The Friday Times: Editorial By Najam Sethi
Pakistan’s Military Inc is angry at leading sections of the local and foreign media for spreading “false”, “baseless” and “malicious” news and analyses designed to “destabilize and undermine the armed forces”. Nothing less than a vicious “conspiracy” against the noble and heroic armed forces is alleged.
There are two core dimensions to this angry retort. The first relates to domestic media criticism of the military’s performance, role and policy as demonstrated by a string of recent failures which show the military and its various agencies and allied institutions in rather poor, even humiliating, light. The second concerns the local media which is fearful and angry after Saleem Shahzad’s abduction and killing and is alleging that the criminals’ “footprints” (as per Saleem’s last testament to media watchdogs) lead to Aab Para.
The first clutch of criticisms relates to the military’s performance. The issue for the military here is not so much about the validity of the facts – which are undeniable – but whether it is proper to reveal them because they weaken the morale and public standing of the armed forces and thereby undermine “national security”.
A rejoinder is in order.
In a democracy there are no “sacred cows”. If elected prime ministers, presidents, chief ministers, opposition leaders, civil servants and businessmen can be hounded out of government or dragged off to jails and courts, if the conduct of judges and their judgments can be seriously questioned and criticized, if the media can be regulated, if parliament can be put on the mat, why can’t the armed forces be stretched on the same accountability rack? Surely, “national security” is determined as much by the potency of the military (which potency is determined by the yardstick of actual performance on the ground in any eventuality) as it is by the vitality of the politico-economic system and its interlocutors (civilians) that underpin the nation-state. Therefore if the latter is kosher for critical appraisal, the former should not take exception to an application of the same rules to its own behaviour and output.
The military should also realize that it cannot and should not monopolize the definition and defense of the “national interest” if it simultaneously wishes to confer the “ownership of it to the elected civilian government when it runs into trouble because of indefensible and opaque policies – contradictions in point being the “strategic” or “transactional” relationship with the US, the winking policy on drones and the war against the Al-Qaeda-Taliban terrorists (our war or theirs).
The military’s case on all core issues has been enormously weakened by its outright refusal, at first, to accept independent and credible commissions of inquiry both about its performance and about the Saleem Shahzad case and then, faced with relentless media pressure to concede, to try and tilt such inquiries in its own favour by clutching at exclusionist notions of “national security” and “national interest”. It would have been less arrogant and more advisable to concede independent commissions but to restrict their findings to parliamentary or judicial committees with powers to classify “sensitive” or “national security” issues, an acceptable norm in most democracies.
The military’s understanding of the way the free media functions in most established democracies is also lacking. Such democracies in the West or in India are built on solid and enduring foundations of civilian and constitutional oversight over their respective militaries. That is why the civilians are quick to bail out their militaries because they have established institutional “ownership” of their country’s military adventures and policies. That is also why the media in such consensually-built democracies is quick to line up behind their democratic governments and subservient militaries and the slogan of “my country, right or wrong” resounds with force. Therefore it is tilting at windmills to accuse the western media of “destabilizing” Pakistan by spreading “lies” that undermine the Pakistani military, without making the same charge at their strategic foreign allies in which such media are democratically and consensually embedded.
The difference between the free media in such established, consensual and functional civilian democracies and the free media in a dysfunctional and fledgling democracy with excessive military overhang in Pakistan is also worth stating.
The Pakistani military accuses the Pakistani media of not being as “patriotic as the Western and Indian media” because it is critical of its national security institutions unlike the “enemy”. In the event, the boot might well be on the other foot. Even after three disastrous interventions spanning thirty years and a military misadventure in Kargil in which elected civilians and fellow air force and navy comrades were kept out of the loop, the Pakistani army refuses to be subservient to the civilian constitutional order and insists of monopolizing the “national interest”. Under the circumstances, it is a moot point at best whether the media or the military is more or less patriotic in heeding or hoodwinking Pakistan’s democracy and the constitution.