Strategy In Our Pockets - Syed Moazzam Hai

The disaster began in the 1970s. The Z A Bhutto government – in search of strategic depth – provided shelter to Afghan dissidents. The government also embarked on a massive nationalisation programme that opened the doors of companies, industries, banks and educational institutes for loyalists in the party and bureaucracy. That laid the culture of mass-scale corruption and erosion of discipline in the country and society. 

General Zia’s era sunk us deeper into the business of digging strategic depth in Afghanistan and minting dirty money in Pakistan. Hypocrisy won grassroots popularity; from duplicity in international affairs to purging interpersonal sins such as corruption by personal prayers and rituals, hypocrisy reshaped our national character. Everything and everyone deemed helpful in prolonging the general’s rule – from armed, unarmed bureaucrats to politicians, jihadists, extremists to ethnic outfits, drug dealers to land mafias – were allowed to play foul at will.

The 1990s saw steady advancement and growth on both fronts – our infatuation with strategic depth in Afghanistan and occupation in the business of corruption. 9/11 brought windfall gains for General Musharraf’s regime and after the 1980s it was yet another heavy monsoon of dollars, riyals and dirhams drenching the ruling class with easy moolah.

Some of the spilled over droplets of this helped the economy gain a facelift – though as thick as thin layered makeup. Corruption became institutionalised, and the business of duplicity evolved holistically to become our unmistaken identity in the world.

The post-NRO ‘democracy’ flung us to the climax of the process that had begun in the 1970s. Corruption became our daily lifestyle and our crude ingenuity in the art of deception rendered us totally unreliable. Terrorism and corruption overwhelmed the country and its society. The country’s debt soared from around Rs6,000 billion to around Rs14,000 billion while nearly half of the population became food insecure.

We stand today on our knees, faced with many inevitable wars that we will have to fight despite our unwillingness. The Taliban, outlawed sectarian and extremist outfits across Pakistan, criminals gangs, land mafia, extortionists, kidnappers, street criminals, every group and individual that carries a gun and challenges the writ of the state in any way, every no go area, every state within the state – we will have to wage a war against them or this anarchy would veritably become uncontrollable.

Besides these internal wars, we will have to finally confront the multifarious patrons of proxy wars on our soil. We will have to act definitively to prevent international actors from staging their sectarian wars in Pakistan, the Afghanistan government from backing the Taliban in Pakistan, India, US, UK and all other foreign powers from abetting insurgency and instability in Pakistan. We will have to act aggressively against India’s water aggression.

We will also have to decisively talk to ‘our brothers’ who appear apprehensive of an emerging Gwadar overshadowing their glitzy port towns to let us also progress peacefully.

We will have to persistently and permanently ensure zero external militant interference in our country and zero militant interference from our soil into other countries. We will have to modernise our defence especially in areas of drone, robot and laser warfare and will have to have a much bigger and modern air force presence. We will also have to develop, expand our indigenous defence research and production capabilities.

The above challenges need our pockets to be deep and loaded. That we do not have. Corruption has literally left us dry and unfortunately we see nothing substantial being done to extract the looted money. We are yet to know where the Rs8,000 billion debt went into.

Would our rulers allow any of their private business managers get away even with a few millions in embezzlement? Then why don’t they seem bothered about recovering the thousands of billions that have been looted in corruption? The end of corruption and recovery of the looted money are crucial to strengthening the economy.

Furthermore, the economy cannot be built by a few mega projects alone especially when the economic capital of the country, Karachi, remains reduced to the level of just another dilapidated plundered goth (village) of the kingdom of Sindh where the writ of local patharay-daars (local dons) rides above everything, the raajdhani where hundreds of millions could be spent on celebrating Sindh’s culture but not on Sindh’s dying children.

Our strategic depth lies in the depth of our pockets which cannot be filled by aid and alms from the US, EU and Saudi Arabia. All this needs a strong economy, which will only be possible by uniform upward-to-downward elimination of crime, corruption and state mismanagement, recovery of looted thousands of billions and uncompromised application of law across the country from Waziristan to Karachi, Rawalpindi to Gwadar. Instead of looking around we need to look into our pockets for strategic depth. If you have it there you have it everywhere.

Email: moazzamhai@yahoo.com

From: TheNews