The Death of Common Sense and Intelligence

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by Shaheryar Azhar, the moderator of ‘The Forum’

What happened in Mumbai was not an abstraction for me. Having visited it thrice; basked as a guest in the old-world charm of Taj Palace Hotel and Towers; played a diligent tourist in this multicultural cauldron of ‘maximum city’; having partaken of its great shopping and some of its finest cuisines; having friends and relatives who are ‘Bombayites’ through and through and can not dream of living anywhere else; and, not the least, being an ardent fan of Bollywood films and music from my earliest memory as a child – seeing the horror unfold on November 26th was extremely personal in many ways.

What Churchill said of English and Americans may be paraphrased about Pakistanis and Indians – they are divided by a common race, cuisine, language, values, culture, emotional make-up but above all by a commonly-shared and a very typical South Asian sense of humor. Increasingly, the common people of these two countries are realizing this shared heritage of theirs even if their leaders, lacking in both imagination and courage, are unable to convert this sentiment into a suitable and more friendly foreign policy.

But as I sat in front of the TV becoming progressively sadder, watching the perpetrators of carnage in Mumbai monopolizing the world attention for three days, it occurred to me that the greatest casualty of President Bush’s version of the ‘War on Terror’ has been the death of common sense and intelligence itself. At the risk of appearing ’soft’ on terror or ‘liberal’ in the face of an existential threat or ‘unpatriotic’ at the time of greatest national peril, we have all been forced to abandon common sense and normal intelligent questioning.

A $300,000, 19-man operation on September 11, 2001 has already seen a response from America that is, according to Nobel-prize winning Economist Joe Stiglitz ‘a three-trillion war’, hundreds of thousands of causalities (ours and everyone else’s) millions displaced and a world that, after all this investment, is a much more unstable Geo-politically and economically. We have failed and are failing in our response. And as far as the enemy is concerned it appears to have no end to new, more hardened recruits, and no end to continually confounding us. What is most disturbing is that the enemy is increasingly attracting a better educated and more sophisticated from amongst their potential supporters.

Where do we start? First, by giving due respect to the enemy – the very first lesson of conducting a successful war.

We face a foe that is both highly intelligent (and thus strategically brilliant) and at the same time incredibly motivated in pursuit of its objectives. It is highly intelligent because it understood as no one else did (certainly not the political leaders of the ‘Free World’) that a globalized and inter-connected world presented it a golden opportunity for conducting an asymmetrical warfare. In other words, it grasped the truth that it didn’t need sophisticated weapons or a lot of money to mount a deadly challenge to the superpower of the world and its allies. It also understood, that it didn’t need much of a developed communications strategy (or an alternative vision of how the world ought to be) to keep up the morale of its troops, financiers and future recruits and to sow uncertainty in its adversary. That work, the enemy knew, would be commendably done by the adversary and its media themselves. How come? Because our public platitudes were all constructed for confronting state enemies, not non-state ones. We have shown to have no mechanism at our disposal other than babbling inanities about the ‘barbarians’ and ‘Islamic fascists’ who ‘hate our freedoms’. We have not properly defined and described those who confront us and for what purpose in any believable manner. We have done so in our hubris because we do not give due ‘respect’ to the enemy and because it is ‘inconvenient’ for us to examine our policies.

In steadfastly refusing to allow a healthy debate from the start about our own vulnerability and their real motives we have continued to strengthen our enemies and weaken ourselves, and our allies. We have above all fooled ourselves by calling it a ‘war’ because we have cornered ourselves in fighting it ‘conventionally’ – how come, some of us are daring to ask, all our technology, our weaponry, our trillions and the bravery of our soldiers appears not enough for the rudimentary resources of the ‘yahoos’? How come?

Someone soon will be forced to answer that question.

As I was watching the coverage of the Mumbai massacres, the Western media was so busy bashing Pakistan or talking platitudes about the threat of hostilities between the ‘two nuclear powers’, that not once did I hear from all the expert talking heads about the ‘capacity’ of Pakistani state to take on the terrorists even if we assume the best of intentions and the political will of steel. Not once did the ‘wise men of Gotham’ say: If thousands of Pakistani soldiers and civilians are killed, if its generals and top political leaders are blown away, if its buses full of ‘all-powerful’ ISI staff are themselves bombed, if a five-star VIP-patronized hotel, a stone’s throw-away from the Prime Minister’s house is suicide-bombed with an incredibly powerful explosive and burned to the ground and if the President, the Prime Minister and the Generals of the country can not move about the cities with all the security at their disposal in the discharge of their normal duties, perhaps the state of Pakistan does not have the capacity to confront the enemy within. There is a limit how far one can take ‘rougue ISI and military elements in Pakistan’ argument to explain everything before it begins to sound trite  and lame.

Not sufficient capacity. That is the right answer. And what has America done to build that capacity? How much has it wisely invested where it counts? The answer is obvious.

So the enemy is much smarter than us. And we have acted much more stupidly than we, in fact, are. That is a very good place to start. That given the stakes and all that stares us in the face, how quickly, for instance, the tension between India and Pakistan developed and escalated in the wake of Mumbai even seven long-years after the formal start of the ‘war on terror’ (notwithstanding the ‘burden of history between those two countries) is truly astounding. There can not be any other conclusion – that all of us are fighting this existential menace with incredible stupidity.

Secondly, the enemy hates our policies. (Whether it hates us or not is moot since it ‘understands’ us so much better, that it can keep its ‘hate’ at bay, not allowing it to interfere with its thinking and planning). That is the second place to go if the ‘patriotic blue-blooded’ will allow us. And which of our policies?

1. Israel-Palestine
2. Kashmir
3. Iraq
4. Supporting dictators, those who use repression and do not even return rudimentary improvements in people’s lives.
5. Using third-world countries for our purposes and then walking away or discarding them as ‘used condoms’ as a Foreign Secretary of Pakistan, who worked closely with us in the Afghan jihad, once bitterly and angrily remarked to me.
6. Following policies (or allowing their drift) that hugely widen economic disparities between nations.

Thirdly, we need to have policies, long-gestation policies, to build capacity (economic, social, military and intelligence) in those countries from within which the threat is most acute and this includes having old foes (like India and Pakistan) coming together to fight the common threat.

Fourthly, to have immediate policies that will keep our alliances from breaking apart during the gestation period (repeatedly using missiles to hit targets in Pakistan only takes away the credibility of Pakistani government rendering it even weaker in doing its job).

Mumbai has made it crystal clear that the time has now come to revive (and rely on) common sense and intelligence once again.

Just the way we used intelligence and our best minds fighting another different war – the cold war! Because losing this will be no less devastating to everything we cherish and have build over the last 200 years.

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Tags: Bombay, India, intelligence, Mumbai, Pakistan, terror, war