Two insurrections pose an existential threat to Pakistan. One is a long-standing guerilla struggle of the Baloch nationalists for their cultural and political rights as well as for the control of the province’s economic resources. The second rebellion is recent in origin but poses a lethal challenge to the Pakistani state. Lead by the Taliban movement known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), its goals are revolutionary: to take over the government and enforce their own version of Islamic Sharia laws. The TTP is intertwined with the Afghan Taliban and has links with Al Qaeda of the global Jihad.
The Taliban have exposed the military’s vulnerability by attacking such high security establishments as the army headquarters, air bases and army garrisons. Their aims extend beyond toppling the government. They have also blown up mosques and shrines of the Islamic sects that do not subscribe to their puritanical beliefs, targeted cinemas, and music stores and girls’ schools to purge ‘corrupt western culture’.
The South Asia Terrorism Portal estimates that 51,585 combatants and non-combatants have been killed since 2003. The military has lost 5,681 soldiers and officers. The injured are in the hundreds of thousands and displaced persons number in the millions. Karachi and Peshawar have suffered particularly from Taliban’s suicide bombs, targeted killings and kidnappings. But other cities have not entirely escaped. Taliban seem to have cells everywhere.
Taliban’s aims extend beyond toppling the government
The state cannot collect taxes from the rich and influential, enforce laws and provide basic services. Electricity outages have crippled industries and made daily life unbearable. Almost one-third of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day. Pakistan has become a country of ‘hollow institutions’ where instruments of a modern state exist in form, but they fail to perform their mandated functions.
The enigma of Pakistan is that its state is imploding but its society is resilient and people entrepreneurial. The society is modernizing fast. Almost 27% of households in the largest province, Punjab, have motorcycles. There are about 100 TV channels and 650 registered newspapers and magazines in Pakistan. About 70 percent of the population has cell phones, filtering down among the poor of this low-income country. The stock exchange has been on a tear, setting new records in prices and trade. Real estate is booming. Cities are choked with traffic.
Fashion shows, literary festivals and music competitions give a cosmopolitan sheen to alistscities of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad-Rawalpindi. About 12-13 billion dollars are remitted annually by Pakistani expatriates, buoying up the consumer culture. A visitor to Pakistan would be dazzled by the palatial houses and overflowing restaurants. Yet it is a country where death stalks everyday and poverty drives people to suicide. People have become fatalistic in the face of violence and disorder.
Why has Pakistan come to this? Of course there are the usual explanations: political instability, democratic deficit, recurrent military rules, deviation from its ideology, corrupt and poor administration. And then there are theories of blaming others, Indian conspiracies, American perfidy, Jewish hostility, international attempts to neutralize the only Muslim nuclear power and so on. Underlying them are deeper and enduring conditions that have torn Pakistan apart, but are not open to discussion.
Pakistan is besieged by moral and intellectual crises. Its imagined culture is based on ideas and beliefs that offer little guidance for the lived life. Pakistan’s state has continually retreated in the face of the Islamic clergy, thereby yielding to them the authority to forge moral narratives. Pakistan’s ruling elite adopted the strategy of ‘playing along’ with the Mullahs, hoping to appease them politically without facing up to the consequences of their promises. Even the Taliban were initially nurtured by the state as an instrument of Jihad in Indian Kashmir and for maintaining influence in Afghanistan. They are now bringing Jihad home.
Pakistan’s successive constitutions have been documents of contradictory goals. They promise democracy, freedom, equality and social justice, while envisaging bringing laws and social life in line with the requirements of particular interpretations of Islam. Islamic teachings admit of many interpretations, liberal, orthodox, modernist, fundamentalist and sectarian. The authority to interpret Islamic provisions has been conceded to Mullahs and traditionalists. In the contest for the power of agency, the liberal Islam has lost to the fundamentalist certainties of those who have the pulpits.
While the Islamic political parties have repeatedly failed in elections, they captured the universities and shaped the school curriculums in the1960s and 70s. Generations of engineers, doctors, teachers and military men, albeit the educated classes, have grown up on a diet of orthodox Islamic ideas and rituals. The Islamization of personal beliefs stands in contrast with the modernization of lifestyles. Individuals bridge this chasm by rationalizing their own lifestyle as the reflection of the ‘real’ Islam.
The Taliban have grown out of this ideological conundrum. The Islamic political parties and the clergy savor the prospect of the Taliban ushering them to power.
Despite past failed peace agreements, Pakistan’s government is again negotiating with the TTP. Most of the political parties and religious bodies favor peace negotiations. They argue that the Taliban, ‘are our brethren’, why not negotiate with them, as even the US and the Afghan leaders have been courting the Afghan Taliban. The TTP has suddenly become a stakeholder in national affairs. By negotiating with the Taliban, the government has unwittingly changed the political map of Pakistan. Islamic parties and Mullahs have become power brokers by becoming interlocutors for the Taliban.
The state has not protected free speech. Since the 1970s, Islamic student organizations have been allowed to violently repress alternative viewpoints in universities and colleges. Educational curriculums have been turned into indoctrination tools of orthodox religiosity. Over the years Islamic scholars of liberal leanings have been hounded out, while the state stood as a mute witness. General Zia’s regime sanctified these practices. In Pakistan, the state intervenes in religion to support the orthodox narrative.
Presently journalists who express liberal views are attacked. Mullahs issue Fatwas with impunity declaring other sects as apostates liable to be killed. Blasphemy laws have led to mob justice. Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus as minorities get no protection from the state. The state has surrendered its responsibility to protect people from the zealots’ violence. Self-censorship is the rule for survival.
Pakistani society and state are unsustainable by the extant narratives of the Islamic order. But liberal Islamic ideas and secular narratives have been practically banished. The expediency politics of the ruling classes, both political and military, has suppressed alternative viewpoints.
Pakistan’s society can be Islamic and modern, if it becomes pluralistic and multicultural. To attain that, the state has to forcefully implement the constitutionally promised freedom of thought and expression and provide security for open inquiry. No one should be allowed to threaten others for their views and issue Fatwas of death. Coercive powers should be reserved for the due process of the state.
An article in Friday Times, Pakistan by Prof. Qadeer
Submitted by Sohail Rizvi
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