Pakistanis fear for their nation

By Bronwyn Curran from The National

Pakistan’s liberal leadership capitulates to Taliban militants in the Swat Valley, what is often described as the world’s “most dangerous nation” faces the biggest existential struggle of its short life.

“The dawn of an Islamic revolution is round the corner,” Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the leader of the country’s largest and oldest religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami, declared this week in a rare opinion piece in The News daily newspaper, weighing into the revived fight over the country’s intended identity.

“Those who believe that Pakistan can be secularised by separating the Islamic system from its state are suffering from a serious fallacy,” he said.

The same idea is found in cries of protest at the government’s perceived surrender to extremists. “It may well be that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan is over in a year if all this chaos continues,” lamented Samad Khurram, a Pakistani student at Harvard University, who famously rejected an award from the US ambassador last year in protest against US drone attacks.

“Perhaps if Jinnah knew that the country he founded was going to become an arena for public flogging, where the laughs of sadist barbarians mingle with the screams of women and children, he would not have decided on creating it.”

Since its founding in 1947, Pakistan has been ambiguous on the connection between state and mosque. Fault lines between moderate and orthodox followers of Islam are historic and the two sides have argued since the country’s inception over whether Jinnah intended a secular or Islamic state for the subcontinent’s Muslims.

His Aug 1947 speech that “you may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state” is interpreted by many as a plug for state-mosque separation. The difference in the debate now is that the vanguard of liberals, the secular Pakistan People’s Party, and its mainstream rivals, have caved in to Taliban demands in a cherished north-western valley. The emboldened militants have been spreading closer to Islamabad, asserting control in Buner district.

The surrender comes even as videos circulate of women being executed and flogged, and even as the liberal government asks the West for billions of dollars in aid to douse extremism. Moderates are asking themselves, to where do they turn now for support against creeping Talibanisation?

“What is dangerous is that the Taliban are tolerated by elitist political parties in urban areas and by some sections of society who look up to such forces as a political alternative, and if that happens, then that would radically transform the identity of Pakistan,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Pakistan is struggling under “an existentialist threat, not in the territorial sense as I don’t see the Taliban staging a violent takeover of Islamabad or Lahore, but more in the sense of what kind of state Pakistan wants to be,” said Prof Rais, who insists that Jinnah’s vision was secular and based on “Muslim modernist rationalist” traditions.

“Complete Islamisation of Pakistan … is the appropriate answer to the lurking fears of Talibanisation, growing rapidly with every passing day as a natural response to the suppression of this public demand at the state level,” said Mr Ahmed of the Jamaat-i-Islami. “This demand surfaced as soon as the inception of the country.”

Mr Ahmed argued that “millions of Pakistanis are ready to sacrifice their lives to achieve Islamisation” and that those who resist total Islamisation of the constitution and legal system are “a small minority of feudals and capitalists led by the colonial bureaucracy” whom he compares to Roman slave-masters, European colonists and Aryan Hindus.

The debate over the urbane, clean-shaven Jinnah’s vision has turned feverish since the national parliament last week accepted the Taliban’s demand for Sharia in Swat, a former tourist mecca fabled for its orchards and serene alpine vistas, its ski resort and trout fishing. Now it is known for morning displays of fresh corpses in the town square. Decapitated policemen and officials were dumped there daily by militants over a two-year insurgency until the provincial government ceded power during February in a deal that allows Sharia in exchange for peace.

Through a grainy video, the world has seen these militants’ version of justice: a young woman flogged for walking without a male relative. Another blurry video came last week from a nearby region: a woman executed by turbaned gunmen as she pleaded innocent to fornication charges. The footage shows her being shot twice in the stomach before slowly falling dead.

When the law approving sharia in Swat went before the secular-dominated parliament, the silence of legislators deafened – barring one dissenting voice from Ayaz Amir of the former premier Nawaz Sharif’s party and a weekly columnist: “If we go down this path, there will be precious little left to save,” Mr Amir cautioned.

Prof Rais said religious parties such as Jamaat-i-Islami quietly applaud the ceding of Swat to the Taliban as the realisation of their dream scenario: an Iranian-style revolution. Islamic parties in Pakistan have never won more than eight per cent of the popular vote, except under military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2002, when they garnered around 11.3 per cent of the vote.

Having failed at the ballot box, they see an alternative route to power.

“Inside their hearts they are delighted because this is the only way they think they can capture the state,” Prof Rais said.

“They think they can cause an Islamic revolution by weakening the state and a weakened state will be much more vulnerable. Their model is the Iranian revolution and they have been working on this for a very long time.

“What really helps their vision is the success of violent groups on the periphery.”

Lasting peace in Swat through Islamic law could be counterproductive, warned a senior intelligence official.

“The worst thing that could happen is if the Swat deal works. Then the rest of the country will want to go the same way.”