The dick-line behind our decline

The current events are outcomes of structural decline in the country’s stability—a decline directly linked to a long dick-line of people who came to power at critical turning points in recent history.

Lawyers on the streets. Journalists on hunger strikes. National Assembly, a routine national circus. Judges’ appointments, transfers, seniority drama playing out to the fullest. PTI chief minister egging on crowds to spit on the state. PTI chief writing letters to the army chief. Terrorism widening. IMF sniffing up our sovereignty’s skirt. We have had it bad, but this bad? Never. When will these windmills of scandalous instability stop spinning? Not in the near future; perhaps never fully.

This is because what is happening in Pakistan is not an episode. These events are outcomes of structural decline in the country’s stability— a decline directly linked to a long dick-line of people who came to power at critical turning points in our recent history, and, to our misfortune, laid deep foundations of an expanding mess that refuses to halt. The decline and the dick-line are chronologically set, starting 2013. Then onwards for eight years a Game of Marauding Morons was played as if there was no tomorrow. One total jerk replaced another, and cumulatively everyone pushed the country deeper and deeper into a hole. They reduced normal politics into a demolition site and carpet-bombed every part of the administrative, judicial and democratic systems. While their public motto was “fresh leadership”, “new vision”, “national progress” and other gobbledygook, their actual motives were crassly petty: to grab personal power and perpetuate the sordid mediocrity they all brought with themselves to the offices they held. If it weren’t for the shenanigans of this dick-line, Pakistan would not have had to face the current political decline that is driving everyone insane.

When did it all start? Effectively from Nawaz Sharif’s fatal mistake of appointing Raheel Sharif as the army chief, though the likes of General Shuja Pasha had been at dirty work much earlier but were held back by a strong command.

Nawaz’s choice had no fame for brilliance. He was a bumbling man who looked impressive as long as he didn’t open his mouth. And yet the then prime minister picked him—against the insightful advice of the outgoing chief, General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kiani, who in a post-announcement meeting pointedly told him that his selection was never “groomed to be in this position” and that he would be totally dependent on the much smarter and powerful generals around him. But since Nawaz Sharif has a habit of Kamikazing himself, he ignored the assessment and lived to rue the day.

General Raheel was putty in the hands of an insomniac clever-by-half General Asim Saleem Bajwa and was pushed to “assert himself vis a vis his civilian boss, the “Prime Minister”, by his ambitious corps commanders to show that Raheel was “The He-Man”. That set the tone for a dozen big or small “civil-military” crises that followed but the real culmination of this not-so-quiet unfolding of the coupe against Nawaz Sharif was the 2014 siege of the red zone by Imran Khan, choreographed by the Establishment, marketed by the media and bankrolled by the private sector.

This template of torpedoing state interests and holding your own country hostage to bring about political change was to become the standard formula that was applied repeatedly to achieve the same result. The intelligence head, Zaheerul Islam, saw to it that the siege went on successfully and that a stunned prime minister was given enough reason to believe that his end was near except for the support of General Raheel, who was harbouring grand designs of becoming the Field Marshall. The game was to game the PM even if it meant pulverizing everything. Two things intervened to thwart the design: A dollar-laced Saudi job opportunity for Raheel and the national tragedy of the APS attack. General Raheel’s extension for a year however remained the ardent desire of the next DG ISI, General Rizwan, so that he could be in contention for the next army chief. Ably supported by Chaudhary Nisar Ali Khan, General Rizwan manuvered everything in his considerable power to somehow align the ducks in his favour. As Raheel moved to the holy land chasing greenbacks, Rizwan’s ambitions got the final kick in the teeth by Nawaz Sharif’s next choice: much worse than the earlier one. The next member of the dick-line causing national decline was General Qamar Bajwa, whose own father in law, and his marketing guru, was surprised that the man was promoted beyond the rank of a brigadier. This was the birth of the grand finale for the dick-line’s most notorious actors who played havoc. Their first act was to bring Imran Khan to power in 2018 by using all hooks, hookers and crooks, unleashing demonical forces of hate and chaos all around. General Faiz, General Ghafoor, General Bajwa commanded a big army of judges, social media trolls, local political thugs. The four pillars of the state system that they constructed was: F.U.C.K. Fraud politics; Upturned Judicial System; Coerced Media; Knaves everywhere.

They injected scum into the system’s veins to ensure that in every field everyone raced to the bottom so that the trio could rise and stay at the top. Saqib, Azmat, Khosa, Ijaz, Bandial and the likes filled the judicial ranks with deep venom. Their false vanity paved the way for cheap populism; even cheaper pranksterism took-over mainstream jurisprudence. Gutter journalism got promoted to the top slots and getting pictured in PM House bathroom tub was elevated to war reporting.

The biggest damage however was done to the political consciousness of the new generation that was fed lies, deceit and pure dirt in order to firewall the false god that Imran was turned into. Everything was kosher as long as it paid homage to this temple of social and political terror; anyone who did not pray there was kafir. Sanity was killed stone-cold and the land was landfilled with long-term abnormalities of thought and actions.

Problems of the present political, judicial and social order are an enduring legacy of those diseased years. Today the nation is embroiled in the consequences of actions that these small men with big boots and outsized robes took in those years. While the current Establishment cannot be absolved of its own egregious mistakes, the roots of our present-day decline spread back to the dark era of this dick-line. Whatever good had remained in the country, they collectively buried it deep into the ground; however, the evil that they all did continues to live after them.