Native Orientalists in Pakistan

Native Orientalists in Pakistan

May 2012

The Orientalist enterprise of Western writers has received a great deal of critical attention since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. As Western academics have learned to bring more objectivity and empathy to their study of the Islamicate, a growing number of Muslim academics, novelists and journalists – in their home countries and the diaspora – have started looking at themselves through new Orientalist constructs that serve the interests of Western powers. This native Orientalism has existed in the past but it has grown dramatically since the launch-ing of the West’s so-called global war against terror. This essay examines the man-ner in which native Orientalists in Pakistan – writing mostly in the English language – have been supporting America’s so-called global war against terror.

M. Shahid Alam

Professor of Economics

Northeastern University

Boston, MA 02115

m.alam@neu.edu

 “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.”

Karl Marx:

A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, formerly editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, to-gether with several of his colleagues, had resigned from their positions in the newspaper. Mr. Sethi thanked his ‘friends’ for their “support and en-couragement…in making Daily Times a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’”

I am not sure why Mr. Sethi had chosen me for this dubious honor. Certainly, I did not deserve it. I could not count myself among his friends nor had I in any way given “support and encouragement” to the mission that Daily Times had chosen for itself in Pakistan’s media and politics.

Contrary to its slogan, it was scarcely ever the mission of Daily Times to be a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’ On the contrary, this newspaper had dredged its voice from the colonial past; it had only altered its pitch and delivery to serve the interests of new imperial masters. Several of its regular columnists aspire to the office of the native informers of the colonial era. They are native Orientalists, local apologists of neocolonialism, who see their own world (if it is theirs in any meaningful sense) through filters creat-ed for them by their intellectual mentors, the Western Orientalists.

Born to Neocolonial Servitude

It is arguable that Pakistan was born to neocolonial servitude because of the conditions that attended its birth. In significant part, the demand to create a separate state for the Muslims of India was fueled by their economic inse-curity. The Muslims were poorly represented in India’s indigenous bour-geoisie and professional classes, especially in the provinces that would form part of Pakistan; but they had a stronger presence in the ranks of large land-

owners and the officer class in the colonial army and bureaucracy in Punjab, Pakhtunkhwa and the United Provinces. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Muslim League – the party that led the Pakistan movement – was largely dominated by landlords, a class that identified with and had worked very closely with the British rulers. This was hardly a propitious start for an in-dependence movement.

Ideologically, the Pakistan movement was doubly handicapped. Since the Muslim League had to make a case for carving out a new state for the Muslims of India, its leaders were anxious to demonstrate that the Muslims were a nation, distinct from the Hindus, who, therefore, wanted a separate state where they would be free to develop according to Islamic ideals. In order to mobilize the Muslims of India behind the Pakistan movement, therefore, the League told the Muslims that their religion would be at risk in a united India; and only Pakistan could save Islam. There was no reason, however, for this rhetoric to monopolize the platform of the League; but it did. As a party dominated by the landlords, the League could speak of free-ing the Muslims from the domination of Hindus, but it could not speak of the rights of Muslim peasants and workers.

This was unfortunate: it meant that the Pakistan movement mobilized the Muslims without making any demands on their class consciousness. The Muslim League did not propose an economic program for emancipating the Muslims peasants; it made no promises to enact land reforms; it did not have any plans to lighten to the debt burden of the tenants and small farm-ers, provide cheap credit, or protect them from the tyranny of the land-lords. The League did not propose measures to set up industries, create employment, or reform the system of colonial administration. They did not even come up with any plans to remedy the serious deficiency of Muslims in various fields of education.

Allama Iqbal was painfully aware of the failure of the League to address the economic emancipation of the Indian Muslims. In a letter to Jinnah on May 28, 1937, he wrote: “The League will have to finally decide whether it

will remain a body representing the upper classes of Indian Muslims or Muslim masses who have so far, with good reason, no interest in it. Person-ally I believe that a political organization which gives no promise of im-proving the lot of the average Muslim cannot attract our masses.”2 Sadly, Iqbal died a year later. Muhammad Ali Jinnah chose not to press these eco-nomic issues upon the landlords who dominated the Pakistan movement. Perhaps, he knew that he could not persuade them to act against their eco-nomic and political interests.

As a result, in August 1947, when they handed power to Pakistan’s na-tive elites – consisting of big landlords, military officers and bureaucrats – the British had few worries that their departure risked compromising their economic or cultural interests in their former colony. These elites did not disappoint their erstwhile or new masters. Within a few years of gaining formal independence, they had firmly strapped the new country to the wheels of the neocolonial order. Since 1958, Pakistan has been ruled alter-nately by increasingly corrupt landlords and military generals, with the mili-tary generally playing the role of the senior partner because of its closer ties to the US establishment. Without effective resistance from intellectuals, workers, peasants or students, these neocolonial hirelings progressively re-duced Pakistan to a condition of vassalage so complete that – by the 1990s – civilian and military leaders could not gain power without the blessings of Washington. Indeed, these elites have sunk so low – because of their de-pendence on Western powers for aid and hiding their stolen assets – that they grovel even before the oil-rich potentates of the Persian Gulf whose own survival depends on serving US-Israeli interests in the Middle East.

This is not a cri de coeur - only a diagnosis of Pakistan’s shame and ig-nominy. Fools have imagined that they can end this misery by appeals to Western conscience; many years ago, Aimé Cezairé reminded us that the

West “uses its principles only for trickery and deceit.”3 Pakistanis alone can end their humiliation: only they can overthrow the system that has castrated them for more than six decades. Pakistan was born gagged and bound, de-livered into the control of the very classes that had been the chief collabora-tors and chief beneficiaries of colonial rule. These neocolonial hirelings have served themselves and their Western masters quite well. Between themselves, the two local contracting parties of the neocolonial enterprise – the military and the party of the landlords – have taken turns running the country into the ground. When the people have appeared to get sick of one these parties, it has transferred power to its twin, which offers itself as just the medicine that will cure the country’s sickness. The party of the land-lords regales the people with the wonders of democracy; the military party rescues the people with homilies about the corruption of the landlords. This game of friendly musical chairs has gone on now for six and a half decades.

A Pakistani Failure

Why haven’t more Pakistanis seen through this deception and why haven’t they acted upon this knowledge to end this game of musical chairs?

It would be foolish to expect neocolonial managerial classes to produce an internal enemy, one that aspires to overthrow the system. Such an out-come is imaginable, but improbable. The leaders of the two neocolonial factions work closely with Western intelligence agencies to ensure that no one from their ranks, bitten by the bug of patriotism, manages to rise to leadership positions in the civilian or military spheres. If the system of sur-veillance fails, and a patriot rises to the leadership of one of the two parties, the United States can use a variety of means to eliminate that threat. In Pa-kistan, this internal threat to the system has never surfaced: at least, not yet.

Challenges to the neocolonial order could have emerged from below –

from the growing middle classes; but that too has not happened.4 Pakistan’s emerging middle classes have been too busy clawing their way up the social ladder to give serious thought to challenging the elites; in any case, they have been more focused on joining the elites not challenging them. Unde-niably, there has been a growth of organizations that claim to be working for social lift. Some of them have been doing good work, and a few have made a significant difference to the lives of the poor. Too many of these organizations, however, are managed by scions of well-connected families, are funded by foreign donors, and, as a result, are willing or unwilling dupes of the social and cultural agenda of foreign powers.

More lamentable is the failure of Pakistan’s intellectual classes – barring a few distinguished exceptions – to lead the people out of despondency. Unable to escape the West’s intellectual hegemony, mesmerized by intellec-tual fashions emanating from Paris, London and New York, Pakistan’s in-tellectual classes have become increasingly alienated from their own people. Very few Pakistanis pursue doctoral work in history, the social sciences or humanities; and if they do, their research is directed to issues that are cur-rently important in Washington or London. Far too many Pakistanis with PhDs in economics end up working for the IMF or World Bank. As a re-sult, few Pakistani academics of any standing – inside Pakistan or in the diaspora – bring a radical perspective to their work. As a result, Pakistanis have produced little authentic scholarship in the recent decades. They have failed to educate, lead and guide a people who cannot act correctly because they lack a proper understanding of their historical condition. They have failed to connect them to their best traditions of scholarship, governance and tolerance. As they remain divorced from their own traditions, they can-not learn from the West without being dazzled by it. Since they have not developed a deep critique the failings of Western modernity, they have done little to shape an Islamic modernity that offers models of change that do

‘’ The only political party that organized the urban middle classes – the Muhajir Qaumi Movement – lacked national appeal because of its ethnic focus, and, as a result, its impact was localized. Even so, it was persecuted for years until it decided to throw its support for the status quo forces, both civilian and military.’’

not alienate Muslims them from their history. Read the op-eds in Pakistan’s English language dailies – and you will be struck by how disconnected they are from any tradition of scholarship, either Western or their own.

This failure is common to most former colonies. Captured by the equivalent of our brown sahibs, more interested in serving their former co-lonial masters than their own people, few of these former colonies enacted any authentic programs of decolonization. Independence brought them a flag, a national anthem and a national airline, but it did little to reconnect the people to their history and traditions, to rid them of the sense of inferi-ority that was drilled into them by decades of racist colonial rule. As a re-sult, we have seen an expansion in the use of colonial languages in the for-mer colonies; they continue to cling to systems of colonial governance and colonial education that have stymied the energies of the people, as they did during the era of direct colonial rule. In Pakistan, the guards and peons out-side important government offices still wear the dress that was once worn by India’s ruling class; while the native bureaucrats who run those offices still dress in three-piece suits. This continuation of colonial policies has deepened the sense of inferiority among Pakistanis aspiring to join the elites; and they have become ever more eager to jettison their culture to quicken their ascent to the upper classes. Worse, since the newly educated classes – fluent only in European languages – can only approach their own history and heritage through Orientalist intermediaries, this sense of inferi-ority has morphed into self-denigration and self-hatred.

Native Orientalism

Ironically, the enormous success of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his devastat-ing critique of the West’s hegemonic discourse on the ‘Orient,’ has deflect-ed attention from the recrudescence of a native Orientalism in many of the former colonies in the last few decades. Its victory in Pakistan is nearly complete, where the Orientalist brigade has been led by the publishers, edi-tors and columnists of the country’s leading English language dailies and

magazines. Anxious to serve their Western masters and their local under-lings, these native Orientalists as well as others of their ilk, dwell obsessively on the failings of Pakistan’s non-elite, non-Westernized and non-English speaking classes. Following a curiously inverted analysis of power, they blame Pakistan’s malaise on its dispossessed classes. It is the rump that rules the Pakistani dog. All of Pakistan’s problems – these native Oriental-ists argue disingenuously – stem from the backwardness of Pakistan’s Mus-lim population: their ‘fanaticism,’ ‘obscurantist’ outlook, and ‘irrational’ opposition to the Pakistani elite’s unconditional embrace of America’s so-called war against terror.5 Considering their Orientalist proclivities, some of Pakistan’s ‘eminent’ journalists and social scientists likely feel more at home in US think tanks, advising their American colleagues and policy makers on how best to ‘civilize’ (read: neutralize) the Pakistanis.

In the euphoria of Edward Said’s success, left intellectuals have nearly forgotten that the West’s underlings in the former colonies – the successors to Macaulay’s brown sahibs – have been producing their own indigenous Orientalism. I refer here to the coarser but more pernicious Orientalism of Muslims writers and journalists who reflexively espouse Western values, and, conversely, denigrate their own. A few of these native Orientalists are deracinated souls who, troubled by the backwardness of their societies, but, unable to understand its historical causes, castigate their own religion and culture for failing to catch up with the West. In Pakistan, they blame the country’s problems on Islam, on the ‘fanatic’ religious classes, and trace these failures back to the ‘obscurantism’ of its medieval theologians who –

‘’ It should be freely admitted that the fanatical and obscurantist tendencies in Pakistani society have been gaining strength since the 1980s, but this is largely the result of official policies. Since the 1990s, poverty has become more widespread under Pakistan’s embrace of Washington’s neoliberal economic regime. The three-tiered education system – consist-ing of private schools, government schools and madrasas – provides social mobility only to those who attend the private schools; and where government schools are lacking – even as their quality deteriorates – the poorest families are forced to send their children to madrasas, often espousing the Wahhabi tenets of the oil-rich Arab donors. Moreover, since the 1980s, Pakistani governments have supported ‘jihadist’ groups, first to fight the Soviets and later to carry on guerilla operations in Indian Kashmir.’’

they claim – opposed rationalism as well as the natural sciences. However, most of these native Orientalists are opportunists, Western lackeys, or wannabee lackeys, eager to serve the corrupt elites who have been tearing down their own societies for the benefit of Western powers.

In the closing years of the colonial era – happy at the chance to replace their white masters – the brown Sahibs played down their contempt for their own people, their culture and religion. This was a tactical move: they wanted to generate some anti-colonial pressure to expedite the departure of their masters. This goal attained, the brown sahibs turned their backs on the nationalist aspirations of their people, since their own class privileges were more closely aligned with that of the Western powers. Unfortunately, even as the power and rapacity of these neocolonial underlings has increased in many former colonies, and especially in the Islamicate, the native ideo-logues who have been defending their country’s growing subservience to Western powers have received little attention from left circles. Post-colonial critics continue to produce learned tomes and erudite essays on the lan-guage, structures, tools, intricacies and the arcana of Orientalism, but they have given scant attention to the growing phalanx of native practitioners of this imperialist grammar.6 These critics prefer to concentrate their firepower on the Western protagonists of Orientalism – so to speak, the ‘far enemy.’ Perhaps, they imagine that the native Orientalists, the ‘near enemy,’ will vanish once the ‘far enemy’ has been discredited. In truth, the ‘near enemy’ has grown more daring even as the ‘far enemy’ has been treading more cau-tiously.

In the 1950s, when most Asians and Africans were struggling to over-throw their colonial masters, convinced that the approaching independence would give them the power to direct their own destinies, Frantz Fanon was more skeptical. In The Wretched of the Earth, he presciently sounded the alarm

‘’For the only book-length study on ‘native informers’ from the Middle East who have won the adoration of the West, see Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (Lon-don: Pluto Press, 2011).’’

about the treachery latent in the ‘national bourgeoisie’ poised to step into the shoes of the white colonials and white settlers in Africa. About this un-derdeveloped bourgeoisie, he writes, “its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neocolonialism.” “Because it is bereft of ideas,” Fanon continues, “because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from point of view of the whole of that nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.”7 Although Fanon did not have Paki-stan in mind when he was writing these words, no truer words could have been written about the brown Sahibs who have managed the neocolonial enterprise in Pakistan.

Soon after its founding, Pakistan began to move steadily into the US orbit. Its first prime minister began the country’s migration from British to American servitude, and in 1954 this was formalized by the country’s entry into two anti-communist military pacts sponsored by the United States. Four years later, strengthened by its growing military ties to the United States, Pakistan’s military seized power; since then it has directly held power on two other occasions. The second military coup was launched to termi-nate a populist, left-leaning prime minister who had angered the United States by his leadership of Third World causes. General Musharraf, leader of the third military coup, consolidated his power by joining America’s so-called global war against terror; only a cover for establishing a more direct American control over the oil fields in the Persian Gulf and giving Israel a freer hand in dealing with the Palestinians and the Arab states.

General Musharraf threw open Pakistan’s airspace, air bases, chief sea port, and land routes to NATO forces on their way to Afghanistan. Shortly

‘’ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, Inc.): 152, 154.’’

afterwards, as the Afghan resistance began its guerilla operations against the American occupiers from bases in Pakistan, General Musharraf turned Pa-kistan’s military into a mercenary force. In exchange for American moneys, he began bombing and shelling the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Pakistan’s mili-tary entered into another lucrative deal with the United States as it began handing over Pakistanis and other Muslims (many of them innocent civil-ians) to the United States and collected bounties on their heads. When civil-ian opposition to Pakistan’s military rule gathered force in 2007, the United States arranged for the return to Pakistan of several discredited politicians – including Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif – after persuading General Musharraf to withdraw corruption and (in some cases) criminal cases against them. Both were willing to serve US interests, but Benazir Bhutto was the preferred candidate. Her assassination ensured her party’s victory in the February 2008 elections, and Asif Ali Zardari – husband of the slain Benazir and notorious for his corruption during two previous governments led by Benazir – took over the reins of power from General Musharraf.

Over the last decade and a half, despite its declared status as a nuclear power, Pakistan’s leading political parties and the military generals have se-cretly – and sometimes openly – competed with each other to better serve the interests of the United States. During these years, moreover, Pakistan’s media – especially its English segment – has spawned a new breed of apol-ogists, eagerly supporting Islamabad’s embrace of Washington’s neoliberal agenda. More damnably, they have persistently made the case for Pakistan’s humiliating surrender to Neoconservative designs against the Islamicate.

Native Orientalists at the Daily Times

To return to the Daily Times, surely some Pakistani – moved by the instinct for collective self-preservation – could have produced at least one damning monograph documenting the methods that this new flagship of native Ori-entalism has employed to support General Musharraf’s corrupt dictatorship and his decision to use the military to fight the Afghan resistance.

Regrettably, you are unlikely to find even a few articles that shine the spotlight on the unabashed advocacy of American and Zionist interests by several media outlets in Pakistan. Unmistakably, several regular op-ed writers at the two prominent English dailies – Daily Times and Dawn – have led this pack of sycophants.

The Daily Times was launched in April 2002, simultaneously from La-hore and Karachi, just a few months after the United States had invaded and occupied Afghanistan. Was this timing a mere coincidence? Or was the launching of an aggressively pro-American and pro-Zionist newspaper, led by a team of mostly US-trained editors and columnists, an imperative of the new geopolitics created by the Pakistan government’s mercenary embrace of United States’ global war against terrorism?

Coincidence or not, the Daily Times has served its masters with verve. Its pages have carried many editorials and op-eds justifying Pakistan’s in-duction into the US led war against Afghanistan. The editors and column-ists at Daily Times have regularly excoriated Pakistanis – who have opposed their country’s surrender to American demands – as naïve sentimentalists unaware of the tough demands of realpolitik. Endlessly, they have argued that Pakistan – despite its population of 175 million, a half-million-man army, and an arsenal of nuclear weapons – can save itself only through ea-ger prostration before the demands of foreign powers. They have argued that Pakistan could not occupy a middle ground: if it did not capitulate to US demands it faced certain destruction from bombers and missiles. The humiliation and disastrous consequences of this capitulation have been sinking, slowly but surely, into the national psyche of Pakistanis. Since Oc-tober 2001, ordinary Pakistanis have begun to see through the treachery of their rulers, as the country so visibly completed its descent into neocolonial bondage.

In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, General Musharraf’s government openly began broaching the need for recognizing Israel. No Pakistani government before this had so openly made the case for recognizing Israel; they knew that they would face strong opposition

from the country’s religious classes. However, General Musharraf and his American patrons may have reasoned that the time was ripe for such a move. If Pakistan’s corrupt elites could get away with the surrender of Paki-stan’s sovereignty – over its airspace, airbases, and highways – without sparking serious popular protests, why not take advantage of this passivity and establish diplomatic ties with Israel? The somnolent Pakistanis would hardly notice. Moreover, as a matter of policy consistency, how could Paki-stan identify so completely with the war aims of the United States and not have diplomatic relations with its closest ally, Israel?

Predictably, the native Orientalists at the Daily Times and Dawn were leading the charge, arguing that Pakistan could advance its national interests by recognizing Israel. Their rationale was derisible in its naïveté. Grateful for Pakistan’s recognition – the brown Sahibs argued – the powerful Zion-ist lobby would neutralize the Indian lobby’s machinations against Pakistan in the Congress and State Department. General Musharraf argued that if the PLO could recognize Israel, should Pakistan take the position of being more royalist than the king? Pakistanis were not persuaded. If the PLO had capitulated, should Pakistan follow their example? On this issue, over-whelmingly Pakistanis acted as if they were the voice of the Islamicate. The religious parties mobilized street protests forcing the General to back down; it was a small but symbolic victory for Pakistanis.

When resistance against US occupation of Afghanistan gained momen-tum, the United States blamed this on the madrasas in Pakistan; since some of the leadership of the Afghan resistance had attended these madrasas.8 Once again the writers at Daily Times were making the US case for ‘reform-ing’ Islam and Pakistan. Shut down the madrasas, they demanded: and

‘’ Demonstrating their ignorance of history or their imperialist hubris – believing they could succeed where the Soviets and the British had failed, the latter repeatedly – the Americans were convinced that they could bomb the Taliban into oblivion. At first that appeared to be the case; but the Taliban retreated into the mountains and sought shelter with their cousins in Pakistan. By the summer of 2003, when a reorganized Taliban began attacking NATO positions in Afghanistan, the Americans began ramping pressure on the Pakistan military to attack the Taliban from the east.’’

mount military operations against the Pakistanis in FATA who were sup-porting the Afghan resistance. Repeated US and Pakistani bombings of the resistance groups in FATA, which has killed thousands of civilians, called forth new Taliban factions that have been attacking military and civilian targets in Pakistan. With barely concealed glee, the writers at Daily Times applauded when the Pakistan military carried America’s war deeper into its own towns and villages in northwestern Pakistan.

In 2007, when the lawyers in Pakistan took to the streets to demand the restoration of the Chief Justice sacked by the military dictator, the Daily Times did not support their call to uphold the supremacy of the country’s constitution. The sight of well-heeled lawyers taking to the streets, braving police baton charges, threats to their lives, and arrests was a proud moment in Pakistan’s history. None of this impressed the columnists at the Daily Times. Instead, they persisted in defending the sacking of the Chief Justice; they were making the case for a ‘gradual transition’ to civilian rule in Paki-stan. A civilian government, they were afraid – mistakenly, for sure – might not be as compliant to US pressures as Pakistan’s military rulers.

When elections became unavoidable, the United States and Pakistan’s generals worked out a plan to bring to power the pro-American Benazir Bhutto, the exiled corrupt leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, who had for years been trying to persuade the US government that she would make a more effective US partner than the military. At US prodding, President Musharraf passed an ordinance withdrawing all criminal cases against the leadership of the PPP. With luck, the US plan succeeded. The openly pro-American PPP followed General Musharraf into power.

Space allows us to list only a few egregious examples of the Orientalist mindset on display in the pages of the Daily Times. As the paper’s resident Orientalist, Khaled Ahmad, for several years surveyed the foibles and follies of Pakistan’s Urdu media, in a column mischievously titled, ‘Nuggets from the Urdu Press.” He scolded the benighted Urdu writers for their naïveté, emotionalism, and foolish advocacy of national interests that collided with

realpolitik (read: US-Zionist interests). Another op-ed writer distinguished himself by writing his endlessly clever political commentaries in the racy street lingo of the United States. Did this make him a darling of the Ameri-can staff at the US embassy in Islamabad?

Consider one more ‘exhibit’ that captures Daily Time’s servile mentality. In a regular column, oddly titled, ‘Purple Patch,’ the newspaper ladles out wisdom to its readers in the form of article-length passages lifted from vari-ous ‘great’ writers, who are always of Western provenance. Presumably, the editors at Daily Times still believe with Lord Macaulay, their long-dead spir-itual mentor, that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”9

Will the departure of Mr. Sethi and his acolytes make a difference? I doubt if the owners of Daily Times will have difficulty finding their replace-ments, voices equally shrill in their advocacy of American interests. More than at any other time, growing numbers of Pakistanis have been grooming themselves for service to the Empire that rules from Washington, as their predecessors once eagerly sought to serve the British Raj. This groveling by Pakistan’s elites will only change when the people act to change the incen-tives on offer to these soulless servants of Empire. But this will only hap-pen when the people of Pakistan can put these mercenaries in the dock, charge them for their crimes against the people and the state, and force them to disgorge the loot they have stowed away in Western banks.

All this will take hard work. Some Pakistanis insist that this hard work is underway. It daily gains momentum, and, at some point, history will catch up with the craven and corrupt elites who have bartered the vital interests of Pakistan and the Islamicate for personal profit. When this ‘near enemy’

‘’Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who, while serv-ing on the Supreme Council in India, was instrumental in persuading the British to adopt English as the official language of India. The quote is from the Macaulay’s ‘Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education.’ See Thomas Babington Macaulay, Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957): 721-24, 29. ‘’

has been dislodged from the governing institutions of Pakistan, the ‘far en-emy’ too will recede into the mists of history. Al-Qaida had got it all wrong. Drive out the foreign accomplices inside your country: and freedom will be yours. No foreign power will dare to invade or occupy Pakistan once the local underlings have been driven out.