A cruel debate is cruelly raging in those “knowledgeable” circles of America which are essentially, in my opinion, both ill-intentioned and ill-informed. They are ‘knowledgeable’ because they happen to be in the centre-stage of American politics. They are media personalities of both known and unknown credentials. They are also high and semi-high officials of the State Department as well as Pentagon. Lobbyists also they happen to be. Also Congressmen and Senators. As this debate gains momentum we are given more and more reasons to get worried or start worrying. The most recent statement in this connection comes from the US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke while speaking before Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Let me assert it firmly that it will be erroneous to presume that Pakistan is a failed state.” This is the crux of the debate. Is Pakistan already a failed state? Is Pakistan rapidly moving in the direction of the Failed State status’? These are the questions that are flung at one another by scores of American opinion-makers, opinion-gaugers, and opinion-analysers – all of them claiming to be on the modern history’s most crucial fact-finding mission. No one should grudge or dispute any one’s right to put up any kind of proposition for debate. Any curious and super-inquisitive mind anywhere in the world can tomorrow come up for debate with a question: “Is America going to collapse totally under the weight of its huge financial melt-down, recession and unemployment?” No harm to start a debate on this proposition. But let a debate stay in the realm of hypothesis, and not be pushed into the zone of probability. Pakistan didn’t collapse in the months after its birth in 1947 when no one was willing to give this ‘feeble’ baby any chance to ‘ever get on its feet’. How can it now, with the status of being a member of the world’s seven (or eight) member-nuclear club, collapse under the weight of all those conspiratorial crises that have been ‘gifted’ to it by those very ‘friends’ who are so openly worrying about its ‘well-being’? My dear friends of Pakistan, whether you are in Washington, or New Delhi, or Tel Aviv or in some gorgeous mansion in the Red Zone of Islamabad – this country has come to the World Map to stay. It will (alone by the force of the idea behind its creation) carve its way out of the dark and dangerous terrain it has been made to adopt by its ‘friends’ and leaders. The endless efforts to drive Pakistan towards the failed state status are doomed to fail.
(This Column was first published on 14-05-2009)
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