I began writing for The Muslim, an Islamabad paper, in Jan 1991.
What drove me to do this was a growing awareness that corruption was seeping into society and corroding its moral moorings at an alarming rate. Individuals were being broken down by it and felled, and these infected individuals were in turn corroding institutions. With fraying institutions, whether cultural, moral, or administrative, a society begins to crumble. With the crumbling of society, a country could not hold.
Year upon year, and then month by month, markers of the spread of this deadly malady could be spotted. By these the decline could almost be measured by its expanding reach, its building appetite and scale, and its shameless acceptance. From becoming second nature to those who defined and rode society, it was fast becoming their prime necessity and driving force. This force was gaining momentum and bulldozing the national ethos at a startling rate, seeping into the moral foundation of the nation, and rendering it hollow, becoming in the process, an existential threat to it. After the shamelessness of its prime practitioners, and its acceptance by those who could do little about it, the greatest allies in its unimpeded spread were the general unconsciousness of its virulence and where this would lead us, and also those who had it in their power to become an obstacle to its spread, but refused to do so, either on account of the lack of cognizance, or of will.
The more I wrote on the subject of corruption, the more I thought about it. The more I thought, the more acutely I became conscious of the fact that historically, Pakistan was an artificially created country with all the frailties of such entities. When such a country was afflicted by a wasting disease eating away at its foundations, during its youth, and this was not checked, such a country could not survive into adulthood. And because it was artificially created, once destroyed, no one would be able to put it together again. With this disease picking up rage, It needed no external enemy to demolish our country. It would be destroyed from within. Unabated corruption would be quite adequate to the task of driving Pakistan to bankruptcy. And this would lead to its destruction. This would begin with the destruction of every institution, and concurrently with it, the moral fiber of society. Without these two there could not be any result other than the disintegration of society. And when society disintegrates, the country which is built upon it, cannot hold.
This was so clear to me that it was beyond me to understand why, those who counted themselves as “intellectuals”, seemed to be sufficiently unaware of what was eating away at Pakistan, so that NOT ONE of them made this a regular theme of his outpourings. Why did they not, with consistency and at its loudest volume, sound the alarm that the exigency of the looming threat begged of them to sound? Perhaps they were intellectuals who came short of social empathy!
And I could not understand why the army, which should always have known that the financial and economic security of the country should have been the principal national security imperative with them, remained unaware of this galloping corruption. The army should have known that a bankrupt country could not field an army in battle which could last even a day, and not be on its knees before the enemy fired its first shot. And though the army was seeing Pakistan being pushed into bankruptcy on account of deliberate policies and massive theft, it failed to move even a finger towards salvaging the country which was paying for their services to defend it, and to keep Pakistan secure.
Most people knew that the army was involved in political engineering for most of its 76 years. They did not mind this. Indeed, they saw in this an act whereby the army was providing a balance, and thus protection to them, by not allowing things to spin completely out of control. In its periodic forays into the halls of power, most saw the army providing relief to them from the unfettered depredations of the politicians. They had faith in the army. They believed it was incorruptible. Virtually no one suspected that in the very act of political engineering by the army, people of choice were being placed by it to make use of unimpeded access to the national treasury. And behind them soon, the generalship of the army began extending its own hands into this treasury. And then there were also those who were not willing to see what the army was doing. This unwillingness arose due to biases in favour of the army, which in turn were driven by a lazy conceit, unwilling to concede to themselves that their well loved army could be falling victim to the same moral deterioration as the rest of society.
Then, with Musharraf’s NRO came a great change. The army was no longer involved just in political engineering. Its High Command side-stepped its principal function, and joined the mega thieves whom it had created or facilitated, in overt theft. Again, most of us could not see this, till at last, on April 10, 2022, in an act of supreme treachery, it did away with any pretense that it stood with the nation. Having thrown aside its modestly and standing naked at high noon, its High Command shamelessly announced, without a word, that they were standing squarely behind mega thieves, thugs, and pimps, and by their own interests. The only legitimacy they could cite in support of their unannounced assumption of total power was the six lakh bayonets which were under their command. And then they hoped to draw legitimacy from the lies which poured forth from their tongues to cover the crimes they were compelled to commit in order to hold on to their position of power. When digging out shaheeds and trotting them out in support of their misdeeds became a jaded trick, this time on May 9 they brought out the children of the nation in support of the shaheeds who had lost their shine. This was a sure sign that the national cupboard of martial tricks to divert our attention was fast being laid bare. The time is fast approaching, therefore, when the High Command itself would need to play monkeys for our relief and amusement, because nothing else will work.
When this trick also loses its fun, will come the time when our army will have to be deployed on the streets to confront an enraged population. When the first citizen is brought down, we shall have entered the last bloody phase of a course which began with petty larceny, grew into mega theft, and blossomed in national bankruptcy, to the point where Pakistan has no economy left today, except to take fresh loans to repay old ones.
For some months now a number of friends and well-wishers have desired that I save all that I have written and arrange this in a manner so that this material can be made accessible to all who desire to visit it. This is an attempt to accede to those wishes.
Unfortunately, I either did not save most of what I wrote, and some of what I strived to save, I did so on cloud, and this I lost when my email was hacked some years ago. The earliest piece which I managed to fish out is one from 2006, and all those I wrote earlier from 1991 to 2006 are lost to me. Fortunately, all I have written from the regime change in April 2022, to date, I have been able to save and reproduce in this file.
As I have said earlier what drove me to write was my fear of spreading corruption, and where this would leave us if allowed to proceed unchecked. My purpose in writing therefore was, to spread awareness of a fear which was eating into me. My hope was that by sharing my fears an awareness would spread which may, perhaps, create a bulwark against the spread of corruption. Because of this, what I wrote cannot be called essays. And because these had to do with a single subject, therefore there is much repetition in my pieces, and issues connected with this main theme, like the fighting the insurgencies in Swat and FATA, the Rangers’ Operation in Karachi, and the infrastructure on which our Democracy was erected.
When I began writing, the benchmarks of corruption which got me going, had to do with the army. One was the case of a Corps Commander who desperately wanted to be the next Army Chief. Towards this end he drafted the help of some friends to write in his favour, building him up as the Rommel of the day. Quite apart from the fact that he had a poor war record, what was unacceptable was the fact that he found it quite acceptable to have people lobby for him in the manner that he adopted. This had never been done before. And frankly the attempt was disgraceful. And the second marker was that I got it from an unimpeachable source that JCOs at a certain regimental center were taking bribes to take in recruits. These two incidents were symptoms of the beginnings of a serious ailment.
During my early writings, I spared the army the stick it deserved. On the really serious issues, I adopted the method of writing to the Army Chiefs. This I did, because I wanted to kill the snake without breaking the stick i.e to make my point while doing the least amount of harm. That was a time when the army was still the only half-functional institution of the state. Almost daily, soldiers, led by young officers, were fighting insurgencies and dying. And they were doing a highly commendable job of it. I thought it would be extremely unfair to judge the army by the same measure as those whose primary claim to fame was theft. But often, with the passage of time, my frustrations with the army began to be reflected in what I was writing.
And it was quite some time later that the realization came to me, as I thought ever more deeply on the subject, that it was never a case of the army versus the politicians, as most of us understood it. This had always been a case of the elite versus the rest. This elite was formed of the top crust of every institution and the top business people, including the army, and they were in partnership, and arrayed against the rest of Pakistan. Without this clarity, it would be impossible to understand what was happening to Pakistan today.
My ultimate conclusion is that it was unchecked corruption which seeped into both our national and moral foundations and rendered them both hollow. This disease began by attacking the head, the elite, and then spread to other parts of the body. Both in terms of its virulence and its spread, this infection has brought the state and the society on which it is built, to the end of its term, My greatest fear is that neither nature nor God, depending on which you believe, has ever forgiven violation of laws set for humanity to follow. But if by any chance, we have any margin yet left to reach the end, and manage to turn the trajectory of our destiny around, the new Pakistan shall have to put theft front and center as the one sin it will not allow to take over its destiny once more.