Ages ago, when our war with India in 1965 began, I had just become a young reporter in an English eveninger. It so happened that I was asked to write a column on the war for the group’s Urdu daily, ‘Hurriyet’. And the directive was to find historical examples to raise people’s morale and promote their patriotism.
I had read a review of a new book titled ‘Russia at war 1941-45’, written by Alexander Werth, who had been a BBC correspondent in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. I was able to get it and was fascinated by its contents. Based on his personal experiences, Werth had described and explained the great resistance of the Soviet people. He told the story of the Russians in startling human terms.
That has remained one of the books that I cherish. I still have it, though it is now in poor condition. I searched it out this week from the chaos that my collection has become and have been browsing through it while mentally and emotionally preoccupied with the war that is raging in Iran and the Middle-East.
Naturally, I am also reminded, with a touch of nostalgia, of what I had picked from this book to write my Urdu columns. I found so much material in the book that only a few references were possible. The most touching was the story of Leningrad, now renamed Saint Petersburg, and how its citizens braved the siege and the famine.
One column that I fondly recall was on a poem: ‘Wait for me’. A soldier, leaving for the front, tells his beloved: “Wait for me, and I will return, only wait very hard”. To quote Werth: “It is difficult at this distance, except for those who were in Russia at that time, to realise how important a poem like this was to literally millions of Russian women; no one could tell how many hundreds of thousands had died at the front or had been taken prisoner or were otherwise missing”.
As an aside, I want to point out this astounding fact that the Soviet Union suffered the highest number of casualties in the Second World War, with total deaths estimated to be around 24 to 27 million people.
Now, this may seem like a distraction. But I thought of it as a point of departure to underline the importance of the morale of a people during a war or a time of deep crisis. A nation is to be judged by the quality of its people. That is how some nations are stronger than others. The patriotic strength of the Russian people was demonstrated during the Great War, even though they were ruled by an authoritarian system, with Joseph Stalin at the helm.
Initially, I was thinking of reviewing the state of the people of Pakistan in this context. We, as a country, are certainly in a very difficult situation because of the complexity of our relations with Iran and the US and the Gulf countries. Specifically, we are bound by a security pact with Saudi Arabia. In addition, we are at war with Afghanistan. It is a critical situation and anything can happen at any time.
So, what kind of social capital does Pakistan have? Are its citizens capable of bearing hardships in a disciplined manner? One may refer to the significant rise in petrol prices and the austerity measures announced by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, both relevant from an economic point of view. But the real strength of a society lies in its civilisational and moral values, and in the people’s spirit of sacrifice in the national interest.
Considering the increasing tempo of the war and the intensity of American and Israeli attacks on Iran, it is the resilience of the Iranian forces that has surprised the world. One expects that some historians and journalists are documenting the human stories of this monumental encounter between Iran and the most powerful military in the world.
Already, a number of social media analysts are meaningfully exploring the reasons why Operation Epic Fury is not able to bring about a regime change in Iran or achieve whatever goals that have confusedly been articulated by President Trump. Meanwhile, the cost of this war is becoming unbearable for the world, mainly due to the energy crisis.
Actually, Iran at war is a spectacle that has baffled many in the world. One aspect of this has perceptively been explained by noted Iranian writer and scholar of religion, Reza Aslan, in a longish piece published last week in The New York Times. Based in Los Angeles, he belongs to the Iranian diaspora. But he rejects the thought that an American president can be Iran’s liberator. Hence the title of his article: ‘The mistake that Iranians make about America’. I also heard him repeat his views in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN on Friday.
Reza Aslan concedes that when American leaders speak of helping Iranians to take over their government, they are tapping into “a powerful longing”, but recent history confirms that regime change delivered from outside “rarely produces the democracy imagined in the inside”.
One excerpt from his article: “Here is what I know for certain: Iran is older than any regime that has ruled it – older than the revolution, older than the shahs, older than the foreign powers that have sought to shape its fate. Across three millenniums of poetry, philosophy, empire and renewal, this civilisation has outlasted conquerors and kings, clerics and generals. It has done so not because a saviour from abroad intervened but because its people endured – sustained by a fierce pride in their language and heritage, by a literary and intellectual tradition that has survived invasion and upheaval, by a collective memory shaped as much by resistance as by rule”.
The ongoing war is a manifestation of Iran’s resistance. A time will come when other battles are fought in another arena.
The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: [email protected]
