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Association for Communal Harmony in Asia (ACHA) Article of the Month THE FUTURE OF PAKISTAN
*Whither Pakistan? A five-year forecast, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3 June 2009 http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/whither-pakistan-five-year-forecast Article Highlights -U.S. government officials and media outlets have exaggerated how close Pakistan is to collapse. -The first step toward calming the situation--Pakistan's political leadership and army must squarely face the extremist threat, something they've finally begun to do. First, the bottom line: Pakistan will not break up; there will not be another military coup; the Taliban will not seize the presidency; Pakistan's nuclear weapons will not go astray; and the Islamic sharia will not become the law of the land. That's the good news. It conflicts with opinions in the mainstream U.S. press, as well as with some in the Obama administration. For example, in March, David Kilcullen, a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, declared that state collapse could occur within six months. This is highly improbable. Now, the bad news: The clouds hanging over the future of Pakistan's state and society are getting darker. Collapse isn't impending, but there is a slow-burning fuse. While timescales cannot be mathematically forecast, the speed of societal decline has surprised many who have long warned that religious extremism is devouring Pakistan. Here is how it all went down the hill: The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan devastated the Taliban. Many fighters were products of madrassas in Pakistan, and their trauma partly was shared by their erstwhile benefactors in the Pakistan military and intelligence. Recognizing that this force would remain important for maintaining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan--and keep the low-intensity war in Kashmir going--the army secretly welcomed them on Pakistani soil. Rebuilding and rearming was quick, especially as the United States tripped up in Afghanistan after a successful initial victory. Former President Pervez Musharraf's strategy of running with the hares and hunting with hounds worked initially. But then U.S. demands to dump the Taliban became more insistent, and the Taliban also grew angry at this double game. As the army's goals and tactics lost coherence, the Taliban advanced. In 2007, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, the movement of Pakistani Taliban, formally announced its existence. With a blitzkrieg of merciless beheadings of soldiers and suicide bombings, the TTP drove out the army from much of the frontier province. By early this year, it held about 10 percent of Pakistan's territory. Even then, few Pakistanis saw the Taliban as the enemy. Apologists for the Taliban abounded, particularly among opinion-forming local TV anchors that whitewashed their atrocities, and insisted that they shouldn't be resisted by force. Others supported them as fighters against U.S. imperial might. The government's massive propaganda apparatus lay rusting. Beset by ideological confusion, it had no cogent response to the claim that Pakistan was made for Islam and that the Taliban were Islamic fighters. The price paid for the government's prevarication was immense. A weak-kneed state allowed fanatics to devastate hitherto peaceful Swat, once an idyllic tourist-friendly valley. Citizens were deprived of their fundamental rights. Women were lashed in public, hundreds of girl's schools were blown up, non-Muslims had to pay a special tax (jizya), and every form of art and music was forbidden. Policemen deserted en masse, and institutions of the state crumbled. Thrilled by their success, the Taliban violated the Nizam-e-Adl Swat deal just days after it was negotiated in April. They quickly moved to capture more territory in the adjacent area of Buner. Barely 80 miles from Islamabad (as the crow flies), their spokesman, Muslim Khan, boasted the capital would be captured soon. The army and government still dithered, and the public remained largely opposed to the use of military force. And then a miracle of sorts happened. Sufi Mohammed, the illiterate, aging leader of the Swat sharia movement, while addressing a huge victory rally in early May, lost his good sense to excessive exuberance. He declared that democracy and Islam were incompatible, rejected Pakistan's Islamic constitution and courts, and accused Pakistan's fanatically right-wing Islamic parties of mild heresy. Even for a Pakistani public enamored by the call to sharia, Mohammed's comments were a bit too much. The army, now with public support for the first time since the birth of the insurgency, finally mustered the will to fight. Today, that fight is on. A major displacement of population, estimated at 3 million, is in process. This tragedy could have been avoided if the army hadn't nurtured extremists earlier. For the moment, the Taliban are retreating. But it will be a long haul to eliminate them from the complex mountainous terrain of Swat and Malakand. Wresting North and South Waziristan, hundreds of miles away, will cost even more. Army actions in the tribal areas, and retaliatory suicide bombings by the Taliban in the cities, are likely to extend into the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the cancerous offshoots of extremist ideology continue to spread. Another TTP has recently established itself--Tehrik-e-Taliban Punjab. So one expects that major conflict will eventually shift from Pakistan's tribal peripheries to the heartland, southern Punjab. Indeed, the Punjabi Taliban are now busy ramping up their operations, with a successful suicide attack on the police and intelligence headquarters in Lahore in May. What exactly do the Pakistani Taliban want? As with their Afghan counterparts, fighting the United States in Afghanistan is certainly one goal. But still more important is replacing secular and traditional law and customs in Pakistan's tribal areas with their version of the sharia. This goal, which they share with religious political parties such as Jamat-e-Islami, is working for a total transformation of society. It calls for elimination of music, art, entertainment, and all manifestations of modernity and Westernism. Side goals include destroying the Shias--who the Sunni Taliban regard as heretics--and chasing away the few surviving native Christians, Sikhs, and Hindus from the frontier province. While extremist leaders such as Baitullah Mehsud and Maulana Fazlullah derive support from marginalized social groups, they don't demand employment, land reform, better health care, or more social services. This isn't a liberation movement by a long shot, although some marginalized Pakistani leftists labor under this delusion. As for the future: Tribal insurgents cannot overrun Islamabad and Pakistan's main cities, which are protected by thousands of heavily armed military and paramilitary troops. Rogue elements within the military and intelligence agencies have instigated or organized suicide attacks against their own colleagues. Now, dazed by the brutality of these attacks, the officer corps finally appears to be moving away from its earlier sympathy and support for extremism. This makes a seizure of the nuclear arsenal improbable. But Pakistan's "urban Taliban," rather than illiterate tribal fighters, pose a nuclear risk. There are indeed more than a few scientists and engineers in the nuclear establishment with extreme religious views. While they aspire to state power, the Taliban haven't needed it to achieve considerable success. Through terror tactics and suicide bombings they have made fear ubiquitous. Women are being forced into burqas, and anxious private employers and government departments have advised their male employees in Peshawar and other cities to wear shalwar-kameez rather than trousers. Coeducational schools across Pakistan are increasingly fearful of attacks--some are converting to girls-only or boys-only schools. Video shops are going out of business, and native musicians and dancers have fled or changed their profession. As such, a sterile Saudi-style Wahabism is beginning to impact upon Pakistan's once-vibrant culture and society. It could be far worse. One could imagine that Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is overthrown in a coup by radical Islamist officers who seize control of the country's nuclear weapons, making intervention by outside forces impossible. Jihad for liberating Kashmir is subsequently declared as Pakistan's highest priority and earlier policies for crossing the Line of Control are revived; Shias are expelled into Iran, and Hindus are forced into India; ethnic and religious minorities in the Northern Areas flee Pashtun invaders; anti-Taliban forces such as the ethnic Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Baluch nationalists are decisively crushed by Islamists; and sharia is declared across the country. Fortunately, this seems improbable--as long as the army stays together. What can the United States, which is still the world's preeminent power, do to turn the situation around? Amazingly little. In spite of being on the U.S. dole, Pakistan is probably the most anti-American country in the world. It has a long litany of grievances. Some are pan-Islamic, but others derive from its bitter experiences of being a U.S. ally in the 1980s. Once at the cutting edge of the U.S. organized jihad against the Soviet Union, Pakistan was dumped once the war was over and left to deal with numerous toxic consequences. Although much delayed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent acceptance of blame is welcome. But festering resentments produced a paranoid mindset that blames Washington for all of Pakistan's ills--old and new. A meeting of young people that I addressed in Islamabad recently had many who thought that the Taliban are U.S. agents paid to create instability so that Pakistan's nuclear weapons could be seized by Washington. Other such absurd conspiracy theories also enjoy huge currency here. Although better financial monitoring is needed, Pakistan's support lifeline must not be cut, or economic collapse (and certain Taliban victory) would follow in a matter of months. The government and army must be kept afloat until Pakistan is fully ready to take on extremism by itself. The United States also should initiate a conference that brings Iran, India, and China together. Each of these countries must recognize that extremism represents a regional as well as global danger, and they must formulate an action plan aimed at squeezing the extremists. Thus, Pakistan's political leadership and army must squarely face the extremist threat, accept the United States and India as partners rather than adversaries, enact major reforms in income and land distribution, revamp the education and legal systems, and address the real needs of citizens. Most importantly, Pakistan will have to clamp down on the fiery mullahs who spout hatred from mosques and stop suicide bomber production in madrassas. For better or for worse, it will be for Pakistanis alone to figure out how to handle this.
*Heading towards victory, Zafar Hilaly, The News, June 11, 2009
*Former extremist now fights militancy in Pakistan, AP, June 5, 2009 ISLAMABAD – Ten years ago, Maajid Nawaz came to Pakistan to recruit for an extremist group intent on a global Islamic state. Now he's on a different mission — to steer youth away from militancy. Nawaz's message is one rarely heard in Pakistan, where the response to extremism has been overwhelmingly military, with little attempt to try to rehabilitate insurgents or keep young people from turning to militancy in the first place. In speeches to thousands of university students across the country, Nawaz emphasized the urgent need to renounce radicalism. "We must reclaim Islam," the British citizen of Pakistani descent told some 100 students on a campus close to the capital last month. "We must reclaim Pakistan." While Pakistan has poured troops and weaponry into its fight against the Taliban and other extremist groups, it has adopted few of the softer measures aimed at dissuading militancy. And critics say that is a major weakness in Pakistan's strategy against terrorism. "There is no country where such a program is more important than in Pakistan," said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert who chaired the first international conference on militant rehabilitation in Singapore in February. "In parallel with the kinetic fight to catch and kill terrorists, there needs to be a parallel policy to fight the ideology." There are signs Pakistan is considering such a program. Senior officials recently went to Saudi Arabia to study the effort there, considered the world's most comprehensive. Egypt pioneered the idea of militant rehabilitation in the 1990s, and Yemen, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia have also followed suit. The programs involve counseling by moderate clerics and former extremists. Militants who renounce their old ways can receive financial support or help finding a job. Parallel programs in schools and mosques are aimed at young people. A former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Saad Iqbal Madni, said he would welcome such a program in Pakistan. "If I had a little support, I could tell them that killing innocent people is not from Islam," said Madni, who was freed last year. Madni, who was never charged, denied engaging in violence, but said he would have credibility with fellow Pakistanis. The results from such soft tactics have varied, said Christopher Boucek, who recently published a report on the Saudi program for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Shazadi Beg, a London-based human rights lawyer who has studied the need for such programs in Pakistan, said they are important because most militant recruits are young men with a limited understanding of Islam and no other way to earn a living. A further complication is that for years the Pakistani government actively sponsored extremists to use as proxies in Afghanistan and Kashmir, a territory claimed by both Pakistan and India. "In Saudi, you're dealing with relatively small groups, but in Pakistan the jails are full with these sorts of detainees," said Mohammed Amir Rana, a terrorism expert at the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. "The problem is the number of people the government wants to be rehabilitated." Most of Pakistan's 180 million people follow a moderate form of Islam influenced by local traditions, but hard-liners have made significant inroads since the 1980s. Anger at the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and support for a succession of Pakistani leaders seen as corrupt and illegitimate have swelled their ranks. Another problem, said Pakistani lawmaker Mushahid Hussain, is that Pakistan is late to realize how serious a threat Islamic militants pose. Bureaucratic inertia is strong, he says, along with an aversion to new ideas and a state of denial. "Unless (the programs) start, we don't know how successful they will be," Hussain said. "It is not a battle of bombs and bullets. It is a battle of ideas." Nazar, the extremist turned inspirational speaker, used to belong to Hizb ut-Tahrir, which claims to have hundreds of thousands of members around the world working on establishing an Islamic caliphate. The group pledges nonviolence, but Nawaz alleges that in some countries — including nuclear-armed Pakistan — a key strategy was to foment a military coup. Pakistan has formally banned the group, as have several other Muslim countries, but authorities are not really enforcing the ban. Its members take part in demonstrations, hold public meetings and hand out leaflets largely unobstructed. In 1999, Hizb ut-Tahrir paid for Nawaz to go to Pakistan, ostensibly as a student, to recruit members. He traveled all over the country doing so. Later, he went to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years for recruiting for the group. He met other radicals, studied Islamic texts in jail and gradually changed his opinions, he said. He now believes that Islam calls for the separation of the faith and politics. Imran Yousafzai, deputy spokesman of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan, said he was aware of Nawaz's activities in Pakistan. "I heard he was once an active member in Pakistan," he said. "I am sad to say that he is now working against Islam." During his recent appearances on college campuses, some students questioned why Nawaz was "attacking" Islam and not U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan. One hard-liner, whom Nawaz accuses of being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, punched him in the face after a talk in the eastern city of Lahore. Nawaz said he hopes to start a network of moderate Pakistani Muslims to speak out against extremism. He gets a salary as director of the Quilliam Foundation, a mainstream think tank that challenges extremism and promotes pluralism, and is partly funded by the British government. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a university lecturer and vocal critic of militant Islam, said students responded positively to Nawaz but that he did not expect to see "any movement building up behind him." "It is a great job he is doing and it's important that people hear him, he said. "But it wasn't a life-changing experience."
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