Re: ‘In The Line Of Fire’ (Merged)
It’s not just Cowasajee, but also Ayaz Amir (one of the bitterest critics of Musharraf) who is recognising that Pakistan under General sahib is a lot, lot freer than it ever was under our touted democrats.
ISLAMABAD DIARY: Second thoughts
By Ayaz Amir
“Among mortals second thoughts are always best.” (Forgive me Euripides for quoting you again.) OUR history is replete with events that should not have happened: plots, coups, conspiracies, one or two high-profile assassinations, open season for charlatans and adventurers of every hue and description. Against the backdrop of this legacy, a head of state writing his memoirs “while in office” hardly qualifies as the most cardinal of sins. Of course this is not the done thing. When you are supposed to be guarding the nation’s secrets you can’t bare all and if you do, you violate your oath of office. These arguments have been rehearsed and indeed done to death since the unveiling of Gen Musharraf’s (ghost-written) ‘In the Line of Fire’. But if memoir-writing “while in office” was the worst thing that could happen in Pakistan, we would count ourselves a lucky people. The book has been accused of selectivity regarding the life and times of our current saviour (three having preceded him). From its pages emerges less mortal Musharraf than Superman Musharraf, always right, invariably courageous, omniscient and infallible. But in the field of scholarship if freedom reigns, there is no great harm in selective history, or even the writing of fairy tales, provided there is opportunity for giving the other side of the story. Beloved Leader Kim Jong Il writing his memoirs is one thing. Gen Musharraf doing the same is a different matter. If he has presented himself as superman everyone, including aunts and uncles, have been busy trashing him — contributing to book sales no doubt. The only thing worse than being talked about, as Wilde put it, is not being talked about. Musharraf’s disparaging remarks about Lt Gen (retd) Ali Quli Khan are perhaps reprehensible. But they would have been inexcusable if Ali Quli had no chance to rebut them. But he has issued a rebuttal at length (and it’s a good one too) which makes the score even. Self-glorification unchecked may be an unqualified pain but if it can be debunked and even ridiculed, our understanding of the issues involved is heightened.
I can’t imagine the same kind of open and sustained criticism of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s ‘Friends Not Masters’. Tongue-in-cheek raillery perhaps but none of the heavy bombardment we have seen in this case. In Gen Zia’s days Begum Zia went on a visit abroad and the Frontier Post (since defunct I think) had a small front-page story saying that the begum had taken about forty pieces of onboard luggage with her and had been allowed so much (I forget the exact figure) foreign exchange. All hell broke loose and intelligence spooks, much more of a nuisance in those days, were all over the newspaper. If memory serves, there was even a sacking or two. By which I do not mean to say that our troubles are behind us and we have entered the Promised Land. But we should be able to see things relatively — contrasting one thing with another — and then determining gains and losses.
**Whatever else may have gone wrong, and much (alas) has, it has been a good time for the media — newspapers free to write what they want, their own incompetence (where present) their harshest liability, and television facing a situation where there are more channels than competent anchors available. True, there is outright tripe being served on most of the channels. But that’s hardly the fault of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). **Why aren’t the TV channels producing good documentaries? Why aren’t they coming up with good probing stories? Because they are lazy, an endearing national quality, and they like easy money — paltry investment, huge profits. It has to be handed to this generation of the army that it has learned to be tolerant of criticism. This is a good thing and may it never be reversed. Indeed, lesser satraps have shown themselves to be far less tolerant. We know what happened to a particular TV channel when in one of its talk shows there was an adverse remark about the Punjab chief minister, or one of his sons. Cable operators throughout the province were pressured to stop its transmissions.
Musharraf has taken a lot of criticism on his chin but he has not shown himself as thin-skinned as Pervez Ellahi. Perhaps the funniest remark in Musharraf’s book: “The Chaudry cousins (Pervaiz Ellahi and Shujaat Hussain) had been victims of some mudslinging, but they were good men.” You would have to take this one with a fistful of salt.** Not that military-allowed glasnost hasn’t paid dividends. We have a dictatorship in which one man calls the shots and all roads lead to Army House. But it is a slightly funny dictatorship where all things can be said by all men (and women). Opposition leaders get hoarse inveighing against the government all the time. In public they thunder, in private they are not averse to talking to the military government. **This has led to a double-faced crisis of credibility. No one believes the government. No one, sadly, believes Gen Musharraf. And no one believes the opposition parties, especially the holy fathers of the MMA whose credibility is several degrees below zero. There is justified criticism of the army — senior ranks, that is — entering every nook and cranny of the administrative services. All military saviours have looked after their constituency but none more so than Musharraf. We now have a ‘corporate’ military, more into things commercial, especially real estate, than anything as dull and prosaic as mere soldiering and fighting. A good thing too because, whatever the other consequences of this fast-moving trend, this is a guarantee we won’t get embroiled in futile adventures such as the ‘65 war and Kargil.
Indeed, the model the Pakistan army seems to be unconsciously pursuing is that of the Thai or Indonesian armies, useful for the occasional coup — to keep the political class in check, among other matters — but keeping well away from anything as foolish as war. We have had too much of jihad, too much of fire-breathing nonsense. Time to pull down the curtains, finally, on the Zia period with its legacy of guns, drugs and God knows what else. But even as we do this, we have to learn one thing — not to be pushed around too much by the Yanks. How we took the decision to side with the United States post-Sep 11 is now history. We should move on and be more concerned about the present.
If we were less confident about ourselves then, and more in awe of American power, we should have the eyes to see that the situation today is radically different. Thanks to Iraq, and also now increasingly to Afghanistan where anti-American resistance is gaining strength, the US is a more chastened power. If the American people have their wits about them — in the political field one can never be certain that they do, or what explains the choosing of such a leader as George Bush? — the Republican party should undergo a reality check in the mid-term congressional elections in November. That should encourage a little more humility. We should thus be setting down stricter parameters for our American relationship. We shouldn’t rupture this relationship — no reason to do so — but we should be curbing some of our excessive zeal for collaboration. And we should learn to keep our lips stitched about our nuclear programme. We have been sufficiently crazy about this already, talking of nuclear proliferation as if it was the proliferation of some wild plant in Islamabad. The golden rule to observe from now on — starting with the president who has a well-diagnosed problem of verbosity to contend with (we should be talking of a serious cure here): not a word in public about Dr A. Q. Khan or our nuke capability. Our loquacity has already caused much damage. Give the Americans an inch and they won’t be satisfied until they do a Qadhafi to our entire nuke programme. A word in praise of the putative writer behind Gen Musharraf’s book: political sage and counselor, Humayun Gauhar, who has followed hallowed family tradition in that his father, Altaf Gauhar, was said to be the brains behind Ayub Khan’s luckless ‘Friends Not Masters’. One of Humayun’s talented daughters is said to have been involved with him in the writing of ‘In the Line of Fire’, which makes it three generations of Gauhars in the service of the higher national interest as personified by our various military rulers.