Nahraf
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2010
- Messages
- 1,508
- Reaction score
- 0
Mosharraf Zaidi: Pakistan, the world’s most dangerous place, but not the most hopeless | Full Comment | National Post
Mosharraf Zaidi: Pakistan, the worlds most dangerous place, but not the most hopeless
National Post August 6, 2010 10:14 am
Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images
A Pakistani man transports belongings and residents with his tractor as they evacuate a flash flood-hit area in Mehmood Kot
Is Pakistan really the most dangerous place in the world, as it has been dubbed by innumerable newspapers and magazines, and now in a new book of the same name by the veteran Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul? The short answer is yes
But the short answer only tells us so much. Understanding the problems of Pakistan requires more, despite the bottomless appetite among journalists, analysts and diplomats for easy-to-digest accounts of the country.
In the wake of the WikiLeaks release, conversation about Pakistan has returned to the thorniest and most opaque of the countrys problems: the status of the ISI, and the relationship between the government of Pakistan and its army and intelligence services, on the one hand, and between the ISI and the extremist groups it helped nurture. But these are not new questions, and the sincerity of the ISI has long been front and centre in any discussion of Pakistan.
Near the end of The Most Dangerous Place whose title refers specifically to the legal no mans land inside Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Imtiaz Gul turns his attention to the ISI and its connections to extremist groups inside and outside of Pakistan, a history that dates back to the U.S. and Saudi-financed jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. As a reporter, Gul has few equals in Pakistan, and he relates a slew of accusations in many cases detailed and well-supported against the ISI, painting a rich and realistic picture without hysteria or exaggeration.
To situate the ISI within Pakistan, Gul reaches back to 2006, and to a quote from General Pervez Musharraf, speaking with an American television reporter. Remember my words, Musharraf said: If the ISI is not with you and Pakistan is not with you you will lose Afghanistan.
To Western eyes, statements of this sort are little more than veiled threats, attempts at leverage that only confirm American suspicions of ISI complicity in the Afghan Talibans war against Nato and U.S. troops. But Musharraf, purposely or not, was making a more profound observation: to demonize the ISI was to demonize Pakistan. For better or for worse, the ISI remains a reflection of Pakistans military, and that military, regardless of its complicated internal dynamics, is a reflection and extension of Pakistans government. The government, however badly managed, and however dramatically disconnected from the people of Pakistan, in turn reflects their votes and again, however badly represents 180 million Pakistanis. Writing this week in the New York Times, the novelist Mohammed Hanif captured this reality well, noting that the news media had come to a full-throated defence of their spies. Suddenly, he wrote, the distinction between the state and the state within the state was blurred. It is our ISI that is being accused, we felt.
It boils down to this: Pakistans interests in Pakistan and in the region are simply not the same as those that the U.S. and other Nato powers have. Unlike alliances that go back a long way and seem to endure all shades of politics, Pakistans relationship with the United States is decidedly inorganic. To stimulate each other the right way, the United States pays the Pakistani military, and gingerly, its civilian government, to put the squeeze on the safe havens for bad guys in Pakistan that are targeting U.S. and Nato troops in Afghanistan.
The message this sends to the Pakistani military and civilian elite could not be more clear. As long as Pakistan is a central and vital instrument for the military needs of the U.S. and the part of the international community that is engaged in Afghanistan with it, there is money to be had. The financial transactions that ensure Pakistans reluctant help for the U.S. and Nato in Afghanistan are not a matter of pride for most Pakistanis. To the contrary, this unnatural relationship deepens suspicions about Americas intentions in the region.
For months now, one of the pet subjects for foreign correspondents based in Islamabad (or those based in New Delhi who cover Pakistan) has been the rabid anti-American sentiment that grips Pakistani cities. Western reporters and readers are understandably fascinated with the proliferation of conspiracy theories that grip Pakistans middle classes, who now regard everything that the West does with suspicion and cynicism. For American and British taxpayers, this is the height of ingratitude, a churlish response to the billions of dollars in aid delivered to Pakistan.
What is less visible to those outside Pakistan, however, is the brutal reality of terrorism inside the country, which has now ravaged rural and urban areas alike, claiming the lives of some 30,000 Pakistanis, most of those in the years since 2007. In his preface, Imtiaz Gul provides an eye-witness account of this expanding terror, describing the massive bomb detonated outside the Islamabad Marriott in September 2008 as he sat outside at the rear of the hotel. Once safely out, he writes, I looked back to see the inferno spreading over the building. Hell had arrived in Islamabad, the leafy capital of Pakistan.
The sense of shock and horror that has taken hold among Pakistanis cuts across class, language and political ideologies. For veteran observers of Pakistans government and military, like Gul, the carnage simply reflects the building and inevitable conflict, now an all-out war, between the state of Pakistan and the holy warriors and violent extremists it once nurtured.
For the average Pakistani, however, this war continues to be perplexing. Pakistani Muslims are a lot more relaxed about their faith than Arabs, but religion is still a central part of private and public life in Pakistan. Between peoples innocent and peaceful commitment to their faith, and the political exploitation of religious symbols by state organisations Pakistani, U.S. and Saudi is a dangerous space. This vacuum is where confusion reigns supreme. Convinced that good Muslims couldnt possibly commit these dastardly acts, many ordinary Pakistanis gravitate to the comforts of conspiracy.
It doesnt help that the vocal English-speaking Pakistani intelligentsia often confuses its westernized lifestyle and its inclination to bomb its foes back to the stone age with actual liberalism. In the absence of more credible mainstream voices, these trigger-happy Pakistani neocons have led the way in constructing a narrative opposing violent extremism, but these efforts have predictably and repeatedly failed to gain traction. Despite glorious opportunities to wrest the initiative like the brutal occupation of Swat by terrorist groups during the spring of 2009, or multiple attacks on mosques and tombs this clash-of-civilizations bluster falls flat on Main Street in Pakistan.
Compounding the battle for the narrative is the democratically-elected government in Islamabad. Though its own value system is tribal and feudal, it is loaded with hawkish pro-war advisers, none of whom have constituencies of their own, and all of whom seem eager to address the countrys problems with larger and larger helpings of raw military force.
Violent religious extremists are deeply unpopular in Pakistan. In surveys, Pakistanis are quite categorical in their rejection of al Qaeda, of the use of suicide bombings and the war waged by the TTP on the nation. But the militants wreaking havoc in Pakistan have little need for the publics support. Gul deftly describes one attempt to bring religious leaders together, in December 2009, to establish a consensus in opposition to suicide attacks. Despite its good intentions, Gul writes, the entire exercise meant little in concrete terms. At this point, no religious decree or legal order will deter militants from executing their mission.
Pakistanis hate the TTP, the al Qaeda spin-off that has declared war on the people, the government, the military and the intelligences services of Pakistan. But these same Pakistanis see a clear distinction between the TTP and the Afghan Taliban, precisely because they do not regard the conflict in Afghanistan as an ideological one. It is therefore unlikely that the state, military, or civilian population of Pakistan will sever ties with the Taliban across the border.
The relationship between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan is so deep and thick that it is difficult to believe Americans ever thought it could be ended. Guls book recounts the stealth with which Naseerullah Babar, who was Benazir Bhuttos go-to guy on national security, helped cement the relationship between Pakistani spies and Afghanistans puritanical Islamist revolutionaries from Kandahar in the early and mid 1990s. In meticulous detail, Gul explains just how the ISI led Pakistans engagement with the Taliban, helping to train farmers, rebuild roads and establish a telecom network that was overlaid on Pakistans own national grid. In a classic exposition of what ails Pakistans institutional landscape, Gul describes the manner in which the military and ISI almost completely monopolized the relationship between Islamabad and Kabul: civilian officials in Pakistans foreign ministry, stationed at the embassy in Kabul, were frozen out of the picture by the ISI and military.
This is the quintessential truth about Pakistan. For 63 years, the military has essentially stuck its hand into every single cookie jar in public life. It has taken all the cookies, and left behind crumbs. These crumbs are the tattered, broken and dysfunctional systems, processes and mechanisms of basic governance. Pakistans economic, social and political problems, without fail, can be summed up by this simple fact. The militarys meddling has dislocated, disincentivized and defaced the basic institutions required to sustain a robust democracy.
The most important of these institutions are parliament, the bureaucracy and local government. Throughout Pakistan, at both the national and subnational levels, military rule in Islamabad has sought to use all three institutions to justify, validate and sustain power. At those moments when military rule has subsided, these institutions have reliably and self-destructively battled one another.
The cancers that eat away at the basic effectiveness of government are much deeper and complicated when we try to examine FATA, the place that Guls book is really about, Pakistans lawless frontier.
The constitution of Pakistan does not apply in FATA. Instead, the area is governed by a set of laws called the Frontier Crimes Regulations, established during the British Raj when the tribal leaders were allowed to administer their own justice. For Pakistans ruling elite, FATA serves as a buffer between Pakistan and Afghanistan helping to keep the matter of the contested border safely unresolved. FATA has always been, and still remains, a black hole where everything is permitted drug smugglers, kidnapping gangs, murderers and mercenaries all seek and find refuge there, because the Pakistani police have no authority in the territory. Within Pakistan, FATA is referred to as ilaaqa ghayr literally strange place, but more poetically, the place where anything goes.
The failure to establish any modern legal framework in FATA in place of the
Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) the unique set of laws enforced in the tribal areas since 1947 is only the most glaring of Pakistans institutional failures, though it may be the most costly. Analysts have long speculated about whether the government will ever manage to plug the legal black hole there, and Gul has a succinct and depressing answer: The government is finding it hard to completely replace the FCR with the normal laws of Pakistan in FATA because of stiff opposition from strong pressure groups like the civil bureaucracy and the maliks (local strongmen). Under the current system, bureaucrats and maliks constitute a privileged class. That is why most of them want to retain much of the FCR and tailor amendments to restrict their scope.
This then, is where Pakistan stands today. Its institutions destroyed by regular military interventions, security ravaged by terrorists, torn internally by competing narratives, and run like a personal piggy bank by the combination of myopic politicians and bureaucrats that cannot see past their own noses.
Pakistan is a super-sized country. Within the morass of institutional decay, ideological confusion, and violent chaos, the country somehow manages to keep ticking. Natural disasters get dealt with in a stunningly effective partnership between the military, civilian government, and a civil society that is robust, diverse, and extends far beyond the hackneyed NGO culture that dots Islamabads posh neighbourhoods.
Pakistan, for all its backwardness, did in fact manage to produce, and protect a nuclear arsenal. While the countrys infrastructure is desperately inadequate, the network that does exist is not reminiscent of a sub-Saharan country on the brink of liquidation, but rather an emerging market thats been horribly, horribly mismanaged.
The institutional decay is not inevitable, and there have been glimmers of hope for its reversal. A two-year long agitation, led by the legal community and supported overwhelmingly by an emerging urban middle class, helped restore an unjustly dismissed chief justice in March 2009. In April this year, parliament passed 102 changes to the constitution in a reforms package called the 18th Amendment Bill, which effects a radical decentralisation of power and may restore the lustre to the bright spots of Pakistans original federal structure. Since 2002, Pakistans electronic media has exploded, offering nearly 30 news channels and a range of almost 70 different channels of entertainment, ranging from the sacred (religious programming) to the often profane (political talk shows, Pakistan fashion weeks, and multiple music-video channels, and even more religious programming).
Most of all, change in Pakistan is being manufactured in its cities. It is not always pretty. The emerging middle class in these cities is nationalist, insecure about its Muslim identity and concerned that the rest of the world wants to dominate Pakistan, and strip it of its traditions and culture. Still, like all middle classes, its primary preoccupation isnt being the flag-bearer for Pakistani morality, but being the countrys bread-winners.
It was the arrival of terrorism in the cities and among the middle classes that precipitated the dramatic shift in the militarys own attitude toward domestic terrorists. As Gul writes: When the militants moved the war into urban centers, attacking civilians and the security forces alike, in the latter half of 2008, the GHQ [Army headquarters] finally woke up.
But Gul knows that the GHQ can only do a sliver of whats needed for Pakistan. Sure, it can help U.S. forces devise an exit plan that doesnt spoil President Obamas domestic political agenda. It can even help scorch the earth, to clear safe havens for terrorists. But the most positive thing about Pakistan in 2010, amid all these disasters, is that the military is still reeling from the bloody nose it got when last it took power under Musharraf. Even the military knows that it cannot stimulate the economic revival the country so desperately needs; it knows that the bureaucracy requires reforms that can only be enacted by politicians, and that those same politicians are the only people capable of negotiating the difficult existential questions now facing the country. The shotgun wedding between the United States and Pakistan has empowered and enriched the military and political elite, but the resulting marriage may not last far beyond the current phase of U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan. Then, perhaps, Pakistan might turn its attention to devising Pakistani solutions to Pakistani problems, to bringing about the profound changes needed in its own institutions and when these come to pass, finally, Pakistan might have a shot at being a valuable and reliable country, for its own people, for its neighbours and allies, and for the rest of the world.
National Post
Mosharraf Zaidi has served as an adviser to governments and international organisations on the delivery of aid in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Mosharraf Zaidi: Pakistan, the worlds most dangerous place, but not the most hopeless
National Post August 6, 2010 10:14 am
Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images
A Pakistani man transports belongings and residents with his tractor as they evacuate a flash flood-hit area in Mehmood Kot
Is Pakistan really the most dangerous place in the world, as it has been dubbed by innumerable newspapers and magazines, and now in a new book of the same name by the veteran Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul? The short answer is yes
But the short answer only tells us so much. Understanding the problems of Pakistan requires more, despite the bottomless appetite among journalists, analysts and diplomats for easy-to-digest accounts of the country.
In the wake of the WikiLeaks release, conversation about Pakistan has returned to the thorniest and most opaque of the countrys problems: the status of the ISI, and the relationship between the government of Pakistan and its army and intelligence services, on the one hand, and between the ISI and the extremist groups it helped nurture. But these are not new questions, and the sincerity of the ISI has long been front and centre in any discussion of Pakistan.
Near the end of The Most Dangerous Place whose title refers specifically to the legal no mans land inside Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Imtiaz Gul turns his attention to the ISI and its connections to extremist groups inside and outside of Pakistan, a history that dates back to the U.S. and Saudi-financed jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. As a reporter, Gul has few equals in Pakistan, and he relates a slew of accusations in many cases detailed and well-supported against the ISI, painting a rich and realistic picture without hysteria or exaggeration.
To situate the ISI within Pakistan, Gul reaches back to 2006, and to a quote from General Pervez Musharraf, speaking with an American television reporter. Remember my words, Musharraf said: If the ISI is not with you and Pakistan is not with you you will lose Afghanistan.
To Western eyes, statements of this sort are little more than veiled threats, attempts at leverage that only confirm American suspicions of ISI complicity in the Afghan Talibans war against Nato and U.S. troops. But Musharraf, purposely or not, was making a more profound observation: to demonize the ISI was to demonize Pakistan. For better or for worse, the ISI remains a reflection of Pakistans military, and that military, regardless of its complicated internal dynamics, is a reflection and extension of Pakistans government. The government, however badly managed, and however dramatically disconnected from the people of Pakistan, in turn reflects their votes and again, however badly represents 180 million Pakistanis. Writing this week in the New York Times, the novelist Mohammed Hanif captured this reality well, noting that the news media had come to a full-throated defence of their spies. Suddenly, he wrote, the distinction between the state and the state within the state was blurred. It is our ISI that is being accused, we felt.
It boils down to this: Pakistans interests in Pakistan and in the region are simply not the same as those that the U.S. and other Nato powers have. Unlike alliances that go back a long way and seem to endure all shades of politics, Pakistans relationship with the United States is decidedly inorganic. To stimulate each other the right way, the United States pays the Pakistani military, and gingerly, its civilian government, to put the squeeze on the safe havens for bad guys in Pakistan that are targeting U.S. and Nato troops in Afghanistan.
The message this sends to the Pakistani military and civilian elite could not be more clear. As long as Pakistan is a central and vital instrument for the military needs of the U.S. and the part of the international community that is engaged in Afghanistan with it, there is money to be had. The financial transactions that ensure Pakistans reluctant help for the U.S. and Nato in Afghanistan are not a matter of pride for most Pakistanis. To the contrary, this unnatural relationship deepens suspicions about Americas intentions in the region.
For months now, one of the pet subjects for foreign correspondents based in Islamabad (or those based in New Delhi who cover Pakistan) has been the rabid anti-American sentiment that grips Pakistani cities. Western reporters and readers are understandably fascinated with the proliferation of conspiracy theories that grip Pakistans middle classes, who now regard everything that the West does with suspicion and cynicism. For American and British taxpayers, this is the height of ingratitude, a churlish response to the billions of dollars in aid delivered to Pakistan.
What is less visible to those outside Pakistan, however, is the brutal reality of terrorism inside the country, which has now ravaged rural and urban areas alike, claiming the lives of some 30,000 Pakistanis, most of those in the years since 2007. In his preface, Imtiaz Gul provides an eye-witness account of this expanding terror, describing the massive bomb detonated outside the Islamabad Marriott in September 2008 as he sat outside at the rear of the hotel. Once safely out, he writes, I looked back to see the inferno spreading over the building. Hell had arrived in Islamabad, the leafy capital of Pakistan.
The sense of shock and horror that has taken hold among Pakistanis cuts across class, language and political ideologies. For veteran observers of Pakistans government and military, like Gul, the carnage simply reflects the building and inevitable conflict, now an all-out war, between the state of Pakistan and the holy warriors and violent extremists it once nurtured.
For the average Pakistani, however, this war continues to be perplexing. Pakistani Muslims are a lot more relaxed about their faith than Arabs, but religion is still a central part of private and public life in Pakistan. Between peoples innocent and peaceful commitment to their faith, and the political exploitation of religious symbols by state organisations Pakistani, U.S. and Saudi is a dangerous space. This vacuum is where confusion reigns supreme. Convinced that good Muslims couldnt possibly commit these dastardly acts, many ordinary Pakistanis gravitate to the comforts of conspiracy.
It doesnt help that the vocal English-speaking Pakistani intelligentsia often confuses its westernized lifestyle and its inclination to bomb its foes back to the stone age with actual liberalism. In the absence of more credible mainstream voices, these trigger-happy Pakistani neocons have led the way in constructing a narrative opposing violent extremism, but these efforts have predictably and repeatedly failed to gain traction. Despite glorious opportunities to wrest the initiative like the brutal occupation of Swat by terrorist groups during the spring of 2009, or multiple attacks on mosques and tombs this clash-of-civilizations bluster falls flat on Main Street in Pakistan.
Compounding the battle for the narrative is the democratically-elected government in Islamabad. Though its own value system is tribal and feudal, it is loaded with hawkish pro-war advisers, none of whom have constituencies of their own, and all of whom seem eager to address the countrys problems with larger and larger helpings of raw military force.
Violent religious extremists are deeply unpopular in Pakistan. In surveys, Pakistanis are quite categorical in their rejection of al Qaeda, of the use of suicide bombings and the war waged by the TTP on the nation. But the militants wreaking havoc in Pakistan have little need for the publics support. Gul deftly describes one attempt to bring religious leaders together, in December 2009, to establish a consensus in opposition to suicide attacks. Despite its good intentions, Gul writes, the entire exercise meant little in concrete terms. At this point, no religious decree or legal order will deter militants from executing their mission.
Pakistanis hate the TTP, the al Qaeda spin-off that has declared war on the people, the government, the military and the intelligences services of Pakistan. But these same Pakistanis see a clear distinction between the TTP and the Afghan Taliban, precisely because they do not regard the conflict in Afghanistan as an ideological one. It is therefore unlikely that the state, military, or civilian population of Pakistan will sever ties with the Taliban across the border.
The relationship between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan is so deep and thick that it is difficult to believe Americans ever thought it could be ended. Guls book recounts the stealth with which Naseerullah Babar, who was Benazir Bhuttos go-to guy on national security, helped cement the relationship between Pakistani spies and Afghanistans puritanical Islamist revolutionaries from Kandahar in the early and mid 1990s. In meticulous detail, Gul explains just how the ISI led Pakistans engagement with the Taliban, helping to train farmers, rebuild roads and establish a telecom network that was overlaid on Pakistans own national grid. In a classic exposition of what ails Pakistans institutional landscape, Gul describes the manner in which the military and ISI almost completely monopolized the relationship between Islamabad and Kabul: civilian officials in Pakistans foreign ministry, stationed at the embassy in Kabul, were frozen out of the picture by the ISI and military.
This is the quintessential truth about Pakistan. For 63 years, the military has essentially stuck its hand into every single cookie jar in public life. It has taken all the cookies, and left behind crumbs. These crumbs are the tattered, broken and dysfunctional systems, processes and mechanisms of basic governance. Pakistans economic, social and political problems, without fail, can be summed up by this simple fact. The militarys meddling has dislocated, disincentivized and defaced the basic institutions required to sustain a robust democracy.
The most important of these institutions are parliament, the bureaucracy and local government. Throughout Pakistan, at both the national and subnational levels, military rule in Islamabad has sought to use all three institutions to justify, validate and sustain power. At those moments when military rule has subsided, these institutions have reliably and self-destructively battled one another.
The cancers that eat away at the basic effectiveness of government are much deeper and complicated when we try to examine FATA, the place that Guls book is really about, Pakistans lawless frontier.
The constitution of Pakistan does not apply in FATA. Instead, the area is governed by a set of laws called the Frontier Crimes Regulations, established during the British Raj when the tribal leaders were allowed to administer their own justice. For Pakistans ruling elite, FATA serves as a buffer between Pakistan and Afghanistan helping to keep the matter of the contested border safely unresolved. FATA has always been, and still remains, a black hole where everything is permitted drug smugglers, kidnapping gangs, murderers and mercenaries all seek and find refuge there, because the Pakistani police have no authority in the territory. Within Pakistan, FATA is referred to as ilaaqa ghayr literally strange place, but more poetically, the place where anything goes.
The failure to establish any modern legal framework in FATA in place of the
Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) the unique set of laws enforced in the tribal areas since 1947 is only the most glaring of Pakistans institutional failures, though it may be the most costly. Analysts have long speculated about whether the government will ever manage to plug the legal black hole there, and Gul has a succinct and depressing answer: The government is finding it hard to completely replace the FCR with the normal laws of Pakistan in FATA because of stiff opposition from strong pressure groups like the civil bureaucracy and the maliks (local strongmen). Under the current system, bureaucrats and maliks constitute a privileged class. That is why most of them want to retain much of the FCR and tailor amendments to restrict their scope.
This then, is where Pakistan stands today. Its institutions destroyed by regular military interventions, security ravaged by terrorists, torn internally by competing narratives, and run like a personal piggy bank by the combination of myopic politicians and bureaucrats that cannot see past their own noses.
Pakistan is a super-sized country. Within the morass of institutional decay, ideological confusion, and violent chaos, the country somehow manages to keep ticking. Natural disasters get dealt with in a stunningly effective partnership between the military, civilian government, and a civil society that is robust, diverse, and extends far beyond the hackneyed NGO culture that dots Islamabads posh neighbourhoods.
Pakistan, for all its backwardness, did in fact manage to produce, and protect a nuclear arsenal. While the countrys infrastructure is desperately inadequate, the network that does exist is not reminiscent of a sub-Saharan country on the brink of liquidation, but rather an emerging market thats been horribly, horribly mismanaged.
The institutional decay is not inevitable, and there have been glimmers of hope for its reversal. A two-year long agitation, led by the legal community and supported overwhelmingly by an emerging urban middle class, helped restore an unjustly dismissed chief justice in March 2009. In April this year, parliament passed 102 changes to the constitution in a reforms package called the 18th Amendment Bill, which effects a radical decentralisation of power and may restore the lustre to the bright spots of Pakistans original federal structure. Since 2002, Pakistans electronic media has exploded, offering nearly 30 news channels and a range of almost 70 different channels of entertainment, ranging from the sacred (religious programming) to the often profane (political talk shows, Pakistan fashion weeks, and multiple music-video channels, and even more religious programming).
Most of all, change in Pakistan is being manufactured in its cities. It is not always pretty. The emerging middle class in these cities is nationalist, insecure about its Muslim identity and concerned that the rest of the world wants to dominate Pakistan, and strip it of its traditions and culture. Still, like all middle classes, its primary preoccupation isnt being the flag-bearer for Pakistani morality, but being the countrys bread-winners.
It was the arrival of terrorism in the cities and among the middle classes that precipitated the dramatic shift in the militarys own attitude toward domestic terrorists. As Gul writes: When the militants moved the war into urban centers, attacking civilians and the security forces alike, in the latter half of 2008, the GHQ [Army headquarters] finally woke up.
But Gul knows that the GHQ can only do a sliver of whats needed for Pakistan. Sure, it can help U.S. forces devise an exit plan that doesnt spoil President Obamas domestic political agenda. It can even help scorch the earth, to clear safe havens for terrorists. But the most positive thing about Pakistan in 2010, amid all these disasters, is that the military is still reeling from the bloody nose it got when last it took power under Musharraf. Even the military knows that it cannot stimulate the economic revival the country so desperately needs; it knows that the bureaucracy requires reforms that can only be enacted by politicians, and that those same politicians are the only people capable of negotiating the difficult existential questions now facing the country. The shotgun wedding between the United States and Pakistan has empowered and enriched the military and political elite, but the resulting marriage may not last far beyond the current phase of U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan. Then, perhaps, Pakistan might turn its attention to devising Pakistani solutions to Pakistani problems, to bringing about the profound changes needed in its own institutions and when these come to pass, finally, Pakistan might have a shot at being a valuable and reliable country, for its own people, for its neighbours and allies, and for the rest of the world.
National Post
Mosharraf Zaidi has served as an adviser to governments and international organisations on the delivery of aid in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
