The media, the military and the Swat operation
Monday, June 22, 2009
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
A few short months ago, private TV channels in this country were beaming live images of lawyers and political activists on the streets, chanting slogans against Pervez Musharraf and the entire military establishment that he represented. In Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP such activism has been going on for decades, but for Punjab it was a qualitatively new phenomenon. Not even after the humiliating surrender in Dhaka in December 1971 was the military top brass subjected to such public berating. It appeared almost as if this was a political awakening of sorts. And the independent private media was lauded for being at the forefront of the ‘civil society’ revolution.
Today one could be forgiven for thinking that the almost two years of uninterrupted sloganeering on the streets of Rawalpindi, Lahore and Multan was but a dream. On TV nowadays are heroic representations of the selfless Pakistani solider engaged in an epic war with ‘terrorists’. Widows of those killed in combat express their steely resolve to inculcate in their father-less children unbridled commitment to the nation. Patriotic anthems, both old and new, ring ceaselessly in our ears. The Chief of Army Staff is shown manning an F-16 on the front page of all national dailies. In short, the military’s role in state affairs , under serious question until so recently, has been magnificently resurructed.
Since the military assault on Malakand began, opinion pages (in this and other major newspapers) have been awash with pieces about the operational brilliance of the troops and the need to ensure that the assault is carried through to its logical conclusion. Some writers have been more circumspect in their appraisal but nonetheless supportive of the operation. As time has progressed, the odd dissenting article has started to appear. The general tone remains pro-operation but at the very least there is recognition that there may be other opinions out there. Unfortunately there is no parallel to this in mainstream reporting of what is going on.
The only source of information on daily events in Malakand and other areas in which fighting is taking place is the Inter-Services Press Relations (ISPR). Sadly press reports rarely note that there are no alternate means to verify the ISPR’s version of events. Tellingly the ISPR has never offered any information on civilian casualties during the course of the operations. Day after day we are fed a numbing dose of numbers of militants killed or apprehended with the occasional addition of number of soldiers ‘martyred’.
That the state would be spewing out facts and figures that conform to its larger narrative of existential war is hardly surprising. What, however, has happened to the private media’s ideals about independence, objectivity, and the public interest? After March 9, 2007 the private media went out of its way to provide coverage of protests and incidents of state repression, and TV anchors in particular delivered regular lectures about press freedom and the responsibility of democratic government. In retrospect it is clear that, more often than not, the private media made sure that the national security state was insulated from critique and that Musharraf’s person was depicted as responsible for all that was going wrong.
The first obvious indicators that something was amiss came during the media frenzy that erupted after the Mumbai attacks in October last year. Admittedly the Indian media was probably even more hawkish than its Pakistani counterpart, but this does not explain the latter’s extremely rapid shift from a posture critical of the establishment to being completely supportive of it. The start of the Malakand operation produced the most amazing spectacle of all. Almost overnight anchors and reporters with a known soft spot for jihadi ideologies had changed their tune about the Taliban. In fact so comprehensive has the transformation been that the term ‘Taliban’ has all but disappeared from the lexicon altogether, replaced by ‘terrorists’ or ‘militants’.
Many observers who have long opposed the establishment’s support for jihadi groups will presumably be happy about the fact that the popular media has also stopped romanticising the Taliban (with a few exceptions). Viewed in isolation, the media’s about-turn is indeed a good thing. But put into its proper context, the shift reflects that very little has changed at all. Ultimately the media is simply singing to the establishment’s (revised) tune. It should not be forgotten that the establishment has assiduously used the media for many decades to project the image of jihad as holy war. Without the media’s support it would have been very difficult to justify the dumping of this narrative that continued to be favoured until quite recently.
An independent media, by definition, cannot simply become the mouthpiece of government. To be fair the private media was at times overly partial during the anti-Musharraf movement, but it has truly outdone itself in the current conjuncture. The media’s fickleness necessarily raises questions about its effectiveness. On the one hand, particularly in the urban areas of Punjab, the media plays a significant role in shaping public opinion. But on the other hand, for the best part of 60 years, the media has been unable to generate support for the state’s national security imperatives in Sindh and Balochistan, and only to a certain extent in NWFP. In effect the media’s pandering to the establishment at the present time serves to keep the Punjabi heartland on board as an extremely delicate and dangerous ideational leap is made in which jihadi forces previously seen as essential to the security interests of the nation are now depicted as constituting a serious threat.
But here again there is a fine print. The volume of stories suggesting the close links between the ‘terrorists’ and an ‘outside hand’ is increasingly rapidly. In recent days Rehman Malik and Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani have been reported as saying that the threat from India remains as real as ever. Given the dramatic change in the media’s posture at opportune times in the recent past, it is eminently possible that more such changes take place in the future so that ‘good jihadis’ are recovered to stall the Indian juggernaut.
Notwithstanding the claims being made by a variety of experts and government functionaries about the broad public consensus on the military operation, it is impossible to expect that there will be definitive agreement across the political and intellectual spectrum on this most emotive of issues. However, what can and must be asserted without any hesitation at all is the establishment’s responsibility for bringing us to where we are today. The media’s role in cleaning up the military’s image by invoking war propaganda must be subject to criticism in this regard. Those who argue that it does not matter how we got here but where we go from here are going down a very dangerous path which will culminate in more ‘unavoidable’ military operations. To adapt a Shakespearean phrase: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Pakistan’ and we cannot afford to sweep it under the carpet, yet again.
