The Truth of this Conflict
Part I

http://www.mosharrafzaidi.com/

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=208876

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
by Mosharraf Zaidi

The conflict that is taking place in Pakistan is not an ideological war. It is a conflict between very small groups of terrorists, whose only weapon is murder, and a very large group of citizens, whose frontline weapon (the Pakistani state) is not a very sharp weapon at all.

Branding this conflict as a war on extremism is factually incorrect. If for no other reason, then because extremist ideology, and extremist groups such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda have never captured the public imagination in Pakistan. The Pew Survey on Global Attitudes and the International Republican Institute’s data, both confirm that Pakistanis reject these groups and their ideologies in overwhelming numbers.

As a construct, branding the conflict as a war on extremism is a deeply problematic one, for three reasons. It gives extremism more than its due in the shape of the country, it absolves government of its duty to protect citizens, and, most of all, it plays right into the extremists’ “us versus them” creed of civilisational conflict between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.

Pakistan is not shaped by extremism. Despite all its massive problems, Pakistan has a vast network of people, organisations, institutions and habits that make up an ecosystem of resistance to extremist ideas and extremist violence. That ecosystem is what inoculates Pakistan from being run over by terrorists. It is the reason that while terrorists can strike regularly in the heart of Pakistan’s urban centres, they cannot, have not, and will not ever constitute a viable political force. Without having serious political capital, terrorists have only one weapon at their disposal: murder. This weapon, of indiscriminate murder, has claimed more than 7,000 victims. Each one of those is a tragic loss. None can or should ever be minimised. But let’s try to be rational and keep it real, shall we?

Pakistan is a country of nearly 180 million people. We speak at least eight major languages. We sustain 10 cities with more than one million people. We make telecom companies rich beyond their wildest dreams, buying up and using more than 85 million active mobile phone subscriptions. We love to watch. Politics. On over 25 news channels. We reject violent extremism in poll after poll–both the IRI and Pew Global Attitudes Survey confirm this. We reject religious political parties in election after election–the desperate and confused religious political establishment confirms that.

So does the sustained caricature of religious parties and their leaders. Indeed, mullahs are mainstream Pakistan’s punching bag. And that has nothing to do with a fabricated post 9/11 image consultant’s playbook. Pakistanis make fun of mullahs because its what we do. Bulleh Shah was tearing up the mullah-ocracy long before Saudi Aramco made millions of billionaires in the desert, and long before Republican spymasters and the CIA helped make the Pakistani military an indispensable part of the global political discourse.

Bulleh Shah was not born yesterday (unlike Seymour Hersh, apparently). He was born in 1680, and his poetry informs the very ethos of Pakistan’s rustic contempt for orthodoxy. It is Bulleh Shah that defines Pakistaniat, not Muridke. And it is Bulleh Shah that informs the larger context of Pakistan’s long-standing historical, cultural and economic resilience and resistance to extremism.

Of course, governments, both Gen Musharraf’s sorry excuse for a democracy, and President Zardari’s democratic excuse for incompetence, love the “fight the extremists” narrative. It gives license to fail, because, of course, as Interior Minister Rehman Malik keeps reminding us, a committed suicide bomber is unstoppable (sic). This is a self-perpetuating myth. Pakistan is getting battered by terrorist attacks because it does not have the capacity to prevent them. Police are under-funded, undermanned and lacking in some of the most rudimentary counter-terrorism instruments.

In India, it is now emerging that Hemant Karkare, the heroic Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad chief, may have been killed on 26/11 because of a faulty bullet-proof vest. We should shudder to think of what would happen as a result of an investigation of the equipment we provide to our cops in Pakistan. At least Karkare had a vest. Pakistan’s law and order and internal-security establishment is literally shirtless.

One reason why this incompetence has sustained is that the bulk of resources for security are employed to protect the lives and property of the government officials that claim powerlessness before the extremists. Another is that, save for the very significant assassination of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, it tends to be the poor and the non-elite that have to bear the brunt of terrorist attacks.

Of course, there is one other reason why we should expect continued incompetence in preventing terrorist attacks. Each successive attack helps strengthen the case of the “beggar state.” If terrorism were to stop claiming the lives it claims on a weekly basis, the argument for massive injections of foreign assistance would persist, but they would be much less urgent than they are in the face of almost daily bombings. To cover up for its own incompetence, and the skewed institutional and fiscal incentives that drive the behaviour of the Pakistani elite, a conflict with extremism is a particularly useful distractive ploy. Buying into this version of the conflict simply excuses government incompetence, when none should be tolerated.

Finally, the “war on extremism” narrative is dangerously problematic because it cedes the discourse to a narrow band of extremists with global aspirations that would otherwise have no foundation to rest upon. A civilisational conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims is a dream scenario for extremist groups. Insisting on defining the law-and-order problems in Pakistan as a war between extremists and moderates, unnecessarily empowers extremists to an extent that outweighs their actual impact in Pakistani politics and economics.

One of the more fascinating ways in which we can see the truth of this conflict bear itself out is in a recent New York Times video report about the Pakistani music scene. In a classical ideological battlefield, the lines would be clearly drawn. Sex, drugs and rock and roll tend to fare poorly with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The rock stars the NY Times interviews, including the ethereally gifted Ali Azmat, can’t and don’t endorse extremist ideology or the groups that espouse that poison. But they do bank on conspiracy theories to explain what Pakistan is experiencing. In response, an over-the-hill music critic with a forceful insistence that is reminiscent of how mullahs talk, calls for more robust and explicit condemnations of the Taliban from within the music community–as if he were defining some kind of litmus test of modernity.

Pakistani musicians are heroic in their own right for having stared down the barrel of a conservative society for the last two decades. They’ve helped replace guns and knives in kids’ hands with Fender Stratocasters and Les Pauls. There are no Noam Chomskys or Henry Kissingers among them. If there were, the magical music they make would have been bereft of any melody.

We can repeatedly try to reject, or debunk, or minimise the conspiracy theories (as I have in recent weeks) that are taking up so much airtime in mainstream Pakistan, all we like. Contemptuous dismissals of the theories are well and good. But if even sex, drugs and rock and roll Pakistan seem to be enamoured with these ideas, perhaps an effective discourse requires more than just backhanded dismissals. Clearly, “na re na” isn’t doing the trick.

(To be concluded)