We tend to reduce faraway conflicts by figuring out who’s the good guy and who’s the villain, then working out the rest of the narrative around those simple distinctions.
And more often than not we decide who the good and bad guys are based on how we associate them with particular good and bad guys we already know and love/hate. E.g. if President So-and-So has pro-American ties, folks might be quick to heroize or vilify that president based on existing attitudes towards the US: extremists on the left start screaming about hegemony and extremists on the right start sneering about socialism.
A pretty good example was the Georgia-Russia conflict last year. People on the far right immediately diagnosed it as a case of Russian imperialism, therefore the Georgian military needs an express shipment of surface-to-air missiles to stand up against Putin. People on the far left immediately pointed out that the Georgian president has deep US ties, therefore Russia was benevolently protecting those poor South Ossetians from US-backed, oil-mongering bullies.
The turmoil in Pakistan is harder to classify; it doesn’t accommodate such simple categories. I get a sense that even the main players there are having a hard time figuring out the angles themselves — never mind angles: what few ambiguously defined “sides” there are only seem like temporary expedients for an incomprehensible clusterfuck of personal motives.
Jason Burke from the Guardian included a brief synopsis in a recent column on how “our skewed world view won’t let us see the real Pakistan“:
Pakistan has very grave problems. In the last two years, I have reported on bloody ethnic and political riots, on violent demonstrations, from the front line of a vicious war against radical Islamic insurgents. I spent a day with Benazir Bhutto a week before she was assassinated and covered the series of murderous attacks committed at home and abroad by militant groups based in Pakistan with shadowy connections to its security services. There is an economic crisis and social problems – illiteracy, domestic violence, drug addiction – of grotesque proportions. Osama bin Laden is probably on Pakistani soil.
And how about all the other foreign coverage? Well, there’s nothing western audiences like more than to be challenged by complex political dynamics playing out among groups and individuals with names we have trouble pronouncing. Eh? And it’s a good thing our media outlets are up to it… Er, no. As Reuters Global put it:
Maybe this always happens at times of national upheaval. But there is a surprising disconnect between the immediacy of the crisis facing Pakistan as expressed by Pakistani bloggers and the more slow-moving debate taking place in the outside world over the right strategy to adopt towards both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Reading Pakistani blogs since confrontation between the country’s two main political parties exploded and comparing them to international commentaries is a bit like watching men shout that their house is on fire, and then panning over to the fire station where the folks in charge are debating which type of water hose works best.
Maybe I read that wrong the first time. It seems to be more about the exuberance of Pakistani bloggers than everyone else’s ambivalence. Ok so I’ll go with that then because it’s an even more important factor to consider: what we saw in the past few days is not an uprising of poor oppressed masses, the Long March has been a middle-class movement composed of some of the most educated and technologically empowered people in the country — specifically lawyers and judges (here’s Aitzaz Ahsan describing the “lawyer’s movement” on Charlie Rose — while two New York Times reporters narrowly talk about the Taliban and the tribal areas — back when Musharraf was still president) which isn’t to say some of the participants aren’t also poor, especially given the condition of the economy (Pakistan’s Karachi Stock Exchange actually ceased trading for months after a violent meltdown in the summer).
Intuitively, it doesn’t seem like a good sign that so many professionals — led by presidents of legal bar associations — feel the need (and, more worryingly, have enough free time and energy) to participate in such a large-scale passionate movement. While I have a hunch that some degree of this amounts to a kind of boredom (which has been shown to correspond with preludes to war) there are specific auspices involved. Here’s the most current one outlined by Juan Cole, going back a few years:
A conflict developed between Nawaz Sharif [leader of the Long March protesters] and PPP leader [now president] Asaf Ali Zardari over the deposed chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhury. Dictator Musharraf had dismissed Chaudhury in spring of 2007 for opposing some of his policies. Pakistan’s massive legal establishment began holding rallies and demanding that the chief justice be reinstated, which he was in summer 2007. Musharraf was under pressure from Washington to become a civilian president. But he found out that fall that the supreme court would not allow this transition because the constitution requires that a military man have been out of the service for 2 years before becoming president. So Musharraf just dismissed the whole supreme court, including the recently reinstated Chaudhury, and appointed a new court, which sycophantically recognized him as president.
When he was allowed to come back to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, who had been overthrown as prime minister in 1999 by Musharraf, began demanding that Iftikhar Chaudhury and the old, dismissed, supreme court be reinstated.
After the PPP won the parliamentary elections, its leader, Zardari, declined to reinstate Chaudhury. Zardari was afraid that the chief justice might reinstate the corruption charges against him, which had been amnestied by Musharraf.
Another reason Zardari might not be in a hurry to have Chaudhry reinstated as chief justice (and why Sharif does) is that the current supreme court helpfully barred Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from running for president. See? There are more varying agendas than can be arranged on one or two simple axes. Complicating things even more, as Cole pointed out more recently,
On the other side of the ledger, Chaudhry did sign off on Musharraf’s 1999 coup against then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and was appointed chief justice by the military dictator in 2005, so I’m confused as to how he is a symbol of the rule of law. He was complicit in a lawless, praetorian regime.
The supporters don’t seem very picky about who represents their ideals — as long as there is at least something and someone to get behind. I found these blogged remarks via the #LongMarch thread on a few of hours ago:
Well, it’s okay. We don’t have to like the guy much. At some point, for reasons that were part personal gain and part opportunity to finally act in favour of the nation, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry exercised his powers as an independent arm of the triumverate democractic system. Masses of people supported him. That’s the reality. He’s no saint. But by God he’ll be independent. And that’s a step in the right direction.
And for a little more cultural background I also found a link to a music video (chorus: “listen to the hope of a new dawn“) posted by a young Pakistani who tweeted about the “patriotic feeling” it gives (the video depicts a young man charging through a police barrier towards a presidential-looking motorcade, which is subsequently stopped by a crowd holding their hands up in a gesture of defiance).
One could certainly find worse ideals to rally behind than judicial independence. The last thing I want to do is discourage Pakistanis (or anyone for that matter) from promoting transparency and justice.
The danger is that passionate idealism tends to turn into opportunities for manipulation by shadier characters. To start with, how genuine is Sharif’s adoption of the judicial cause?
Even more dangerous is the possibility of movements turning into mobs, with a life and direction that nobody especially intended or approved. Further, intellectually affected movements have the added drawback of providing a foil — something to rally against and be inspired by — for anti-intellectual movements (by which I don’t mean stupid, but simply less about debate and more about getting something done, i.e. straight-up ass-whooping), which Pakistan already has the makings of, waiting just off to the side in the form of radical theocrats (or militias posing as such).
Then there’s the military… and the intelligence services…
