What are client-states?
The client-state as a category developed for a State acting subservient to an imperialist power in the neo-colonial world order. Pakistan falls under the category – except for the rather short Zulfikar Ali Bhutto era. The Pakistani state fell under the category of ‘non-aligned’ during this period.
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The Raymond Davis issue is not the Raymond Davis issue. If it were merely limited to Davis then the response to it would not have been as elaborate. Two federal ministers have been toppled due to comments made on the matter. The Pakistani State has been structurally shaken.
And the question we are left with is Lenin’s question: what is to be done?
It is likely that by the time this article appears in print Raymond Davis will have been let go.
This shall be despite the three complimentary petitions being heard in the Lahore High Court calling for different micro measures – but coherent on their collective aim: bringing down the influence of the ever-fading American empire in Pakistani socio-politics.
But there is another point to be made. A rather more subtle point for the charged political atmosphere we find ourselves in.
It is that all three petitions miss their end. None asks for the truth of the event to be uncovered.
It is a strange event. It is moreover a bizarre event.
An American national shoots down two Pakistani motorcyclists in broad daylight. He gets off his vehicle to make their vehicle. As he does so, a Consulate Landcruiser comes the wrong way – purportedly to his rescue – but kills a pedestrian along the way. The purportedly cavalry (the Landcruiser) is later nowhere to be seen. The American national who shot the men and is now video-taping them is arrested. It turns out that one of the dead men has a licensed gun. The arrested man identifies himself as Raymond Davis.
All these details were established in the first five minutes of the reporting of the incident. It is most interesting to note that days after the incident nothing more is known for certain. The incident – and more importantly – the actors involved in it all appear shady.
There are shades of grey all around.
The incident is like all other high-profile incidents to have taken place in Pakistan’s political history. Assassinations and intelligence scams are both covered up – and covered up well.
Hypernationalism as a form of politics:
Despite the lack of facts a public imagination develops around an incident – that transpires into a form of politics. That form of politics mires itself in a strange mix of hyper-nationalism and mob fever.
This is not to say, as I said earlier, that we not be anti-imperialist.
I am an anti-Imperialist in my heart. And I shall use the Raymond Davis incident to centre my anti-Imperialism.
But I am not one who shall forget to ask the rather simple (or so it appeared) question: so…what actually happened?
…and moreover this is not the limit to my questioning.
It appears we shall also have to disarticulate two other ideas (a) the idea of diplomatic immunity (b) the idea of the killer’s skin colour.
This is not to say again that we not take an anti-Imperialist stance. It is to say, rather, that we ask questions.
Brown skin, white masks:
The idea of the killer’s skin colour is an interesting idea. Allow me to be biased but most of those – including those who wield proud beards – would prefer Raymond Davis’s colour of skin. A disrespect of our own self was naturalized into us during the colonial period.
But there is an interesting something about this self-disrespect that we carry. We channel it onto our perceived oppressor. It is a slave’s rebellion. It is a dialectic. It is a Hegelian moment. It is an attempt to restore our humanity.
This is necessary. Only that it needs to be channeled into the long-term and into a coherent politics.
Mock hangings of Raymond Davis are not going to make a difference. A structural re-adjustment is needed – and a new self-perception.
Those who understand what I am saying now please raise their hands.
I am only being playful. One must stop and attempt to understand.
Again as I said earlier, it is not that I am not anti-imperialist. It is not that I do not want Davis to be punished. But rather what I wish to open up the space for is to let the truth of the event that we are imagining to come out.
Intelligence cover up?
What if it turns out that the event is a massive intelligence cover up? What if the two men who were killed were intelligence agency chaps? The possibility has already been speculated in the media. The BBC itself has lend credence to the theory.
I remember sitting at home watching the incident being covered the first day on four separate TV channels. I was told four separate stories on the chronology of the shooting.
Though the quickness with which the media adopted the view of the victims – rather unquestionably to this point – that one of the victims carried a gun because of a family enmity.
Should the media have accepted this perspective so easily? There is something deeply disturbing about this tacit acceptance. Are we a society in which every man with an enmity is mandated a gun?
Events, as we must come to realize, are complex creatures. This is especially true of events manufactured in Pakistan.
It is strange to think that both a Foreign Minister and an Information Secretary in the Federal Cabinet have fallen to statements uttered on the diplomatic status of Raymond Davis. These individuals are figureheads of bureaucratic offices. Their statements reflect the position of the machinery beneath them. They do not produce their own information.
There is a strange mechanism that is working to topple domino’s. Shah Mehmood Qureshi falls, Fauzia Wahab falls…is the democratic government next?
The many non-fans of democracy are now spreading their wings. It is hoped that it continues to be remembered that the malady before us does not take route in the PPP government. It takes route in the previous military government of General Musharraf.
The PPP, I admit, have been bad at cleaning up. But the mess that was left to them was rather cancerous.
So, yes, it has a chance to perform chemotherapy. But its resistance appears to be likely to take its steam down with it.
There are other questions too.
If Davis is indeed a member of a private security consultant – or if indeed he is a spy then what are the questions that originate and where must blame be directed at.
IF he is a security consultant and he was let in then the letting in of ‘security consultants’ began in the Musharraf era. And thus it is the army – which has so-quietly shy-ed away from the political landscape as the matter gained ground – that is responsible for the entry of ‘Raymond Davis-types’.
Can a diplomat be let in without ISI clearance?
More so – can a security consultant be let in without ISI clearance?
And why – indeed why – was that security consultant not being monitored?
Straw Pinyatas:
The military intelligence has a habit of making straw puppets of our politicians and putting them in front of the public as piniyatas. Can we mature to recognize that there are no toffees available in the straw piniyatas we make of our politicians.
The politics that has emerged after the incident is by no means simple. We do not realize it that the moment on a number of very specific futures: (a) public memory (b) US-Pakistan relations (c) immediate political developments.
I suggest the public memory shall be the most important – and perhaps most problematic.
The question to ask is: what sort of a legacy is produced when a public is anti-Imperialist but a State is comprador?
Not that the public’s imagination is unproblematic or partakes more of emotion than sense.
But the question is of the specific anti-Imperialist stance we are to take after the Raymond Davis incident – and it is not a stance we can take without deciding that the future of the Pakistani state cannot be as a client of the United States of America.
Blackwater, the CIA, the ISI – and Raymond Davis types do not matter in such a future.
- The article was printed in The Review in Pakistan Today on 28 February 2011.
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