By Hajrah Mumtaz

News is not the same as information. They’re interlinked and interdependent, but they are very far from being synonymous. News, being ephemeral and immediate, tells you what is new, what’s happening right now or very recently, and it gives you the maximum possible details about what is of necessity, because of format, a rather small picture. That is because news – what’s ‘new’ – changes minute to minute and day by day.

Information, on the other hand, presents the larger picture, incorporating not just what happened recently but also what happened in the past. It connects the dots, with the subject being viewed in its entirety through the context of linkages and patterns, which then lead to causal understanding.

Voracious consumers of the news as times have made us, we Pakistanis would do well to dwell upon this, because listening to or reading the headlines every day is not enough to keep us informed about the meaning or significance of events. The news presents a fleeting picture of what’s happening now, with the assumption that the consumer has the prior knowledge that enables him to connect the dots and become informed. But from much of the debate one hears these days, this prior knowledge is either missing entirely (which is unlikely) or has been erased from our far-too-short societal memory (which is rather more likely). As a result, our understanding of current events appears to exist suspended in space, caught in a vacuum. We can discuss what the Taliban are doing now, for example, how many bomb blasts yesterday or how many militants killed. But few of us can discuss with any objective coherence how the TTP came about in the first place, or why it suddenly emerged as such a major threat last year.

Recall the events of last year: the TTP suddenly appeared to have wrested control of towns and villages across the north-west, till at one time there were fears of Peshawar falling to them. There was the ill-fated and stridently criticised ‘peace-deal’ with Sufi Mohammed of the TNSM, and then there was a military operation which, it was claimed, was fighting with “renewed resolve.” This last, it was said, was because there was finally a “societal consensus” about the need to take the TTP out.

The TTP and the perceived handling of them is a good example of mistaking news for information. The most recent news is that the army is experiencing success in the battle against the Taliban-led militants, and major portions of the territory they controlled are back under the writ of the state. The news is that the military is succeeding where the political government could not.

But this is not the full picture: much information is missing. For one thing, the TTP and the insurgency problem did not and could not have appeared overnight. As many analysts agree, the issue has its roots first in Pakistan’s policies during the Afghan war in the 1980s, when Islamic ideology was disseminated as a battle cry and the jihadi culture was born; and then in the post-9/11 world when the country, led by the then General Musharraf, became a partner in the war against terror – and yet continued to play a double game where there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban; when the Taliban and other associates that were on ‘our’ side continued to enjoy the patronage of the ubiquitous agencies, or at the very least, powerful individuals within them.

This is the background information that is most often missing in the day to day headlines. Because it is not, in itself, news any longer. What happened during the 80s or at the turn of the century is now, technically, history. Yet knowledge of this is essential to develop an understanding of matters as they stand today. Certainly, the civilian government could have dealt with the issue better. But a problem that is decades in the making cannot be resolved overnight, least of all by a government that has no effective control over the one institution that it could potentially call upon to undertake a clean-up: the army.

As the army today marches in boldly to claim glory, and society once again juxtaposes the news of the military’s success with the failure of a democratic regime, it is worth keeping in mind the ‘olds’ of who was on watch when the problem was created in the first place. Who led the government in the post-9/11 world, and who was cosying up to the Americans when the Soviets were in Afghanistan? The ‘old’ is that no civilian government in the past 60-odd years has had control in any meaningful sense over the country’s military apparatus or, indeed, foreign policy. What the army is doing now amounts to cleaning up a mess that it created in the first place.

In terms of the military, another erroneous assumption is in the process of being encouraged to take root by the immediacy of the news: of mistaking the soldiers – the individuals that constitute the army – with the institution of the army. These are not synonymous either. The army may comprise brave jawans, patriotic soldiers and experienced strategists, but the army as an institution is far larger and infinitely more powerful. In Pakistan it is and always has operated as an independent entity and it has interests in sectors that range from banking to land to cereal and fertiliser. The news is that soldiers are falling in the battle to save the country’s territorial integrity. But it is of vital importance to recognise that support for the soldiers is not the same as approving a blank cheque to the institution of the army to do as it pleases, whenever it pleases. In the current instance, the army’s actions are justified and necessary. But in other spheres, in the past, the army has had a dangerous record that has almost always spelt disaster for the country.Judging from the rhetoric building up in the country, society as a whole is losing its ability to make such distinctions. And this is deeply dangerous, for it implies a citizenry that lives in the here and now, with no clear memory of the past and little idea, therefore, about the future other than guesswork.

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Source: Dawn
Date:2/14/2010