Intolerance,
Lies and Half-truths
By Dr Shireen M Mazari
As a nation, we continue
to display a degree of tolerance for abuse inflicted
on us from outside, especially allies like the US,
as well as from some amongst us who decry the alleged
intolerance of the so-called 'fundamentalists' but
are themselves intolerant of alternative viewpoints
or criticism. This group writes and speaks in support
of the Pakistan-bashing indulged in by 'scholars'
and 'analysts' in the USA and India. Ironically
these compatriots make much of free speech and freedom
of the press, but where they are in control, they
themselves practice the most extensive form of censorship
-- primarily in the English language press.
The issue at hand is that of suffering an amazing
amount of abuse and invective in the form of deliberately
distorted books that have little basis in proper
scholarship, produced by US analysts and academics
who have become 'South Asian experts' primarily
by playing to a seductive audience in the US. Take
the now infamous Bruce Reidel assertion, at the
time of Nawaz Sharif's visit to Washington in July
1999, that Pakistan had readied her nuclear tipped
missiles for launch during Kargil. Since most Americans
want to see Pakistan as a violent Muslim state,
Reidel's contention fitted into the preconceived
misperceptions within their mindset. Unfortunately
for Reidel, General V. P. Malik, Indian Chief of
Army at the time of Kargil, publicly rebutted this
fanciful claim at a conference on Kargil in Monterey,
California, in May-June 2002. But even if he had
not done so, sheer logic should have exposed the
absurdity of Reidel's claims given that Pakistan
had only tested in May 1998 and it was not possible
to match the warheads to delivery systems fast enough
to make them operational by June-July 1999.
But logic has never mattered in the doomsday scenarios
of Pakistan painted by many analytical groups and
think tanks in the US. The Indian-US complicity
in trying to use academic forums to attack Pakistan,
especially on Kargil, was most clearly reflected
in the Monterey Centre for Contemporary Conflict's
(CCC) Kargil project. The architect of this project
refused to accept a chapter authored by a Pakistani
-- selected by the CCC in the first place -- because
they disagreed with his findings. So, in a totally
unethical fashion, they sought the help of a more
pliable Pakistani to co-author the chapter in question.
The ploy has not worked so far as the original author
has refused to play along because he feels the rewritten
and doctored chapter is "90 per cent in support
of the Indian version" which in his opinion
is "untenable". This attempt to put forward
a particular viewpoint, but with the token Pakistani
name included for credibility has had to suffer
a long delay because one Pakistani refused to compromise
on his academic integrity - probably taking the
Monterey project architects by surprise.
That the Kargil project in Monterey was inspired
by Indian-US complicity can be judged by Strobe
Talbot's revelation in his latest book, Engaging
India. While revealing how Jaswant felt Clinton's
handling of Kargil had reduced Indian mistrust of
the US, he suggests that "our (US and Indian)
governments engage in a joint case study of the
crisis. This would be helpful ... in that it would
transform the Kargil affair from a cautionary tale
of Pakistani perfidy into a more positive one about
US-Indian mutual trust."
Of course everybody has the right to use all resources
to further their ends. My contention is with the
Pakistani state and civil society opening their
resources and hospitality to those with political
agendas targeting this country. Yes, we should interact
with anyone interested in working on Pakistan, but
we should also be able to discover the genuine scholars
from those with their own agendas - especially when
the latter have already spilled their venom on Pakistan
in earlier writings, thanks to the open access granted
to them, an access not granted to Pakistani scholars.
Genuine scholarship can be distinguished from agenda-driven
works and two recent books on Pakistan reflect this
very clearly. Take American writer Stephen P. Cohen's
book, The Idea of Pakistan and French scholar Christophe
Jaffrelot's The Origins of Pakistan. Given Cohen's
past record of books on Pakistan, especially on
the Pakistan Army, it would have been foolish to
expect a rational approach in his latest work -
and one does not find it.
In contrast, the French scholar, while critical,
has at least maintained a scholarly approach to
the work. American scholars, like their civil society
will only accept images and ideas that fit their
preconceived notions and beliefs. That is why works
like those published by Christine Fair for the Rand
Corporation on Pakistan find ready acceptance.
Having experienced Pakistan at a highly personal
level, Ms Fair has her own axe to grind. Some years
earlier she had also used unsubstantiated statistics,
whose source she was unprepared to reveal, to try
and prove Indian contentions on Occupied Kashmir.
She was totally affronted to find questions being
raised on her statistics and contentions. After
all, US scholars do not expect Pakistanis to challenge
their assertions!
Now Ms Fair has once brought out a report on Pakistan's
security forces and, as expected, she asserts that
we view our police as an "occupying force".
Now I know that most people in Pakistan view the
police with either fear and mistrust -- and this
is not half as bad as the way American-Africans
view the US police -- or even ridicule. But I have
not met anyone who sees the police as an "occupying
force", with all that implies. Her claims -
especially her figures -- once again have no rational
basis and many of her contentions remain simply
that. But we, as Pakistanis, must accept her analysis
as the gospel truth. Worse still, the even more
ignorant US decision makers probably will accept
what she has to say as the truth and act accordingly.
And what some of our own scholars in the US bolstering
misperceptions about Pakistan because that is what
the audience wishes to hear? Only recently, one
of our scholars, an expert on defense production,
presently based in a US think tank (incidentally
sponsored by a Pakistani business community sponsorship),
chose to hold forth on Balochistan on which she
is not an expert. Perhaps she should have read a
most commendable recent article in a Pakistani newspaper
by a well-informed Baloch, Qazi Faez Isa, entitled,
"Facts about the crisis in Balochistan",
before claiming that 65 per cent of the Baloch favor
armed struggle. How she arrived at this statistic
is highly questionable, but her lack of knowledge
was exposed during the question and answer session
when she was asked how she could have given a talk
on Balochistan without even discussing the Sardari
system and the feudal stranglehold on Baloch society
and she failed to respond. Incidentally, there is
a book entitled How to lie with statistics and I
am sure many academics are aware of this slim volume.
In any event, as any good propagandist knows, if
you have to lie then tell a big lie so that it takes
time to refute it!
Moving beyond the inbuilt biases of academia in
the US, the American intelligence services have
been predicting the end of Pakistan for almost a
decade - although the red line continues to move
forward by a decade every time a new report on this
issue comes out and Pakistan continues to exist
ever more robustly. This robustness should be used
to expose the lies and half-truths that seek US
academic guise.
(The writer is Director General of the Institute
of Strategic Studies in Islamabad. Courtesy The
News)
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