Chakwal Diary: Cricketers bring home lessons for all

Nothing is more calculated to subvert the national interest than the suggestion, voiced in some foolish quarters, that following the laughable performance of the Pakistan cricket team in the World Cup, Pakistan's cricket czar, serving Lt. Gen. Tauqir Zia, should step down.

If performance were the criterion for sticking to a job or stepping down, a serious unemployment crisis would hit the higher reaches of the military. Colonels, brigadiers and generals are all over the place. They were scarcely under-privileged before but since the Musharraf revolution they have really come into their own. To the point that the line between the military and civilian spheres is all but blurred.

If all these men in uniform, busy these past three years doing everything except their own job, soldiering, were to be judged solely on merit, the ensuing mayhem and slaughter can well be imagined.

True, cricket is smack in the centre of the public eye and tied to the nation's heartstrings. The team wins and the national pulse beats quicker. The louts in it behave like the untutored morons that some of them are and national morale plunges to the depths. So it's perfectly sensible to assume that a disaster on the cricket field would carry a heavier burden of heartache than a reverse elsewhere.

Still, no reason to judge Tauqir Zia by exceptional standards of heroism. He has only come into the spotlight because cricket is a high profile sport. If he had ruined anything else, as many of his colleagues have, no one would have bothered.

Indeed, if recent experience is anything to go by he should be rewarded. If the glorious referendum of last April could gift General Musharraf a five-year presidential term, what reason to deny Lt. Gen. Zia five more years at the helm of Pakistani cricket?

Granted that it is an unsound exercise drawing cosmic conclusions from a game. Cricket, after all, is a game, not a contest between good and evil and certainly not the difference between salvation and the fires of hell. But trust the army to draw a connection where none need exist.

Trust it to draw a connection between sports and politics. When it was taking over the rest of the country, it couldn't resist the temptation to take over sports.

Musharraf and his generals had no agenda when they seized power. They hastily drafted one as they went along. Hence the famous seven-points. They did feel the country was going to the dogs - a belief the army cherishes whenever it is out of power. But they seemed to have no doubts whatsoever that they could fix everything.

This was the theoretical basis for the army's intrusion in every sphere. Nothing escaped its vigilance. Army teams went into districts to improve local administration. The Accountability Bureau set about reforming national morality. Living up to its name, the Reconstruction Bureau went about reconstructing the country.

How could the glamour world of sports remain outside the military's purview? Soon after the coup, General Aziz, one of the heroes of Kargil and a close confidant of General Musharraf's, was put in charge of hockey. Lt Gen Tauqir Zia then commanding the Mangla Corps-now, sadly, in other hands-became commissar of cricket.

But not to wallow in gloom, we can also look at the bright side of things. Cricket has exposed military incompetence in a way the whole of the British Library could not. Many people not overly inclined to be critical of military rule have been compelled by the debacle of the World Cup to draw for themselves the connection between sports and politics.

If the military have no business messing around with sports what business to mess around with politics?

The louts and the management gurus of the cricket team thus deserve the nation's thanks. They could not make it to the Super Six or bring any trophy home. But by their singular ineptitude, brought into sharper focus by the fact that it was a general of the army looking after cricket affairs for the last three years, they have given the Pakistani nation a lesson in elementary politics.

Another connection the cricket team has also brought to the fore. The knack of knowing when to quit has been alien to Pakistan's military rulers. Pakistan's aging cricket superstars share the same predilection. They'll have to be pushed out of the team. Forget their thrashing at the hands of the Indian team. On their own they will not go.

Reminds one of Generals Yahya and Hamid in December '71. Despite defeat in East Pakistan they were desperate to stick on. Only the threat of force by a section of the army (Maj Gen R. D. Shamim, Brigadier F. B. Ali, etc) compelled them to relinquish power.

Incidentally, among the first persons from the army Bhutto got rid of when he became president were R. D. Shamim and F. B. Ali. Ayub Khan put his fellow coup-making generals to civilian pasture - Azam, Sheikh, etc - pretty fast. Zia got rid of Chisti, his principal coup-maker, at the first available opportunity.

Likewise Musharraf who got rid of Mahmood and Usmani as soon as he decently could. Some things never change. Power abhors a vacuum. But more than that, it abhors co-equals.

Cricketers are tough guys with more resources of resilience and tenacity than the average person. But even if they as a team have crumbled before the effects of three years of military management, consider the nation's plight. What must it be going through? Cricket's wounds are obvious. Those to the nation's psyche run deeper.

So simply removing an individual is not going to help matters. The malady is far bigger and cricket is only one of its many symptoms. Just consider this: a four-man committee has been set up to investigate various aspects of Pakistan's World Cup disaster. Who's heading this committee? A retired colonel. Can't beat the system, can you?

At any rate, cricket's joys and sorrows will soon fade from the public mind. A few jeers and catcalls and then back to business as usual. What about bigger sorrows? A uniformed presidency is the last refuge of Pakistani strongmen, the strongest insurance policy they can take out.

But does it really avert nemesis in the end? Does it ward off the evil eye? It didn't save Zia nor Yahya. It doesn't serve to exaggerate the situation but does Musharraf, for all his insurance policies, look all that comfortable?

Power is made secure by legitimacy, acceptance and performance. Self-tailored suits like the Legal Framework Order (LFO) work up to a point but not enduringly. If they did, Ayub Khan's self-tailored constitution and political system would have outlived his fall. Is the Q League an enduring phenomenon? Not even the turncoats and fair-weather champions who constitute its vanguard would claim as much for a party whose godfather and pope all in one remains the ISI.

The Q Leaguers and the Jamali government (one and the same thing) should take heed from some of the other creations of the ISI. What's happened to the Taliban and the whole jihadi movement? Scattered and on the run. Why should anyone in the government think that the Jamali-cum-Shujaat government, custom-built by the ISI, will withstand the elements any better?

Just look at the pressures besetting Musharraf. On the external front he is