The Truth of this Conflict
Part II

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http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=209046

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

by Mosharraf Zaidi

Extreme views are present everywhere. In most cases, extreme groups tend to invoke the kind of disgust that any despicable set of ideas and their proponents deserve. However, no matter how deeply extremists upset the mainstream of a society, no country is immune from the scourge of extremism. That is why, in the United States, the same 11-12 percent of Americans that believed President Barack Obama was a Muslim before he was elected, continue to believe that lie, well after. Not surprisingly, among white evangelical Christians, that lie is twice as popular, with nearly one in five believing that the US president is a Muslim. In India’s Maharashtra state, the Shiv Sena and BJP coalition (whose extremism may be contested) won 91 seats in the recent elections there. But even Raj Thackeray and his MNS (whose linguistic extremism is an uncontested fact) continue to capture enough of the imagination of Maharashtrans to win 13 legislative assembly seats.

The distinction between extremism in other places and in Pakistan is that a large number of citizens have been killed by terrorists in Pakistan (since 2003, more than 7,300). The overwhelming number of these deaths has been claimed by terrorists that are extremist Muslims. They claim to derive their inspiration from Islam for the death and murder they spread.

Extremists in other places either don’t have the urge, or the motivation, or the wherewithal to kill people they disagree with. In Pakistan, extremists have all three. But Pakistan’s extremists don’t just have a fetish for Pakistani blood. Indeed, if anything, their fetish for foreign blood is much greater. So the defining question that needs to be asked is not, as so many conspiracy theorists pose, who is paying for these attacks to be carried out. Nor is the defining question, as was posed by The New York Times’ recent video, whether Ali Azmat has the same counter-terrorism pedigree as Andrew Exum, or David Kilcullen. Nor is the defining question, as so many Pakistanis and Americans keep asking, who started pushing money into extremist mullahs’ bank accounts in the 1970s to win the Cold War. Those are all fine questions, but the defining question for Pakistan in this time of conflict they are not.

The defining question is much more mundane. Simply put, what is the difference between the environment in which terrorists operate in Pakistan (where they meet with stunning regularity of success), and the environments they aspire to operate in everywhere else (where they tend to meet with consistent and stunning regularity of failure)?

Or, to put more context to the question, what is the difference between Pakistan, which now features almost weekly, if not daily, terrorist strikes, and the US or the UK or India, where the strikes are so infrequent that we can remember their dates, 9/11, 7/7 and 26/11? That is the defining question.

The simple answer is that Pakistan represents an uncontested space for terrorists. With impunity terrorists can indoctrinate, recruit and train future terrorists. With impunity terrorists can procure weapons–guns, armour, bullets, explosives and detonators. With impunity terrorists can stake out targets, identify soft spots, and execute their plans. No such impunity for terrorists exists in any other country in the world.

The impunity they enjoy before an attack is matched only by the impunity terrorists enjoy after an attack. Victims are rarely questioned, forensics are rarely recorded, investigations are rarely held. Political commentators lament the lack of accountability of elected and military leaders in continually allowing Pakistan to be struck by terrorists. But such accountability is a ridiculous notion. How can a country’s leaders be held to account for terrorist events when terrorists themselves operate with such impunity?

That is the truth of this conflict–Pakistanis are dying with alarming regularity because of the incompetence of Pakistan’s state organisations and institutions and the operational space they offer to terrorists, based on that incompetence. What’s more, this truth is value-neutral. Neither zero-constituency polemicists, nor mass-constituency conspiracy theorists can argue this point. In part, because it is a historically independent fact. It does not, as so much of the foreign discourse does, implicate a wilful evil design that motivates the incompetence of Pakistani state agencies–whether civilian, military or intelligence.

Most of all, this fact does not demonise Pakistan–either as an idea, or as a people. As a matter of fact, it simply states the sterile truth about what we’ve seen from the Pakistani state, consistently over the course of several years.

Why is it pertinent to not demonise the idea of Pakistan, or the Pakistani people? Quite simply put, Pakistanis are already besieged with bombs and sniffer machines. When push comes to shove, people’s ideological orientations in Pakistan will have little bearing on which “side” they choose. Pakistanis will, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly and emphatically choose Pakistan. Demonising the very existence of the country, which is how a lot of the criticism and denial of Muslim nationalism in South Asia is taken, or vilifying the Pakistani military wholesale, which, despite their reservations about it, is the only one the Pakistani people have–are utterly stupid ways of engaging Pakistanis.

Conspiracy theories are about displacing blame for the hard-to-comprehend, from oneself to “the other.” Displacing blame for the evil that extinguishes Pakistani lives with such cold efficiency as the terrorists have been doing, problematic as such displacement is, should not be impossible to understand. But it is hard to understand Pakistan’s conspiracy-theory disease when attempts to do so are made without even a small measure of empathy for Pakistanis. Pakistanis are enduring a wretched time, trying to comprehend, and then operate normally, in a very unsafe environment that they did not choose to create.

The rabid conspiracy theorising about the insecurity and conflict that is consuming Pakistan is not rooted in extremism. It is rooted in Pakistani nationalism. The more extreme versions of this nationalism, or hyper-nationalism, represent borderline criminal negligence, in terms of burden of proof. It endangers people’s lives, and it desperately damages Pakistan’s prospects for having a normal relationship with its immediate neighbours–India, Afghanistan and Iran–to say nothing of the distant shores of the United States, or Europe. We saw exactly how this hyper-nationalism manifests itself, with the fiasco that led to The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Rosenberg having to move out of the country for fear of his safety.

Not everybody that buys into conspiracy theories, however, is a dangerous hyper-nationalist. In fact, among Pakistan’s urban middle class, where the conspiracy-theory problem is possibly deepest, just a few short months ago, millions stood up and spoke for rule of law, and against military rule. Those are not extremist values. Those same millions consume Indian and American culture like chocolate. These are not the enemies of India’s growing status as a global power, nor are they inimical to President Obama’s appeals to the Muslim world. Indeed, they may represent the most potent and sustainable allies to the rest of the world that Pakistan offers.

Holier-than-thou condemnations of Pakistan’s rock stars because they aren’t as vociferous in their condemnation of the Taliban as The New York Times or out-of-touch zero-constituency polemicists would like them to be is a poor way to engage middle Pakistan. It further cements the polarisation that feeds conspiracy theorists with raw material in the first place.

The uni-dimensional rhetoric about extremism on the one hand, and an irrational, and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory blather on the other, simply serve to crowd out the real challenges Pakistan faces. The Pakistani elite don’t want to answer the fundamental questions that today’s Pakistan raises. Why do these attacks keep occurring? How will the challenges of federalism, and its manifestations in local government, police, and the civil services, be resolved? How will Pakistan fix education, maternal and neonatal health, and primary healthcare? What will Pakistan do to respond to climate change and energy shortages?

Pakistan’s elite are too self-indulgent to want to answer those questions, and Pakistan’s terrorist enemies too evil. But there is no possible conspiracy that prevents middle Pakistan from having that discourse. That discourse is where solutions to Pakistan’s real problems lie. The faux umbrage of Pakistan’s polar extremes must not become an ally of the terrorists that are trying to suffocate Pakistan. That is the truth of this conflict.

(Concluded)