Way back when our war with India began in 1965, I had just become a young reporter at an English party. 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 boost the morale of the people and promote their patriotism.
I had read a review of a new book called “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 obtain 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 surprising human terms.
It has remained one of my cherished books. I still have it, although it is now in poor condition. I looked for it this week in the chaos that my collection has become and looked through it while mentally and emotionally preoccupied with the war raging in Iran and the Middle East.
Naturally, it also reminds me, with a touch of nostalgia, of what I had chosen in this book to write my chronicles in Urdu. I found so much material in the book that only a few references were possible. Most touching was the story of Leningrad, now renamed St. Petersburg, and how its citizens braved siege and famine.
One column I remember fondly concerned a poem: “Wait for Me.” A soldier, leaving for the front, said to his beloved: “Wait for me, and I will come back, just wait very hard.” To quote Werth: “It is difficult at this distance, except for those who were in Russia at the time, to realize how important a poem like this was to millions of Russian women; no one could say how many hundreds of thousands had died at the front or been taken prisoner or missing.”
In passing, I would like to point out this staggering fact: the Soviet Union suffered the greatest number of casualties during World War II, with a total death toll estimated at between 24 and 27 million people.
Now this may seem like a distraction. But I thought of it as a starting point to emphasize the importance of a people’s morale in times of war or deep crisis. A nation must be judged by the quality of its people. This 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 governed by an authoritarian system, with Joseph Stalin at its head.
Initially, I thought I would examine the situation of the Pakistani people in this context. As a country, we are certainly in a very difficult situation due to the complexity of our relations with Iran, the United States and the Gulf countries. Specifically, we are bound by a security pact with Saudi Arabia. Additionally, we are at war with Afghanistan. The situation is critical and anything can happen at any time.
So, what kind of social capital does Pakistan have? Are its citizens capable of bearing difficulties in a disciplined manner? We can cite the significant increase in gasoline prices and the austerity measures announced by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, both of which are relevant from an economic point of view. But the true strength of a society lies in its civilizational and moral values, as well as the spirit of sacrifice of its people in the national interest.
Given the accelerating pace of the war and the intensity of US and Israeli attacks on Iran, it is the resilience of Iranian forces that has surprised the world. Some historians and journalists are expected to document the human stories of this monumental encounter between Iran and the world’s most powerful military.
Already, a number of social media analysts are meaningfully exploring why Operation Epic Fury is unable to bring about regime change in Iran or achieve the goals confusingly articulated by President Trump. Meanwhile, the cost of this war is becoming unbearable for the world, mainly because of the energy crisis.
In fact, Iran at war is a spectacle that has baffled many people around the world. One aspect of this situation was insightfully explained by renowned Iranian writer and religion scholar Reza Aslan in a lengthy article published last week in the New York Times. Based in Los Angeles, he belongs to the Iranian diaspora. But he rejects the idea that an American president could be Iran’s liberator. Hence the title of his article: “The mistake the Iranians make about America”. I also heard him repeat his words in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN Friday.
Reza Aslan concedes that when U.S. leaders talk about helping the Iranians take power, they are exploiting “a powerful desire,” but recent history confirms that regime change brought about from the outside “rarely produces the democracy imagined from within.”
An excerpt from his article: “Here is what I know for sure: Iran is older than all the regimes that have ruled it – older than revolution, older than the shahs, older than the foreign powers who sought to shape its destiny. Through three millennia of poetry, philosophy, empire and renewal, this civilization has outlived conquerors and kings, clerics and generals. It has done so not because a foreign savior intervened but because its people have endured – sustained by a fierce pride in their language and heritage, by a literary and intellectual tradition that has survived invasions and upheavals, by a collective memory shaped as much by resistance as by domination.”
The ongoing war is a manifestation of Iranian resistance. A time will come when other battles will be fought in another arena.
The writer is a seasoned journalist. He can be reached at: [email protected]
