Mullah vs Military

At any given forum for political debate especially in our third world countries, we come across the phenomenon of 'establishment' to such an extent that it starts becoming absurd. It always reminds me of some contemporary buzz word from the political jargon which does not remain that exclusive after all and its use becomes a game of Chinese whisper. In Pakistan, for instance, to many, establishment is an official institution, I’ve even heard people blabbering about it being a secret undercover unit that even the president or the prime minister doesn’t know about, in the same way its not a surprise listening to conversations on topics of national security or high level diplomacy or international peace by fruit and fish mongers in downtown Karachi or Khanewal or the place you would least expect them to take place. Ironic is the fact that the people somehow think exactly what the establishment wants them to think, except for the fancy details of course, which is a result of the Chinese whisper. One of my teachers once told me about establishment, that how simple of a concept it is, and for reasons of simplicity and my limited knowledge, we'll stick to that definition. According to him, the establishment is a group of people in a country who have achieved a certain status of desirability in their respective dimensions and want to hold onto it, or they are the people who want to maintain status quo in order for their own lives to be easy. Precisely the successful businessmen, feudal lords, high ranking government officials, CEOs of corporations, in fact every successful individual or group of individuals who want to hold onto their positions irrespective of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or any other denominator, constitute the establishment. Oh boy! This brings half the country aboard the evil vessel of establishment, seems like we are all doomed at its hands, but wait! There’s a catch: a big majority of this 'establishment' is unaware of the fact that they're a part of it and they're the people who have become so intoxicated with their 'success' and good fortune that they've grown indifferent to what goes around them. These people, in my opinion, are just ignorant and serve as examples of success and glory for our naive hunger-ridden oppressed public (no surprise that the majority of our elite bureaucrats come from such a class of people). That’s for the 'many among us who think that life is but a joke'; it seems as if there’s an invisible hand of the establishment carrying out all the dirty work without the people of the establishment knowing but that invisible hand is not that invisible after all, although the ordinary elements can’t be isolated from the general classification of establishment but for analytical purpose they can be excluded to investigate the more 'responsible' elements.
This brings us back to the topic of this article, the Mullah (religious fanatics) and the military are the two institutions in Pakistan which have, over the past six decades, jeopardized everything that a successful and 'honourable' nation stands for. The malicious plots and manoeuvres of both have decayed the country and they've leeched on the resources (especially military) and lives of people to further their own agenda. When we talked about establishment, we should have made a distinction between its responsible and ordinary elements. The responsible elements are the ones which are totally aware of the consequences of their actions and policies, and they exercise a significant amount of power control over the ordinary elements (obviously which makes them powerful), whereas the ordinary elements just carry out the routine work for the former without even knowing the large scale consequences. The field operatives for the military and mullah are the ordinary soldiers and our everyday 'maulvi', Imams or madrassah goers, respectively. Let’s take one step at a time and see where the mullah and military cross paths in our problems. What we know of the two is the fact they've pursued their own agenda over the past so many decades while euphemistically terming it as 'national interest' or catering to 'spiritual needs' of the people. The system of power sharing gives a major share of the pie to our political elite, namely the feudal lords, industrialists and businessmen, but however corrupt, incompetent or unsuitable they might be for the government, they are the ones principally eligible to be there, so for that reason, let’s leave them out of the equation for a bit. We as a nation never saw stability in our country; the wars with India, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and God knows what else had plagued our economy and society till date. Somehow we are always in need of military dominance: to counter the hostile neighbour, to fight the Russians, to help the Kashmiris with their cause, is it the invisible hand of the establishment at work?? Not really... if seen carefully, there’s always a religious provision for the above mentioned problems as well: the wars with India backed by a public sentiment flooded by anti-Hindu ideals instigated by the Mullah among the people, the Russian invasion supported by the idea of 'Jehad fi sabilillah' (another ingenious joint venture of the religious and military elements), the Kashmiri nationalist cause which is still seen by the 'naive' Pakistanis as a religious movement, and of course last but not least, the Taliban, which despite of their murderous intent towards all those who don’t share the same set of ideals with them, is seen by many in the military as an asset for Pakistan, in fact the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist religious organizations were created by the military wing of the ISI during the Afghan war to be used against India and to export terrorism across the LoC. What the fuck?? The Pakistani blood is being spilled everyday in the name of Allah, and theres a wide scale public indifference towards the real causes of that bloodshed which are so obviously clear to us. No one wants to blame the army or the Mullah because they cater to our 'national interest and spiritual needs', because the whole cyclic process becomes so complicated for our naive Pakistani common man that he begins to take things at face value. For example, when the Imams of mosques in somewhat backward areas of Pakistan start off their loudspeakers at 2 in the morning, ruining the sleeps of hardworking hunger ridden poor people, no one says a thing because obviously they're calling out God's name, not to mention the fact that usually those behind those megaphones are people in their late 70s with nothing else to do in life, in fact some of them usually suffer with some bizarre medical condition which doesn’t even let them sleep at night, so why not make most out of that time and fuck with people's heads in the name of GOD. It’s as simple as that, the same principle can be applied to worse cases of exploitation and goes up to the level of suicide bombers, what’s worse is the fact that they're not alone in it, other stakeholders in the power dynamics occasionally borrow the power of nuisance these religious fanatics exercise.
The military has eaten up the resources of our country and has been leeching on them since it came into being. Almost 65% of the budget (after the share of debt servicing being allocated) is consumed by the military; this has resulted in an economic autonomy of the military which has made it very powerful and a larger than life phenomenon in Pakistan. This autonomy has created so many problems for us in the past and we somehow conveniently manage to sleep over this bloody unfair distribution of resources every night, because hey! C'mon, they're serving the national interest for us and protecting us from enemies....bullshit!! This national interest coupled with the autonomy of the military forms a deadly combination and we've seen in the past that how military dictators took matters into their own hands however they saw fit, while ravaging all the ideals and values that a true republic stands for. This is where our heinous politicians and the rest of the establishment plays their part; they simply embrace the military dictators and their agenda till the point that people start to realize the difference between right and wrong, its only then that the dictator steps away from power so that 'true democratic' forces can be brought back into power. This cycle of political drama is also not new to us and we've been witnessing it like dead corpses for years, only if the military wouldn't interfere with politics, will there be a possibility of political change, and new real political actors from among the masses could be brought into the scene. Joining all the pieces together, it won’t be hard to realize that Pakistan, despite always being depicted as a politically unstable country, is a fairly stable one, as the predictability in the political drama is so significant for the past so many years that it makes us common people all look like fools.
Fredrich Nietzsche once said that the concept of God makes man feeble and renders him useless for this world, Iqbal (although being greatly inspired by Nietzsche) on the contrary, said that the idea of God is capable of making man capable of ruling the world and it’s the weak who lose themselves in God, whereas the powerful find him within themselves. To our greatest misfortune, we are following the religion Nietzsche talked about rather than Iqbal's, and that’s the reason the Mullah always succeeds to solicit the common man into surrendering to concepts of 'higher reality' rather than finding the reality among themselves, rendering them incapable of even recognizing themselves and vulnerable to attacks on every front. The military, and the rest of the establishment, for the same reason, keeps eating at the flesh of the Pakistani man like vultures, and we all know that it’s not news to anyone, the purpose of saying all these things is not self pity but to serve as a wakeup call to get our act together and embrace the reality as it is but not as it is taught to us.