Opinion

Back to the Future
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

Earlier this month, veteran diplomat Ahmad Kamal spoke to a gathering of some 150 Pakistani Americans in San Francisco. He is a senior fellow with the UN Foundation in New York and served as Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN during the tumultuous nineties when governance alternated between the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League.

The participants, who had been brought together by a new pro-democracy group, Mashal, listened intently as the ambassador discussed Pakistan’s prospects in 2009 and beyond. After providing a historical synopsis, and noting that his task was made difficult by the several assassinations that remain unresolved, the ambassador identified six factors that hold the key to Pakistan’s future.

The first factor was feudalism, which had long acted as a canker in the nation’s strategic culture. Unless feudalism was checked, Pakistan would never realize its full development potential.

The second factor was the armed forces. They had performed poorly when they ran the government and even more poorly when they fought on the battlefield.

The third factor was the economy. While it had problems, official statistics neglected the multitudinous transactions taking place in the informal sector, which was large and significant.

The fourth factor was religion. The country was created as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent and the glue that held it together was Islam.

The fifth factor was internal politics. The future would be decided by the interplay of political forces. The game-changer here would be the replacement of a winner-takes-all attitude with an attitude of reconciliation and tolerance.

The sixth factor was external politics. The most salient influence came from Washington which the ambassador noted was called the real capital of Pakistan by some analysts. Saudi Arabia and Iran were competing for Pakistani influence and it would not be surprising to see Iran emerge victorious in the end. It had always had a much deeper influence on the culture of the subcontinent. And, finally, a lot would depend on how India dealt with Pakistan and whether it put an end to its history of expansionism.

Against this backdrop, Kamal talked of ways to accelerate positive change. He exhorted the youth to play an active role in coming up with creative solutions to Pakistan’s myriad problems and advised them to not let their elders talk them out of innovative thinking. He cited the inspiring example of a young woman who used the Internet to single-handedly focus the world’s attention on the hazards posed by land mines.

In closing, the ambassador noted that the future of Pakistan would be decided ultimately by the battle that is now going on between those who are forward-looking and those who are fixated on past glories.

A lively question and answer session moderated by Jaiza’s Omar Khan followed. Some of the ambassador’s points continued to occupy me in the days that followed.

Take the case of feudalism. Hardly a day goes by without some maven holding that factor responsible for all of Pakistan’s travails. Yet, in these very pages, S. Akbar Zaidi has shown convincingly that the share of agriculture in Pakistan’s economy has declined significantly since independence. Maybe the feudalism of political commentary is not the feudalism of economists but the feudalism of sociologists. The term may be best interpreted as a surrogate for elitism, a state of the mind, and not a state of the economy.

On the track record of the armed forces, one would be hard put to disagree with the ambassador. Even Shuja Nawaz, who hails from an army family and who is the younger brother of a former army chief, takes the army to task in both civil and military spheres in his encyclopedic history, Crossed Swords.

Even the most nationalistic Pakistanis would find it hard to accuse Nawaz of being in the payroll of various “foreign” intelligence services, a charge that they have always laid at the door of other writers who have dared to lift their pen against the army’s sword.

Change will only arise from within the army. The time will come when a forward looking commander will realize that it’s time to reorganize and right size the army, so it can truly become one of Asia’s finest, a prospect that was put forth by the silver-tongued Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the early 1970s.

Yes, the informal economic sector is large and unaccounted for. But that does not mean the economy is doing better than it actually is. It is in a shambles and much of this sorry performance predates the global meltdown that began on the 15th of September. Indeed, it goes back to the last two years of the Musharraf administration.

As for religion, while there can be no doubt that the country is called the Islamic Republic, it is equally evident that religion as a glue failed to hold the country together in 1971. As one witnesses the struggle going on for the soul of Pakistan today, not only in the tribal areas and Peshawar but also in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, one is made despondent by the thought that one day the country may be rent asunder not by a deficit of religiosity but by a surplus.

At the Mashal conference, Dr. Erfan Ibrahim asked why people had forgotten the message of tolerance that was put forward by the Quaid in his speech of August 11, 1947, where he called on all Pakistanis to regard each other as equal citizens regardless of their personal faiths and beliefs. Time did not allow further discussion of the question at the conference.

However, it is not difficult to answer. Instead of finding inspiration in the Quaid’s pluralistic and entirely secular concept of nationhood, many Pakistanis have succumbed to patriotism, “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” to quote Dr. Johnson.

Such fervor has led them to a legerdemain where they trace every problem to the “enemy’s hand” and absolve themselves of any responsibility.

When I wrote about Dr. Abdus Salam’s towering achievements on these pages, a person who identified himself as a senior, award-winning journalist wrote to me that the scientist was a Zionist spy and that is why he was ordered out of the country by Prime Minister Bhutto.

It is sad that while the headlines in the world press dealing with Pakistan are about the kidnapping or killing of foreign journalists, the beheadings of “American spies” and the honor killings of women, those about India deal with the successes of its space program (which has now landed a probe on the moon) and about the transformation of its agrarian economy into a high-tech wonder that will soon be one of the world’s strongest.

An attitude of going “forward to the past” needs to be replaced with one of going back to the future, a bright future as envisioned by the Quaid, not the dark and conspiratorial future envisioned by Al-Qaeda.

Faruqui@pacbell.net.

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