Source: ET
Listening to Mian Nawaz Sharif finally speak to the nation, an outsider can almost be forgiven for mistaking him as an opposition leader. Doom and gloom, Mian Sahib displayed an admirable grasp of the obvious. One thing absent (amongst many other things) was specifics. To be fair, Mian Sahib’s speech was like almost all other speeches made in Pakistan. Our problems are huge and thus, the solutions must also be grand. Wrong.
Mian Sahib along with being the prime minister, saving up on precious resources, is also the foreign and defence minister. Good intentions are not a substitute for a foreign orcounterterrorism policy. We have arrived at a consensus that everything has to be fixed before anything is fixed. It is the era of the generalist, who can as easily talk for 10 minutes on the women cricket team as on thermal power. The academic has no similar entertainment value. Everything here is connected with everything else. Each argument is an overarching narrative ideological argument. Looking at the big picture is extremely important, however, the picture is not to be stretched so far that sight of the centre is lost.
Ideological battles are important and we find ourselves in an ‘existential’ one right now. However, outrage and lament are no policies. At least on some issues, the small stuff has to be sweated. Priorities need to be aligned. One gunman in Islamabad got more media space and attention in a week than Balochistan gets in the entire year. That is bad, right? Actually, worse, all the attention still missed the basic points, which sound bites and ticker size analysis often do, while much pontification has been done on how the SSP should have acted and how the police failed or not in the duty to maintain law and order, etc. Almost all the ‘experts’ seem to have missed that the Police Order, 2002 and the previous local government law have never been applicable to Islamabad. The Capital Territory still has Deputy Commissioner (DC) (not the District Coordination office (DCO)) who is also the District Magistrate and responsible for Law and Order not the SSP (whose is not a City Police office (CPO)). The DC should have been the one coordinating, leading and being ultimately responsible for the episode. While analysis of how this symbolises the failure of the state and the war on terror was being done, nobody looked this up, at least for asking the right questions, having the right framework of analysis.