On Tuesday January 30, 1962, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a former Prime Minister of Pakistan, was arrested from his Karachi residence on ambiguous charges of anti-state activities, under the Security of Pakistan Act. His real crime, however, was opposing General Ayub Khan’s martial law regime. Sixty-two years later, on the same day and date last week, another ex-PM, Imran Khan was sentenced to a 10-year jail term, on a flimsy charge of leaking state secrets by making a diplomatic cable or cipher public. The French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous phrase, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” or “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, has perhaps never rung truer. Like Suhrawardy, who at the time of that arrest had already been disqualified from electoral politics through the martial law regime’s Elective Bodies Disqualification Order (EBDO), Imran Khan too was barred from elections last year and remains imprisoned after a conviction on corruption charges.

That’s where the similarities between Suhrawardy and Imran Khan end though. Suhrawardy was an intellectual and political giant who stood firmly for parliamentary democracy, a pluralist nation state, and refused to endorse military rule. Imran Khan, on the other hand, is an authoritarian demagogue who was handpicked, groomed, installed into the high office, and sustained there by the army till they fell out. In addition to imposing a martial law four times, the Pakistan Army has ruled indirectly for most of the country’s existence. To that end, the junta has manipulated the political process by creating or coopting what it deemed ‘patriotic’ and pliant individuals and parties. The army’s chosen politicians, however, have invariably spun out of its orbit like former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and some even locked horns with the brass, like Nawaz Sharif.

They all ultimately paid the price for standing up to the army. And Imran Khan’s fate was not going to be any different. Chairman Mao Zedong had famously said that “the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party”. The gist of Pakistan’s perennial civil-military imbalance is that those wielding the guns clearly believe that no political party – including the assorted king’s parties that they sired themselves – should ever be allowed to command the gun. So when in late 2021, then PM Imran Khan tried to assert himself and insisted on retaining his closest ally Lt. General Faiz Hameed in place as the director general of the ISI, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa stonewalled him. Never mind that General Bajwa had himself presided over Imran Khan’s installation into high office in an arrangement called the hybrid regime. By that time, Imran Khan had already been losing the confidence and support of the military establishment, largely due to a horrifying mismanagement of the economy and shoddy governance. The generals who were rightly getting blamed for imposing and sustaining the disastrous Imran Khan project, decided to change horses. The opposition political parties saw the army’s proclamation that it would stay politically neutral, as a nod to lunge at Imran Khan. In April 2022, a rainbow coalition called the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which included the parties like the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) and Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Islam, supported by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), ousted Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) party’s government through a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly. PMLN’s Shehbaz Sharif became the PDM government’s PM.

Imran Khan, however, trained his guns on General Bajwa, holding him responsible for his downfall. He also tried unsuccessfully to forestall General Asim Munir – whom he had removed as the DG ISI — becoming the new COAS. While this escalated tensions between Imran Khan and the brass, the latter remained rather restrained. But all hell broke loose when on May 9, 2023 the PTI leaders and workers rioted against military installations after Imran Khan’s arrest. Imran Khan seemed to have calculated that with pockets of support within the army, judiciary, and general public, he could bring down the army chief through a coterie of generals allied with him and also upstage the PDM government. It was a monumental miscalculation and misreading of the army’s discipline and unity of command. The army cracked its whip and thousands of PTI cadres and leaders were arrested. Imran Khan himself was rearrested and remains incarcerated since. Scores of PTI leaders were forced to repent and pledge allegiance to the army publicly and quit the party. Independent political groupings and even a new party were carved out of the PTI. Imran Khan went from being the army’s darling to its detested demon. But he remained popular with his cult-like followers, something which worried the brass deeply. The PDM government’s own dismal economic performance, lackluster leadership like Shehbaz Sharif and total subservience to the junta, didn’t exactly capture the public imagination. The generals and the PDM, which virtually served as the hybrid regime on steroids, tried every trick in the book to buy more time to manage Imran Khan. The outgoing PM Shehbaz Sharif had the National assembly dissolved a couple of days before its term ended, which pushed the due date for fresh elections to 90 instead of 60 days. The PDM appointed the army’s chosen minions to run the caretaker government, stacking the executive and administrative deck against Imran Khan. A scheduled change of guard in the Supreme Court deprived Imran Khan of his patrons in the judiciary as well. The army, which through its allied judges had shielded Imran Khan in the past in assorted legal cases, now deployed the administrative and lower courts machinery to expediate proceedings against him. On the other hand, the former three-time PM Nawaz Sharif, whom the army had gotten convicted and disqualified from politics, and was living in self-exile in London, returned and got those verdicts reversed. While the charges against Sharif were trumped-up and politically-motivated, the relief coming their way was also seen as a political rapprochement between the PML-N and the army to pave the way for his ascent to the high office for a fourth time. Nawaz Sharif, now bereft of his anti-establishment plank and shouldering the blame for the PDM’s abysmal performance, however, needed more time to reconnect with and reenergize his base. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) delayed the polls citing a requirement to redraw the voting districts following an updated census.

While the PMLN, the PPP and other parties finally got their election campaigns off the ground, the army was simply not ready to leave anything to chance. The brass wanted even the remotest possibility of Imran Khan’s electoral victory or even a respectable loss, vanished. And the ECP obliged and stripped the PTI of its iconic election symbol – a cricket bat — on the technical grounds that it had not held intra-party elections. In a country with an abysmal literacy rate and preponderance of rural constituencies, an election symbol carries both brand value and polling-day utility. The ECP’s decision was clearly a ploy to undermine both. The Peshawar High Court overruled the ECP decision and restored the PTI’s election symbol, only to be overruled by the SCP. The otherwise well-respected Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa was widely criticized for a verdict that stood on very thin techno-legal ice. Without its leader who had been forced out of the chairmanship due to his legal predicament and an election symbol, the PTI, though not legally banned, was pushed out of the contest as an organized party. A bruised and battered PTI still managed to field a large number of candidates, who were now forced to run as independents and were whimsically given a confusing assortment of election symbols by the ECP. The army, however, was not satisfied still.

A day after the verdict in the cipher case, Imran Khan and his wife were given a 14-year prison term on charges of misappropriating from the Tosha Khanastate repository, several gifts he had received while in the office. But two major strikes against Imran Khan in two days were still not enough for the army. Imran Khan and his wife were fined and condemned to seven years in prison, on one of the most ludicrous and sleazy charges in Pakistan’s checkered judicial history. The couple were charged with contracting their marriage in violation of a Islamic requirement of a post-divorce waiting period called Iddah before which a woman is not supposed to remarry. The army and its henchmen in judiciary were plumbing new depths. Whatever the veracity of the allegations might be, but the unholy haste with which the kangaroo courts delivered these rapid-fire verdicts point to the army’s desire to seal Imran Khan’s electoral fate totally and irrevocably. Through these three verdicts, the army sought to paint Imran Khan as a national security risk, as well as a financially and morally corrupt leader, who not only stands a zero chance in this election but in the foreseeable future as well. There are other legal cases pending against Imran Khan, including those pertaining to the rioting against military installations, which could be expedited, especially, in the unlikely event of the PTI-backed candidates somehow mustering a victory on February 8. In that case, an eventual government reference to the SC seeking to ban the PTI remains well within the realm of possibility. At the time of this writing, the election campaign has ended in Pakistan, but the crackdown against the PTI workers and hounding of its rump leadership and potential voters continues unabated. Calls such as from the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, urging the Pakistani authorities to ensure a free and fair election, are too little and too late. While the pre-polls rigging by keeping the PTI from running as party and crippling its electoral machinery should be enough to deliver the army’s desired verdict, an election-day tinkeringcannot be ruled out.   

Assuming that the army has successfully vanquished Imran Khan come February 9, Pakistan will be looking at yet another civilian dispensation beholden to the junta. Nawaz Sharif, seen by many as the frontrunner, had started off by challenging the junta over its misadventures like the Imran Khan project. But along this campaign trail he chose to hold his silence over the army’s disastrous role in political engineering, while castigating the judges responsible for his 2017 ouster. The PMLN, and for that matter, the PPP or any other political party’s calculus seems to be that by confronting army over its political machinations, they risk falling out of favor with the brass. The army, for its part, has always had a penchant for introducing or picking multiple players and factions in the political arena. The tactic is conducive to the army’s strategic objective of retaining the ultimate power by coopting the politicians who, in turn, compete for its benefaction. The moment the collaborators of today try to assert themselves, they are trotted out and replaced with whoever is ready to do the army’s bidding at the time.  Samuel Finer has noted in The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics that “politically the armed forces suffer from two crippling weaknesses, which preclude them, save in exceptional cases and for brief periods of time, from running without civilian collaboration and openly in their own name … one weakness is the armed forces’ technical inability to administer any but the most primitive community. The second is their lack of legitimacy: that is to say their lack of moral title to rule”.  Pakistan’s foremost human rights defender, the late and much-lamented Asma Jehangir had put it much more simply, when she stated that the army’s generals are dangerous duffers out to ruin Pakistan. And by accounts of General Asim Munir’s interactions with the students at home and the Pakistani diaspora in Washington, D.C., Asma Apawas on the dot. One participant of the D.C. meeting described General Munir as an intellectual flyweight who underwhelmed the audience by his half-baked geopolitical views anchored in religious certitude and cliché verses that he misattributed to Pakistan’s national poet Allama Iqbal. Be that as it may, General Asim Munir, however, serves the army’s institutional imperatives and his sophomoric intellect, would matter very little.

What remains of profound concern is that the Pakistan Army, which considers itself the final arbiter of patriotism, national interest and the ultimate framer and executer of foreign and national security policies, has used the Imran Khan and PDM hybrid regimes to make a power and governance grab not seen since 1958 when General Ayub Khan imposed the country’s first martial law. The army got the PDM government to give constitutional and legal cover to its business enterprises and sweeping powers to its intelligence agencies. The army is much more deeply entrenched today than it was on the eve of 2018 elections. While the PMLN and the PPP made no mention of the civil-military relations, foreign policy, the simmering conflict in Balochistan and the disastrous security situation in several Pashtun regions, during the elections campaign, these are realities that would have to be grappled with. The army with its burgeoning business empire, a voracious appetite for budgetary allocations, and now a constitutionally-sanctioned seat at the economic policy table, is more deeply involved than ever in the fiscal affairs as well. Manifestos and rhetoric of the political parties, including the PTI’s, however, sounded more like a wish list rather than policy prescriptions for the deep economic crisis that Pakistan is in. Whoever forms the government will be dictated to by the army sitting atop the tutelary commanding heights. History, however, informs us that even the weakest PMs like Muhammad Khan Junejo and Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali ended up having differences with the strongest army dictators, General Ziaul Haq and General Pervez Musharraf, respectively. Nawaz Sharif himself was ousted thrice by the army when he tried to assert his constitutional authority. The power dynamics of the de jure authority and de facto rulers is such that once in the office, the former invariably seeks agency that’s due their moral title. What follows is the replacement of old collaborators with the new ones. And it won’t be any different this time regardless of whether the army plans to consort with the new dispensation for 10 days or 10 years in the so-called Bangladesh model of a diarchal controlled democracy. None of this is lost on Imran Khan’s political opponents and the army with which they have made a common cause. But they still chose to destroy democracy in order to save it from Imran Khan.

Pakistan has a long history of rigged elections and manufactured mandates. This election would rank right up there with the 1985 party-less vote under General Zia-ul-Haq and the 2002 polls under General Musharraf and would have equally disastrous consequences lasting an equally long period, if not more.

That Imran Khan is a vindictive demagogue who had hounded not just his foes but friends as well and sought to perpetuate himself in the office through undemocratic means, is not moot. But even he should have had a fair judicial trial as well as a fair chance in the court of public opinion. Pakistan has long history of rigged elections and manufactured mandates. This election would rank right up there with the 1985 party-less vote under General Zia-ul-Haq and the 2002 polls under General Musharraf and would have equally disastrous consequences lasting an equally long period, if not more. The way the army has manipulated the executive, parliamentary, judicial, and electoral machinery to keep Imran Khan out, hasn’t just undermined those very institutions for here and now; it has set the stage for instability and political chaos for years to come. Pakistan’s already dysfunctional democracy has been dealt a near-fatal blow. What’s past is prologue; no matter who wins the elections, it is the military who will rule the roost. 

Mohammad Taqi

The writer is a Pakistani-American columnist and commentator. He tweets @mazdaki.

The post Here’s Why The Results Of Today’s Elections Are Totally Irrelevant appeared first on Dissent Today.

Pakistan stands not just on the brink of an economic disaster today but also faces an imminent meltdown of its state institutions. With each passing day, the Pakistani state looks increasingly dysfunctional. While there is an elected coalition government at the helm, the country appears rudderless. The parliament has been rendered ineffective and irrelevant by the largest opposition party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of former prime minister (PM) Imran Khan, staying out of the National Assembly.

Unwilling to enter a dialogue with the government, Imran Khan has been calling for fresh elections, since his ouster through a vote of no-confidence in April last year. The PTI chief had a very public falling out with his patron, the former Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa in November 2021, eventually leading up to Khan’s ouster. The rancor between the two has by leaps and bounds since, with Khan dragging General Bajwa over the coals daily. The President of Pakistan, Dr. Arif Alvi – a PTI partisan – has locked horns with the country’s Chief Elections Commissioner (CEC) over the dates for provincial elections that come due in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and the Punjab provinces, after the PTI dissolved the two assemblies. After the president, the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SC) jumped into the fray over the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) dithering and ordered various authorities to fix the dates. But in the process, the SC, and especially the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP)  made a very controversial public spectacle of itself. Four SC judges openly dissociated themselves from the CJP, effectively expressing their distrust in how he is presiding over the highest court of the land. The development was highly unusual but not unprecedented. In 1997, a majority of SC judges had rebelled against the then CJP, albeit for different reasons.

What is unprecedented though are the palpable divisions in the army brass. The Pakistan army, arguably the most powerful entity in the country, has been an extremely disciplined outfit. Technically, a department of the ministry of defense, the army sees itself as an institution in the Pakistani state structure, which has always acted in unison to preserve its institutional interests. And for all practical purposes, the army is the chief and chief the army. While the decision-making is collective, the COAS is the face of the army’s unbridled power. But when the army decided upon the controlled demolition of its failed hybrid regime experiment, wherein it ruled jointly with Imran Khan, the brass, especially General Bajwa faced criticism from the officer class. In the end, the army went through with dismantling its Imran Khan project but in the process discovered itself to be a divided house. The incumbent COAS, General Syed Asim Munir, whose appointment Imran Khan had cast aspersions over, hasn’t been heard from much. While this could be him keeping in line with the army’s proclamation that it intends to remain neutral in the political matters or a more plausible scenario where the COAS hasn’t consolidated his authority.

Decades of army patronage have helped Imran Khan create not just a devoted public following but also a sizeable following within the civil bureaucracy, judiciary and, above all, the armed forces. The odious potion disparaging traditional politics and politicians, which the army had helped him peddle, was also consumed by its own. Capitalizing on his support in the army rank and file, Imran Khan has continued with his relentless assault on the former COAS Bajwa. Large sections of media, which previously parroted only the official army line, have sided with Imran Khan, drawing some notable but ineffective reprimand orchestrated by the current brass. And case after case, the superior judiciary, which has been the army’s handmaiden for the better part of the country’s existence, has given Imran Khan a kid glove treatment, indicating either a nod from a section of the brass or trying to chart its own course absent a directive from the army. Pakistan is, in effect, a house divided against itself. Add to this volatile mix a resurgence of the home-grown Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists, and disaster in near future is writ large.

Most, if not all, the factors contributing to the morass Pakistan finds itself in today, are of the army’s making over the past 65 years, and should be put into perspective, when looking for a way out. While Pakistan was founded on the basis of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory, as a country for the Muslims of India, not much else about the direction the new state would take was clear. Jinnah, who passed away after year of the country’s founding, was not much of a writer and didn’t leave any written treatise about the national, constitutional, and economic orientation of the nascent state. His thoughts and vision were expressed mostly in his speeches and correspondence. Jinnah’s actions and views – often self-contradictory — were meticulously archived by Jinnah and his associates, but have been interpreted, unsurprisingly, by his detractors and admirers according to their own political, religious or ideological leanings.

In the absence of a clear roadmap, this makes his legacy infinitely negotiable and thus problematic to derive legitimacy from. The debates in the first Constitutional Assembly clearly show that politicians such as Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ghaffar Khan and Bhupendra Kumar Datta et al had presciently called for the new state to be a pluralistic and progressive democratic federation of the diverse religio-ethno-national entities it included. Suhrawardy even warned that limiting trade ties with India and levying tariffs on exports would have dire economic consequences. But most importantly, he suggested replacing the Muslim League (ML) with what he called a Pakistan Nationalist League.

On the other hand, Jinnah’s close associates like the first PM Liaquat Ali Khan and scores of clergymen the founding father had gathered in his ML and in the assembly, proposed an Islamic identity for the state, and prevailed. But the bickering ML leaders, large numbers of whom had no electoral base in Pakistan, quickly lost political ground to a combination of the civil-military bureaucracy, out of which the army eventually prevailed.

After the partition of India, Pakistan inherited about one-third of its military and under one-fifth of its population and revenue sources. Being the largest organized entity in the new country’s chaotic polity, the army not only grabbed power in 1958 but also clearly enunciated its vision for the new state based on “Islamic ideology”. The military establishment anointed itself the guardian of not just the physical frontiers of Pakistan but also of the ‘ideological frontiers’ and smeared as anti-Islam and traitor, anyone who would challenge that notion. The usurper junta desperately needed a fortifying cement for the multi-ethnic state that would not just hold the various ethno-national entities in the two wings together but also legitimize and consolidate the military’s controlling position. The army made a conscious decision to transform Pakistan into an ideological, national security state as against a democratic, pluralist nation-state championed by politicians like Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, whom the military had toppled and disparaged. Field Marshal Ayub Khan codified, in writing that the supra-ethnic Pakistani identity was to be Islamic in ideology and anti-India in military orientation, while its economic model would be a quasi-market economy literally financed by the US and western aid. To peddle its version of nation-building without any opposition, the junta cracked down on both the free press and political opposition.

All militaries, however, are uniquely ill-trained professionally and intellectually to rule the complex civilian societies, multi-ethnic states and modern governments, and invariably fall back on civilian collaborators. Discussing this design flaw in the militaries world over, Samuel Finer points out in The Man on Horseback: the role of the military in politics, that “politically the armed forces suffer from two crippling weaknesses, which preclude them, save in exceptional cases and for brief periods of time, from running without civilian collaboration and openly in their own name … one weakness is the armed forces’ technical inability to administer any but the most primitive community. The second is their lack of legitimacy: that is to say their lack of moral title to rule”. And this has rung true in case of every army dictator who has ruled Pakistan.

After an initial rule purely by the junta, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf, all brought in a coterie of pliant civilians to run the government. Every single Pakistani dictator resorted to coercing and coopting the superior judiciary, introducing some aberration into the constitution and/or manipulating the parliament to give legitimacy to their rule. From elections heist to fraudulent presidential referenda, from sham devolution of governance to local bodies to raising or appropriating political parties, from martial law to presidential rule, and from a tutelary role to a hybrid regime, the army has tried every trick in the book cling on to power. And predictably the playbook has not changed one bit since the first martial law.

Decades of constant meddling in the political process, tampering with the constitution, and manipulation of the state institutions, however, has had catastrophic consequences. Perpetual political engineering by the army has not just stunted the natural evolution of the state institutions but has made them disfigured and dysfunctional. Visualizing the smaller nations like the Baloch, through the national security lens rather than an equitable rights-based approach, and consequently unleashing a dirty war on them has pushed them to alienation and militancy. Additionally, the army’s use of jihadist proxies to prosecute its warped foreign policy has had bloody domestic blowback in the form of groups like the TTP that have been unleashing terror at home for over a decade-and-a-half.

The military, which is also the country’s leading business enterprise, however, has a vested interest as an economic class that it seeks to secure and perpetuate. It benefits immensely from fomenting discord with Pakistan’s neighbors as that helps it not only retain its preeminent position as the arbiter of national interest and security but a direct beneficiary of the domestic defense budget allocations and foreign military aid.

Perpetual political engineering by the army has not just stunted the natural evolution of the state institutions but has made them disfigured and dysfunctional.

The national security state façade is built at the expense of economic growth and diverts resources from health, education and social welfare sectors and tramples upon civil liberties and provincial autonomy. But while the army would seek to preserve its powerful position in Pakistan’s polity, the virulent mutations it has introduced into the state structures over the past decades, and especially during its hybrid regime experiment with Imran Khan, have compounded exponentially. The rot in the organs of the state is deeper than anyone thought, and it has put their viability into question. A fundamental reason that had kept the army’s four martial law regimes and a near-uninterrupted tutelary status afloat was the largesse received primarily from the US as an ally during the Cold War and the so-called War on Terror, to a lesser extent from Saudi Arabia and Gulf Sheikhdoms for mercenary duties, and later on from China for serving as a client counterweight to India. With the windfall from all these patrons effectively drying out over the past several years, the ugliness of the praetorian ventures has been laid bare. The tiff between Imran Khan and General Bajwa came to light after their bickering over the appointment of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) director, but it truly had started over the country’s coffers drying up when the international gravy train came to a grinding halt.

The situation as it stands today is untenable. Pakistan looks down an economic and political abyss. Problems are myriad and solutions far and few between. It would take a herculean effort on part of the political parties to first come together to take stock and then bring the public at large, onboard to understand the gravity of the complex the crises the country is in. The political effort would have to be geared towards demanding of army to put its money where its mouth is. The army has proclaimed that it has decided to stay neutral and not meddle in the political affairs.

But that is not enough. Both the former army chief, General Bajwa and his ex-chief spook, Lt. General Faiz Hameed have confessed to violating the constitution and installing their blue-eyed boy Imran Khan in the high office. Before that, the duo had the orchestrated, in connivance with the superior judiciary, the disqualification of the erstwhile PM Nawaz Sharif on cooked-up corruption charges. In addition to that, their hands are smeared with the blood of the Baloch and illegal detentions of the Pashtun nationalists. The army could show the veracity of its words by bringing the two to book. The chances are, however, slim to none that anything of the sort would transpire. On the contrary, the army might actually go back on its word and consider an overt intervention if it decides that its institutional imperatives to preserve and perpetuate its preeminence demand such a drastic move.

Samuel Finer has discussed that a military putsch is generally a function of and an interplay between an army’s disposition to intervene vis-à-vis the opportunity existing on the ground for such intervention. Pakistan’s history has shown that its army has always maintained a relentless disposition and readiness to intervene. It has seized the opportunity when one popped up or manufactured one if none existed. The current political instability is reminiscent of the 1976-77 bitter feuding between the then PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the opposition parties, which culminated in General Ziaul Haq taking full advantage of the chaos and imposing martial law. While the economic viability and international acceptance of a martial law regime today would be questionable and make such intervention less likely, it might serve to consolidate the incumbent COAS’ rather precarious position within the brass and rally the army behind him. Another wild card is the judiciary, which while appearing to side with Imran Khan currently, may eventually cast its lot with the army when push comes to shove.

The politicians, especially those in the coalition, have to put their house in order to preempt and stymie any adventurism. To bring Pakistan back from the brink requires a political will and capacity of the Himalayan proportions, which the incumbent civilian dispensation seems to lack. It would, however, behoove them to at least try to build a consensus for a new charter of democracy that calls for holding the previous putschists and their collaborators among the judiciary, bureaucracy, and politicians accountable.

There are already calls from the senior coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) to court-martial the former ISI chief, General Faiz Hameed, and proceeding against the complicit judges. But as General Hameed has himself declared, he was but an operative – albeit a powerful one – in a grand institutional scheme authored by the top brass and commissioned by General Bajwa. Instead of punitive measures against him, the political leadership should call for a truth and reconciliation effort, the forum for which should be the parliament. But that would require a massive political heavy lifting and vigorous narrative-building, for which the current government does not have the intellectual bandwidth and institutional wherewithal. There does not appear to be any organic grassroots effort on the horizon either that would hold the civil and military elite’s feet to the fire. Sections of the intelligentsia have made the clarion call, but absent a political response to it, prospects of bringing Pakistan back from the brink are dim.

Mohammad Taqi

The writer is a Pakistani-American columnist and commentator. He tweets @mazdaki.

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