During mid-May, at Washington, DC, the Pakistani American Congress (PAC) convened a conference at Capitol Hill, the seat of the US Congress, on the topic of “Growing Global Terrorism and Pakistan’s Response.”
The inaugural morning panel included the director of the Pakistan desk at the US State Department, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a senior diplomat from the Embassy of Pakistan, and myself.
I was tasked to deliver a talk on the root causes of terror and the way out – the core subject of the colloquium. In my presentation, I strove to pull the pieces together to form a single picture. What follows is the gist.
The overall environment in which the public discourse takes place today in the US is contaminated with hate speech. In the public space, there is erosion of common decency, common sense, and basic civility. It is the terror of the tongue. Hate mongers in the West don’t have to live with the consequences of their actions. But others outside and now inside, too, are radicalized by the attempts to ridicule values that are dearest to their self-worth and dignity.
Then, too, there is a one-sided view of terror. It’s a symptom of a wider malignancy that ignores the fundamental underlying metastasis of state terror. This approach doesn’t work in a globalized world, nor does it make sense. The OIC was formed in 1969 because of Palestine. The 1973 oil embargo was imposed on the West because of Palestine. And it was Palestine that motivated the greatest ever Islamic Summit at Lahore, in February 1974, where the majority of the resolutions centered on Palestine.
Similarly, applicable UN resolutions on Kashmir plebiscite were coauthored and cosponsored by the United States. Yet, leaving unattended the occupations of Kashmir and Palestine has been disastrous. Resolving both would debilitate 90% of militancy.
The feting of Prime Minister Modi by US elites, after he was barred for 10 years from entry into America for his complicity in the Gujarat massacres of 2002, undermines the US stance on terror, and sends a mixed message of duality and moral elasticity.
The illusion that secular, moderate, and liberal elites would foil militancy is a false hope. Indeed, they are a part of the problem and their venality and tyranny fuels militancy.
The West today stands at a policy crossroads. There are two paths: the well-traveled path of confrontation, which has proven to be the path of destruction with no sure-shot winners; the second path is the path of reconciliation. This path is much less traveled. But it has been tried with success 25 years ago in South Africa, with the release of Mandela and the dismantling of apartheid. And it has proven successful just now with Pope Francis facilitating the rapprochement between Washington and Havana.
I concluded that don’t expect politicians to change on their own in that they are wedded to their own agendas and the agendas of their investors. Change happens when civil society steps up and takes responsibility.
