FPIF 60-Second Expert |
60-Second Expert: Pakistan's Identity Crisis
Shibil Siddiqi | June 29, 2009
Editor: Noor Iqbal
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On the surface, it appears that Pakistan's greatest internal threats stem from the dangerously autonomous Swat Valley and Southern Waziristan. Look deeper and you'll see that the country's ailment is rooted in a crisis of national identity.
From Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) to Baluchistan to Buner, Pakistan's military has been fighting domestic insurgencies since the country's tumultuous birth just over a half-century ago. Under intense pressure from the United States in the last two years, it has fought a series of offensives against a growing Taliban presence in the northwestern regions. Historically primed to excel in counterinsurgency, the army has been surprisingly ineffective against the relentless Taliban militia. Why? In facing a serious Islamist threat for the first time, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan must take on a monster of its own creation.
The impetus for Pakistan's Islamization came during the 1970s, when the country became a strategic ally in the U.S. Cold War crusade against communism. In launching an anti-Soviet jihad, Pakistan and its Western supporters strengthened militant Islamist forces and encouraged the growth of a radical, drug-smuggling, Kalashnikov-wielding warlord elite.
Political Islam, however, has played a crucial role in unifying and centralizing the Pakistani state since its creation in 1947. Shared religion has been the only — if tenuous — commonality in an otherwise ethnically and linguistically diverse country. It has been utilized to undercut regional and communal loyalties and to consolidate political power at the center.
The state's reliance on Islam as a tool for domestic and foreign policy hampers its ability to take effective action against the Taliban. By aligning political fealties with religious ones, the government now finds itself in an ideological morass. It has discredited secular and progressive institutions while legitimizing Islamist groups that work within the state's ideological framework.
A military response in the AfPak region will not enjoy popular support for long. The Pakistani state must reevaluate its ideological underpinnings and reimagine its national identity to regain the legitimacy it needs to succeed.
Click here for the full report.
Shibil Siddiqi is a Foreign Policy in Focus contributor and a Gordon Global Fellow with the Walter & Duncan Gordon Foundation in Toronto.
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Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:
Shibil Siddiqi, "60-Second Expert: Pakistan's Identity Crisis," (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, June 29, 2009).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/6216
Production Information:
Author(s): Shibil Siddiqi
Editor(s): Noor Iqbal
Production: Jen Doak |
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| Name: |
Sameer Dossani |
Date: Jun 29, 2009 |
Hate to nitpick, but can we drop the AfPak shorthand? While there are some ethnic similarities between two countries, they have no real shared history/culture. It makes more sense to refer to Pakistan as part of the Indian subcontinent than as part of AfPak. And besides, why should we be using state department/military nomenclature?
Your friend and proud paki,
Sameer. |
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| Name: |
Barekzai |
Date: Jul 01, 2009 |
| If I may add to Sameer's request here, whilst true that much of Pakistan is indeed a part of the Indian subcontinent, nothing however can be further from the truth when describing the people of Baluchistan and the NWFP, who are ethnically Afghan. To avoid this grounded reality is to shut ones eyes to the underlying reasons for the violence that's plagued the region for decades.
Although Shibil Siddiqi can be commended for his verbal acrobatics. It would however serve him well to admit that the underlying reason for a lack of any nation-wide concensus in Pakistan outside of Islam, owes itself to the fact that there is no singular Nation to be found in Pakistan, as it is a geopolitical pretender that occupies other nations by crook and by force. |
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| Name: |
inocent pakistani civilian |
Date: Jul 02, 2009 |
| our request to western and particularly indian hindu media is that pakistanis educated people seek peace and our armed forces are already sheding theire blood they have lost much more than any other country did. so rather than creating such articles you should incourage our armed forces and show your support for pakistan rather than proviong your point that pakistan is just 50 years old bla bla for your kind information this is the way nations are born every nation has gone through this process. world should incourage the enhancment of civiloizations rather than picking on nation its clear cut discremination. pakistan will live for ever as long as 170 million people are on earth people are countries identity not a land. |
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| Name: |
Barekzai |
Date: Jul 03, 2009 |
| Dear "inocent pakistani civilian",
Every nation deserves its leaders and Pakistan is no exception to the rule. The leadership you’ve either voted for or had accepted by way of consent in the absence of a befitting rebellion immediately places you as a co-conspirator. You are by no means an “innocent” bystander and certainly no more than the “innocent” Japanese and German civilians who could not stand up to their own leaders during murderous campaigns in the run-up to and including World War II. Provide me names other than a handful among you like Ahmed Rashid and his soft articulation in selectively criticizing Pakistani foreign policy. Can’t find many? It’s all because there weren’t any! Whilst your government spawned hundreds of murderous Islamist barbarians against Afghanistan and India, where were you to stand up against them? How likely is it that you were supporting them? On this note, every Pakistani I came across before 9/11 could barely hide their glee over their government’s policies in the region, including their foolhardy attempt to rule Afghanistan via proxy.
Shibil Siddiqi in this forum has chosen to maliciously slight the United States for its support of the Zia regime in the eighties, by way of delegating your own responsibilities as a nation state to them. Yet we all know that the hard-line Islamists like Gulbudeen Hekmatiar were supported by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s regime well before Zia and well before President Carter’s sanctioning of covert support for the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan around 1979 and hence AFTER the PDPA coup in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s elected governments as well as self-imposed dictators have willingly used murderous Islamists against Afghanistan and India as an extension of their foreign policy. We all remember the joyful cheers of your people in support of Musharraf’s coup, don’t we?
The only reason for the United States having supported the Zia regime against a common Soviet foe owed itself to the fact that with Iran swarmed by the Ayatollah’s, Pakistan was the ONLY conduit to support Afghans in their war against the Soviet invader. Precisely for this reason, the Americans had little say in which Afghan resistance group was to receive the bulk of support against the Communists. Therefore the Pakistanis – YOUR leaders – continued to favor murderous Islamists like Gulbuideen Hekmatyar, irrespective of how alien his views were to traditional Afghan leadership and how detested he was by the majority among the anti-Soviet resistance. Off course, Pakistanis weren’t interested in helping out their fellow “Muslim brethren” in Afghanistan, for the nurturing of Islamo-Fascists was precisely aimed at extending the religious fanaticism that already existed in Pakistan for the purpose of binding the nation state together. After all, an alternative nationalist outlook would have never materialized as there’s no Pakistani nation to speak of. Your country is a state imposed on nations by the departing British colonialists. You have absolutely no claim to nationhood. Absent Islamist ideological doctrine and you’ll have to resort to another equally barbarous ideology to keep you state together.
Now, when the tides have turned against Pakistani ambitions, you turn to your pathetic and offensive ramblings about the blood your poor military is shedding. On the one hand, you cry “poor civilian” and on the other you render yourself an apologist for a brutal military that is often above the law and a lays at the centre of global jihadism. Indeed, poor “innocent” Pakistanis, poor “innocent” Japanese who worshipped Emperor Herohito as a living god whilst he executed mass slaughter, and poor Germans who legitimized Hitler via the ballot box!
Natural justice demands that what goes around, comes around. If the Americans had indeed committed a sin by looking the other way whilst Pakistan indulged itself, then they paid a price with the lives of up to 3,000 men and women in 9/11 and more thereafter. If Afghans committed sins against one another over three decades, then they too paid the price as their nation turned into a heap of rubble. This leaves Pakistan and its tower of sins, from mass murder in Bangladesh to nuclear theft and proliferation and the sponsorship of mass terrorism. What’s coming your way is no less avoidable than the mighty sun filtering through your fingers as you try and block it. you've only yourselves to blame for this. |
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