Your dog does not lie, and neither does your pet parrot, owl, rooster, cow, or cat. But your kid does. Lying is as old as speech, and was pressed into service the day you decided to appropriate something which did not belong to you, and you had to justify wrongful possession.
Lying begins when your kid is caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and this need keeps growing with time till at last you have to justify your London flats. That is the time when all your children are drafted in to lie for you, but being daft, each one of them tells a different lie. And you, their dad, being a complete idiot, tell your own lies, which do not coincide with those of your kids….and you tell one lie in parliament, a different one to the press, and a third one in the court.
And then you have the lies of your Chief Justice, who cannot give the money trail to justify his property made by corrupt means. But being a Justice, he gives a technically legal twist to his lies. He attacks the legality of the methods used to collect information about his property. His ultimate argument is that because these methods were not legal, his ownership of illegal properties stood legalized!
Then there are lies put out by large policy-making bodies to justify disastrous policies or strategies. These are resorted to when, instead of correcting these policies, you fall back on plying narratives of falsehood to reinforce the original disasters. This approach is called the Mule Approach to Policy Correction. Such narratives of falsehood are daily being bandied about in the case of the US cum NATO approach to the War in Ukraine, and the Israeli cum US approach to the war on Gaza. With each new day, the disasters in each of these theatres of war are becoming larger, and when the old narratives are considered insufficient to cover them, new ones are put out to take their place.
In Pakistan, the narrative industry has been working overtime ever since the criminally illegal ouster of the Imran Khan government by the High Command in April 2022. To stay in power, and to keep Imran Khan out, resorting to ever new criminal undertakings has been the need of the hour. These are needed to meet the challenge of every new situation. For each new criminality, a new narrative is essential. Manufacturing these new narratives seems to be the primary new occupation of our High Command for the last two years. Just as prayers in congregation [ba-jamaat namaz] is recommended for greater efficacy, so the High Command gets together for their monthly CCC at GHQ. There they reinforce the current batch of lies, and draw strength from lying in unison. And then it is the job of the ISPR to sell this new batch of reinforced lies to the people of Pakistan, both in and out of uniform, hoodwinking whom is the essential purpose of these lies.
The choicest narrative of the High Command has been to sell to the public, their version of the events of May 9, 2023. This was a False Flag operation so incompetently planned and conducted by them, that this needs to be taught in Staff Colleges all over the world as an example of how not to do things.
The first choreographed attempt to sell this to the public was the press conference by DG ISPR on June 26, 2023. This attempt fell apart when, at minute 29:17 of the video of this event, Iftikhar Shirazi of Dawn asked his first “out of syllabus” question for which the DG was not prepared. He asked: “…… defence installations have special provisions for their security, but we saw on 9 May the people were free to attack GHQ or get into the Corps Commander’s House, so why were the layers of security absent?”
The DG’s response was words to the effect that in preparation for this event, it was decided to withdraw security so that the possibility of bloodshed could be avoided. The essence of this admission was that the High Command had made PREPARATIONS to meet the eventuality of this event. From here, it was just a small step for any thinking person to deduce that a part of these preparations was their INSTIGATION by the High Command.
The second major attempt to sell the High Command narrative on May 9 events was another press conference by DG ISPR on May 7, 2024. This time he was determined to be better prepared, and not repeat the mistakes of his previous attempt. But this time he fell because he came too well prepared. Within minutes, it was apparent to the audience that this show was little more than a shoddy propaganda attempt to sell the same old story, and no one bought it.
The essential unanswered question remains the same: when the security of an urban installation is to be enhanced, this is done by posting additional manpower for its security, and NOT by removing these men. So, why did the High Command remove security around the sites which needed their security to be beefed up?
Why was it that in all the video footage, no one can spot more than two security guards at the Corps Commander’s House, when at any one time, two details of 2X10 each [two NCOs and ten men] should be present? Where did the rest of the men go? Where was the rifle company which is earmarked to counter exactly an event like that of May 9.2023? Where were mobile armed patrols that drive around the roads of Lahore Cantonment 24 hours a day, when they were most needed?
Unless the stupid men who populate the High Command can answer these questions, they are well advised not to repeat this narrative again in May 2025, because this narrative is born punctured in many places. They should give up the “Mule Approach” to floating narratives which do nothing more than reinforce the disaster. I don’t care a hoot for what this does to their credibility. But I do care a hell of a lot for mine. And I cannot face my civilian friends who, after each such oafish performance, ask me if all army officers were that stupid!
