By Omar Kureishi

Until Copernicus revealed a multiplicity of worlds, it was believed that the Earth was flat and was the center of the universe. This may have been a breakthrough in our knowledge of astronomy, but it did not impact on our political lives. Such is our personal ego that we believe that we were the center of the universe and all else in the heavens was ‘outer space’.

In the 1960s, we lived in a bi-polar world, and those who were not in the bosom of either the United States or the Soviet Union were called or chose to call themselves ‘non-aligned’. These divisions were not necessarily ideological, but expedient.

In 1965, the foreign policy of Pakistan that had been anchored on military alliances with the West and which had been described as ‘pactitis’ stood in disarray. Neither SEATO nor CENTO nor indeed the bilateral military arrangement with the United States under the Mutual Defense Assistance had proved of any value when Pakistan had been imperiled in the 1965 war against India. Pakistan may have received military assistance and economic aid, but it had also made enemies. If Pakistan had been counting on the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Kashmir, it had not factored in the inevitability of a Soviet Union veto.

In 1958, I had written a two-part article, Disenchantment with the West, and I had pointed this out. I had got a mild ticking-off by our foreign office. Those were the days when it was seriously believed that what we wrote in the newspapers had the power to influence public opinion.

In February 1967, somewhat belatedly, the Secretary-General of CENTO, an Iranian, admitted that CENTO had outlived its purpose: “It is like insuring your house against fire, the policy does not cover earthquakes or theft.” Iran was to discover that much more than CENTO had outlived its utility. The Shah’s Iran itself was destined to implode, though there were no signs of that then.

As a tangible geographic fact, Pakistan belongs to South Asia. Emotionally, it may consider to be a part of any region it chooses. West Pakistan bordered India, Afghanistan and China and the Soviet Union was close enough for its shadow to fall in West Pakistan. East Pakistan was never considered a factor in foreign policy formulation and, in any case, it was not a part of the ‘northern tier’ regional security, which was the motive-force behind numerous plans for the Middle East. Nor can it be claimed that Pakistan joined SEATO for the reason of East Pakistan.

Even Ayub Khan was at a loss to understand why Pakistan had joined SEATO. In his book, Friends Not Masters, he wrote: “The other Pact which we joined was the South-East Asia Treaty Organization. I do not know the reasons that prompted the Government of Pakistan to join this organization. One must really ask Choudary Zafrullah Khan, who was then the Foreign Minister. I thought that Pakistan had no reason at all to join SEATO. Perhaps, the main consideration was to oblige the United States which had been giving considerable economic help.”

SEATO, in any event, came about through events that had nothing to do with Pakistan’s security. In 1954, France appeared to be losing Indochina. The sun was beginning to set on the French Empire. The Eisenhower Administration believed that the “loss of Indochina to communism would be a grave disaster.” There was fear, too, that China may intervene in Indochina on a large scale. America had already assumed the role of policeman of Asia. It was pure luck that this SEATO entanglement did not drag Pakistan into the Vietnam War as a combatant of sorts.

What were we doing in a Pact that Ayub himself was not able to justify? Yet, even when he became all-in-all, he did not pull Pakistan out of CENTO. It was a military alliance that was China-specific. In criticizing these pacts, there was a tendency to see ourselves as an innocent party that had been dragooned or duped or seduced. Pakistan’s main enemy was India, and these pacts did not apply to our disputes with India. We had seen that in the 1965 war.

In the ‘60s, the Vietnam War had reached a full boil. All pretexts had been abandoned and the war was no longer a divine mission. I had dined with a US Congressman in New York. Naturally, we talked about the Vietnam War. Naturally, we disagreed about it. I cannot even say that we agreed to disagree. We argued from a different set of assumption. I simply did not agree that China was a predatory power, that it sought an empire or posed any kind of military threat to any of its neighbors. I told the Congressman that “it was a wrong war being fought in the wrong place at the wrong time”, and it was being fought for highly suspicious reasons. It was not China but the United States that wanted to extend its sphere of influence. He dismissed this by saying that I was talking “a load of crap.”

But the dinner conversation did not end with this categorical pronouncement. We carried on. I told him that once, very early in the morning, I had been driving on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. This was when I had been at USC. I saw what looked like a house-on-wheels approaching me. I had done a double take. I discovered that indeed it was an entire house that was being moved and I marveled at America’s ingenuity. I told him that I felt that the US foreign policy operated in the belief that geography was not something fixed and like houses, countries, too, could be moved from region to region. Thus, I gave the good Congressman a lesson in geo-politics. Had he wanted, he could have easily turned the argument against me. He could have said that the lesson was better suited to Pakistani leaders who had put Pakistan in both the Middle East and South-East Asia!

“Give me a prejudice,” says the investigating magistrate in Gabriel Gracia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, “and I will move the world.” The magistrate is investigating a murder committed as an act of revenge for the defilement of a sister’s virtue. The killers are acquitted because the murder is judged to be a crime of honor.

Thomas B. Morgan, in his book, The Anti-Americans, recalls the words of an Englishman with whom he is having a drink at the Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi: “Spare me from the idealists. They are always the first to use torture in wartime.” It must speak well of the human race that, unlike animals in the jungle, do not kill without a moral justification. The betterment of the world, to make it safe from unspecified enemies, the final logic is the final solution.” Pakistan was getting tangled up in other people’s wars and no one was prepared to get entangled in our wars. The ‘60s was the period when all the contradictions came to the surface.

Asghar Khan was due to visit East Pakistan and I accompanied him. It was a routine visit, but immediately on our arrival, it changed to something else. We were informed that one of our helicopters had crashed at Faridpur. The helicopter had been hit by a vulture and must have dropped like a stone. There were no survivors.

There had been an earlier crash of a helicopter and this meant that our helicopter fleet was reduced to one and effectively the end of the helicopter services. Asghar Khan left from the airport for the site of the crash and I stayed behind to release the news to the press. There is no question of playing down a story. The best way is to let the story write itself. My job was to make available all the known facts and thus prevent sensational ‘facts’ from getting into the story. I told my PRO to give full cooperation to the press, but try and keep out photographs of a gory kind.

This was easier said than done. The Governor of East Pakistan, Monem Khan, accompanied by photographers and members of the Information Ministry, had rushed to the site. He was going to make damn sure that his photograph at the site of the accident, suitably in grief, would be splashed the next morning. An air disaster, in any case, is public property and politicians squeeze out mileage from it.

That evening, I had been asked to dinner by a good friend of mine. It was not a dinner in my honor. He was a social person and was always inviting what the newspapers called “the elite of the city.” The guests, obviously, were aware of the helicopter crash but my presence helped them get a first-hand account. One of them told me that as soon as he heard that the helicopter had been brought down by a vulture, he thought I had lost my marbles. “But then, we Pakistanis are so accustomed to believing anything, the vulture story is at least original.” I don’t think that he was trying to be nasty. It took some doing to convince the guests that bird-hits are a flying hazard. How can something as small as a bird cause an aeroplane to come crashing down? I told them that they can get sucked in the engine, to start with. I didn’t sound very convincing.

When I got back to the hotel, I telephoned my PRO and told him that if any of the newspapers had a photograph of the vulture that had brought down the helicopter, persuade them to run it. “But you told me no photographs,” he protested. I told him it was a long story, but he should do what he was being told. As it happened, one of the newspapers did have a picture of the vulture and it appeared the next morning. Credibility had been restored.

PIA was always image-conscious. Not because it suffered any delusions about its own importance. But cooperate-image is like collateral. The public had no alternative but to fly PIA. But it helps if it does so with too much anxiety. The helicopter crash was accepted by the traveling public as something that happens or can happen. Confidence in PIA was undiminished. I was earning my daily bread, not being given it.