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Of books, of proximity to power

The point should not be missed, which is that it is always a healthy idea for an individual to write a book once he has taken himself out of a position of influence and has spent a reasonably good length of time reflecting on the events and incidents that once shaped his place in the scheme of things.

Syed Badrul Ahsan
IT is often a good thing when someone in the corridors of power, or one who has enjoyed being in power, comes forth with a book. The general feeling, though, is that when men who no more happen to be in power or around it get down to the business of writing books, they arouse our genuine pleasure in reading what they have to tell us. By that measure, so the consensus goes, General Moeen U. Ahmed should have appeared before us with his new book quite sometime, or a long time, after he had departed from the position he happens to occupy at this time. His new book has generated quite a good deal of talk, especially in the drawing rooms of the urban elite. For obvious reasons.
Books generally generate a good deal of controversy, especially if they deal with politics. The controversy is incredibly intense if those who produce such books do so without first having relinquished the power they have exercised for a rather long period of time. The point should not be missed, which is that it is always a healthy idea for an individual to write a book once he has taken himself out of a position of influence and has spent a reasonably good length of time reflecting on the events and incidents that once shaped his place in the scheme of things.
Now, the difficulty with the Moeen book is two-fold. In the first place, his narration of events is perilously close to the events he
had a huge hand in shaping over the last two years and, so, is one side of the story. In the second (and this is where the questions pour in), as he is still in active government service, one could and does naturally wonder if he is empowered to produce a work where he can give free rein to his thoughts on politics and statecraft.
These reflections take us back to the 1960s, when Field Marshal Ayub Khan foisted on die people of Pakistan an autobiographical work he called Friends Not Masters. The cynics will of course tell you it was a ghostwritten work, the handiwork of the influential bureaucrat Altaf Gauhar. I^t that be.
The point here is that Friends Not Masters ought not to have appeared before Ayub Khan left office. He was still in power and so was not expected to write on the events that had shaped his life and career in a dispassionate manner. He was close to everything of significant note in his times. And so when the book came to us, it did not exacdy inspire in us diat zeal you need in order to plunge into a reading of published material.
Remember, though, that Ayub Khan and Moeen U. Ahmed are not the only individuals we know who have, being in power or being powerful, have given us thoughts to mull over. There is General Pervez Musharraf as well. His In The Line of Fire was a panegyric to himself. It made good reading, only because we were all interested in plumbing the depths of his ego.
Naturally, we came away unimpressed, if not exactly appalled.
For men of power or historical influence, it is therefore crucial that they opt for the intellectual once they have walked away into the twilight. No one is about to suggest tha, at a remove from the events they have been part of, they will exude wisdom. No, they will not.
You only have to study the horrendous book which General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi wrote years ago to explain away his role in the Bangladesh war of 1971. He was positively asinine during the war. His book only re-emphasised the buffoonery that had always been part of his character. But, yes, there are people who help to shape events, even cause tragedy, before moving off into the shadows and then waiting for years to tell their version of the tale.
Robert McNamara, he of the so-called club of the best and the brightest in 1960s' America, remains known as one man who
made a mess of things in Vietnam. He left the Johnson administration in 1968 and went over to the World Bank, where he served as president for thirteen years. And then he decided, from a pure sense of conscience, to reflect on Vietnam. The result was his mea culpa, In Retrospect. It is more than a book. It is a confession. McNamara admits he and his colleagues in .government were wrong about Vietnam. You can be certain he would have caused moral outrage had he written his book in his days as secretary of defence under Kennedy or Johnson.
Ah, let us pause. And let us wonder if, now that General Moeen has spoken, other men -- lajuddin Ahmed, Fakhruddin Ahmed. General Masududdin, General MA Matin - will one of these days, arise to let us in on what they have known and done in our emergency times.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor. Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yihoo.co.uk