"...countries, such as Pakistan, find themselves in a state of havoc. They find themselves at mercy of power hungry politicians and in the middle of ever persistent crises..."
Influence of Nightmares (Part I)
FEAR POLITICS Amna Ejaz Tuesday, April 21, 2009
“…in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, the fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.”
- Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares
Welcome to the New World Order; A world where, as stated by Samuel Huntington, “global politics has become multi-polar and multicivilizational.” It is a world that sees wars not between countries, but on deeper analysis, between civilizations; a world where “countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.” It is a world where people individuals relate themselves to smaller pseudo-tribes, on basis of religion, culture, tastes etc, rather than looking at the greater common factors between themselves. In such a world, individual countries, such as Pakistan, find themselves in a state of havoc. They find themselves at mercy of power hungry politicians and in the middle of ever persistent crises, based on the exact same concepts as explained by Huntington.
In Pakistan, it is felt though as the people are faced with one ‘crisis’ after another. Though the same can be said about any country in the world, what sets Pakistan apart is that these crises usually seem to be literally ‘dropped from above’ with no indicative shortcomings. Take, for example, the 2007-08 wheat crises. One is forced to wonder how it can be that the country produces a bumper crop one year and is faced with the worst wheat shortage the very next. Or how did it come to the point that Pakistan is helping the U.S fight a war against the same ‘brothers’ it fought alongside with just two decades ago?
These along with many other such questions force one to question the transparency of matters. Are these matters just as simple as they are said to be or all these clever moves of a chess game being played by the politicians and different governments in order to stay in power? Are these all ‘real’ problems or just ‘phantom enemies’ created, as stated in the quotation above, by politicians to induce a common fear among the people for personal benefits?
In our analysis of some of the major crisis and controversies in Pakistan, we tried to distinguish the ‘real ones’ from the ‘nightmares’ deliberately created by the government and politicians. Below we have discussed four of these main issues, relating the facts, as given by the government, with some popular controversies regarding the authenticity of these facts.
