Not every revolutionary situation leads to a Revolution

Elections 2013 are coming closer, most probably in April, as the current Assembly will be dissolved after completing its five-year term in March 2013 (hopefully).  If it does, we might as well have the first democratically elected government to have survived its full five-year term. Strangely, it is a proud and yet an embarrassing feeling to have finally achieved the holy grail of surviving a full term without any army intervention (so to speak) in our 65 years of existence on the world map.

Politics is in the air and not a single day passes when my Twitter and Facebook timelines are not swamped by political debates. Though I do not purport to be an elections expert as there are already enough out there without me stepping into the fray, I will make an effort to present my thoughts about the elections from a layman voter’s perspective.

Lenin once said that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation. So is there such a situation in Pakistan. These elections are being heralded as harbingers of change-positive change i.e. But are they really?

PTI, PMLN, PPP, MQM, ANP are all, promising to usher Pakistan into a new era of prosperity. To me, after the nightmare 2008-2013 period nothing that comes from PPP should be taken at face value, well at least I will not take it. But despite all its failings – and those are some pretty gigantic failings- PPP still has support in Southern Punjab and  Sind, even though its popularity in interior Sind is waning, courtesy bad governance. While PMLN, ANP and MQM are squabbling over their respective regions, what Pakistan truly wants right now is a national party. Supporters of PTI will disagree with me as they will cite successful rallies in the four provincial capitals of Pakistan as proof of support, but rallies do not automatically translate into votes and despite claims, PTI is focusing to get seats in Punjab as it does not have enough “electables” to be a serious contender in three other provinces.  We can call PPP, the ghost of a national party it once was but now it cannot form a government without coalition support in Baluchistan, KPK, Karachi and Southern Punjab.

Since no party right now can claim to be a truly national party, what they are doing is squabbling over and exploiting, biradri, sectarian and ethnic votes. Policies and plans have been left over to be argued on social media and Talk shows, none of which, in all sincerity, will affect the opinion of the general voter populace much. The main body of voters resides in rural areas and is too hard pressed in their daily struggle of lives to really give a thought to the various economic and educational plans put forth by the political parties.

Hence, hunting for electables in constituencies is the main strategy of parties right now, policies and issues be damned.  This is the sad reality of Pakistani politics. Every election in this country has been called as a change but has the change ever come? Every single government in this country’s 65-year existence is a case study in bad governance and indecisive character. And, expect this trend to continue unless one thing happens. Spread of Education.

In my opinion, it all comes down to education when we are choosing which political party will be leading our country for the next five years. Like I said before, we are still quagmired in ethnic, biradri, sectarian and favor asking politics and all this is because our general ‘awam’ is not educated enough to really question the manifestos and economic recovery plans of political parties nor are they really empowered to vote freely.

Talking about published plans by political parties, they really haven’t evolved from being simple idealistic statements to implementable objective plans with checks and balances because quite honestly they don’t need to.

When 70% of our prodigal parliamentarians don’t even pay taxes and at least 60% of whom we will be seeing in the next assembly, how can you expect major changes? The general Pakistani population is too busy in making their ends meet to really go out into the streets to protest or to go in courts to sue their respective MNAs and MPAs and thus this issue will soon fizzle out into nothingness and will not affect the outcome of elections in possible sense, which really tells us something about how the voters will be marking their ballot in the upcoming elections.

So if you ask me if the next elections would bring anything new to Pakistan, will any positive change be coming, all I can do is to re quote Lenin, “…..not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution”.

Kamra Airbase Attack.Time to End the Double Game

Within hours of the operation to secure the Kamra Minhas Airbase, the elite military commandos had killed all the militants and readily identified them as foreigners. The identification procedure has not been provided. But looking at the pictures it is my proposition that it looks like they belong to the Punjab and southern KPK regions. But that is just a conjecture and nothing else. So let’s leave it.

dead body of the militant at Kamra Airbase. Courtesy Saach.tv

However, one thing about the attackers that caught my eye was their apparent physique. All of them seem well built and their beards wouldn’t have looked out of place in a professional SSG unit. I am not implying that they were rogue SSG commandos but they seem to have this ‘military man’ look about them.

Factor in their brazen but well coordinated attack on the base, their target intentions and you might suspect that it was an inside job. I am just theorizing, nothing else.

Kamra Airbase is an alleged nuclear installation or at least the base where aircraft can be fitted with nuclear devices before such a strike. Also, it is the home to the prized JF-17s and AWACS airplanes and is supposed to be under the maximum security that the military can offer. Yet, the militants attacked the base even after issuing a threat.

Now here one must observe that although the military’s efforts have been lauded and much has been made about their preparedness and the level of security employed, the real intent of the militant strike has been left untouched.

How determined can one’s enemy be when it openly issues a threat that it’s coming at you and then attacks your premier military installation.  The level of determination and the sophistication of the attack needs to be considered by our analysts, because this attack was doomed to fail once the threat to attack a PAF base was made public . But then maybe it was originally planned as a secret operation but after the intelligence report, it was re designed to be that way.  May be it was used to send a message that they know our military installations and they can attack it and breach the security parameter at any time and which is precisely what they did.

The attack also raises some questions about the level of preparedness and the counter intelligence efforts of ISI and the Army. Why wasn’t this group of attackers intercepted and traced before the attack? How did the attackers breach the security parameters, so much, so that they managed to damage one airplane, which the military has not elaborated much on.

Mehran Airbase Attack

Certainly, the military needs to come out open and clean in its explanation but of course, it never will. The Mehran Airbase attack should have opened the military eyes and one might have been led to believe that the military might have learnt lessons from that debacle but it didn’t.

As is now widely held to be extremely plausible by many experts, the Mehran Airbase was an inside job, led by TTP with coordination from disgruntled naval officers. When a journalist ‘Saleem Shehzad’ published an investigative report on the Army Al-Qaida link and the involvement of its own officers with Al-Qaida , he was promptly abducted and tortured to death ‘allegedly’ by ISI.

Even before the Mehran Airbase, the army had convicted five officers for their links with banned Hizb-ut-Tehreer (HT).  This conviction came after the attack on GHQ where a similar breach of security parameters was carried out.

Our military and intelligence agencies should worry about terrorist infiltration within its ranks because quite frankly the Zia era has left our armed forces quite changed with fundamentalist tendencies and terrorist organizations like HT, Al-Qaida, and TTP find eager supporters inside the army camps. The assassination attempt by army officers, with terrorist links, on Musharraf was one of the early signs of internal strife within the army. This strife is directly linked to the Army and Intelligence’s double game in matters of crackdown against terrorist network and their back channel support. They get confused when they are ordered to attack those same people that they were told sometime back were mujahedeen and defenders of Islam.

The army has to come clear and define once and for all, who its enemies are and who its supporters are. Taking Allied Support Funds, propping up the Haqqani Network and now back stabbing them with an operation in North Waziristan would leave many people, including its own soldiers, asking questions. And as an Army Officer, you do not want your soldiers questioning your orders.