Sunil Dasgupta believes that external foreign aid hasn’t helped curtail extremist violence in Pakistan. That’s because the aid has focused too much on minimizing the Pakistani state’s weaknesses and ignored the real problem – too many people in the country believe that violent extremism is politically legitimate.
By Sunil Dasgupta
According to a recent Financial Times report,
Pakistan is in the process of buying eight Chinese submarines worth $4-5
billion. To paraphrase the American national security writer William Arkin,
this means that U.S. aid to Pakistan now goes toward buying Chinese weapons for
a war against India that everyone is hoping will not happen, and if it does,
will not be fought at sea.
Through billions of dollars in foreign aid,
the United States has tried to convince the Pakistani state, its leaders, and
perhaps even the country’s elite to turn the tide against Islamist extremism in
the country. Do not expect an obituary, but this foreign aid policy should now
be recognized as a complete failure. By focusing on strengthening the extant
Pakistani state and military, these policies have ignored and even aggravated
the social sources of the country’s problems.
Beyond the State
The basic facts of the case about Pakistan are
well known. For years, the country has been at the center of a number of
international security concerns. First, Pakistan has become the source of
Islamist extremism and violence. It is now home to a number of terrorist
groups, which erupt into violence regularly at home, in the region, and
sometimes across the world. The state of Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons,
which it uses to keep its simmering rivalry with India from boiling over, but
the nukes also cause fears of what might happen if they fall into the hands of
a terrorist group. The military plays a larger role in Pakistan than warranted
in a democratically elected government.
Those invested in transforming Pakistan—the
United States and the Western world in general, overseas and liberal
Pakistanis—have concluded from these facts that the solution in Pakistan lies
in strengthening the state so that it can make difficult choices and undertake
necessary reforms. In support of that goal, the United States has provided
Pakistan with billions of dollars in foreign aid. Far from reversing the
problem, Pakistani state policy has exacerbated Islamist extremism in the
country. Arguably, external assistance itself has undermined the possibility of
change, tainting the Pakistani state as a foreign agent. Notwithstanding
repeated failures, however, the United States has persisted in its aid policy.
Furthermore, this is not a problem of U.S.
policy alone. The British approach toward Pakistan is similarly misguided, and
European thinking is even less cogent. India, whose future is most closely
linked with Pakistan’s, has hardly done any better, and Pakistan’s closest
allies have failed as well. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has not managed to
convince Pakistan to act against extremist groups with anywhere near the vigor
with which it has done at home. China has acted opportunistically to consolidate
its relations with Pakistan on a number of fronts, but, on the issue of
Islamist extremism, Beijing has not had noticeable influence even as the
problem has grown inside China.
The breadth and persistence of the failure of
international policy toward Pakistan is mind boggling. How can so many countries
be so wrong, for so long, on so vital an issue? In recent years, authors such
as T.V. Paul, Christine Fair, and Hassan Abbas have blamed Pakistan’s situation
on the misplaced priorities of its government, the insecurities of the Pakistan
Army, and the arrogance of the United States. But this essentially
state-centered diagnosis of Pakistan’s troubles is too narrow. If anything, the
origins, dimensions, and consequences of religious extremism and violence are rooted
in society. Indeed, placing the state at the center of Pakistan’s political
development is historically far-fetched. In matters from democracy to extremist
violence, the state has followed social preferences rather than shaping them.
For example, the conventional wisdom holds
that Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator of the country in the 1980s, seeded the
radical Islamist movement in the country both to consolidate his own position
and to generate religious fervor in the military campaign in Afghanistan.
However, strong elements of radical Islamist beliefs in Pakistani society
pre-existed Zia, and his political rival Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who Zia tried and
executed) sought to capture its emotive appeal for his own gains.
Source:
CGDEV Website Article - calculations using data from Congressional Research
Service, “Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance,” July 2013.Note that figures only
include accounts designated by the CRS analysis as Economic-Related Assistance.
The Legitimacy of Religious Extremism
The Pakistani state has contributed to the
problem, but today, the challenge is not only beyond the state, it is beyond
the state’s ability to fix. No amount of foreign aid, as the submarine deal
shows, can fix the problem. The Pakistani government simply cannot fight the
social acceptance of terrorist groups. With public support tilting away from
the government, the actions of a democratic state—driven to be responsive to
the population—can hardly to be expected to bring about the necessary transformation.
Even Pakistan’s military regimes, which have also ruled with a keen eye toward
public attitudes, have not shown the ability to engender a national makeover.
The terrorist group, Lashkar-e-taiba, is
banned in Pakistan, but it can send a rally through its crowded cities without
anyone being surprised let alone upset. The United Nations and major countries
classify Lashkar as a terrorist organization. After it was banned inside
Pakistan, Lashkar changed its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Jaamat-ud-Dawa’s leaders
further proclaimed a break with the Lashkar-e-taiba. But most Pakistanis do not
make the distinction between the Lashkar-e-taiba and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. In 2008,
the group organized deadly commando attacks in Mumbai, killing 166, and India
has demanded that the Pakistani government arrest the leaders of the group.
Instead, this year, a Pakistani court allowed one of the key accused to be
freed for lack of evidence.
The extremist groups may have been perceived
to be serving a greater purpose against India, in Afghanistan, and against the
United States. Today, however, Pakistan itself has become the bigger target of
religious extremist violence linked to Lashkar-e-taiba. Although attacks such
as on the Peshawar school in 2014 have outraged Pakistanis, the disgust has not
led to the complete rejection of the groups.
Religious extremist groups have killed many
Pakistanis who have spoken out against their thinking, among them, Salman
Taseer, the former governor of the Punjab province. Malala Yousafzai cannot
return to Pakistan because of threats to her life. Meanwhile, mobs have chased
and killed non-Muslims they accuse of blasphemy. The violence against Shias has
been significant. Walking around Pakistani cities, however, does not leave the
impression of a society threatened into submission. Most Pakistanis remain
proudly nationalist. The streets are vibrant with people and commerce. The
traffic is only getting worse. The Pakistani media is alive and well. Even
Pakistani political institutions, such as the National Assembly, churn out new
and important laws. The only thing missing is a thorough rejection of extremism
and violence.
The conclusion to draw from this is that Pakistanis
generally accept that groups rooted in extremist religious thinking can and
should occupy legitimate public space in the country. If there is a private
rejection of the extremist groups, the general acceptance of extremist groups
preserves a powerful and damaging public lie. Since Pakistan has never been
quieted in the same way as Soviet-era Eastern Europe, the public space occupied
by extremist groups captures the private and the public truth: a
religious-political group such as the Lashkar that is complicit in acts of
terrorism can be a normalized social association.
This legitimacy of religiously driven
extremist groups and, consequently, the violence they bring to politics appears
to be sufficiently wide and deep that those who seek to fight them are
repeatedly thwarted, and external support is immediately suspect for
undermining Pakistan’s true national interest. Even the Pakistan Army, the most
powerful institution in the country and often a sponsor of extremism itself,
has been accused of fighting “America’s War” when fighting against the Taliban,
with which Lashkar-e-taiba has been linked.
To be fair, all countries carry their own
millstones. Race has been the never-ending lightning rod in the United States.
Caste has been the persistent drag on India. These issues have endured numerous
environmental and institutional changes. Changing attitudes toward religious
extremism in Pakistan’s population has similarly meager prospects.
Given the true nature of the problem, the
reason for the persistence of the foreign aid diplomacy speaks to a larger
failure of the imagination. The discipline of political science, following a
lineage going back to Weber, Marx, and Hobbes, sees leadership as essential to
the prospect of change, and control over the state as a powerful tool to
further or deter change. Foreign aid, diplomatic demarches, economic sanctions,
and even threats of war are predicated on the idea that the state in the target
country will see new reason and provide the leadership to change course, but
what happens when the state is not in a position to do this?
As currently constituted, the state in
Pakistan simply cannot deliver, but there is no commitment and viable pathway
to reconstituting the state. Instead, there is fear that reconstituting the
state at this time will strengthen Islamist groups and open the possibility of
nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands. Foreign aid diplomacy, then,
becomes something to do in the belief that doing nothing may be worse; and the
reason a failed policy does not see the end that it deserves.
It is now time for outsiders to stop making
demands on Pakistan even when they come on the back of large checks. As it is,
these checks do little more than color the receiver as a foreign agent.
About The Author:
About The Author:
Sunil Dasgupta is the director of University
of Maryland Baltimore County's Political Science Program at the Universities at
Shady Grove. His research and teaching focuses on security and foreign policy.
He is currently working on research examining changing military organization
and Indian and Chinese pursuit of great power status.
This article was originally published at ISN ETH Website on April 28, 2015 under Creative Commons License 4.0 International
Image Attribute: Pakistan Army Solider / Source: Wikimedia Commons [Link]
Image Attribute: Pakistan Army Solider / Source: Wikimedia Commons [Link]
