The hybrid government has finally decided to kick the chessboard and start playing solitaire. Nothing new or surprising. The cast of characters keeps changing but the sordid script remains frustratingly unchanged. Welcome to Fatherland!
But wait. I am not about to give you a lowdown on this development.
Within the logic of the conflictual model pursued by our plug-in hybrid and Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaaf’s fight for survival, this was the only logical outcome after talks broke down. That this will do nothing to solve the systemic problem that necessitated the government’s action in the first place is another matter. I have a term for it: the logic of non sequitur. A logic inheres in every action, even one that is illogical. In any case, friend Fasi Zaka has already penned an excellent analysis of the situation in Dawn. I can’t add much to that.
My purpose here is to discuss the plethora of ex ante analyses and the many ex post arguments that will follow. The central point I want to make is more than just point to the partisan flavour of such analyses. It is about why we are generally incapable of getting to the core of a problem.
So here goes.
We (humans) are plagued by a paradox. We do fairly well when faced with abstract systemic challenges. We try to dissect complexity, we classify things, what is called constructing taxonomies to structure the world around us. Put another way, we take complexity and reduce it into many parts to get a better understanding of what it constitutes. It’s useful, even though there’s a huge downside to it but we can let that slide.
Going by this, one would assume that when confronted with a political problem we would try our best to get to the origins of it to better understand why it has become intractable or whether there’s any way of resolving it. Nah!
We leave the core issue hanging and find intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) escape hatches. Let me explain. Rather than going back to the original sin, we begin obsessing over subsequent symptoms while consciously evading, even erasing, the catalyst.
One could perhaps ascribe it to a lack of rigorous analysis. But then we see people with otherwise high IQs and intellect taking refuge in downstream complexities while conveniently ignoring where and how the problem began.
Take Palestine. Today, we have a wicked problem getting wickeder with narratives on both sides of the conflict when the core problem is/was painfully simple: a people stealing another people’s land. Moral, legal and logical clarity requires that we go back to the essence of the problem. That doesn’t happen because the interests of individuals and collections cannot afford such clarity.
It’s the same with Occupied Kashmir.
Psychologists call it motivated reasoning. When observers/analysts process highly polarised socio-political conflicts, they rarely operate with an “accuracy goal”. Instead, they are driven by “directional goals” aimed at protecting a preferred political identity, justifying a status quo or avoiding admitting that the constitutional compact is being violated.
Let me give another example. This hybrid has pushed through sweeping constitutional amendments, explicitly designed to neuter the judiciary to clear the deck for itself without pesky judges troubling it. One would have assumed that this core point — the genesis and purport of the amendments — would be the highlight of any subsequent commentary. In some cases, yes. But there were two other categories: the hybrid partisan who hailed them and constructed arguments from thin air to justify the amendments and those who said they were opposed to the amendments but diluted that point by launching into exhaustive dissections of the judiciary’s historical overstepping. They litigated past judicial activism and argued that the courts had it coming.
Here’s the thing. The criticism of the judiciary was/is grounded in facts. But to frame the issue this way means the argument must morph from “is this executive action constitutionally legitimate?” to “does the target deserve to be punished?” Worse, it completely downplays the immediate context of an action and its intentions.
Let’s apply this erasure of catalyst to the current action against the PTI government in KP. Analyses will tell us about talks and how and why they got derailed. They will give us granular evaluations of PTI’s tactical shortcomings and how and why the party lacks a coherent long-term strategy, why its leadership is fractured, that it is obsessed with the singular goal of securing Imran Khan’s release, that its provincial administration had failed to sign on to centre’s counter-terrorism policy etcetera.
Again, each of these points taken without any context or, worse, without any reference to the core issue could be litigated. PTI’s structural and strategic vulnerabilities are visible. But can the imposition of emergency rule be treated as a standalone administrative response to a breakdown in talks. Did it start there and must therefore end there?
Similarly, criticising the PTI for not having a coherent strategy without any reference to the completely illegal and unconstitutional moves against the party is a strange way to analyse the situation. Pooh-poohing the party for not being able to conduct an effective long march in the face of a draconian response from the current hybrid is to expect the party to act as an insurgent group, which it is not.
All such analyses — and airwaves and print are full of them — completely erase the upstream catalyst and ignore the chain of events: the engineered vote of no-confidence that originally ousted Mr Imran Khan, the multi-year state-sponsored campaign to systematically dismantle his political party, the big operation to steal its mandate, the sweeping incarceration of its leaders and cadres, the rule by law decrees to destroy it and the open, persistent flouting by the executive of explicit court orders.
It’s called strategic framing. The way a problem is “set” dictates what we are permitted to see and how to perceive and analyse it. The current crisis thus becomes a “law and order” issue triggered by a stubborn party and emergency rule becomes an unfortunate administrative necessity. But if one zooms out to the upstream reality, the emergency declaration is exposed for what it truly is: the brute-force culmination of a prolonged campaign to either subjugate or erase a political rival from the politico-constitutional landscape.
Incidentally, this is exactly how the situation and the protestors in Azad Jammu and Kashmir were also framed.
Why does this happen? Answer: safety of pragmatic neutrality. Psychologists tell us that people tend to alter their psychological distance when faced with the messy, dangerous reality of an immediate event. They either zoom out into high-level abstractions or zoom in so closely on technical minutiae that the central ethical (or as in this case, legal-constitutional) crisis becomes entirely blurred.
Focusing on downstream complexities allows analysts to posture as objective, neutral observers. It also feels intellectually rigorous to debate the fine points of judicial overreach or to evaluate the PTI’s flawed strategies or its supposed opposition to the federal government’s counter-terrorism policy (which is another issue on which the less said the better).
Corollary: write an elegant (increasingly AI-assisted) op-ed blaming the victim without risking pointing a finger at the hand holding the gun.