[Dawn] PERHAPS it is a sign of the times that Gen Kayani's... four star general, current Chief of Army Staff of the Mighty Pak Army. Kayani is the former Director General of ISI...
comments at the Pakistain Military Academy in Kakul will attract little meaningful attention or comment.
"Pakistain was created in the name of Islam and Islam can never be taken out of Pakistain ... The Pakistain Army will keep on doing its best towards our common dream for a truly Islamic Theocratic
Republicof Pakistain," Gen Kayani said.
In truth, however, both the timing and the content of Gen Kayani's speech ought to be parsed carefully. Given the recent travails of election candidates facing new, and unwarranted, scrutiny of their Islamic credentials and a debate being triggered on the true ideology of Pakistain, the army chief ought to have considered whether weighing in on such matters at this time was the appropriate thing to do or not. The political battle lines have already been drawn, with religious elements and anti-democratic forces beating the drum of an exclusionist version of Pakistain's ideology and trying to make it an election issue. Has Gen Kayani, wittingly or unwittingly, given those religious elements and anti-democratic forces a boost going into next month's election?
The substance too of the comments requires close examination. Who is trying to take Islam out of Pakistain; where is the threat to the public's right to practise their Moslem faith?
In fact, the threat is in the opposite direction: to those of other faiths who are also Pak and some of whom don't even enjoy the theoretical right to practise their faith without fear or intimidation. If Islam is in fact the core of the Pak state, does that mean non-Moslem Paks have no place in this state and society? Even among Moslems, from the early 1950s, the question of which of the many different interpretations of and schools of thought in Islam ought to be given precedence over the rest has been a dangerously divisive
...politicians call things
divisivewhen when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never
divisive,they're
principled...
issue when the state has seen fit on occasion to tackle it.
More relevantly to Gen Kayani's institution, the exclusive, obsessive even, focus on using Islam to galvanise the armed forces is precisely where the origins of the tragic and disastrous policy of state-sponsored jihad has arisen.
Gen Kayani and the army high command should stick to questions of national security and leave it to the politicians to sort out for whom and why Pakistain was created. The ideology of Pakistain should be an issue for politics, not the armed forces.