A long time ago, when our war with India began in 1965, I had just become a young reporter for an English evening newspaper. It so happened that I was asked to write a column on the war for the group’s Urdu newspaper, ‘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 called ‘Russia at War 1941-45’, written by Alexander Werth, who had been the BBC’s correspondent in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. I was able to get it and was fascinated by its content. Werth described and explained from his personal experiences the great resistance of the Soviet people. He told the story of the Russians in strikingly human terms.
This is still one of the books I cherish. I still have it, although it’s in bad shape now. I looked for it this week in the chaos that has become my collection and have been thumbing through it while mentally and emotionally preoccupied with the war ravaging Iran and the Middle East.
Naturally, I also remember, with a touch of nostalgia, what I had chosen 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 moving was the story of Leningrad, now renamed St. Petersburg, and how its citizens defied siege and famine.
One column I remember fondly was about a poem: “Wait for me.” A soldier, leaving for the front, tells his beloved: “Wait for me and I will return, just wait a lot.” 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 literally millions of Russian women; no one could say how many hundreds of thousands had died at the front or been taken prisoner or were missing for other reasons.”
As an aside, I want to point out this surprising fact that the Soviet Union suffered the highest number of casualties in World War II, with total deaths estimated between 24 and 27 million people.
Now this may seem like a distraction. But I considered it a starting point to underline the importance of the morale of a people during a war or a moment of deep crisis. A nation should 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 it was governed by an authoritarian system, with Joseph Stalin at its head.
Initially I thought of examining the situation of the people of Pakistan in this context. We, as a country, 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. Furthermore, 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 enduring difficulties in a disciplined manner? Reference can be made to the significant increase in oil prices and the austerity measures announced by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, both relevant from an economic point of view. But the true strength of a society lies in its moral and civilizational values, and in the spirit of sacrifice of the people for the national interest.
Considering the increasing 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 be documenting the human stories of this monumental encounter between Iran and the most powerful military in the world.
Several social media analysts are already significantly exploring the reasons why Operation Epic Fury is not capable of bringing about regime change in Iran or achieving whatever goals have been confusingly articulated by President Trump. Meanwhile, the cost of this war is becoming unbearable for the world, mainly due to the energy crisis.
In reality, Iran at war is a spectacle that has baffled many in the world. One aspect of this has been insightfully explained by the prominent writer and scholar of Iranian religion, Reza Aslan, in a rather 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 that the Iranians make regarding the United States’. I also heard him repeat his opinions in an interview with Christiane Amanpour in cnn on Friday.
Reza Aslan admits that when American leaders talk about helping Iranians take over their rule, they are tapping into “a powerful longing,” but recent history confirms that regime change implemented from without “rarely produces the democracy imagined at home.”
An excerpt from his article: “This is what I know for sure: Iran is older than any regime that has ever ruled it: older than the revolution, older than the shahs, older than the foreign powers that have sought to shape its destiny. Through three millennia of poetry, philosophy, empire and renewal, this civilization has survived conquerors and kings, clerics and generals. It has not done so because a foreign savior intervened, but because its people endured, sustained for a fierce pride in their language and heritage, for a literary and intellectual tradition that has survived invasion and upheaval, for a collective memory shaped by both the resistance and the government.
The ongoing war is a manifestation of Iran’s resistance. There will come a time when other battles will be fought in another area.
The writer is an experienced journalist. He can be contacted at: [email protected]
