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Living up to the name

“When we were in PMA most of us knew Shabbir Sharif would either get the Nishan-i-Haider (posthumously) or become the chief, such was his courage and commitment.”

These were the words of a course mate of the new army chief’s brother who was killed in the 1971 war and was awarded the highest gallantry medal. I was reminded of them when news broke of Gen Raheel Sharif’s rise to the most coveted office in the army.

It seems Raheel Sharif was destined to fulfil the one half of the prediction about his brother that Major Shabbir Sharif could not. The two brothers were some 12 years apart at least in terms of the dates of their graduation from the Pakistan Military Academy.

Described by one of his course mates at the PMA as a “total soldier”, Raheel Sharif’s rise to the highest office in the army comes at a time when the challenges facing the institution he heads are multi-dimensional. The foremost being the restoration of peace within the country and in the region around Pakistan.

Given his professionalism, “martial stock” as ISPR chose to describe his background, and the fact that he comes from a family where a brother and a close relation (Maj Raja Aziz Bhatti) were the recipients of the highest gallantry award and whose members among them share a number of other medals he is well-placed to help win us the peace.

At a time when the national narrative has become so warped that we have trouble identifying as martyrs the soldiers who die valiantly defending our freedom and ensuring our safety, at least the shaheeds in Raheel Sharif’s family are undisputed.

Where his predecessors struggled to change the narrative because of their fears, prejudices and misplaced strategies among other factors, should he so choose to spell out the truth as it is, he can. Too early to say definitively but perhaps Nawaz Sharif, the peacemaker, has chosen wisely.

Strictly in military terms, many experts say Gen Kayani’s leadership provided reorientation to the army, and in terms of the training and equipment prepared the various fighting units to effectively play their new role in terms of counter-insurgency and counterterrorism.

This is clearly evident in the successes of the military counter-insurgency operations in Swat and South Waziristan earlier and, with the solitary exception of North Waziristan, all other Fata agencies which now stand cleansed of mass murdering militants.

However, a dangerous game played with the best national interests at heart, I am sure, left the nation totally confused about the war we were fighting and the losses we took both in terms of material but far more significantly in terms of thousands of lost lives.

This strategy authored by Gen Musharraf’s team, which was also bought by many ultranationalist politicians, was directed at extracting maximum concessions from the US for the regime but to also win it a voice in shaping the region’s future.

But it is now proving no less disastrous than other strategies formulated by the military leadership with minimal or no civilian input. The Musharraf years are more or less consigned to history. Let’s look at more recent events, for example, the Raymond Davis affair.

As the then ISI chief Shuja Pasha was thinking up ingenious solutions which would let the CIA ‘contractor’ who had shot two people in broad daylight in Lahore off the hook, the ISI’s surrogate councils and parties were demonstrating on the roads asking for the American’s head. The umbilical chord with such surrogates has to be cut.

To me, this incident and all other such incidents were part of failed ‘psy ops’ because while the Americans saw through our game and played along for a while in their own interest, the seeds of confusion and chaos we ended up sowing among our own people have left them with no handle on reality.

Why then should we be dismayed that there’s a need to evolve a national ‘consensus’ when it should have been a given, because we face an existential threat. The military top brass may have to take most of the blame for this but the civilian leadership cannot be absolved either.

This is too onerous a challenge to play politics with. At least the prime minister should ensure that his ministers speak with one voice. While it may provide small tactical gains to have the Nisar Ali Khans and Rana Sanaullahs saying different things, they combine to create a strategic disaster.

At the same time, Gen Sharif will at least need to put his intelligence set-up on a tight leash so when a political party is fed highly sensitive information and makes it public all thinking people are not left wondering why but nod in agreement, marvel at the genius in the move.

Sharif will also need to ensure that a Mumbai-like attack doesn’t happen again. Kayani was said to have been livid at Mumbai but it was after the fact. Equally, the new chief would need a rethink on Balochistan. The kill and dump policy is not delivering and needs to be abandoned.

The COAS will need to hit the ground running, focus on his fighting units and should leave the ‘consensus’ building to the elected government. And, yes, he’d be well advised to shut down for now at least his psy ops machine which seems to score more own goals than damage any external or internal enemy.

Sharif comes from a family of officers. He’ll need to take a leaf out of the common soldier’s son Kayani’s book and work tirelessly for the welfare of the other ranks. At a time when religion is being invoked by even mass murderers, this is the only way to maintain cohesion in the ranks. And Kayani understood this to his credit.

Major Shabbir Sharif’s gallantry earned him the Nishan-i-Haider, his brother will need to lead with exemplary courage and imagination if he is to contribute to winning us peace and sanity.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn. abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Abbas Nasir, "Living up to the name," Dawn. 2013-11-30.
Keywords: Social sciences , Political leaders , Armed forces , Military-Pakistan , Politicians , PM Nawaz Sharif , Gen Musharraf , Raheel Sharif , Nishan-i-Haider , Shabbir Sharif , Ch Nisar Ali , Gen Kayani , United States , Pakistan , ISPR , FATA , ISI , CIA