'Pakistan under Siege' book review: Paranoia as state policy

Madiha Afzal joins a galaxy of recent writers who are attempting to understand Pakistan’s deep affiliation with Islamic extremism and violence and to speculate on how the country can be reformed. This is an urgent challenge as over 25,000 Pakistanis have been killed in extremist violence over the past 10 years, even as its jihadi institutions are central to the proliferation of extremism in its neighbourhood.

Emerging as a new nation, with no traditions, values or viable institutions, unlike India, Pakistan’s early leaders felt the need to use religion to define their nation as different from India, even as they used faith to shape their hostility to India. Thus, as Ms Afzal astutely notes, “Pakistan is anti-India because of its association with Islam, and an Islamic state to assert its opposition to India.”

Pakistan was initially anchored in an Islam that was moderate and accommodative. But, under pressure from domestic politics, it mutated into an increasingly coarse and harsh belief-system, presided over by villainous and venal politicians, cold-eyed and cynical army generals and religious zealots who espouse intolerance and cruelty. 

Pakistan’s progressive affiliation with extremism has meant that the Ahmadi community has been deprived of its Islamic identity. More pernicious have been the anti-blasphemy laws, which have been frequently misused, at times through vigilante violence, against personal enemies, minorities and liberals.

Based on the state promotion of “Pakistan Studies” as a compulsory subject, successive generations of students have acquired the most distorted views of their faith and the violence that is perpetrated in its name, the history that led to the creation of their country, and its permanent “enemies”, India and the US. For instance, a majority of senior school students have “unfavourable” views of the two countries: Nearly 90 per cent of the US and 60 per cent of India. 

Most of them also believe that the US and India are behind the terrorist attacks in their country. These same students, by vast majorities, reject violence in the name of Islam (90 per cent), and also have an “unfavourable” view of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) (72 per cent). 

These views are largely in line with mainstream national opinion. In 2009, while 62 per cent of Pakistanis opposed Al Qaeda’s attacks on the US, a large number (34 per cent) supported Al Qaeda’s attitudes toward the US. Most Pakistanis are convinced that Islam is in danger from the West and it is the US’ goal to “weaken and divide the Islamic world”. 

Again, in 2015, 72 per cent Pakistanis had an unfavourable view of India, though this attitude has changed with the prevailing political climate: In 2011, 82 per cent had an unfavourable view, while it was 56 per cent in 2013. 

As Ms Afzal points out, most Pakistani views are shaped by conspiracy theories. Thus, while one group believes that jihadi attacks in Pakistan are the price the country is paying for backing US interests in the region, another group feels that these attacks are the handiwork of India and the US who wish “to destroy, destabilise, and embarrass Pakistan”.

Afzal accepts that that Pakistani state and its institutions, particularly its armed forces, have played a central role in fostering “paranoia and hatred but also violence in the name of religion”, with the armed forces viewing conflict with India as a jihad.

The focus on a continued threat from India, the author notes, has kept Pakistan in a “permanent militarised state”, giving the armed forces control over the country’s internal and external security and allowing them to use jihad as an instrument of state policy both in the country, in Afghanistan and against India.

The centrality of extremist Islam in the education system and in state policy has meant frequent attacks on eclectic Sufi Islam that characterises the popular faith of the people. The author has noted with concern the systematic assaults on the country’s Sufi shrines — including those of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sindh, of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan, and the 1,000-year-old Data Ganj Bakhsh shrine in Lahore — by suicide bombers, who have also killed hundreds of worshippers in the process.

At the end, Afzal asks if Pakistan’s malaise can be remedied; she says she is cautiously hopeful. Her panacea includes: A conscious ideological shift through the country ridding itself of India-related insecurity and the repressiveness that has come from its link with religion; the revamping of education and the shedding of faith in conspiracy theories which divert attention from the root causes of national failure, and, above all, the delinking of the armed forces from religion and the extremists they have nurtured over the years.

This book is a lucid account of the sources of the Pakistani malaise and is particularly useful in its analysis of the country’s education system. However, the suggestions the author has made to reform the nation’s severely damaged, corrupt and intolerant political order, while laudable, are hardly likely to have any takers in the foreseeable future. 

The reviewer is a former diplomat

Pakistan under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State

Madiha Afzal

Penguin/ Viking

192 pages; Rs 599