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Not another intervention

The situation demanded action, and I acted to mobilise the world.” — President Asif Ali Zardari writing in the Wall Street Journal.

So staying in the country at a time of great disaster is symbolism. This really is a first and takes the prize for inanity. Zardari mobilising the world: one feels like tearing one’s hair. A supposed leader acting foolishly in normal times—say committing a gaffe of some sort or, like George Bush, mixing up his words—is no big deal. It happens all the time. But choosing to play out the fool, and being unaware of one’s performance, amidst a calamity of unprecedented proportions is not the stuff of everyday comedy.

It suggests not only a disconnect from reality, which it all too obviously is, but also a degree of insensitivity and lack of comprehension bordering on if not surpassing the radioactive.

Adjusting to the astonishing, virtually unbelievable, spectacle of Asif Zardari as President of Pakistan was not easy for most Pakistanis. Prepared for most things, they were unprepared for this. But realising that there was no immediate help for this disaster—Zardari as president being almost the perfect definition of disaster—there was a shift in popular thinking, with many people reconciling themselves to this bizarre idea.

When a section of the media began what seemed like a campaign to target Zardari there was, incredible as it may sound, a rush of sympathy for him, and the feeling that the media gladiators involved, whatever their confused agenda, were overplaying their hand.

All that has suddenly changed, the cup of patience shattered, forbearance giving way to seething anger as the nation has watched Zardari visiting the family chateau in France (some acquisition this) and undertaking an entirely useless trip to the UK, at a time when the country was drowning in the worst flood waters in living memory. What this has underscored is a simple thing that Zardari remains what he is, what he always was, and that he is impervious to change. But it also raises a related question: can the country any longer afford Zardari as president?

The most powerful argument in his favour was the democracy argument: that any attempt to topple him would fatally undermine democracy. One thing would lead to another and the whole edifice of democracy would be swept away, with potentially disastrous consequences for the country.

But Zardari’s self-exposure, his singular inability to comprehend what really are little more than the dictates of common sense, prompts the question whether democracy can do any good when its core is hit by a serious infection in the form of a president as inept and uncaring as him?

There came a time when the Conservative party in Britain became tired of Margaret Thatcher, hugely successful as a prime minister though she had been. So the party rebelled and she was ousted. The Labour party became fed up with Tony Blair, even though he had led it to victory three times. He was replaced by Gordon Brown. Zardari is neither Thatcher nor Blair. Instead he can flatter himself for being, currently, Pakistan’s leading symbol of embarrassment.

Is this state of affairs sustainable? Is this luxury affordable? Can Pakistan’s democracy survive with Zardari around as president for another two or three years? Democracy already stands undermined. General Ashfaq Kayani’s high profile is not for nothing. It comes at the expense of the incompetence of the Zardari-led government.

The army had taken several steps back after the February 2008 elections. Instead of filling up the vacated space and taking charge of national security matters, at least to some extent if not completely, the PPP government found it convenient to virtually outsource national security—Swat, South Waziristan, etc—to the army while concentrating on things closer to its heart, on what it was best at: earning a reputation for incompetence and mis-governance, and corruption on a scale that almost defies imagination.

Zardari’s continuation as president, thus, is no service to democracy. If anything, it is a grave threat. Two more years of this arrangement and political stock will sink so low, and Gen Kayani, just given a three-years’ extension by a hapless government, will look so tall that a military takeover will remain just a formality. If we are to protect what remains of this carcass of democracy, the infection within must be taken care of, or there will be nothing left to save.

It is dangerous to even think of 111 Brigade as constitutional court of last resort. It can only complicate matters further, something we can ill-afford. The Zardari presidency has presided over the greatest expansion in the frontiers of incompetence in Pakistan‘s history, something driven home by the President’s trip to France and the UK. Hard times call for more ingenious solutions.

One focus of public attention was the rejuvenated Supreme Court. Pakistan’s quest for salvation, so it was fondly thought, would be led by their restored lordships, the Supreme Court leading the fight against corruption and cleansing the national stables.

Their lordships, however, have presided over a great frittering away of energy, taking up too many matters and opening too many fronts at the same time, and not concentrating on any primary focus of attack, to borrow a military analogy. And they have forgotten Bacon’s dictum to the effect that much-talking judges are like ill-tuned cymbals. In short, while raising a lot of froth they have, alas, achieved very little.

When a front is extended too much, the sensible captain of war reduces his frontage. If those considered messiahs (although this idea, sadly, has worn thin) are to live up popular expectations and do something meaningful about the issue of national corruption, symbolised by none more than the leading lights of this dispensation, then something similar would perhaps have to be undertaken.

As Lenin said famously of the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution, yesterday was too early, the day after tomorrow would be too late. Thus was fixed the matter of its timing. Zardari has undertaken countless trips abroad. Indeed, there was a time when he spent more time abroad than at home. But his most recent trip, an exercise in self-immolation if there was ever one, has transfixed the public imagination. It has unleashed a tide of revulsion and served to concentrate minds like nothing else.

Such a favourable conjunction of the stars would not come about again in a hurry. There is a tide in the affairs of men…but I will spare readers the rest of Brutus’s incantation.

Ayaz Amir is a distinguished Pakistani commentator and Member of National 
Assembly (parliament). For comments, write to opinion@khaleejtimes.com