Have you ever thought that your views maybe biased or even completely wrong?
The army is you... a better run version of you. It's the only institution that works and gives power to ordinary man. I personally know of an extremely poor family whose son went on to become a General... is there any hope of any talented man from humble beginnings ever coming to power in Pakistan? I say that it's only through the army that a 'normal' Pakistani has ever come to power. Take your own example, you are a product of a middle ranking army upbringing and patronage, that gave you a helping hand to be what you are now. It's a functioning system.
What you should be railing about is the non functional broken political system. It promotes no meritocracy and instead seeks to curtail anything and anyone that challenges it. It's democracy in all but in name. It is this what creates a vacuum for army to fill in and provide leadership, as it has to. You say NS has no support? Ask yourself why, he got the most votes, surely he can muster few hundred thousand and start a protest against the army to retake the power that he supposedly doesn't have. If he was a real leader, he would do an Erdogan and call people to the streets to retake this supposed lost power.
How the Zardari led PPP is still in existence is just mind boggling, a party that systematically destroys all institutions as if there is no tomorrow. Or for that matter MQM whose killed more pakistanis than perhaps even the terrorists in the last 10 years or so.
The media is not independent... it's not anywhere. It's run by vested interests, it can be bought and frequently is to portray a certain POV. Compare CNN to Fox News for take on a similar story about trump for example.
I am all for civilian democratic process, but it needs to be a real democratic process not an exercise in futility. History of subcontinent tells us that you better have a powerful army if you want to survive as one entity.
The army is certainly not me and the only reason it works better than the rest of Pakistan is because it takes money to run institutions well and it's business interests along with the ability to decide their own budget gives them the financial resources to work well. As far as giving power to the ordinary man is concerned, that is questionable. Individual examples of unlikely success can be found in many places, be it a Christian street cleaner's son becoming a judge or a rickshaw driver going on to become one of our top cricketers. Army may have it's redeeming qualities, everyone does, but the question is are those positives worth the negatives that come as part of the package?
My views on the army have evolved a lot in the last few years and I'm always open to the possibility that I may be wrong which is why they have evolved the way they have in the first place. This is a post of mine on this very forum from 2011:
He and his idiot followers were facepalming all over national TV, international media and the internet about the military's action against the TTP. I recall some of his followers(including one here) using the term 'Napak Fauj' for the Army. Traitorous actually had the gall to have a go at the military for setting up a front against these animals.
Doesn't that sound a lot like what is now being said to me in this thread?
Getting back to my point, your suggestion that I should instead be railing at the broken political system suggests that you're not exactly familiar with my views on the subject. Nawaz Sharif or Zardari are not exactly people I have much higher an opinion of than I do of the army but if we're going after the system, we can't exactly disregard the army's role in how such a system came to be, can we? Afterall, they ruled the country for 34 out of its 69 years of existence and played no small part in shaping the system as it is today. Do you think they had nothing to do with the development of a system that affords them such an obscene amount of power even when they're not formally ruling the country? Does it make sense that Nawaz Sharif or Zardari would allow a system which allows the military to veto their decisions on, say, critical foreign policy issues to stand if they could do something about it?
I don't agree with how every issue is reduced to an either-or equation with a clearly defined black and white element. Nawaz and Zardari are responsible for a whole host of other issues and should be held accountable for those, something I have repeatedly emphasized here on many occasions, but it's the height of intellectual dishonesty to completely deny the existence of other players who may wield equal or more power than them. In our case, it's an unfortunate fact that there are certain areas where the military has control and counterterrorism policy happens to be one of them. There is precedent in the recent past for Nawaz trying to do his own thing on that front and being shut down authoritatively by Raheel. This is a man who has a long and extremely acrimonious history with the military so I find any suggestion that he's in any way responsible for the current balance of power patently ridiculous.
Then there's the suggestion that the army is filling a void created by the fragility of our democratic system because of people like Nawaz and Zardari but again, where did they come from? Nawaz and Altaf Hussain were created by Zia. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was Ayub's foreign minister. Imran has always been cozy with the likes of Hamid Gul, so that's the four largest parties covered, all in one way or the other connected to or, in Nawaz and Altaf's case, created by the military. Now since coincidences seem to be all the rage today, I find it to be a hell of a coincidence that the military takes over for decades on end, finally gives up power to one of their own so called democrats, then cites said democrats' incompetence to wrest control of important issues from these democrats.
If the excuse is that incompetent leaders aren't allowing democratic institutions to develop, and the military truly has the nation's best interests at heart, as opposed to their own which I believe to be the case, they should take a step back, make use of the copious amounts of evidence they have on all these so called democrats to get rid of them legally and allow a democratic system to develop organically through the people but is that ever really going to happen? We both know the answers to that because contrary to popular belief, the military, much like Nawaz or Zardari, puts it's own interest first even if they come at the country's expense, the only difference is that they have much better PR on account of them having the final say on how they're reported on or covered in history books.
The media may not be independent, and it certainly isn't in Pakistan(not through political control from the top down but through financial interests) and that is obvious from the striking differences between how various outlets report the same stories with a clear bias towards one party or the other but where they're all on the same page is the military? Do you think that's out of patriotic fervor or that all of those outlets are run by drones who are all pro military? It's neither of those. It's because the military micromanages it's media coverage through ISPR and any negative coverage or highlighting sensitive issues like human rights violations can and does result in the offending party going missing, or being shot at. Like I've said many times before, just ask Saleem Shehzad, Hamid Mir or the missing bloggers, some of whom have now returned but still won't name their abductors publicly.
Terrorism in Pakistan, however much we deny it, is inextricably tied to the military in one way or the other. You have sectarian organizations like LeJ and their offshoots SSP/ASWJ who are entertained by top military brass openly and notoriously. Jaish e Mohammad cadres can take selfies with uniformed personnel but anyone who dares speak up on that disappears, how do you expect there not to be at least some people like me who would be deeply resentful of that? Then you have that walking international relations disaster Hafiz Saeed. TTP, who have now become a major thorn in our side and are responsible for this attack along with at least two others today, were mostly trained using infrastructure our own army set up and, during it's early days, drew it's leadership from the same group of people who were once our army's 'mujahideen'. Today, it's blindingly obvious that, for better or for worse, counter terrorism is an area where Nawaz Sharif has no control, nor would anyone else who would replace him so, with that reality in mind, we should at least have the moral courage to ask questions of the army for their failures the same way we do of Nawaz or Zardari or is that an act of treason now?
I'm not even going to touch on their role in some of the other issues, heroin and gun culture being the most important ones, because it has previously been made clear that discussion on those issues is not welcome here.
It's clear your position is miles apart from mine on this issue but what I ask is that you respect the fact that having lived 25 years in this country, a quarter of them on army bases, I may have some reasons to resent them just like you have your reasons to admire them.
Anyhow, this thread is ultimately about a great tragedy where many have lost loved ones so if you wish to continue this discussion, we should probably move it to a more relevant thread, which I'm sure there is somewhere on the first few pages.
