Above: Najam Sethi, Irfan Hussain, Saroop Ijaz,Khalid Ahmed, Nadeem Farooq Parracha,Bina Sarwar,Murtaza Razvi,Nusrat Javed, Fasi Zaka,Jugnu Mohsin, Farhat Taj Anderson, Kamran Shafi, Asad Munir, Gen.Talat Masood,Dr Farukh Saleem etc
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.
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.
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 nave 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 navet. 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 Pakistan 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 navet, 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’ 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.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2050547