Universal Exports

Universal Exports


The way Ian Fleming wrote it, “James Bond (007)”, the fictional British MI-6 spy with a “licence to kill”, pretended, on occasion, to be a dapper travelling salesman from “Universal Exports”, selling, one knows not what.

Now if JB, fast forwarding from the Cold War to present times, was called Hafiz Mohamed Sayeed instead, and was working for the ISI/LeT/Jamaat/Pak Army/Civilian leadership/Al Quaeda, and used a similar Universal Exports card, because it did sort of describe his outgoing nature and was broadly descriptive of what he did; he wouldn’t be able to say what his company really sold either.

Of course, Fleming’s laconic “Export” subterfuge was never enthusiastically defended, and was always something of a see-through fig-leaf, for all, except the likes of comical East European Customs officials who have no English, and were expected to be satisfied with the moniker, provided “James” didn’t start leaping over the conveyor belts firing his Walther PPK.

But enjoyable as the Bond series still is, standing in for comfortable thrills and spills in an uncertain world, one doesn’t really want to endure the “B Movie” version playing out in real life.

This one comes with moustachioed and bearded villains, uniformed oil-can Harrys, shifty-eyed heavies in suits, swearing and oath-taking militia with rotted middle teeth and yellowed fangs, pathan-suit and woolly hat clad sarkari journos with aquiline noses, other commentators in banker’s pin-stripes, all reasonably intoning orchestrated lies in Oxonian accents, nicely laced with menace.

Pakistan loves calling “Hindustan” names. Some are rather inventive, like the hybrid “Saffron Zionists”, updated after the latest Mumbai attacks. They comment derisively on our incompetence and suggest we are trying to shift the blame for home-grown troubles across their green and pure borders.

A substantial section of the Pakistani media is put out with Indian “belligerence”. It is amazed that we dare summon their ISI Chief or that we demand the extradition of Indian criminals and terrorist warlords nestled in their midst. In short, the Pakistani intelligentsia can’t understand why they are being accused at all, and quite a few analysts are convinced we have staged the Mumbai terrorist attack ourselves in order to malign Pakistan.

But then, such fantasy-mongering seems to be an uniquely Islamic phenomenon. It is often so outrageous that it would give Joseph Goebbels, the club-footed sex maniac who was Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, an inferiority complex.

When Iraq was being demolished during the Second Gulf War, their Minister of Information, Muhammad Al Sahhaf, dubbed “Comical Ali” by the World Press, regaled satellite TV with unsinkable but hilarious hyperbole on the supposedly grand successes of the Iraqi Armed Forces. And President Ahmenidajad of Iran, never threatens in twenty-first century terms. No, for him it’s always about dismemberments and beheadings.

Some of us will recall listening to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s feverish ranting in 1967, claiming the invasion of Israel during the Six Day War. In reality, the Egyptian Army abandoned 400 brand new tanks on the Golan Heights along with the Heights themselves, and ran away. They did the same with Gaza, abandoned it, but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to dear old Nasser’s broadcasts.

Ignominy and defeat never seems to stop Islamic fantasists. In Pakistan, true to form, the counter propaganda is in full flow. Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, Head of the banned LeT, responsible for the attack on Indian Parliament, on the Red Fort, on the Mumbai local trains, and now, the hotels, station, hospital, streets, and Chabad House; is protesting his innocence.

Mr. Sayeed is flooding the airwaves with denial. He says he cannot understand why his good name is being besmirched. The Jamaat ud Daawa, where he sits these days, is engaged only in social work, and all of Pakistan knows it.

President Zardari is doing his bit too. He says he doubts that the terrorists are Pakistani at all and muses they may be “stateless people”. He says he might have to abandon the fight against the Taliban and the Al Quaeda and concentrate his troops on the inexplicably angry Indians instead. He says this to the visiting Condoleeza Rice, to put her off her stroke. And Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani chimes in with an offer of the “fullest cooperation and assistance to bring the perpetrators to justice”. It doesn’t hurt to make promises, and Gilani knows it.

Everyone in the Pakistani Government has an insatiable appetite for “evidence” and “proof” though. You’d think they were sticklers for the law if you didn’t know better. Still, it doesn’t stop them scoffing at any and all evidence and proof submitted. They always find fault with its probity, efficacy, veracity, accuracy and anything else they can think of to trash it. This, from what the US Congressional Committee on the Prevention of Terrorism calls the “intersection of terrorism and nuclear threat” is not as funny as it may seem.

And Pakistan’s idea of democracy is a number of mutually secretive power centres. The civilian government’s influence, now threatened by military coup already, is limited to sections of Islamabad. Most of the rest of the country is parcelled out between bands of marauding terrorists and the Armed Forces/ ISI. There are also tribal areas and other bits and pieces which are only Pakistan on paper.

But perhaps this time America will not be looking for a certificate of veracity from Pakistan. They may be working towards a relentless end game even as the Pakistani establishment are falling about wheezing over their latest caper.

If they stop to think, they might realise they won’t get away with it this time. Perhaps it will occur to them that the outgoing US administration, with barely 50 days to go in office, is not going to be the one to deliver the comeuppance. But the new President could well have other plans.

One Mr. Robert Kagan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, might be reading the Crystal Ball for Pakistan. In a recent Op-Ed piece in The New York Times he says, “perhaps they need a further incentive-like the prospect of seeing parts of their country placed in an international receivership”.

Ah but what parts would that be? The bits with the nuclear facilities in it one hopes. Because, if it’s Al Quaeda, Taliban and other assorted terrorists America is after, they might just have to occupy the whole country!

(1,056 words)

December 5th, 2008
Gautam Mukherjee