Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteToday's editorial in the Daily Times, "PPP and the Pakistan Army", winds its way through the bad blood tale that tells how and why the late Benazir Bhutto's party (PPP) has long had a bone to pick with President Pervez Musharraf's army, and then how Musharraf has repositioned, perhaps ineffectually, to ameliorate the damage done to his political standing. [1]
In many ways, the editorial stands as a contemporary version of the origin story, certainly not mythical but concerned with defining who one is -- or who one's enemies are -- through a majestic retelling. Through it, one catches the mechanics of a political culture whose parts grind against themselves even when near in their perception of the state's position and mission in the world at large.
I am less concerned with the political history represented in the editorial, which is illuminating, than with the role it may play as indicative of the language habits of the culture.
Practically any page on which one may look for the political wisdom in Pakistan features a great recounting of accusations, injuries, and slights that form the imprisonment of so many minds that cannot (or may not wish to) escape the past.
The problem in the big look backwards involves both placing the past in the future and blocking in the present, and for the present, new and helpful cultural and political concepts.
In Pakistan especially, this most banal and perhaps overlooked of langauge-culture features at play across the political spectrum may also be the most dangerous as it sustains animosity, cultivates fear, mistrust, and suspicion, and locks all who rely on the legacy of internecine and state violence for guidance into an overwhelmingly retributive political system.
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Much of the popular and personality-related English-language presentations I read out of Pakistan in a week endorse "democracy" and "rule of law" as gestures belying outlooks and principles incongruent with either. Take the most progressive of cases: in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Pakistani attention turned to her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, who seems to have inherited his mother's position under the guidance of his father, and then the press turned toward Benazir's niece, Fatima, a 25-year-old journalist working for Pakistan's The News.
The lords have left the castle and manor, but the public keeps calling them back: instead of new ideas, old bloodlines; instead of rewards earned on merit, payment for who you know or from whom you were born; instead of programs addressing the most practical and reasonable of universal human needs and interest in contemporary amenity, a crazy quilt of government and nongovernmental organization service providers, responsible and irresponsible professionals in various fields.
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Fatima Bhutto has been through her own rehash with her aunt. Whether one-time or an example, here is such a piece posted with the Los Angeles Times: "Aunt Benazir's False Promises". [2]
Elsewhere on this blog, I've noted that "war is personal". For Fatima Bhutto, violence in Pakistan could not be more so:
"And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.
"My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority." [2]
Today's The Times (January 15, 2008) features by Fatima Bhutto a different approach to the same sore subject in "Farewell to Wadi Bua" [3]:
"I have never before written an article that seemed so impossible. We were very different. Though people liked to compare us, almost instinctively, because well, they could. It is difficult for me to write about two people, one in the present tense and one in the past, at the same time.
"Especially when one person’s passing makes the other one wonder whether there is a cusp to things and whether or not there really is a past and present to life."
Fatima, there is a future too.
Fatima Bhutto mentions the hope found in hymns and asks in regard to their promise of an end to darkness, "And how do we proceed to wake the dawn?"
The question begs a romantic, even transcendent, answer: one might say, "One lets go of the past, Fatima, and looks for the dawn from new ground."
Given a more practical bent, one facet of that "new ground" may well be the development of new language along with discovery of the ways competing parties use language to demonize enemies, humiliate competitors, force their messages on unwilling ears, obfuscate in regard to their actions--i.e., an examination of the whole lot and phenomenon of poisonous rhetoric--and then respond to that with conscious work toward developing a leadership class more committed to civil society and constituent services than their own aggrandizements and ideological confirmations.
Other changes in thinking would be welcome as well. Nowhere does the "Jewish lobby", which has yet to find me and reel me in, exist so well as where it exists not at all (Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Pakistan--reports fewer than 3,000 Jews living in Pakistan and all of one synagogue in operation).
Of course, American is The Enemy, unquestionably so, but for exactly what in Pakistan, it's hard to tell. But for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and later the rape of two village girls at the hands of Afghani war lord's checkpoint patrol (read "bribe and tribut demanding troops"), the Taliban would not have been gathered and swept into Afghanistan under its own force. To then provide the launch site for attacks on U.S. targets in other countries and, finally, the "homeland" . . . . Who--I'll take any answer--who was served by that?
Was anybody fed, housed, clothed, educated (broadly) because of it?
Was anyone better enabled as regards attendance to prayers and study of the Koran?
While words make the United States the world's "Great Satan" the dismal truth is that the number one target for the migration of Moslems by choice is . . . America. (I'll find today's earlier source if pressed, but this sort of report is common on the Internet: http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back802.html).
Sometimes, to obtain new things (and ways), one may have to part with old things and far outdated habits, especially the habits of mind that make themselves present through language.
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In the philosophy of conflict, weakness, not strength, gives way to violence.
To counter weakness, characterized in Pakistan by the inability on the part of too many parties to agree to terms and hammer out compromises in legal code (perhaps even on the most practical of matters), may require overlooking the impossibity of knowing the truth about so many murky events--leave that to the historians of other and more privileged generations--while looking more deeply into the rhetorical fixations, habits, and manners that so characterize the nation's political agony.
One may note the same could not be said of Somalia, for example, where anything like a civil competition for ideas has been supplanted by a fearsome skien of interests--competing and break-away governments, private individuals, criminals outright, NGO service providers, guerrillas with interests comfined to tribal lands and needs, and clerics, among others--working wildly at cross-purposes.
1. "Editorial: PPP and the Pakistan Army." Daily Times. January 15, 2008.
2. Bhutto, Fatima. "Aunt Benazir's False Promises." Los Angeles Times. November 14, 2007.
3. Bhutto, Fatima. "Farewell to Wadi Bua." The Times. January 15, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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