http://wichaar.com/news/294/ARTICLE/...010-01-06.html
Dr. Manzur Ejaz's opinion piece above, in which he has unequivocally stated that the army-jihadi nexus is history and all jihadi parties will gradually be eliminated by the armed forces. An unstated corrollary of this hypothesis is that the state will actually survive and stabilize and all the "worst case scenarios" will fail to materialize.
I tend to agree with Dr. Ejaz. I think the army has no choice. It was a terrible mistake to create free standing armies of jihadis in the first place (what sane state has ever done that? what were they thinking when dozens of training camps were being set up all across the country and Masood Azhar and company were going around with escorts of armed men on pickup trucks? what was the plan? I already know the answer: there was no plan in the mind of the "secular" morons like Musharraf. They were just being their usual idiotic selves and were being made total fools by the jihadis like General Mahmud and General Gul and so on. But I ask the question to encourage all of you to spend a few minutes thinking about this. WTF was the army thinking and doesnt this deserve a real inquiry and several court martials?). But by now, even our generals must have realized what a mess they have made and know that this is not sustainable.
I also think the arguments presented by many educated people in Pakistan (all this is an American plot, Islam is in danger, Jewish-Hindu plot) reflects the (carefully manufactured) confusion of the chattering classes and not a systematic analysis of the facts on the ground.
But I also think that these confused statements (blaming the jihadis, General Zia, the CIA and everyone else in almost mutually exclusive theories) are an indication of what a tremendous job lies ahead of the army high command and how poorly they have managed the "information war" until now. Once again, I think the explanation has less to do with any clever scheme of having their jihad and eating it too, and more to do with the limited abilities of the high command and their desire to avoid (at all costs, even the cost of efficient handling of the war on terror) any discussion of how they created this mess and who the enemy is. Instead, they prefer to keep people confused with CIA-Jew-Freemason-Hindu conspiracies and any other story that comes to mind...anything but the truth that their own creations have brought Pakistan to this pass. The other driver behind this nonsense is their desire to hold on to "the commanding heights" of the state, even if they have to imperil the functioning of national institutions in a time of war to do so. On this, I differ with Dr. Ejaz, who beleives the army is actually trying to strengthen civilian institutions to save the state. I think he underestimates how totally the PMA mindset hates civilian politics and politicians and how exalted an opinion they have of their own ability to run everything from credit rating agencies to the railways.
I would make an analogy with the US civil war. A Dr. Ejaz in 1861 would have confidently predicted (on the basis of rational analysis of economic realities and the direction of historical trends) that the North was going to win the civil war and the Union would be preserved. Not only that, slavery would be abolished and the entire slave-owning economy overhauled and converted to more modern lines. That is exactly what eventually happened. But this 1861 Dr. Ejaz may not have known how close fought the thing would be, how long and hard the war would turn out to be, how terrible a slaughter it would cause...and even this imaginary Dr. Ejaz might have had second thoughts about his predictions when Lee was marching around Pennsylvania.....I think we are in for some very bad times in Pakistan as well.
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Originally Posted by jmm99
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