[R-G] Legends of the fail

[Anthony Fenton]

Ahmed also appeared on Democracy Now! today:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/7/pak

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090508/REVIEW/705079996/1008

Legends of the fail

     * Last Updated: May 07. 2009 2:29PM UAE / May 7. 2009 10:29AM GMT

Manan Ahmed examines the decades-old tradition of experts predicting  
that Pakistan is sure to collapse any day now.

Times are bleak for the state of Pakistan, if the international media  
is to be believed. For the past six weeks, the world’s newspapers have  
charted the apparently unstoppable march of the Taliban toward  
Islamabad – with daily reminders that their forces are “only 100  
miles” and then “only 80 miles” and then “only 60 miles” from the  
capital. That Pakistan is a “failed state” or “on the brink” no longer  
even requires elaboration: it is the universal consensus among pundits  
and “area experts” alike.

In the United States, the news articles have begun to game out the  
fall of the regime: the New York Times, hardly alone in its  
hyperventilating, has run two stories in as many weeks about America  
courting the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif as a replacement for  
Pakistan’s prime minister, Asif Ali Zardari. The counterinsurgency  
guru David Kilcullen, a former adviser to General David Petraeus, has  
suggested in print that the state could fail within six months, while  
Petraeus himself warns that the next two weeks will be decisive, and  
that the army may have to return to power to prevent a total collapse.

The notion of Pakistan as a “failed state” has roots far deeper than  
the last few years; it was first deemed to have “failed” in the early  
1960s, and this framework has dominated discussion of Pakistan in  
America from the days of the Cold War to the War on Terror. The  
surprisingly long history of the rhetoric of failure reveals that  
America’s engagement with Pakistan has rarely, if ever, transcended  
narrow strategic aims – and that, for the United States, the solution  
to Pakistan’s problems has always been, and will always be, the strong  
hand of a military ruler.

It was that under the rule of the military usurper Field Marshal  
Muhammad Ayub Khan that Pakistan was adopted as a Cold War ally and  
held up as a model “developing nation”. During Khan’s tenure, Pakistan  
was said to enjoy the benefits of a so-called “developmental  
dictatorship” – many dams were built and much cement was poured.

The US even helped Ayub Khan engineer an election victory in 1965. But  
shortly thereafter, he foolishly went to war with India; his  
popularity plummeted, and his flashy foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali  
Bhutto, began a national campaign for a democracy based on socialist  
principles. Bhutto’s rise ran afoul of the “domino theory” intended to  
check the spread of Communism; it was in this context that Pakistan  
was first crowned a “failed state” – giving rise to decades worth of  
books and studies with titles like The Failure of Democracy in  
Pakistan (1962), The Failure of Parliamentary Politics in Pakistan,  
1953-1958 (1967), Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1968),  
Ethnic Conflict and the Failure of Political Integration in Pakistan  
(1973), Pakistan, Failure in Nation Building (1977) and Pakistan On  
the Brink (2004).

By 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, another military  
dictator, Zia ul-Haq, ruled Pakistan, and the country once again  
became a pivotal US ally, funnelling arms and funds to the mujahideen  
across the border. The billions in US military aid during that decade  
of armed conflict had two direct consequences for the present  
situation. First, the Pakistani army became a monster on steroids,  
stacked against the fragile civil and bureaucratic state. And second,  
the guerrilla-trained militias that ejected the Russians found  
themselves in charge of the country next door. But Zia’s demise in  
1988, and Pakistan’s return to democracy, rendered it a “failed state”  
all over again.

The “failed state” rubric dominated the 1990s, as Pakistan became a  
nuclear power while stagnating economically under the burden of  
crippling foreign debt. But the attacks of September 11 brought  
Pakistan back into the American fold as a “close ally in the War on  
Terror”, under the leadership of Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a  
1999 coup. If Pakistan was on the brink of failure, few in America  
wanted to talk about it – at least until 2007, when Musharraf’s firing  
of the chief justice sparked street protests that eventually led to  
his resignation. The exiled leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif  
returned to contest the state’s first democratic elections in more  
than a decade. Now the floodgates opened: a Newsweek cover story in  
October 2007 dubbed Pakistan “the most dangerous place in the world”,  
nicely setting the tone for everything we’ve heard since.

This decades-long tendency to reduce Pakistan’s complexity to either  
“failure” or “stability” reflects, above all, a glaring poverty of  
knowledge about the real lives of 175 million Pakistanis today. Since  
2007 alone, they removed a dictator from military and civilian power  
without firing a single shot, held the first national election since  
1997 – in which right-wing radical parties were soundly rejected – and  
launched a secular movement for justice.

None of this matters, we are told, because Pakistan is facing “an  
existential threat” from “violent extremists”, as a State Department  
spokesman said on Monday. US generals and media commentators are  
hinting that a military takeover may be the only way to arrest the  
imminent “failure” – to combat the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan and  
keep the dreaded nukes from “falling into the hands” of terrorist  
groups.

A comically exaggerated version of reality underpins such concerns.  
There are roughly 400 to 500 Pakistani Taliban fighters in the Buner  
region (the area deemed to threateningly close to Islamabad) and  
15,000 to 20,000 operating in the region between Peshawar and the  
north-west borders of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the number of active  
Pakistani army personnel ranges around 500,000, supported by an annual  
budget of approximately $4 billion. In comparison, the Taliban in  
Afghanistan and Pakistan make an estimated yearly revenue of around  
$400 million from the heroin trade – only a fraction of which makes it  
to the Pakistani wing in the rural north-west of the country. As a  
threat to a large and diverse nation-state, 40 per cent of whose  
population lives in urban centres like Karachi (with its 18 million  
residents) the rural Taliban fighters are not terribly intimidating.

Pakistan is neither Somalia nor Sudan, nor even Iraq or Afghanistan.  
It is a thoroughly modern state with vast infrastructure, a fiercely  
critical and diverse media, an active, global economy and strong ties  
with regional powers such as China and Iran. It is not a “failed  
state” – it even has met its debt payments to the World Bank and IMF  
at the expense of providing electricity to its citizens. It has a  
deeply entrenched civil bureaucracy. The “failed state” rhetoric  
obscures these realities. It hides the fact that religious-based  
parties have never garnered more than 10 per cent of the seats in any  
election. According to its 1973 constitution Pakistan is an Islamic  
state, but it is home to multiple forms of religious expression, and  
the majority of Muslims in Pakistan embrace a model of Islam more  
syncretic than the Deobandi Salafism of the Taliban. The majority  
province of Punjab is ethnically, linguistically, politically and  
economically far more diverse than the northwestern valley of Swat –  
and it is home to a well-entrenched landed elite unlikely to cede  
authority to the Taliban. Sindh has its own landed elite – as well as  
a powerful urban political party, MQM – neither of whom show any  
inclination to welcome the Taliban.

Even if Pakistan is not going to capitulate to the Taliban, it does  
face grave dangers, and the “failed state” rhetoric – dangerous in its  
own right – forces our attention away from them. In Baluchistan, as a  
direct result of Musharraf’s heavy-handed military policies, a civil  
war has been brewing since 2005, and there is no military solution to  
that unrest. At the same time, anti-Americanism is rising across the  
country in reaction to the campaign of missile strikes from unmanned  
US drones, which have killed nearly 1000 civilians since August 2008.  
The drones have emboldened religious conservatives who decry “US  
imperialism” at work in Pakistan, and they are gaining strength with  
every tally of civilian casualties. The Tehrik Taliban-e Pakistan  
control in Swat is less a victory for that ragtag militia than a  
demonstration of the Army’s unwillingness to fully engage them.

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy  
currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the  
marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of  
both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never  
been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future  
lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain  
democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and  
strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

Manan Ahmed, a historian of Islam in South Asia at the University of  
Chicago, blogs at Chapati Mystery.