involved in nothing smaller than the proposed Lahore-Karachi Motorway Project and, as the same TV report reveals, in a mega coal-fired power project near Karachi.

He is welcome to his projects but the point here is different. Should there be room for such blatant cronyism when the nation is in a state of war? The larger question is whether business tycoons, with endless commercial interests, can make good war leaders?

Even if inadequacy – in other than commercial matters – wasn’t enough of a factor, Imran Khan’s sustained political assault has further weakened and bruised the confidence of the present setup. The space thus created is being filled by the army. You don’t special specs to see this happening.

Can this arrangement last? Can the imagination of the Pakistani people be fired up by a clueless leadership? 

The democratic argument is interesting. Democratic continuity should on no account be compromised. But nagging thought: how does replacing Chamberlain with Churchill sacrifice democratic continuity? In our own time the Tory party in Britain put a knife in Mrs Thatcher’s back and replaced her with a more acceptable figure. The Labour Party got rid of Tony Blair. Pakistan seems to have no mechanism for a similar knifing arrangement.