Coming from a dubious salesman a shady communication treated as Holy Scripture. Only we could do this, without stopping to think what it says about us: a nation of chumps hard put to smell the difference between the earth-shaking and the trivial.
The cast of characters in the memo affair couldn’t get more sublime: chief of the army, chief spymaster, shining jurists, a posse of media wizards with flecks of froth on their angry faces, two reputed politicos with pretensions of reformism not only buying into the conspiracy tale called Memogate but scarcely pausing before becoming its leading champions, one of the reformers taking this joke to the Supreme Court, thus lending it weight and respectability.
The generals in question have a reputation for deep thinking. Hmm. If these are the fruits of deep thought the alternative is best left to the imagination. There is no shortage of comics, or call them patriots, who say this is a God-gifted country. That may be so but did the Most High also gift us our priceless sense of humour?
An adventurer who has now gone a bit quiet but who had everyone dancing to his tune manages to take an entire nation for a ride. If he had a heady feeling he can be forgiven. But why blame the nation? Ordinary folk have a better grasp of reality. Mansoor Ijaz’s shenanigans, for that is what they were from day one, fooled the Pakistani establishment, or at least parts thereof.
But wait, it gets richer. Mansoor was the man who made his column-writing and chat-show reputation in the United States by maligning the Pakistan army and ISI. And he becomes the ISI’s star witness in the memo affair. Nor is this all. When everything hangs on his appearance before the Supreme Court-ordered investigation commission, comprising three heavyweight lordships, Mansoor puts the last nail in the embarrassment of his various champions by refusing to appear.
His counsel Akram Sheikh, Falstaff sans the wit or humour but unwittingly funny in his own right, goes into contortions of rage trying to explain why Mansoor cannot come while Interior Minister Rehman Malik, scarcely able to control his laughter, says adequate security, yes, but if Mansoor wanted band and baaje (instruments) on his arrival that was a bit difficult.
There are laws against contempt, and rightly so. May not the time have come for a law against self-inflicted ridicule? For this is what has happened in the memo affair: Pakistan’s leading institutions going out of their way to invite scorn and laughter. And all because of that one ambition embedded deep in the genetic code of the Pakistani establishment: the desire for political engineering.
Pakistan’s best and brightest and, it has to be said, the not-so-bright, thought that Mansoor Ijaz’s memo was their chance, what they had been seeking and not getting these past three years. So casting ordinary judgment aside they seized it and made heavy weather of it, turning an absurdity into a high-stakes drama, convinced that with only a little pushing the walls they wanted to bring down would come tumbling down, and the long desired for change would happen at the top…as muffled drums beat a military tattoo in the background.
But the walls, for all the cracks in their facade, have withstood the shocks administered to them, and the prime instigator of this affair, the international financier with a yen for intrigue and publicity, has been exposed as the charlatan many suspected him to be all along, his word taken seriously only by certified dupes.
Hardly surprising in the circumstances if there are a lot of red faces around, trying as best they can to hide their embarrassment and figure out what has hit them. It takes time for emperors to be stripped of their clothes. But this de-stripping has occurred at astonishing speed: one moment national balloons full of pomp and righteous anger, the next moment the sound of gas escaping…the balloon deflated.
But, sobering thought: paladins supposed to be guardians of the truth (as enshrined in the law), keepers of the national flame, defenders of ideology, protectors of our nuclear secrets, thus exposed. Sets one thinking about the quality of our heroes. If this is the best we have what might be our worst?
When Admiral Mike Mullen, no enemy of Pakistan, said that he did not consider Mansoor’s communication worthy of serious notice, when Gen James Jones said much the same, going on to add in the same breath that Pakistan seemed a country bent on self-destruction, shouldn’t our good and great have paid some heed to these caveats? Instead, in full possession of their senses, they chose to make clowns of themselves. Conscious clowns can be intelligent souls, circus lore testifying to this circumstance. But unwitting clowns are a different thing altogether.
Never reinforce failure is a maxim on the lips of even half-educated military men. There is nothing to be mined from this affair except more ignominy and ridicule. It is time to pull up the tents, close this particular adventure camp and move on.
Zardari and company may deserve purgatory. They may deserve something more. But if the desire for political engineering remains irresistible, as it has been these past 65 years, there should be other ways of achieving it. Elections are the prime means of change around the globe, except in those forgotten corners where the sun of democracy, with all its blemishes, has yet to rise. Elections were very much a part of the divine scheme of things, as we like to believe, which led to the creation of what in our more fervent moments we still like to call the fortress of Islam. Why not, for once in our benighted history, give elections a chance?
Meanwhile a measure of penance and humility may do all concerned some good, even if humility is not amongst the prime Pakistani virtues. The General Staff is unassailable, so let us keep it out of the equation, humility certainly not a construction material widely used in General Headquarters. But like the Roman custom of a slave whispering into the ear of a triumphant emperor, “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal,” it may not be such a bad idea to put up a bust of Mansoor Ijaz in the foyer of ISI headquarters in Aabpara as a cautionary reminder that even the best are not above making asses of themselves.
About the guardians of the law, a temporary vow of silence – perish the thought of anything more permanent – may be in order.
Imran Khan, living up to his reputation of being a slow learner, continues to harp on the theme of getting to the bottom of the memo affair. What will it take to convince him that this is the bottom? Nawaz Sharif, considerably smarter, is already walking away himself from this saga as if he had nothing to do with it, although one of his lawyers, Mustafa Ramday, is still saying that the commission could travel abroad to get Mansoor Ijaz’s statement. Why does the name Ramday send a shiver down my spine? Are we missing some connection?
Media warriors are a tougher lot. It won’t take them long to simply shrug off their embarrassment and say that the anti-climax we are seeing is part of a sordid deal. Between exactly whom we know not for sure, but a deal still…you get the point. It could even be part of yet another American plot.
It won’t be long before these gladiators take to their swords and trumpets again, to lift the veil of secrecy over the next conspiracy against national security. This is just an intermission. The show goes on.
