Ages ago, when our war with India began in 1965, I had just become a young reporter in an English evening. It so happened that I was asked to write a column about 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 entitled ‘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 surprisingly human terms.
It has remained one of the books that I treasure. I still have it, although it is now in poor condition. I dug it out this week from the chaos that my collection has become and have been flipping through it while mentally and emotionally preoccupied with the war raging in Iran and the Middle East.
Naturally, I am also reminded with a touch of nostalgia of 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 Saint Petersburg, and how its citizens braved the siege and famine.
One column that I fondly remember was about a poem: ‘Wait for me’. A soldier going to the front tells his beloved: “Wait for me and I will return, 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 literally millions of Russian women; no one could tell how many hundreds of thousands had died at the front or been captured or otherwise missing”.
As an aside, I would like to point out this astonishing fact that the Soviet Union suffered the highest number of casualties in World War II, with total deaths estimated at around 24 to 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 during a war or a time of deep crisis. A nation must be judged by the quality of its people. That’s 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, headed by Joseph Stalin.
Initially, I thought of reviewing the condition of the Pakistani population 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 United States 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 can refer to the significant increase 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 civilizational and moral values and in the people’s spirit of sacrifice in the national interest.
Given the increasing pace 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 some historians and journalists to document 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 probing the reasons why Operation Epic Fury is unable to bring about regime change in Iran or achieve whatever goals have been confusedly 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 confused many in the world. One aspect of this has been clearly explained by noted Iranian author and religious scholar, Reza Aslan, in a long piece 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 can be Iran’s liberator. Hence the title of his article: ‘The mistake Iranians make about America’. I also heard him repeat his views in an interview with Christiane Amanpour regarding CNN on Friday.
Reza Aslan admits that when American leaders talk about helping Iranians take over their government, they are tapping into “a strong yearning,” but recent history confirms that regime change delivered from the outside “rarely produces the democracy envisioned on the inside.”
An excerpt from his article: “Here’s what I know for sure: 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 destiny. Across three millennia of poetry, philosophy, empire, and renewal, this civilization has transcended general conflict and competition. not because a savior from abroad intervened, but because its people persevered—supported by a fierce pride in their language and heritage, of a literary and intellectual tradition that has survived invasion and upheaval, of a collective memory shaped as much by resistance as by rule”.
The ongoing war is a manifestation of Iran’s resistance. There will come a time when other battles will be fought in another arena.
The author is a senior journalist. He can be found at: [email protected]
