Pakistan’s Problems are Solvable

The writer, Mohsin Hamid, is the author of two novels, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Moth Smoke (2000)

Just before moving back to Pakistan a year and a half ago, I wrote a short story called “A Beheading”. It was about the imaginary kidnapping and beheading of a nameless Pakistani writer, told from that doomed and terrified man’s own point of view. I wrote it not because such events are commonplace in Pakistan, or typical of life in our country. I wrote it because it expressed a pernicious fear, a fear that gives rise to self-censorship. I thought in writing it I would become, if not braver, then at least more questioning of my silences and those of others.

I’ve long tried to be an optimist about Pakistan. The reason isn’t that I believe things here are fine. They’re a mess. But I’ve always believed our mess is solvable.

1. My own set of solutions would include (as a top 10):
2. Raising our shamefully low tax revenues;
3. reducing the defence budget (especially money spent on shiny, imported and easily embargoed toys like F-16s);
4. increasing the development budget (education, water and electricity, in particular);
5. beefing up the police and lower courts;
6. cracking down much harder on militants;
7. phasing out American (and ideally all) aid;
8. making more of an effort to pursue peace with India;
9. actively campaigning to end foreign meddling in Afghanistan (including our own);
10. giving more power to the provinces;
11. refocusing judicial reform on speedy and unbiased justice for all, rather than on the balance of power in Islamabad; and
12. forcing political parties to become internally democratic.

Many reasonable Pakistanis might disagree with me over items on this list. Some of what I advocate could well be ill-considered. But nothing on my list cannot be done. None of it is impossible or beyond Pakistan’s capabilities. Hence, my optimism doesn’t require me to reject reality.
My optimism does, however, require that Pakistanis be somewhat free to speak. Only by expressing themselves can Pakistanis articulate their own lists of national priorities, debate them and call for them to be implemented. When a speeding train is hurtling down the wrong track towards a cliff, optimism lies in the hope that passengers will raise an alarm in time for a conductor to pull the brake.

Silence kills that hope. It kills optimism.

And lethal efforts are under way to spread silence in Pakistan.

Half a year after I moved back, over 200 people were killed or wounded in simultaneous attacks on Ahmadis in Lahore. Few politicians openly condemned the massacre. The message was clear: Those deemed to be non-Muslims can be silenced in Pakistan. Five per cent of our fellow citizens will be denied their voice.

A little over a year after my return, Salmaan Taseer was gunned down, followed weeks later by Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti. Again, public condemnations were limited. And again, the message was clear: Those who seek to change laws in ways deemed to be non-Muslim can be silenced in Pakistan. The substantial swathe of Pakistanis who are socially liberal (a tenth of our population? a fifth? a third?) will be denied their voice.

And now, a year and a half after my return, journalist Saleem Shahzad has been assassinated. He was tortured, his body left in a canal. We do not know who killed him. But we do know what he wrote in the Asia Times on May 27: That the Pakistan Navy faces infiltration by al Qaeda sympathisers, that it has purged some of these elements, that the attack on PNS Mehran was in retribution for these purges and that it was carried out with insider help.

Days later, he was dead.

What message is sent by killing a man who writes such things? Its style represents a shift. This is a communication confident (or desperate) enough to no longer seek to cloak itself in a language of Muslim and non-Muslim, of sectarian groups or of religious symbols. And its substance appears to be the following: Those who speak of sensitive security matters can be silenced in Pakistan. Hereafter, it suggests, every Pakistani will be denied their voice.

For we all speak of sensitive security matters. We speak of drones and India and terrorists and Abbottabad and America and nukes. We do it all the time. As well we should: We are being slaughtered in our thousands, over 30,000 Pakistanis in the last decade alone, and our country is grievously undermined by violence. We know things must change. And we need our journalists to help us figure out how, by telling us, underneath all the conspiracy theories and secrecy, what is actually going on.

The challenges facing Pakistan require a citizenry that is more engaged with security policy, not less, and a security establishment that is more open with and responsive to its citizenry, not less. The yawning gap between our people and our policies has allowed self-destructiveness to fester. It has made our Pakistan a blood-drenched contradiction: Taking aid, hating dependency; cooperating with drone strikes, proclaiming sovereignty; buying warplanes, drowning in floods.

We do not have a security state, we have an insecurity state.

We will only get better if we close this gap, and we will only close this gap if we speak. So we must urgently ask why journalists who write on security issues are dying, and who is killing them. We must demand that it stop. We must reject an enforced national silence that encourages our country to continue on its present trajectory, ever downhill, ever faster, towards the cliff, to the despair of those of us who, despite everything, still love Pakistan, and to the misfortune of all who call this wounded land of tremendous potential home.

We must also persevere in looking for reasons for optimism. They exist. Courageous journalists are raising their voices. The media is disseminating information ever more widely. It may be that the balance of power in our state is finally, slowly, shifting towards our people. The outcome is uncertain, but silencing Pakistan has yet to succeed.

Budget Fails to Bring Anything New on the Table

Our budget makers could have followed social democracy model of Scandinavians that deplore extremes of wealth and poverty.

But we prefer to follow the American Model, which promotes rich-poor divide and pays little attention for the welfare of the needy.

The Scandinavians, on the other hand, detest the idea that people should remain mired in poverty. They have initiated a number of welfare programmes by taxing the rich to help those lagging behind, enabling them to move ahead economically and socially. They impose high taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth and income in their societies. In Pakistan, the situation is exactly the opposite.

Our IMF-World Bank-imposed economic managers love to extend major economic benefits to the rich and their favourite recipe for growth is selling off profitable assets at throw-away prices to foreign investors.

Holbrooke Favored More Pressure on India to Solve the Kashmir Dispute

As special envoy to the Af-Pak region, Holbrooke winced at the overreliance on military force, for it reminded him of Vietnam.
“There are structural similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam,” he noted, in scattered reflections now in the hands of his widow, Kati Marton.
“He thought that this could become Obama’s Vietnam,” Marton recalled. “Some of the conversations in the Situation Room reminded him of conversations in the Johnson White House. When he raised that, Obama didn’t want to hear it.”
Because he was fiercely loyal to his friend Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, Holbrooke bit his lip and kept quiet in public. But he died in December, and Marton and some of his friends believe it’s time to lift the cone of silence and share his private views. At this time, with Pakistan relations in a crisis and Afghanistan under review, our country could use a dose of his wisdom.
Holbrooke opposed the military “surge” in Afghanistan and would see the demise of Osama as an opportunity to go into diplomatic overdrive. He believed strongly that the only way out of the mess in Afghanistan was a peace deal with the Taliban, and his team was secretly engaged in outreach to figures linked to the Taliban, Marton says.
“Reconciliation — that was what he was working toward in Afghanistan, and building up the civilian and political side that had been swamped by the military,” Marton recalled. “The whole policy was off-kilter, way too militarized. Richard never thought that this war could be won on the battlefield.”
His aim, she says, was something like the Balkan peace agreement he negotiated at a military base in Dayton, Ohio. The process would be led by the United States but include all the regional players, including Pakistan and Iran.
“He was dreaming of a Dayton-like setting somewhere, isolated, no media, no Washington bureaucracy,” Marton said. “He was a long way from that, but he was dreaming of that.”
He understood from his experience that every conflict has to end at the negotiating table.
Holbrooke’s aim for Afghanistan was “not cut-and-run, but a viable, lasting solution” to end the civil war there. If Holbrooke were still alive, he would be shuttling frantically between Islamabad and Kabul, trying to take advantage of Osama’s killing to lay the groundwork for a peace process.
To do that, though, we have to put diplomacy and development — and not 100,000 troops, costing $10 billion a month — at the heart of our Afghan policy. Holbrooke was bemused that he would arrive at a meeting in a taxi, while Gen. David Petraeus would arrive escorted by what seemed a battalion of aides. And Holbrooke would flinch when Petraeus would warmly refer to him as his “wingman” — meaning it as a huge compliment — rather than seeing military force as the adjunct to diplomacy.
As for Pakistan, Holbrooke told me and others that because of its size and nuclear weaponry, it was center stage; Afghanistan was a sideshow.
“A stable Afghanistan is not essential; a stable Pakistan is essential,” he noted, in the musings he left behind. He believed that a crucial step to reducing radicalism in Pakistan was to ease the Kashmir dispute with India, and he favored more pressure on India to achieve that.
Holbrooke was frustrated by Islamabad’s duplicity. But he also realized that Pakistan sheltered the Afghan Taliban because it distrusted the United States, particularly after the United States walked away in 1989 after the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan. And renewed threats of abandonment won’t build trust.
Rather, Holbrooke poured his soul into building a relationship not only with Pakistani generals but also with the Pakistani people, and there were modest dividends. He helped improve CIA access to Pakistan, which may have helped with the raid on the Osama compound. And he soothed opposition to drone attacks.
“He was treating them as a serious player, not as if you’re just having a one-night stand but as if there might actually be marriage at the end of the relationship,” Marton said.
It’s a vision of painstaking diplomacy toward a strategic goal — peace — and it’s what we need more of. President Obama said wonderful things at the memorial service for Holbrooke. But the best tribute would be to listen to his advice.

Army is Indispensable to Pakistan’s Survival, Despite its Interference in the Polity

The United States has long complained thatPakistan’s military and intelligence services are playing a double game when it comes to terrorism and extremism: publicly promising cooperation-and indeed delivering some-while privately supportingAmerica’s enemies.

They point toPakistan’s apparent reluctance to take on groups like the Haqqaani network, a Taliban affiliate that launches attacks on American soldiers inAfghanistan, and the Quetta Shura, Taliban leaders based in Balochistan.

In the eyes of theUnited States, thePakistanarmy has not been the most dependable international ally, a sentiment that is reciprocated by the Pakistanis.

And now, many American officials are hoping that the raid that killed Osama bin Laden will give them the leverage to force the Pakistani security establishment to choose sides once and for all.

If only it were that simple.

Killing bin Laden has indeed succeeded at putting pressure on the Pakistani army, but not to the effect that Washington may have wished. The truth is that Pakistanis are angrier about theUnited States’ ability to launch a special-operations raid right under their noses than they are that Osama was found on their soil-and the military is bearing the brunt of the criticism insidePakistan. Text-message jokes about the army are making the rounds, parliament is angrily voicing embarrassing questions about the military’s lack of preparedness, and the chattering classes are tossing ceaseless insults.

But it’s theUnited Statesthat now has the most to lose. The Pakistani military is destined to remain an important institution inPakistan’s otherwise dysfunctional polity, and Washington has more to gain by reforming it cooperatively than by casting it aside.

Pakistan’s history and geography has always dictated the need for a large military. It is surrounded by multiple major powers and conflict zones:Afghanistanto the west, risingIndiato the east, andChinato the north, makingPakistana key locus of super power interests and rivalries. It is necessarily wary about its own security. And the army has always seen itself as the national institution par excellence, an organization explicitly of the people and for the people. Indeed, recruitment patterns show that the army is increasingly representative of the country as a whole: in an otherwise fractured country, that is reason enough to justify its outsized presence on the national stage.

For the most part, the Pakistani military has earned its reputation as an effective military force. But it also overreached in trying to take over civil administration under general-cum-president Musharraf. And it has been poor at political engineering. The army under Musharraf had penetrated the ranks of the civilian bureaucracy, taking over education and training institutions and essentially running certain ministries. After assuming command as army chief, Kayani ordered all army officers serving in government to either resign from the military or to return to it full time.

At the time of the May 1 raid, the Pakistani military had just recently restored its pride of place as the most respected institution in the country. It had slipped in public confidence after it allowed the Pakistani Taliban to take over parts of Malakand and Swat in 2006, but in the past four years, the army, under its new chief, Gen. Kayani, has focused on burnishing its credentials and improving the institution’s professionalism and capacity to fight. Both had been compromised under Musharraf’s autocratic rule.

In the face of a rising tide of homegrown terrorism and insurgency, the army also shifted gears and its training from being India-centric to being more agile and prepared for low-intensity conflict, using some of the counterinsurgency (COIN) principles that the United States army learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. Within the past two years, it revamped the training at its military academy, infantry school, staff, college, and the national defense university to focus on how to fight asymmetric war against its own people. And it has moved some 150,000 troops to fight terror groups on its western border, incurring the wrath of a domestic insurgent group, the Tehrik-e-TalibanPakistan(TTP). This was a major shift in thinking for a force that had in earlier years used its top spy agency, the ISI directorate, to foment insurgency in neighboring countries and support militancy againstAfghanistanandIndia. It was a shift that was in tune withWashington’s priorities in the region.

That’s not to say that the military has been unimpeachable. It is still too involved in the country’s economy, with major holdings in banking, real estate, and transportation. Especially as the national economy has deteriorated, the military has had incentives to involve itself in civilian decision-making.

Further,Pakistancontinues to countenance the use of its territory by Afghan Taliban groups that fight the U.S.-led coalition inside Afghanistan. Its inability or unwillingness to take on these Afghan groups in their Pakistani sanctuaries is a constant irritant in its relationship with theUnited States.

But the Pakistani military apparently recognizes the value of its ties with theU.S.military — and not just the $16 billion it has received in security-related aid and reimbursements since 2001. A measure of the importance attached to American military training by the Pakistani military is the fact that a number of officers sent to the United States have been promoted before their return to Pakistan, if not immediately afterwards. Clearly, a lot of thought is going into the selection of the individuals being sent to theUnited Statesfor specialized training. Some 100 of them will be in theUnited Statesthis year alone.

Washington would be wise to use that cultural affinity — as well as the fact that the Pakistani army depends on the United States to maintain its weapons systems and supply spare parts — as leverage to change the shape of their long-term collaboration. Both sides need to explicitly agree on the nature of their relationship and identify and determine the reasons for their disagreements so there are no residual suspicions. A written agreement would provide maximum certainty. But the trust that is needed to sustain this relationship has to be earned by both sides. That will take time.

Determining the role of the Pakistani intelligence should, no doubt, also be on the American agenda. The ISI is an integral part of thePakistanmilitary, and the current head, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, is a close confidant of Kayani. It would be a mistake to assume that Pasha is working at cross purposes with the military.

But Washington can do plenty to immediately prove its good faith toPakistan’s most important public institution. It should share any links it can substantiate between the army and al Qaeda in general, and Osama in particular. It could emphasize that the United States is prepared to work together with Pakistan to find other al Qaeda leaders in other towns in the vicinity of Abbottabad, where they are likely to be located (given the reliance on courier communications of al Qaeda central). It could work to strengthen the capacity ofPakistan’s civilian police institutions, which are closer to the ground and could play a key role in fighting militancy.

Of course, the United Statesis within its rights to lay out the options clearly and the implications of non-cooperation. Americans are angry at what they see as Pakistan’s duplicity in the face of terror. But punishment is not a policy. No matter what theUnited Statesdoes,Pakistan’s military will maintain its outsized role in the country’s public life, and any agreement has to be in its interests for it to stick. Fortunately, there is much overlap between Washington’s andIslamabad’s interests in the region, from a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan to normalization ofPakistan’s relations with India.

Before anything else, however, the Pakistani army should be given time to resolve its internal debates, tempting though it may be to ratchet up criticism and pressure after its public humiliation on May 1. If not, then a break with Pakistan may be unavoidable. And if that happens, it’s likely theUnited Statesthat will find itself friendless at a time when it needs allies more that ever.

Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. He is also the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within