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Christina Lamb
Published: 10 April 2011 (Sunday Times)
An injured child is carried from a Peshawar mosque hit by a suicide bomber
W hen David Cameron announced £650m in education aid for Pakistan last week, I guess the same thought occurred to many British people as it did to me: why are we doing this?
While we are slashing our social services and making our children pay hefty university fees, why should we be giving all this money to a country that has reduced its education budget to 1.5% of GDP while spending several times as much on defence? A country where only 1.7m of a population of 180m pay tax? A country that is stepping up its production of nuclear weapons so much that its arsenal will soon outnumber Britains? A country so corrupt that when its embassy in Washington held an auction to raise money for flood victims, and a phone rang, one Pakistani said loudly: Thats the president calling for his cut? A country which has so alienated powerful friends in America that they now want to abandon it?
As someone who has spent almost as much time in Pakistan as in Britain over the past 24 years, I feel particularly conflicted, as I have long argued we should be investing more in education there.
That there is a crisis in Pakistans education system is beyond doubt. A report out last month by the Pakistan education taskforce, a non-partisan body, shows that at least 7m children are not in school. Indeed, one-tenth of the worlds children not in school are in Pakistan. The first time I went to Pakistan in 1987 I was astonished to see that while billions of pounds worth of weapons from the West were going to Pakistans intelligence service to distribute to the Afghan mujaheddin, there was nothing for schools.
The Saudis filled the gap by opening religious schools, some of which became breeding grounds for militants and trained the Taliban. Cameron hopes that investing in secular education will provide Pakistans children with an alternative to radicalism and reduce the flow of young men who want to come and bomb the West.
I would struggle to find a country that it is more in Britains interests to see progress and succeed than Pakistan, he said. If Pakistan is a success, we will have a good friend to trade with and deal with in the future If we fail, we will have all the problems of migration and extremism that we dont want to see.
As the sixth most populous country, with an arsenal of between 100 and 120 nuclear weapons, as the base of both Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, and as homeland to a large population in Britain, Pakistan is far more important to our security than Afghanistan. But after spending two weeks travelling in Pakistan last month, I feel the situation has gone far beyond anything that a long-term strategy of building schools and training teachers can hope to restrain.
The Pakistani crisis has reached the point where Washington its paymaster to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 10 years is being urged to tear up the strategic alliance underpinning the war in Afghanistan.
Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California who sits on the House foreign affairs committee and has been dealing with Pakistan since working in the Reagan White House, says he now realises they were playing us for suckers all along.
I used to be Pakistans best friend on the Hill but I now consider Pakistan to be an unfriendly country to the US, he said. Pakistan has literally been getting away with murder and when you tie that with the realisation that they went ahead and used their scarce resources to build nuclear weapons, it is perhaps the most frightening of all the things that have been going on over the last few years.
We were snookered. For a long time we bought into this vision that Pakistans military was a moderate force and we were supporting moderates by supporting the military. In fact the military is in alliance with radical militants. Just because they shave their beards and look western they fooled a lot of people.
Christine Fair, assistant professor at the centre for peace and security studies at Georgetown University in Washington, is equally scathing. Pakistans development strategy is to rent out its strategic scariness and not pay taxes itself, she said. We should let them fail.The Pakistani crisis has reached the point where Washington is being urged to tear up the strategic alliance underpinning the war in Afghanistan
Pakistans prime minister, Yousuf Gilani, comes from one of Punjabs largest land-owning families. Watching Cameron sign over the £650m, he said: I think the root cause of terrorism and extremism is illiteracy. Therefore we are giving a lot of importance to education.
If that were the case one might expect Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the most elite universities in the country, to be a bastion of liberalism. Yet in the physics department Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics, sits with his head in his hands staring out at a sea of burqas. People used to imagine there was only a lunatic fringe in Pakistan society of these ultra-religious people, he said. Now were learning that this is not a fringe but a majority.
What brought this home to him was the murder earlier this year of Salman Taseer, the half-British governor of Punjab who had called for the pardoning of a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy law. The woman, Aasia Bibi, had been convicted after a mullah had accused her of impugning Islam when she shouted at two girls who refused to drink water after she had touched it because they said it was unclean.
Taseer had been a key figure in Pakistans politics for decades and had suffered prison and torture, yet when he said the Aasia case showed the law needed reforming, he was vilified by the mullahs and the media. In January he was shot 27 times by one of his own guards. His murderer, Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero, showered with rose petals by lawyers when he appeared in public.
After the killing, Hoodbhoy was asked to take part in a televised debate at the Islamabad Press Club in front of students. His fellow panellists were Farid Piracha, spokesman for the countrys biggest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Sialvi, a supposed moderate mullah from the Barelvi sect. Both began by saying that the governor brought the killing on himself, as he who blasphemes his prophet shall be killed. The students clapped.
Hoodbhoy then took the microphone. Even as the mullahs frothed and screamed I managed to say that the culture of religious extremism was resulting in a bloodbath in which the majority of victims were Muslims; that non-Muslims were fleeing Pakistan. I said Im not an Islamic scholar but I know there are Muslim countries that dont think the Koran says blasphemy carries the death sentence, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt.
I didnt get a single clap. When I directly addressed Sialvi and said you have Salman Taseers blood on your hands, he looked at them and exclaimed: how I wish I had done it! He got thunderous applause.
Afterwards, I came back and wanted to dig a hole in the ground, he said. I cant figure out why this country has gone so mad. Ive seen my department change and change and change. There wasnt one burqa-clad woman in the 1980s but today the non-hijabi, non-burqa student is an exception. As for the male students, they all come in turbans and beards with these fierce looks on their faces.
Yet, he points out, these students are the super-elite, paying high fees to attend the university: Its nothing to do with causes normally associated with radicalism; its that the mullah is allowed complete freedom to spread the message of hate and liberals are bunkering down. Those who speak out are gone and the government has abdicated its responsibility and doesnt even pretend to protect life and property.
Raza Rumi, a young development worker and artist who blogs regularly, agrees. As we sat in a lively coffee bar in Lahore that could have been in the West until the lights went off in one of the frequent power cuts, he said: Radicalism in Pakistan isnt equated with poverty and backwardness were seeing more radicalisation of the urban middle and upper class. I look at my own extended family. When I was growing up, maybe one or two people had a beard. Last time I went to a family wedding I was shell-shocked. All these uncles and aunts who were regular Pakistanis watching cricket and Indian movies now all have beards or are in hijabs.
I think were in an existential crisis. The moderate political parties have taken a back seat and chickened out as they just want to protect their positions. What is Pakistans identity? Is it an Islamist identity as defined by Salman Taseers murder, ISI [the intelligence service], the jihadists? Is that really what we want to be?
He does not know how much longer he will write about such things. Ive been getting repeated emails that I should leave the country or shut up, he said.
When I left the cafe I was followed for the rest of the day by a small yellow car.
link
Published: 10 April 2011 (Sunday Times)
An injured child is carried from a Peshawar mosque hit by a suicide bomber
W hen David Cameron announced £650m in education aid for Pakistan last week, I guess the same thought occurred to many British people as it did to me: why are we doing this?
While we are slashing our social services and making our children pay hefty university fees, why should we be giving all this money to a country that has reduced its education budget to 1.5% of GDP while spending several times as much on defence? A country where only 1.7m of a population of 180m pay tax? A country that is stepping up its production of nuclear weapons so much that its arsenal will soon outnumber Britains? A country so corrupt that when its embassy in Washington held an auction to raise money for flood victims, and a phone rang, one Pakistani said loudly: Thats the president calling for his cut? A country which has so alienated powerful friends in America that they now want to abandon it?
As someone who has spent almost as much time in Pakistan as in Britain over the past 24 years, I feel particularly conflicted, as I have long argued we should be investing more in education there.
That there is a crisis in Pakistans education system is beyond doubt. A report out last month by the Pakistan education taskforce, a non-partisan body, shows that at least 7m children are not in school. Indeed, one-tenth of the worlds children not in school are in Pakistan. The first time I went to Pakistan in 1987 I was astonished to see that while billions of pounds worth of weapons from the West were going to Pakistans intelligence service to distribute to the Afghan mujaheddin, there was nothing for schools.
The Saudis filled the gap by opening religious schools, some of which became breeding grounds for militants and trained the Taliban. Cameron hopes that investing in secular education will provide Pakistans children with an alternative to radicalism and reduce the flow of young men who want to come and bomb the West.
I would struggle to find a country that it is more in Britains interests to see progress and succeed than Pakistan, he said. If Pakistan is a success, we will have a good friend to trade with and deal with in the future If we fail, we will have all the problems of migration and extremism that we dont want to see.
As the sixth most populous country, with an arsenal of between 100 and 120 nuclear weapons, as the base of both Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, and as homeland to a large population in Britain, Pakistan is far more important to our security than Afghanistan. But after spending two weeks travelling in Pakistan last month, I feel the situation has gone far beyond anything that a long-term strategy of building schools and training teachers can hope to restrain.
The Pakistani crisis has reached the point where Washington its paymaster to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 10 years is being urged to tear up the strategic alliance underpinning the war in Afghanistan.
Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California who sits on the House foreign affairs committee and has been dealing with Pakistan since working in the Reagan White House, says he now realises they were playing us for suckers all along.
I used to be Pakistans best friend on the Hill but I now consider Pakistan to be an unfriendly country to the US, he said. Pakistan has literally been getting away with murder and when you tie that with the realisation that they went ahead and used their scarce resources to build nuclear weapons, it is perhaps the most frightening of all the things that have been going on over the last few years.
We were snookered. For a long time we bought into this vision that Pakistans military was a moderate force and we were supporting moderates by supporting the military. In fact the military is in alliance with radical militants. Just because they shave their beards and look western they fooled a lot of people.
Christine Fair, assistant professor at the centre for peace and security studies at Georgetown University in Washington, is equally scathing. Pakistans development strategy is to rent out its strategic scariness and not pay taxes itself, she said. We should let them fail.The Pakistani crisis has reached the point where Washington is being urged to tear up the strategic alliance underpinning the war in Afghanistan
Pakistans prime minister, Yousuf Gilani, comes from one of Punjabs largest land-owning families. Watching Cameron sign over the £650m, he said: I think the root cause of terrorism and extremism is illiteracy. Therefore we are giving a lot of importance to education.
If that were the case one might expect Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the most elite universities in the country, to be a bastion of liberalism. Yet in the physics department Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics, sits with his head in his hands staring out at a sea of burqas. People used to imagine there was only a lunatic fringe in Pakistan society of these ultra-religious people, he said. Now were learning that this is not a fringe but a majority.
What brought this home to him was the murder earlier this year of Salman Taseer, the half-British governor of Punjab who had called for the pardoning of a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy law. The woman, Aasia Bibi, had been convicted after a mullah had accused her of impugning Islam when she shouted at two girls who refused to drink water after she had touched it because they said it was unclean.
Taseer had been a key figure in Pakistans politics for decades and had suffered prison and torture, yet when he said the Aasia case showed the law needed reforming, he was vilified by the mullahs and the media. In January he was shot 27 times by one of his own guards. His murderer, Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero, showered with rose petals by lawyers when he appeared in public.
After the killing, Hoodbhoy was asked to take part in a televised debate at the Islamabad Press Club in front of students. His fellow panellists were Farid Piracha, spokesman for the countrys biggest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Sialvi, a supposed moderate mullah from the Barelvi sect. Both began by saying that the governor brought the killing on himself, as he who blasphemes his prophet shall be killed. The students clapped.
Hoodbhoy then took the microphone. Even as the mullahs frothed and screamed I managed to say that the culture of religious extremism was resulting in a bloodbath in which the majority of victims were Muslims; that non-Muslims were fleeing Pakistan. I said Im not an Islamic scholar but I know there are Muslim countries that dont think the Koran says blasphemy carries the death sentence, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt.
I didnt get a single clap. When I directly addressed Sialvi and said you have Salman Taseers blood on your hands, he looked at them and exclaimed: how I wish I had done it! He got thunderous applause.
Afterwards, I came back and wanted to dig a hole in the ground, he said. I cant figure out why this country has gone so mad. Ive seen my department change and change and change. There wasnt one burqa-clad woman in the 1980s but today the non-hijabi, non-burqa student is an exception. As for the male students, they all come in turbans and beards with these fierce looks on their faces.
Yet, he points out, these students are the super-elite, paying high fees to attend the university: Its nothing to do with causes normally associated with radicalism; its that the mullah is allowed complete freedom to spread the message of hate and liberals are bunkering down. Those who speak out are gone and the government has abdicated its responsibility and doesnt even pretend to protect life and property.
Raza Rumi, a young development worker and artist who blogs regularly, agrees. As we sat in a lively coffee bar in Lahore that could have been in the West until the lights went off in one of the frequent power cuts, he said: Radicalism in Pakistan isnt equated with poverty and backwardness were seeing more radicalisation of the urban middle and upper class. I look at my own extended family. When I was growing up, maybe one or two people had a beard. Last time I went to a family wedding I was shell-shocked. All these uncles and aunts who were regular Pakistanis watching cricket and Indian movies now all have beards or are in hijabs.
I think were in an existential crisis. The moderate political parties have taken a back seat and chickened out as they just want to protect their positions. What is Pakistans identity? Is it an Islamist identity as defined by Salman Taseers murder, ISI [the intelligence service], the jihadists? Is that really what we want to be?
He does not know how much longer he will write about such things. Ive been getting repeated emails that I should leave the country or shut up, he said.
When I left the cafe I was followed for the rest of the day by a small yellow car.
link
