Pakistan’s Enemy Within
NEW DELHI—Pakistan is facing a societal meltdown, and the reason is not the failure of its army to wrest the two-thirds of Kashmir which has remained in Indian control since 1949. Nor is it the operations of NATO forces in Afghanistan, or the periodic Predator raids into its territory carried out by the United States. The media and “experts” notwithstanding, the spread of jihadist violence in that country does not have its roots in Kashmir, or the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, many though Indian, U.S. and NATO mistakes in these conflicts have been. Rather, jihad in Pakistan is nourished by two factors, both of which are internal to the country.
The first is the continuation of feudalism, with the traditional landlords still dominant throughout most of the country, so that many youths from less privileged social backgrounds turn to radicalism as a means of escape. The other slow-acting cancer is Pakistan’s education system, especially at the grade school level. This affliction finds its roots in the 1970s, when the “graduates” of religious schools and seminaries—more than 80 percent of which are Wahhabi—were given equality of status with those from “modern” educational platforms. These religious schools, or madrasas, focus exclusively on rote learning within a severely circumscribed curriculum, and as a result turn out “graduates” who are incapable of integrating into a modern economy.
It is convenient for Pakistan’s politicians, most of the top echelons of whom are themselves from a feudal—or (usually covert) Wahhabist—background, to pin the blame for the failure of civil society in Pakistan on external factors. Unless significant internal reform takes place within Pakistan, however, the jihad industry will not get extinguished, even in the face of concessions to Wahhabi demands from moderate states and peoples. Until slaveholder control of the feudal elite is removed from rural society in Pakistan, and land is redistributed among the rest of the population, the way it has happened in most parts of India, and unless school education in Pakistan is rescued from the clutches of both the religious institutions as well as from “modern” curricula that emphasize Wahhabi gobbledygook rather than a scientific worldview, Pakistan will continue to deliver greater and greater numbers of recruits to the jihadist cause.
Poring through school textbooks or forcing into irrelevance the very feudal elite who host visitors from the United States and the EU so magnificently in their fiefs is hardly glamorous. It is certainly far less so than televised meetings with VIPs and zigzagging between capitals, moving from one five-star hotel to the next to cajole the natives into signing declarations and agreements that usually have about as much value as the paper they are printed on. But they are much more necessary. Unless fundamental internal changes are effected within Pakistan, the country will continue its descent into “Talibanization.”
That process is already well under way. Eight years after it was declared by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to be a stalwart U.S. ally in the War on Terror, the followers of Mullah Omar are present in every Pakistani city, and have formed a dense network of “overground” agencies that nourish the militia in Afghanistan and the growing portion of Pakistan that is effectively under their control.
The new administration in Washington has an opportunity to make a real difference. The Internet and cable television have blown huge holes through the system of Wahhabist-Khomeinist educational indoctrination practiced in many majority-Muslim states (including those misleadingly labeled as moderate), and has generated within the youthful populations there a thirst for modernity and for acquiring the skills needed in a globalized world that local schools and colleges are unable—indeed, unwilling—to provide. (The educational infrastructure in the Muslim world is pitiful, with only 500 universities in the 57 OIC countries, as compared with more than 8,400 in India alone.)
This undercurrent of dissatisfaction with local educational and lifestyle models has created an opportunity for President Obama to move beyond a Clintonesque fixation on South Asia’s external conflicts into the area of internal reform. To be sure, each country in South Asia is in significant need of such change. Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority needs to avoid a repeat of the Tamil-phobic policies of the 1950s and the 1960s that spawned the LTTE. Bangladesh needs to begin the task of rolling back the numerous jihadist nests that have been set up under the patronage of an army that has become an accomplice of the Pakistani military. Nepal needs to ensure that Maoists do not gain so much power that they succeed in setting up a single-party state. India needs to give up its fascination with the softest of soft responses to international jihad. And Afghanistan needs to move away from its hot-cold policy towards the Taliban and take the help of all available elements within its society to eliminate this menace to the civilized world.
Stability in the region will remain elusive, however, unless Pakistan gets the attention it deserves. And with regard to Pakistan, the primary roots of instability are internal. U.S. policymakers need to remember that, and engage the growing (and moderate) civil society that for too long has been ignored by the international community.
Madhav Nalapat, India’s first-ever Professor of Geopolitics, is also UNESCO Peace Chair at India’s Manipal University, which has campuses worldwide, including in Antigua, Malaysia, Dubai and Nepal.
