Delusion

By admitting that “India is a shining Mercedes coming on a highway like Ferrari, but we are a dump truck full of gravel,” Pakistani army chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir has finally accepted that Pakistan is the loser. And by adding that “If the [dump] truck hits the [Mercedes] car, who is going to be the loser,” he has unwittingly acknowledged that Pakistan is the unruly dump truck driver who being a bad loser is just thirsting for the chance to “hit” the ‘Mercedes car’ called India. Wouldn't the Field Marshal have done much better by rewording his self admitted “coarse analogy” saying what would happen if a Mercedes chose to ram against a gravel filled dump truck?

While the visualised outcome of a head-on collision between a Mercedes and dump truck may enthral Pakistan’s newly promoted Field Marshal, isn’t he aware that on highways, cars and dump truck s ply on separate designated lanes? Or is it that after seeing the international community’s abject apathy towards Rawalpindi’s ongoing romance with globally proscribed terrorist groups, Field Marshal Munir is confident that no one will object when the dump truck driven on his orders violates traffic law by entering the car lane to specifically crash into a Mercedes?
While the puerile Mercedes and dump truck analogy continues, this raises two serious questions- one, who turned Pakistan into a dump truck and two, why is it full of gravel and not something much more valuable? The answer isn’t too hard to find as the same has been provided by Pakistani army Generals themselves.

Reality

While Pakistan continues to play the terrorism victim card, it conveniently forgets that its army is the one responsible for this sorry state of affairs. In the late seventies, didn’t Gen Zia ul Haq allow Washington to convert Pakistani territory bordering Afghanistan into a veritable breeding ground and a safe sanctuary for radicalised Islamist terrorists to fight America’s proxy war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan?
Hasn’t Pakistan’s ex-President and former army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf himself admitted that “We poisoned Pakistani civil society for 10 years when we fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s,” adding that “It was jihad and we brought in militants from all over the world, with the West and Pakistan together in the lead role.” When the Pakistan army itself sowed the seed of religious fundamentalism on its own soil, why blame outsiders for the grim harvest it is still yielding?
In his 2015 TV interview to Dunya News, Gen Musharraf admitted that “In the 1990s … Lashkar-e-Taiba and 11 or 12 other organisations were formed. We supported them and trained them as they were fighting in Kashmir at the cost of their lives.” Similarly, in April, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar revealed that “We opposed the mention of TRF [The Resistance Front] at the UNSC statement condemning the Pahalgam terror attack,” boasting that “I got calls from global capitals, but Pakistan will not accept. [Mention of] TRF was deleted and Pakistan prevailed.” And yet Pakistan has the gall to deny waging proxy war in J&K.

‘Home Grown’ Terror

Pakistan alleges that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [TTP] is an Indian proxy but hasn’t explained that if this was as indeed true, then why did it not only enter into a ceasefire with this terrorist group but also unconditionally release more than 100 TTP commanders and fighters held in Pakistan army’s custody in 2021? If TTP is working at the behest of New Delhi, why did Pakistan army’s media wing Inter Services Public Relations [ISPR] in August 2022 rubbish reports of large scale presence of armed TTP fighters in Pakistan’s Swat Valley as “exaggerated and misleading”? First, Rawalpindi makes a Faustian deal with the perpetrators of the heinous 2014 Army Public School Peshawar attack in which nearly 150 students and teaching staff lost their lives and more than a hundred were injured, and then unashamedly blames India for helping TTP.
The Pakistan army’s role in aggravating the Balochistan problem and provoking an armed separatist movement is no secret and that’s why no one takes its allegation of Indian support to armed Baloch groups fighting against the forceful occupation and indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources of this region seriously.
In May 2010, former speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly Syed Fakhar Imam and former Ambassador to the US Syeda Abida Hussain organised a seminar on “Friends of the Baloch and Balochistan.” Speaking at this event, former Pakistan army chief Gen Abdul Waheed Kakar opined that Gen Musharraf had “committed a big mistake” in launching the 2006 military operation in Balochistan and killing of the Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was “a crime against Pakistan.”
According to The Express Tribune, Lt Gen [retired] Salahuddin Tirmizi said that in other countries the intelligence agencies collect information and the governments make decisions. “But here the intelligence agencies make decisions.” Such a scathing attack on the Pakistan army by one of its former Generals exposes Rawalpindi’s rot within.
Similarly, highlighting the fact that Baloch people have been deprived of their rights and their natural resources, Baloch Students’ Organisation [BSO] leader Aleem Baloch lamented that those who speak for their rights either get killed or abducted and disappear forever. Another BSO leader, Muhiuddin Baloch complained that the Pakistani military, the media, parliament and judiciary have no concern for the plight of Balochistan. Unfortunately, this sorry state of affairs expressed a decade-and-a-half ago still endures.
Despite strict media control, these views were endorsed by many newspapers. In its May 17, 2010 editorial, Dawn put forth a compelling argument by observing that “Is the trouble in Balochistan inspired by India or is India stirring a pot of the Pakistan state’s own making?” It goes on to mention that “To outside, non-army observers, it seems clear it is the latter. But so long as the army seems to cling to the former ‘India-centric’ explanation, peace in the province will never be had. A flawed diagnosis cannot lead to a successful solution and in the case of Balochistan it continues to poison any semblance of trust between the two sides.”

Crying Wolf

Field Marshal Munir needs to understand that blaming foreign “inimical forces” for the rising wave of terrorism despite the inordinate overuse of force including air and artillery cannot conceal his army’s humongous failure to rein in home grown terrorism in Pakistan. He should also realise that it ill-behooves a Field Marshal to issue hollow threats or make unfounded allegations. And so, Munir needs to accept that reality that when it has failed to bring TTP terrorists and Baloch armed groups down on their knees, harbouring the belief that his gravel laden dump truck could pulverise the Indian ‘Mercedes’ is nothing more than a classic case of great expectations!

Email:--------------------nileshkunwar.56@gmail.com