19^th February, 2008

By Safoora  Arbab

Student at Columbia University, New York City 

Why is it that we so readily accept the correlation between disingenuous rhetoric and regimes of power? And its opposite: the impotence of speaking truth to power? While listening to the Pakistani Ambassador to the UN, Munir Akram, when he spoke at Columbia University this evening, my mounting indignation instigated the first question. Imran Khan, the famous Pakistani cricketer turned politician, also spoke a few weeks ago at Columbia University, and the second question was brought about by a comment that the person sitting next me made, at the talk this evening: she agreed with me that Imran was very honest when he spoke, but nevertheless, she said, he was completely ineffective as a politician. And yet when I attended Imran’s event at Columbia, which was the first time I had heard him speak publicly, I was struck by the fact that he was disarmingly forthright in both his manner and his views, and how refreshing that was for a politician in general, and perhaps as a glimmer of future hope for politics in Pakistan in particular.  

      By contrast, Ambassador Akram, speaking about the strategic importance of Pakistan, gave the official government narrative of the reality on the ground. Spoken very eruditely, and with the knowledge of requisite facts very keenly at his command, as expected of any good diplomat, he mangled the truth in order to uphold the national interests of Pakistan in the eyes of his audience.  That too, of course is expected of all good politicians and diplomats. But my tortured question is why? Why is that the normative state of affairs? What is it that we are party to when we readily conform, either by speaking or listening, to that unquestioningly accepted status quo. Are we not, by extension, a party to the violence that is bred by such a mangling of truth in the name of power?  

      And I do not specifically mean that such is the case only in Pakistan, but rather, this is a universal critique of such political posturing, applicable to all nations, and all national allegories, of the world. It is only that in this particular case I know how and why the truth was being mangled, that I bring up these rhetorical questions in order to vent my anger.  

      The remark that especially hit a nerve close to home, so to speak, was when the Ambassador disingenuously described the turmoil in the North West Frontier of Pakistan as matter of ethnic Pakhtun loyalty to the Taliban. The Taliban, he explained, were the last Pakhtun “dynasty” to rule Afghanistan, and with their ouster and continued targeting, the rest of the Pakhtuns, on both sides of Durand line ( in Afghanistan and Pakistan ), were reacting to it by a sense of tribal camaraderie and honour. Therefore, by implication, the Ambassador seemed to be suggesting, all Pakhtuns were in a sense loyal to and sympathetic with the Taliban.  

      Speaking as a Pakhtun I can most vehemently deny that implication, and the recent elections in Pakistan have proven, quite decisively that there is no great sympathy for fundamentalist views in the Frontier, as all extremist religious parties were resoundingly defeated.  The Frontier, like most of South Asia, (of which it too is very a much a part, lest the official rhetoric allows us to forget), is biased more towards heterogeneous rather than homogenous belief systems. Ambassador Akram did not mention the fact that there is in fact a Pakhtun nationalist uprising going on in the Frontier, (as there is in Balochistan as well), and all the violent retaliation emerging from that area is due to the fact that the Pakistani military is killing its own, or at least the Pakhtuns, for the benefit of the army maintaining its regime of power in Pakistan, firstly; and secondly that it create a picture of a region that is of dire threat to the world, mainly America and Europe, so that the army be seen as the only possible solution in the war on terror in the constructed enigma that is the tribal areas. It escapes the official view that the escalation of suicide bombings is in direct relation with the violence inflicted upon both the innocent and the guilty, indiscriminately, in that area, by the Pakistani army and the US-coalition forces. And that the recent resurgence of the so called “Taliban” has more to do with revenge and retaliation for this promiscuous violence being inflicted upon that region, at the behest of the US war on terror, than it does with the improbable concept that all Pakhtuns are in sympathy with the ousted Taliban regime simply because they share the same ethnic identity; the ethnic identity, in other words, giving rise to a common political ideology based upon the inherently violent, and tribal, disposition of the Pakhtuns.  

      The label of “Taliban” has become the rubric under which all Pakhtun responses to the violence being inflicted upon them is subsumed.  It provides a simplistic banner delineating the “bad guys” in this dangerously simplistic war on terror. And so to get back to the indignant question with which I began: are we not, all of us, implicated in the violence being perpetrated when we accept, either in speaking or in listening, to political rhetoric that mangles the truth for the perpetuation of its own power, and for no other reason. Is power, in this case the power of nations, to be upheld by this charade at the expense of human life that is daily being sacrificed, by the willful distortion of truth? We all, we Pakistanis especially in the case of the Frontier, know what is actually going on. We are indignant in our own country at what the government is doing—as the elections have clearly proven—we are not equally indignant when such rhetoric buys us the role of America’s policemen in our own country, when its give us all those dollars that have suddenly boosted our economy and the GDP? Why does a matter of national honour and pride make us sell, and buy, such rhetoric to an audience in America? Why do we listen to such a distortion of truth in New York City, when we probably could not stand it if we were listening to it in Islamabad or Peshawar? Is not such patriotic posturing fueling precisely, the violence upon our own people? Is not speaking and accepting the discourse of power, even if for the sake of national pride, responsible for allowing us to kill our own? Is it not allowing us to kill human beings, and fund their killing, for the sake of a posture?  

      All of what I have said and am indignant about, can be argued, is merely what all nations and their spokespeople do—I do not deny that. I am compelled by my indignation to write and vent my feelings in this case because it is the place of my origin, and as such it arouses in me a more compelling desire that truth be spoken. It wrenches from the question as to why we accept lies as a worldly posture but honesty merely as naiveté and anti realpolitik. Realpolitik has to be amoral and dirty to be effective. 

      And so I come to my second query: do the Noam Chomskys, the Ralph Naders, the Imran Khans of the world have no affect upon the present political world, upon regimes of power, except as voices of conscience, rarely heard; or when heard regarded as futile to change the political mainstream? The answer, unfortunately, is a dismal no—they have no significant enough of an effect. But does not that state of affairs have something to do with us, with our acceptance of what rhetoric, what forms of discourse, ought to have power? What if we were to demand that those that speak in our name speak the truth, be frank, be honest—is that merely just naiveté and wishful thinking on my part? Is writing this piece simply another form of the naive and unpragmatic discourse that is ineffective at changing anything?  

      But we also clearly see the results of the non-naïve, Machiavellian political posturing we have accepted as normative—the violence exploding in every part of our world speaks volumes for itself—a clear sign of failure of our current political paradigms. Isn’t it about time that we admit, or at least accept, that politics as usual is not so powerful after all at creating a world in which we want to live. Perhaps the naïve may be more powerful than we have given it credit for. Isn’t it upto us to bestow the power where we ought simply by changing our conception of what are the acceptable forms of discourse that ought to narrate our world to us?