Line in the sand

Columnist HUMAYUN GAUHAR warns us about the conspiracy against the Pakistan army.

We may have our internal differences. We may acrimoniously debate certain issues. Some of us may like democracy of one kind or another, or not at all. Some may hate the mullahs while others approve of them. Some may dislike the army’s involvement in government or be indifferent to it or want it. But when it comes to attempted disparagement by treachery, we see red. When our enemy lends a hand to those who would damage our country by damaging our army, all differences recede. We close ranks and draw a line in the sand. On one side of the line we stand. On the other stands the enemy who would destroy us by destroying the only remaining army in the Muslim world. The publication of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report by an Indian magazine has made us do just that. They realise not that when we take issue with our army it is our business. When our enemy starts butting in it is an entirely different matter.

The Turkish army was neutralised by being subsumed in NATO. The Iraqi Army was armed to the teeth and ‘persuaded’ to take advantage of the confusion in Iran and attack it, forgetting that you cannot attack a revolution and win. Lasted a war that virtually destroyed the Iranian Army. The powerful Iraqi Army was inveigled into invading Kuwait to create the justification for its destruction. Today, the only army of any consequence left in the Muslim world is the Pakistan Army. But the problem is, how does one destroy an army that is nuclear? Not by conventional war, for it would certainly lead to nuclear conflict. The answer is to destroy it in the eyes of its own people and the world by deprecation and ridicule. It’s a pretty clever ploy and it must not be allowed to work.

The first question is, how did they manage to get hold of the Report considering it was one of the few well-guarded secrets in Pakistan? The next question to ask is whose interests does it serve to destroy the army? The answer to the second question will identify the traitor. “I think lightly of what is called treason against a government,” said Theodore Parker in a speech on the Mexican War of 1846. “That may be your duty today, or mine. But treason against the people, against mankind, against God, is a great sin not lightly to be spoken of.” Bringing ridicule to a country by having its secret investigation into a debacle printed in an enemy country’s magazine is treason against its people and their God.

In the ‘Clash of Civilisations’, the rest versus Islam, the Muslim world is seen as the next potential superpower. So that potential must be nipped in the bud. Thus not only must its military prowess be curtailed, so must the other two sources of power: finance and media. The Muslims have had billions of petrodollars for decades, but they have not been able to create even a proper international commercial or development bank let alone set one of their currencies as the benchmark. They have no ability to muster capital and move it across international boundaries at the hit of a button, like the West can. The Muslims have many newspapers and television stations, but they don’t have a Press that can mould even the opinion of its people, leave alone the world. These three sources of temporal power (military, finance and media) will be denied to us as long as it can be helped or until we awaken from our somnambulism. Their temporary self-interest could not prevent us from acquiring the bomb. Now that we have it, it must be diffused so that when the impending political fallout comes in the oil world of the Middle East, a powerful Muslim army is not there to prevent them from maintaining their control. Better still, use a bombless powerful Muslim army, once again as an ‘ally’, to exercise that control.

The timing of the publication of the Hamood Report is ominous in itself, for it looks too much like a continuation of the ‘Rogue Army’ ads that were published in US newspapers during Kargil. India is bleeding in Kashmir as never before. They have to do something and it seems that some nefarious design is in the works. The ploy being used right now is to exclude Pakistan from any Kashmir settlement by making it irrelevant. The best way to achieve this is to ridicule its army and make it universally disliked and distrusted.

It is our own fault, though, that we have had to see this day. We should have made the report public when it was finalised in 1974 and acted upon its recommendations with alacrity. Instead, we hid it. There is nothing in it that we did not already know, the atrocities, the sexual misconduct and downright stupidity, the cowardice and dereliction of duty. The only surprise is that General ‘Tiger’ Niazi was smuggling Indian pan on the side. How pathetic! He set the stage for the ‘legal’ export of sugar to India from the factories of our Prime Minister and his cronies. Few know that the appellation ‘Tiger’ came not from valour but because Niazi used to accost waiters in the mess as ‘oi shera’ or ‘tiger’.

We go to extremes. Here was one report that was vitally important to the future of the country, and we hid it. Years later we had another report concerning match fixing by cricketers, and instead of taking those who had been identified as the culprits to court, we treated its recommendations as ‘verdicts’ and passed ‘sentences’ on them. Sadly, our tribulations and frustrations have made us completely lose track of what the rule of law is all about.

The rule of law demanded that all the officers identified as culprits in the report be court martialed immediately. Logic demands that this be done even now, even after all these years, at least of those officers who are still alive. South Africa went through a longer and greater trauma than we did, but lost no time in setting up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It has healed wounds and done them a lot of good. If we had acted upon the Report’s recommendations instead of hiding them, we would have expatiated our guilt and exorcised the demon. That we did not led to a lot of the suffering and many of the problems that we face today, for we are being punished for our sins against East Pakistan.

Sins? The animal lurks not too far beneath the surface in every human being. Scratch the surface just a bit and the raving animal emerges. When all social norms and laws break down, the animal comes out in all its madness. This is what happens with a conquering army. It pillages, it loots and it rapes. Russian soldiers raped 80,000 women and girls between the ages of eight and eighty during the first night of the conquest of Berlin. This is meant in no way to condone what happened in East Pakistan. Far from it. What happened there was atrocious, inhuman, treacherous and suicidal.

But East Pakistan was our own country. How could we behave like a conquering army? The reason was that we never treated East Pakistan as our own country. We treated it like a colony and could not tolerate the idea of a Bengali Prime Minister. With devolution now in serious vogue, what was so wrong with Mujib’s Six Points? Were they worse than the result that we managed to achieve by preventing him from rightfully taking office? Thus we did not behave as if we were subduing a civil war; instead we behaved if we had conquered another country. I keep saying ‘we’ rather than ‘the army’, for all of us in West Pakistan either mutely acquiesced in what was going on or applauded. We are all culpable, those of us who were alive and adult at the time.

If the government does not go ahead with the Report’s recommendations, are those officers who are still alive willing to remain damned forever? They should return their medals and decorations and voluntarily offer themselves for court martial. At the very least they will expatiate their guilt; at best we would learn long overdue lessons.

1) You cannot ask people to exercise their franchise and then dishonour it. Disaster results.

2) The adage is reinforced: War is too serious a matter for generals.

3) From there we arrive at the next adage: Government is too complex a business for generals. If they are running the government they can hardly be expected to fight a war and also look after the diplomatic and propaganda fronts and keep up the morale of the people.

4) Not least because of the pathetic performance of politicians, the army has come to assume, quite wrongly, that it has the answer to everything. It does not. It is neither the business nor the expertise of generals to read electricity meters, make political systems, hold accountability, monitor the performance of others in jobs they don’t understand, run cricket and hockey and everything else under the sun.

5) Thus they put the wrong people in the wrong jobs. Can a judge be a good general or a cricketer a good corps commander? The suggestion is as laughable as it is the other way around, no matter how seriously the generals running accountability, cricket and hockey may be taking themselves right now.

6) By running government they do the enemy’s work for it, because they grievously compromise the fighting ability of the army in the process.

Had the offending officers in East Pakistan been tried and, if found guilty, punished, many of the mistakes we have made since 1971 would not have happened. Our enemy would not have had this ammunition to fire at us. We have to save the army, even from itself, for without it we are naked and defenceless.