My Pakistan

Growing up in Pakistan, I couldn’t help but be proud of our army. Year after year I read laudatory accounts in my Urdu schoolbooks of our soldiers’ bravery in repeated wars against India. Streets were named after martyred soldiers. Prime residential districts were called Defence and Cantonment. Smartly painted fighter jets and tanks occupied public squares, like statues of poets and kings do in other countries.

Nor was I unaware of our neighbour: big, belligerent India. The bogeyman waiting to devour us. All that stood between them and us was our army: selfless, competent, our only functioning institution. It was our patriotic duty to give it unquestioning obedience—and most of the national budget.

I subscribed wholly to this narrative until the war of 1971. I was eight then, and I remember the blackouts and the sound of strafing at night. I can see the L-shaped trench in our garden in Renala, our village 70 miles west of Lahore. I can hear rousing radio updates commending our brave boys who, though outnumbered by Indians, were fighting hard. I remember our driver declaring we’d win because we ate meat and fought like lions while Indians ate carrots and ran like rabbits. I recall with absolute clarity the day my brother ran across our garden screaming, “We’ve surrendered! We’ve lost! We’ve lost East Pakistan!”

That was the first time I began to question the army’s narrative. My scepticism grew during General Zia’s martial law. I was a teenager in Lahore when, in 1977, he ousted and later hanged our elected leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and subjected us to 11 years of harsh Islamic rule “for our own good.” He “Islamised” television, replacing sitcoms and chat shows with hours of Koranic recitation; mangled the constitution and slashed the rights of women and minorities; jailed politicians, activists, journalists, poets and intellectuals; outlawed dance and theatre and declared Sharia law supreme. I remember those years vividly.

I remember being beaten by baton-wielding police when I demanded the reinstatement of my rights with a small band of women. I remember going with a group of female friends to one of the last remaining cinema halls in Lahore and being jostled by bearded thugs who shouted at us to return forthwith to the “sanctity of our homes.” I remember the afternoon I was stopped by a policeman who demanded I prove I was legally married to the male friend who was giving me a lift home in his car. I remember with sadness watching my Christian friends—born and bred Pakistanis—pack their bags and emigrate. I remember with horror the first public hanging in Lahore.

When Zia hired Pakistan out to the Americans in their war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, life got even worse. The country was flooded by armaments, Afghan refugees, mujahideen and heroin. Crime skyrocketed, bombs arrived in cities, religious intolerance rose. Flush with dollars and answerable to no one, the ISI, the army intelligence agency, became a state within a state. I remember the day ISI thugs barrelled their way into my brother-in-law’s bookshop and dragged him off to a 400-year-old dungeon at Lahore Fort. His crime? Publishing a book critical of America’s role in Pakistani politics.

Meanwhile, the generals became richer: the army now has a hand in every business from cereal and armaments to golf courses and luxury apartments.

Musharraf’s decade, from 1999, did little to alter this. While trumpeting the army’s guardianship of our sovereignty, he too extracted rent from America for conducting a war on terror. He allowed US bases and drone strikes on Pakistani soil while protecting the jihadists who attacked the Americans in Afghanistan. He spoke of “enlightened moderation” while nurturing extremists to fight the army’s proxy war in India. The truth is, of course, that Pakistan’s army has never won a war with India.

Too many of my fellow citizens, demoralised and disappointed, continue to swallow the army’s self-serving narrative. They do so out of misplaced patriotism and also fear: it’s easier to blame one’s failure on others than accept responsibility for it.

But with this latest humiliation, the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, there are signs that things might, finally, be changing. Liberals who for years have warned against the army’s suicidal security doctrine have now been emboldened to ask tough questions publicly. When my sister, a journalist in Lahore, criticised both the ISI and America on CNN the week after bin Laden was killed, she was inundated with grateful emails from Pakistanis all over the world. “I applaud your courage,” wrote one, “for saying what few dare to think.” My own Twitter account is flooded with outraged Pakistanis demanding accountability. Influential TV anchors like Kamran Khan, until recently an ardent army supporter, have started asking how and why the country is overrun with jihadists. The leader of the opposition has demanded a judicial probe into the Osama affair. Americans, too, have finally put the army on the mat, with Congressmen demanding aid cuts to an untrustworthy ally.

I don’t know if we will succeed in whittling down the army’s power now—or even in my lifetime. But my children will know a different Pakistan—if only because the army is on a collision course with history.