Our National Mea Culpa

The events have a life of their own and despite the best attempts to foretell, what consequences they might hold for the future, the final eventualities are often shrouded in the uncertainties. The ability to fathom and understand the events in hopes of removing some of the obscurities is not an easy task and neither is it an exact science. Despite the most vehement protestations of political scientists, there is no readily agreeable science to the study of politics. Politics are either considered as the art of the possible or a Faustian bargain depending upon the person, but there are no disagreements over the statement that politics offers the most summarized and the most cogent argument for an individual’s introduction into everything that is neither holy nor decent.

Pakistan and the people of Pakistan were bluntly introduced to this truism in the sequence of events, which preceded the siege of Lal Masjid and in the events, which unfolded after the rebellion of the Lal Masjid, against the government of Pakistan, was crushed. The purpose of this article is not to offer a chronology of the events leading up to the government’s attack on Lal Masjid and neither is it the intention of this article to join the shrill chorus of people blessed with a perfect hindsight. The intention of this article is to offer an alternate point of view and to pose the question as to where, Pakistan and Pakistanis as a nation seemed destined to be headed.

Pakistan, as a nation in the light of the past events, appears to be precariously balanced on the razor’s edge of disaster between chaos and anarchy. The politics of Pakistan pose more unanswered questions and the people of Pakistan are bewildered, because their questions, which worry them, are answered with more questions. It is not an issue of the politicians of Pakistan speaking in Delphic riddles, which the confused citizens of Pakistan cannot comprehend, but rather it is an inability of the politicians, themselves, to understand the questions that are being asked by the people of Pakistan.

The people of Pakistan had made a bargain with their government at the moment of Pakistan’s birth. The state of Pakistan promised its people that if they would be patient and tolerant, the government would compensate them for the price they had paid in creating Pakistan. The terms of the contract, between the government and its people was not a constitution of civic rights and responsibilities but rather an understanding that the people of Pakistan would give up their freedoms in exchange for security, but more importantly in favor of a continuity which would guarantee their physical existence and nurture their aspirations of the future. It was an extremely unfair arrangement, because the people of Pakistan were simply given the promise of an existence and in hopes of securing this promise, they had to agree not to hold their governments responsible for its failure in fulfilling its pledges to them.

Lal Masjid changed the paradigms of this relationship by questioning the very functionality of a government and reasons for which governments are created. According to the American Declaration of Independence, governments are created to bring life, liberty and happiness to their people and draw their legitimacy to rule over them from the consent of the governed. The consent of the governed was taken as an argument for establishment of a social contract that measured and regulated the freedoms of the governments, with the rights of the individuals and this became the basis for an enlightened political thought championed by Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau. This ideal of enlightenment became the model for political expressionism in the modern world. In the last century as the United States became the dominant world power, it was the notions of American political thought that became prevalent in the world and within this the idealism that existed in United States’ foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson’s pledge to bring democracy to the world.

It was this epistemology of democracy that Pakistan inherited at its birth and since this idea traced its roots to the Magna Carta that resulted in the birth of the British parliamentary democracy, Pakistani notions of democracy, as they developed, were alien to its own cultural political experience. The territories that constituted the nation of Pakistan had historically never experienced democracy, as a choice of government, and were more accustomed to the autocratic feudalism of the Mughul empire and later to the patronization of the British rule in India, which replaced the Mughul imperium. The political legacy of Pakistan, which would later become the source of the problems of governance faced by contemporary Pakistan, was that it never developed a tradition of dissent. In fact, the failure of Pakistan at crafting a successful democracy for itself was not due to a failure of the popular will wishing a democratic polity and neither was it a result of the old clichéd argument that Pakistan and its people, were too immature to handle democracy. The salient reason, why the process of introducing democracy in Pakistan was usually a stunted affair was that Pakistan never learned to reconcile the contradictions between its authoritarian past and its aspirations for an egalitarian future.

The national failure of Pakistan to develop a tradition of dissent, in its politics, meant that it would be incapable of defining the very nature of a democratic polity and the manner of democracy under, which it wished to be governed. In this sense, Pakistan and its’ people would become victims to the myth that once a western styled parliamentary democracy was instituted in Pakistan, it would be the panacea for all their political problems. This is not to suggest that democracy is not a viable option or to imply that democracy does not offer benefits to a polity, but to posit the caveat that the definition of democracy, in any polity, is open to an interpretation which is generally based on the collective sum of a nation and its political experience. It is simply not enough for a nation to want democracy, because the important question in the case of Pakistan or any other nation seeking democracy is not how it hopes to attain democracy, but rather what does it hope to gain by attaining democracy as its preferred mode of governance.

Lal Masjid’s contribution to the political debate, in Pakistan, was that it forced the people of Pakistan to consider some elementary realities about their government; the nature of political rule and to identify the levels of political discourse that exist between different political interests in Pakistan, which all demand and claim a stake in the politics of Pakistan. For the first time in the history of Pakistan, questions were asked demanding the clarification of the responsibilities of the government towards its people and for the government to clearly and unambiguously explicate the demarcation of its functionality; its raison d’etre and utilitarianism for governing Pakistan. The significance of the Lal Masjid, in the evolution of Pakistani political thought, was that it forced the people of Pakistan to reconsider the compact they made with their government, because in the eyes of the people of Pakistan, the government of Pakistan had failed in protecting their physical security and as long as the Pakistani governments, in the past, had offered a sense of physical security to its people, the people of Pakistan were quite content not ask for their political rights.

The people of Pakistan had certain expectations from their government and these included the idea that the primary obligation of their government was to safeguard the personal security of its citizens from both external and internal threats and not to favor or support policy or policy choices, which inflict harm upon its citizens. These were the explicit expectations that the Pakistani public expected from their government and within these, was the implicit expectation that the role of the government, in any country including Pakistan, is to create and sustain a political climate that allows the people to create a more representative system of government that allows for the effective implementation of social justice, economic and gender equality, and an equilibrium of the law, for all reinforced by the recourse to a due process of law and order, which is supported by a legal framework that is inclusive and not exclusive in the dispensation of justice.

The arguments of disappointment and critique that were voiced in the aftermath of the manner, in which the issues raised by the Lal Masjid were dealt by the government, were reflective of two facets in Pakistani politics. One was the recognition of the fact that the political debate in Pakistan still was still wedded to the principles of deniability and the second was the misperception and misunderstanding, which existed between the people and government in Pakistan. The German political philosopher, Frederick von Schiller, had written that “man learned nothing from history except that man learned nothing from history” and this was an accurate description of the Pakistani nation in the wake of the events of July 10, 2007. The mea culpa, in the context of the Lal Masjid, proved that the Pakistani nation had learned nothing from the experience of Lal Masjid and instead, was adamant in finding a scapegoat to bear the lash for their own sins, because the origins of the events surrounding Lal Masjid did not reside in the illegal occupation of the children’s library or in the visions of a puritanical clergy, but in the appeasement of the Pakistani nation to the policies of their own government, which sought to use Islamic militancy as leverage for its own interests in the past.

The American Declaration of Independence, perhaps the most enlightened of all enlightened political documents, claimed that governments are created to bring happiness to their people and though it may be a laudatory aim, it is not the intention or the role or the reason why governments are constituted. The intention and function of a government is to create an illusion of a continuum in the life of the nation by reassuring the people of the certainty of life and existence of a law and order in order to facilitate the task of governance and to maintain the conditions that would prevent the regression of the polity into a Hobbesian state of nature. The covenant of sovereignty, which underlies the principles of political institutionalism and in return, establishes the writ of the state over its people resides in a mutual agreement, between the people and their government, over who has the dejure right to decide and to monopolize the powers of retribution in a political state. Therefore, the reasons which explain the existence of governments imply that governments come into existence and derive, to paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, their legitimacy from the consent of the governed to allow their governments to utilize the powers of violence on the behalf of its citizens.

The legalism, which allowed governments and states to use violence as a legitimate tool of state power, was solemnized in 1648 in the town of Westphalia, in Germany, and it was out of this rationale, that the modern nation state came dominate to international relations. Another outcome of the Treaty of Westphalia was that it denied religion any role in the execution of state power and prerogatives by allocating the political right to declare wars and make peace to the secular powers and not to the papacy. Hence, the authority of the modern nation state, upon its people, rested not in any moral claims, but in its war making powers, externally, and its domestic powers, over its citizens, lay in its ability to monopolize violence by arrogating to itself the sole right to punish those who violated its laws.

In terms of Pakistan, what this implied was that the state of Pakistan and its government would have simply eased to exist, in an international regime still influenced by Westphalia, had they not responded to the politics of Lal Masjid, which was openly challenging the government of Pakistan over the monopolization of retributive state violence. Secondly, Pakistan would have forfeited its sovereign rights in the international system had it allowed for the violation of the truisms of Westphalia and had appeased the right of non-state actors, the clergy of Lal Masjid, and not the secular government to define its war making powers and thus, ipso facto assume all the sovereign rights of a nation state, but without any accountability of a nation state in a modern international system. Finally, and the reason why the government of Pakistan was finally forced to undertake a military response against Lal Masjid and remove the threat by force, was the realization that the international system may tolerate variations of an equivalent and parallel power structure within a state, but would have not accepted the emergence of a parallel international order that would have sought to challenge the supremacy of the Westphalian model of international relations.

As Cardinal Richelieu once noted, the soul of man is immortal and the salvation of man lies in the Hereafter, but the salvation of nations only exists in the present and there is no Hereafter for nations, which perish in the world. If, and had, the Government of Pakistan maintained its inaction and allowed the worldview of Lal Masjid to capture Islamabad and from Pakistan to be exported outside into the neighboring states, it would have acquiesced in the creation of a parallel international order and would have suffered the consequences for it. The consequences for the establishment of Sharia, in the eyes of the international community, is the people who practice and implement Sharia deem to hold themselves accountable to no one, but God and in a Westphalian system of international order, nations are accountable for their actions via the mechanism of international laws and treaties that bind and govern international relations. The international opinion would have tolerated and accepted the existence of Sharia, or Islamic government, within the specificity of geographic boundaries; nations, but would not have accepted such a proposition if the intention was to spread Sharia internationally and in the process, seek to challenge and undermine the system of international order that was already in existence. The failure of the Pakistani government to act, would have created the reasons and the rationales for an international intervention into the domestic politics of Pakistan and had that eventuality occurred, the same people who are presently critiquing the government for using harsh measures to quell the rebellion of a parallel state inside Pakistan, would have been the loudest in complaining that Pakistan had capitulated and appeased its sovereignty to outside powers, when Pakistani territory would have been occupied by foreign armies.

As mentioned earlier, the roots of the misunderstanding and misperceptions that exist, between the Pakistani people and their government, stem from an inability of the political debate in Pakistan to explain the issues, to the people, and in this sense, the media in Pakistan must also shoulder its fair share of blame. The media’s role, in the matter of reporting on the events surrounding Lal Masjid, was the most confused and contradictory of all the participants. The media in Pakistan is still subjective in its reporting and instead of objectivity in its analysis; it tends to cater to the gallery of popular opinion, which in the case of Pakistan, unfortunately, is also misinformed and prone to influences of sentimentalism and emotionalism. The media, touting its new found freedom of expression, while focusing its attention, and in the process the nation’s attention on Lal Masjid, seemed to be seduced by its own importance because instead of reflecting the reality of the situation, it seemed eager to manufacture the reality itself. The media’s conduct in this matter offered a strong justification to the idea that the media should be held responsible and accountable for its actions, because the freedom of expression, to report, must never be allowed as excuse to escape accountability.

It was the media, which initially raised Cassandra cries, when the students of Lal Masjid started to flex their political power, in Islamabad, and it became one of the government’s most vocal antagonists demanding that the government stop the “creeping of Talibanization” inside Pakistan by acting to uphold the writ of the state. In fact, the media anchors, on many different television channels, seemed to have lost their sense of proportion and started to act, as intermediaries between the clerics in Lal Masjid and the government, in resolving the crisis. The notions of media accountability must arise from the fact that, while the media appears quite willing to blame the government, it does not seem to admit its own role in fermenting and pushing the issues towards a confrontational stage. The purpose of the freedom of expression, in a media, makes allowance for the media to identify with issues and even support or resist a particular issue, but it does not mean that the media should foist its own sense of morality into the issues.

The media’s failure was categorical in the sense that it portrayed the events in a moralistic prism and in doing so, did not fully explain to the public what were the real issues involved. The issue, and point of the confrontation, which the media glossed over, was that once it had exhorted the government to re-establish the writ of the state, it should have informed the public that reinforcement of the writ of state would be based on the use of force and use of force will invariably lend itself to loss of life. The utopian nature of media demanded that the Pakistani government restore the writ of the state by agreeing to all the demands of the Lal Masjid clerics and in doing so, the media confused its role in the tradition of dissent as one of being a critic of the government. The media should have informed the people that the nature of rule and the ability to rule is predicated on the willingness to use violence and if the writ of the state is lost, it cannot be regained merely by discussing its revival.

The media is still a young entity in Pakistan and it is still in the process of maturing, hence it would not be proper to judge it too harshly, but the critical observation can be made that in the future, the media should identify the issues and not identify itself with the public opinion on a particular issue. It should clarify the issues to the public and make the public understand the nuances of the issues and it should, most importantly, trust the conventional wisdom of the people and their common sense to draw their own conclusions, without adopting a preaching and a moralistic tone in explaining the issues. Furthermore, it should help to explain the true nature of government and power to the people of Pakistan and make them realize the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between their perception of the government’s role in their lives and what the actual influence of the government is in their daily existence.

In this sense, the media should rightfully ask that a national inquiry be held into the decisions that led to the fateful events of July 10, 2007 and it is well within its rights to ask that the Supreme Court of Pakistan conduct such an inquiry. The media can influence the public opinion on this matter, but it should also educate the people of Pakistan as to what is the true intentions of any inquiry that peers into the conduct of the government, lest it and the people of Pakistan suffer from another disappointment. It should not assume that the inquiry will shed light on the truth, because the utility of a government inquiry and commission, as cynical as it may sound, is not to find the truth, but to absolve the actions of the government itself. Also, it should be brave enough to tell the people of Pakistan, that should they demand an inquiry into the events of Lal Masjid, even by Supreme Court of Pakistan itself, they should be prepared to accept the verdict of such an inquiry and not weave conspiracy theories in order to deny their own culpability in the matter.

This is the crux of the argument, which explains why democracy and the tradition of dissent, which is so necessary in maintaining a democratic polity, is absent in Pakistan. The lack of a tradition of dissent in Pakistan springs from the basic inability of the Pakistani public to tolerate dissent itself on any opinion that is contrary to its own orthodoxy. The word, “orthodoxy” is used in its true Greek sense of the meaning and means a “true believer” and an average Pakistan, either due to religion or personal conviction, is wont not to tolerate any wisdom that disturbs his/her sense of an intellectual, moral, personal and social status quo and in this sense, the bargains that successive generations of Pakistanis have made with their government, was to create a status quo that would ensure a niche of comfort, in which a average Pakistani could exist in the hopes and pretensions that nothing outside of his/her zone of personal comfort had any impact on their lives. Therefore, it does not really matter whether an inquiry or a commission should troll the secrets behind Lal Masjid or what the nature of its composition should be, because the findings of such an enterprise would not be accepted by the Pakistani public or the Pakistani media itself.

The reason behind the above mentioned statement is that it is not the function of governments to tell the truth and in the case of Pakistan, where the population is influenced by its religion and like their personal lives, demands morality in the existence of their government’s actions; it becomes a difficult task to explain to them that there is no morality in politics. Religion can claim to be based on the certitude of moral principles that are etched in monolithic granite, but the principles that shape politics are written on the sands of opportunity. In this sense, written constitutions may be the agreement of the people with their governments on the nature of political power, but an unspoken constitution that exists, between the sovereign and the subject, is that the people will not question the actions of the government, undertaken in their name, and will not judge the morality of their government’s actions, when they themselves have tacitly condoned such actions by their silence.

In the case of Pakistan, any inquiry delving into the causes of Lal Masjid will discover that it been the abdication of the Pakistani public, towards its political responsibilities, that laid the eventual foundations for the loss of lives in Lal Masjid. The mea culpa for Lal Masjid is a national one and it cannot be apportioned to either the government or the clerics in Pakistan, because just as nature abhors a vacuum, politics also abhors a vacuum. The people of Pakistan harmed their own interests by adjudicating to the government the freedom to make policies without any accountability. In a similar vein, a representative government in Pakistan could not be created, because the nature of a truly representative government demands an active participatory involvement by the people and the people of Pakistan did not meet this criteria, when they refused to acknowledge or even vocalize their dissent against the policies adopted, in their name and on their behalf, by the various governments who came to power.

Consequently, the lessons of Lal Masjid, for the future of Pakistan, do not bode well because they chilling point to a character flaw in the Pakistani body politic. A mature polity, has many names and one of its names is the ability to accept accountability and the question faced by Pakistan and Pakistanis alike is not how to create a democracy in their nation, but how to hold itself accountable for its actions. In this sense, the Pakistani nation should not naively demand accountability, through commissions of inquiries, from its rulers till that point in its political evolution that it is mature enough to accept the conclusions of such councils of accountabilities. The political tragedy of Pakistan is that the nation should not hope to hold its rulers accountable for their actions, when it is not willing to hold itself accountable for its own actions.

The true culprit of Lal Masjid is the nation itself and its refusal to accept the consequences, of its past actions, which created the crucible, whose fires have now consumed Pakistan.