A wake-up call

Post-September 11 President Musharraf recounted Sheikh Zayed al-Nahyan's advice to him. When there is a storm, he said, follow the ostrich way - bury your head in the sand and let the storm blew over.

Sheikh Zayed's advice was close to nature, loaded with folklore wisdom. Perhaps Musharraf could have asked him in a follow up: "What if the storm was after the ostrich neck." But he did not. It suited his psychology of surrender, which he proudly described as his pragmatism.

Seductive as such stories are they lend themselves to easy acceptability, forgetting that their parameters are time bound and thus specific to a limited situation.

Musharraf failed to foresee the prolonged US stay in the region that will create craters of hatred and resentment morphing into violent responses in Afghanistan and around; that it would stretch Pakistan armed forces' stay in FATA pitting it against its own people; and that India would love to oblige US in aggravating the situation in FATA and Balochistan.

Musharraf also failed to see the impact his secularisation agenda would create on his people's psyche throwing them into a state of shock, grief, and eventually desperation to preempt his secularism.

But Musharraf's ostrich-in-the sand policy aside, the whole attitude to the brewing crisis seems problematic. The PPP's secular government in the centre and ANP's government in the Frontier province should press for the use of force against the militants so that the land opens up to their secular and ethnic policies. Statements and slogans are being crafted to convey a particular impression from the cottage industry of doomsday scenarios to bleakness and denial of redemption. From all counts, the national psyche is under siege. The motives are as different as are the spin masters. Some do it willingly, calculated to undermine national will - a preparation for surrender, and others do it because they have cultivated the pathology of despondence, they see bleak and desolate, circumstances notwithstanding.