The Stone Age has Come

“We will bomb you back to stone-age�, says Armitage to Musharraf, on a very long distance call, across five oceans and several aeons. I don’t know the facts of the event but I like to think it is past midnight, around 3 am and the president is woken from his light sleep, only just arrived and beginning to be treasured. For the president works late, hard working as he is. From his desk to his bed, he makes a little stop at his mini bar. He considers his options for a second then reaches for a brand brewed locally, a few yards away from his mansion, right in the heart of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (God forbid, I must add, lest I be blown to pieces by supporters from either side of the conflict).

After a while comes the call. I wish Musharraf had just shrugged then, tightened the belt of his dressing gown around his waist for a false sense of security and gone back to bed, muttering some colourful expletive on the way. That would have been better, perhaps, than ingesting this slow poison. Now the American war on terror has internalized in Pakistan, has become her own. It is not cancer as pointed out by our new, very bright president but auto-immune. The body attacking itself because it is malfunctioning, has been malfunctioning for too long. In fact the only function it has ever performed is "mal".

Ideas may give birth to nations but ideas do not sustain them, not for long in any case. Ideologies are the province of well-fed stomachs, warm beds and loving embraces. Deprive the human body of these for too long and the despair it produces is the most destructive force on earth. Is it a surprise that Africa has the highest incidence of genocide? Why is violence most brutal in post-colonial nations?

I cannot remember when I first heard of the Taliban. I suppose they just seeped into our collective Pakistani consciousness without much turbulence. Although, I can say for my generation it happened after the introduction with the concept of martial law. “Martialaa� was uttered in slight discomfort, with dejected heads rocking from side to side. It was like the reappearance of a stubborn wart that defies cures and brings with it deeper, more sinister disorders. But it evoked in kids an image of something grand, imposing and fearful. General Zia himself. Even now I cannot think of Martial Law without conjuring up his image in my head, which is not a pleasant experience by any standard. Zia’s martialaa gave us the Taliban. I wonder if he was threatened as well. Perhaps even General Ayub too. They need not have threatened Jinnah himself since he was dying of TB anyway. And although Mountbatten didn’t know, Nehru wished he did and Gandhi didn’t care, the CIA must have known. Then Liaquat Ali Khan was murdered and the case remains open. The motives of the assassin remain unclear. 1n 1965, Fatima Jinnah not so mysteriously lost to Ayub. Although she had the general support, the elections weren’t held via direct ballot. Bhutto got his own “we-will-make-a-terrible-example-of-you� phone call from Kissinger. Somehow, all of Pakistan’s popular leaders have been murdered or have been removed from power. The instrument has conveniently been the Pakistan Army. It is absolutely wrong to suggest that a leadership vacuum granted such unlimited powers to the Army. The vacuum was created. Why? There are no definite answers. Perhaps Pakistan was never meant to serve the people living inside its borders. Perhaps the forces that allowed it to exist entered a bargain – “here, amuse yourself with the freedom-label but you will continue to serve us�. And now, we keep increasing the white man’s burden by allowing mad-men with rocket launchers to run around on our streets and the white man is too keen to dispose of his duties. The white man’s burden that is the heart of darkness. That has no redeeming quality.

The tragicomedy that is now unfolding in Pakistan has no parallels. Much more comic is the commentary about it. A New York Times writer suggested that the attack on the Sri Lankan team was orchestrated by the Pakistani authorities to show Indians that Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism. How does one counter such logic and retain one’s self respect? As if any evidence was needed. Besides, Mukherjee must have shattered any illusions of solidarity that the naïve Pakistani authorities may have entertained. It would be simplistic to suggest that India does not have a hand in what is going on in Pakistan just as it’s incorrect to deny any involvement of “Pakistani elements� in Bombay attacks. After all, the Indian authorities did find a jar of Ahmed Mango Pickle in the boat used by the terrorists. The terrorist who had the skill of keeping a city hostage for 72 hours did not have the sense to dump the jar in the sea. Just like the 9-11 hijacker “forgot� his Arabic air line manual on a taxi after some last minute cramming. It won’t be long before some evidence of a Bihari Pan is found in Lahore liberty as well.

For 'tis the age my friends. Let’s trade our brains for stones!



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Notes:

1. The term white man’s burden was coined by Rudyard Kipling to refer to the responsibility the white man had to assume to enlighten and liberate the barbaric nations of the world.

2. Heart of Darkness is a novel by Joseph Conrad about colonial Africa. He says in the book, “They were conquerors, and for that you only want brute force…. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale, and men going at it blind…. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only�. It is this idea that I reject.