The Sydney Morning Herald
Pakistanis are up in arms - but not about bin Laden
Mohammed Hanif
May 5, 2011
There were no celebrations in Pakistan, and no mourning. It didn't occur to anyone to make an Obama effigy; no American flags were burnt. There were no heated debates about whether Osama was a martyr.
The buses that were set ablaze in Karachi had nothing to do with the high drama in Abbottabad. The crowd in front of Karachi Press Club was a group of bank employees wanting their jobs back. The little group at the gates of the electricity company was demanding nothing more than some good, clean electricity. A hunger strike camp with young men's posters was part of a campaign to recover young men who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
In fact, the reaction to the killing of bin Laden was so subdued that a colleague noted the absence of text messages in circulation with conspiracy theories and inevitable jokes about bin Laden's wives. Pakistanis are not in denial. Just busy. They are busy fighting a hundred little battles that don't involve US Navy SEALs or helicopter crashes or Arab tycoons.
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These battles are as vicious as any that you have seen in the past 10 years but they don't make good TV. How do you create high drama out of millions of industrial labourers being laid off because there is no electricity? How do you sex up the banal fact that every tenth child who never sees the inside of a school room is a Pakistani child?
So it fell to our TV pundits to prove that we were also part of this global soap opera. They raged against yet another invasion of our much-molested sovereignty. They demanded transparency from America. They wanted footage. How many hours of rolling news can you spin out of a single, bullet-riddled mugshot? In the real world an educationist and chronic optimist tried to fantasise. ''So the party is over,'' he enthused. ''Americans will go home. Our boys will ask their jihadi boys to pack up, surely?'' Someone reminded him. ''Have you been to a party lately, sir? Nobody goes home.''
Pakistan's security establishment, of course, went into a sulky silence. Were they protecting Osama bin Laden? Or were they so hopelessly inefficient they couldn't track the world's most recognisable face when he was camped out practically at the edge of the Pakistan Army's most famous parade ground? As they are answerable only to their mistrusting partners in Washington, they didn't feel like obliging us with any information.
But anyone who has lived through Pakistan's three military dictatorships sponsored by Washington can tell you there is no need to be such a reductionist. Why can't Pakistan's security establishment do both? Why can't they shelter him and then forget about the fact that they were sheltering him? Or why can't they shelter him and then shop him later?
Pakistan's army is often accused, mostly by their best friends in Washington, of double-dealing and fighting on both sides of this war. In its long role as rent-an-army to the US, it has been accused of becoming a mafia, a secretive clan and a corporation, all at the same time. But what does it feel like to live under this bloody delusion? It's like watching a person whose one hand is hacking away at his other hand.
There is blood, there are cries of pain, and there is the obvious sound of one hand hacking away at the other. The person keeps looking around trying to figure out: ''Who is doing this to me?'' Military operations and house-to-house searches to look for the hidden hand end up where they started.
On Tuesday, an official from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency did come up with a frank but not particularly reassuring explanation about that house in Abbottabad. It was embarrassing, he told the BBC. He then reminisced about their past victories, duly acknowledged and celebrated by Washington. ''We are good but not gods,'' he said. What he really should have said is that we are gods, but not good.
Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistani journalist and author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
The Guardian
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/pakistanis-are-up-in-arms--but-not-about-bin-laden-20110504-1e8cc.html
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