A New Pakistan

Mahboob Mahmood March 23, 2009 Copyright © 2009

A New Beginning for Pakistan: America’s Strategy for Success By Mahboob Mahmood March 23, 2009 President Barack Obama has been a strong supporter of the twin propositions that (a) a stable, peaceful and progressive Pakistan is crucial for success in the global engagement that his predecessor had so trippingly mislabeled the ‘war on terror’ and (b) the problem of Pakistan must be addressed at a military, political, diplomatic and economic level. While these propositions appear to make sense, the battle for Pakistan is close to being lost. Only a strategy born at the ground zero of defeat will be able to engender a new beginning for Pakistan. The Future of Pakistan The case for an intensive engagement with Pakistan is clear and compelling. Over the next several years, there are three basic scenarios that could unfold in Pakistan. The first scenario, the realization of which I rate at a probability of 50-60% (or 95% in the event intensive US support is withdrawn), is the completion, at a minimum, of the first two stages of the transformation of Pakistan into the world’s first Sunni militant fascist state (lets call this state ‘Jihadistan’ for the sake of convenience). The second scenario involves the perpetuation of the division of power among the military, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the existing political parties and militant forces. The third scenario, the realization of which I rate at a probability of 5%, is that a small, effective and positive new force emerges which has the potential to unify the progressive elements in the country and bring about a much-needed transformation in the fortunes of the people of Pakistan. The Rise of Jihadistan. Pakistan is rapidly transforming into the world’s first Sunni militant fascist state. Up to now, Sunni militant ideologies and institutions around the world have operated as anti-government, oppositional forces in established states (such as the Islamic brotherhood movements in Saudi Arabia and Egypt) or as governing forces in small semi-states (such as Hamas in Gaza and the Taliban in Afghanistan prior to 9/11). Jihadistan, which could within a few years embrace all or most of Pakistan and Afghanistan, will be the first substantial state ideologically dedicated to the creation of a worldwide order based on a narrow and inflexible interpretation of Sunni Islam imposed through a dynamic of permanent militancy towards individuals within the state and towards other states. Consistent with its ideology of permanent militancy, Jihadistan will come about in stages. In between stages, Pakistan may splinter, only to be reunited by the compelling forces of Jihadistan. In the first stage, Jihadistan will straddle the mountainous divide between Afghanistan and Pakistan and proximate valleys and plains. The state will be largely coterminous

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with the territories dominated by the Pathans, who comprise 40% of Afghanistan’s population of 32 million and 15% of Pakistan’s population of 165 million. During this stage, predominantly Pathan groups such as the Taliban will form the political and military front line of the state, with militant groups in Pakistan (such as Jamaat ul Dawa) and more globally inclined Islamic groups (such as Al-Qaeda) playing a critical strategic and supportive role. In the second stage, the mountain valleys of Northern Pakistan linking the Northwest Frontier Province to Indian Kashmir will be occupied so that an easily defensible contiguous mountainous state is formed which controls the water resources of the remaining 140 million people in Pakistan (and is poised to control the water resources of 500 million people in India). During this stage, the Taliban and the fundamentalist Kashmiri independence groups (such as the Harakat-al-Mujahideen) will initially join hands and, inevitably, clash with each other as the ethnic composition of Jihadistan is broadened. During this stage, the pan-Islamic militant groups will expand in influence to create a more global and less ethnically and geographically tied ideological basis for governance. In the third stage, Jihadistan will thrust outwards in all directions. In the West, the new state will seek to bring under control the segments of Afghanistan that are dominated by non-Pathan ethnic groups (such as the Tajiks and Hazaras). In the North, the support of Islamic militant groups in China and Kazakhstan will be intensified. In the East, the resolve of India to defend its segment of Kashmir and in dampening down the highly corrosive radicalization of its own 160 million Muslims will be severely tested. But the most immediate, easiest and biggest prize will lie in the South – control over the remaining portions of Pakistan. The Potohar plateau of Northern Pakistan, a short distance from the mountains, will be continuously attacked from within and from the Pathan areas in the West and the Kashmiri areas in the North until Islamabad (the civilian capital), Rawalpindi (the military capital) and the considerable nuclear, missile and armament development centers around these twin cities are brought firmly into control. Progressively, the forces of Jihadistan will thrust downwards into the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. The fall of Pakistan (or, as some might see it, the fulfillment of Pakistan’s destiny to become an Islamic state) will be ably supported by the hundreds of thousands of militants already organized into well-armed groups that populate every city and town of Pakistan and the thousands of fervent ideologues within the Pakistan military and the ISI.

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Punjab province, where 60% of the population resides, and the Punjabi dominated military, will, for reasons explained below, relatively quickly submit to the control of the supporters of Jihadistan. The interior of Sindh, still awakening from its political slumbers of thousands of years, will succumb readily as well. Armed resistance to Jihadistan will continue in pockets for many years, principally from the 25% Shia population of Pakistan and a small Baluchi nationalist movement (both supported by Iran) and the secular-minded muhajirs or migrants (led by the Muttahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM)) who crossed into Karachi and Hyderabad during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. However, this resistance will provide a welcome basis for the state of Jihadistan to maintain a constant footing of armed struggle and unleash a series of bloodlettings that will be deemed necessary for the state to achieve the

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requisite degree of purity and order. By subsuming Pakistan, Jihadistan will gain control over one of the most populous countries in the world, a reasonably well-developed talent pool and an agricultural and industrial base that could be quickly rendered more productive. Although Jihadistan will not control substantial energy resources, it will control or threaten routes critical to the transportation of energy from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. In addition to its sizable revolutionary armies, Jihadistan will possess a million-man conventional military force, a nuclear missile arsenal, a nuclear weapons development capability, a substantial conventional weapons production capability and the world’s largest informal weapons manufacturing industry. Most immediately threatening to the rest of the world, Jihadistan will inherit the Pakistani diaspora of over 5 million people who are integrated into almost every country in the West, who occupy almost every economic and professional strata in these countries, who are indistinguishable from the even greater diaspora of Indians and who by and large retain strong links with their home country. If the geographical expression that is presently called Pakistan will create the geo-political base for a major Sunni militant state, the massive diaspora of overseas Pakistanis will provide the transmission mechanism for the export of the theory, knowledge and tools of mass killings into the heart of the West. Firmly entrenched, internationally minded terrorist groups will cultivate this rich source of recruits to yield a steady stream of culturally dexterous young militants thoroughly infused with the implacability and confidence of the new Jihadistan. Moderate Islam, which has been intellectually deadened for over 800 years by the separation of faith from reason, is already intellectually and institutionally unable to defend itself against this onslaught. With Pakistan firmly under control, the leaders of Jihadistan will be able to fully institutionalize their five new pillars of faith: (1) the Holy Quran and the Prophet Mohammad’s life set out a ‘plain meaning’ set of rules for ordering society in the image of 7th century Arabia; (2) the only legitimate state is a theocratic state committed to enforcing such rules; (3) women are legally inferior to men in all substantial respects; (4) economic activity must conform to theologicallyprescribed guidelines; and (5) the greatest form of salvation derives from armed struggle to the death to impose the system throughout the Muslim world and possibly beyond. These new pillars of faith will be progressively integrated into the country’s laws, political system, bureaucratic institutions, economy, educational curriculum, military doctrine and foreign policy framework. The country’s demographics – a median age of under 22 years, a population growth rate of almost 2% and an illiteracy rate of over 50% - will prove a boon for ideological and institutional transformation. Within a decade, most of the population will know no other way of thinking or living. Hundreds of internecine ideological and military battles will be fought as a leadership cabal emerges to unify and harden the force of Sunni militancy into a fascistic system that is capable of controlling a large and complex state and acting as a substantial interlocutor in world affairs. In this way, Jihadistan will serve as an engine for the broader realization of state power by Sunni militancy. Unlike Iran, whose Shia ideology has appeal only in parts of Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan, a radicalized Sunni militant state in Pakistan will serve as an ideological and institutional magnet for

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Sunni militancy from Morocco in the West to the Philippines in the East. Much as the Bolshevik revolution in Russia served to define the geo-political dynamics of the 20th century, the occupation of Pakistan by the forces of Sunni militancy will constitute one of the defining geo-political events of the 21st century. The cause of Jihadistan is now so well advanced and militarized that it can only really be grasped at a district-by-district level. The seven ‘tribal agencies’ in the Northwest of Pakistan, nominally under the jurisdiction of the federal government, are already largely controlled by Taliban and related forces. The Taliban have also established a critical stronghold in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, and control the Northwestern districts of Baluchistan. Taliban forces are now spreading into the North-West Frontier Province and Northern Areas using a two-pronged approach: (1) strategic control over the more Northerly, mountainous districts; and (2) intermittent guerilla operations in the more Southerly, plains districts. Of the seven key Northern districts, two large districts (Dir and Swat), are already substantially controlled by the Taliban. From Swat, the Taliban are implementing a Southerly expansion strategy, which involves occupation of four small districts and one large district (Buner, Shangla, Batagram, Swabi and Mansehra, all of which already have strong militant presences), and a Northerly expansion strategy which will take them through Kohistan district (the most mountainous and least populated district, which is largely under the control of local militant and criminal groups) to Mansehra district. Once Mansehra district falls, Jihadistan will border the thin sliver of valleys in Kashmir controlled by Pakistan: Pathan and Kashmiri militant forces will be able to move freely across borders and will, thereafter, push the Pakistan military out of Kashmir to complete stage two of Jihadistan. In the meantime, the Taliban and related forces have stepped up attacks in the plains districts of the NorthWest Frontier province, particularly in Peshawar, Mardan and Kohat districts. While fuller control over these districts may have to wait until the Taliban have secured their mountain state, targeted attacks to reduce foreign presence in these districts are well underway, most notably with the assassination of a USAID worker in Peshawar and a spate of attacks on NATO convoys. Even as stages one and two of Jihadistan are being worked on, substantial groundwork is being laid towards the eventual occupation of all of Pakistan. The Taliban are not simply winning because of their ideological fervor and command over an ethically homogenous, mountainous territory. The Taliban and related groups have a robust and diversified economic base, which includes transportation, smuggling, drugs sales, weapons sales, foreign worker remittances and ‘charitable’ donations from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. The Taliban can also call upon the support of hundreds of well-armed militant groups embedded in every city and town of Pakistan. Already, militants from Punjab and boys from over 50,000 madrassahs (religious schools) across the country are being used as front line forces in the battle for the Northern areas of Pakistan. Indeed, the Taliban are simply the most manifest expression of a revolutionary overthrow by militant Islam of the existing order in Pakistan. The Perpetuation of the Status Quo. The two principal internal narratives for Pakistan’s political morass are that the weakness and corruption of the civilian

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leadership and the security environment of the country has necessitated military intervention or, alternatively, that military voraciousness has not allowed civilian supremacy and democracy to take hold. However, with the regular alternation of military and civilian governments over 62 years, we need to recognize that we are dealing less with a fledgling state’s struggle towards democracy than with an established system of power with a built-in mechanism of instability. The roots of this systemic instability derive from the collision of the new state of Pakistan against forty centuries of settled practice. The dynamics of Pakistan’s political situation are driven by deeply embedded attitudes towards power and statehood. Pakistan was born a state of half-people: the Punjabis and Bengalis were divided between India and Pakistan and the Baluchis and Pathans straddle Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Only the marginalized muhajirs (migrants), who moved across from their homes in India, fully subsumed their regional affiliations to the national identity. Behind this division of loyalties lies a more problematic calculus of sovereignty, particularly among the Punjabis. For over 5,000 years, Punjab has been a settled territory, a breadbasket for the great Indian subcontinent. Yet, remarkably, since the fall of the Indus Valley Civilization around 1700 BC, Punjab has almost continuously been ruled by non-Punjabis. The Aryans, Macedonians, Mauryas, Kushans, Huns, Afghans, Persians, Turks, Mughals and English have all found it easy to conquer and hold the Punjab (Ranjit Singh’s 133-year Sikh kingdom of the 17th and mid-18th century represents one of the sole expressions of Punjabi sovereignty prior to the creation of Pakistan). With each conquering horde, Punjab has struck a grand bargain: in exchange for a subordinate role in government, Punjab will accept the sovereignty of the conquerors and serve as an agricultural and military recruitment heartland for the new empire. The Punjabi bargain with Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) was no different. Jinnah, although born in Karachi in Sindh province, was essentially a non-native to the territories that came to form Pakistan, having lived most of his life in Bombay. His movement for the partition of India only acquired heft when Sikander Hayat, the leader of the Punjab, decided to accept junior partnership by bringing Punjabi Muslims behind the movement. However, since independence and after the early demise of Jinnah, Punjab has had power thrust upon it. And its response has been classical: it has sought a client from outside with whom sovereignty may be shared. The Pakistan military has been a major proponent of this strategy. (Tellingly, the Ghauri and Ghaznavi missiles of which the military is so proud, are named after Afghan conquerors of the territories which are now Pakistan; this is the equivalent of the United States military naming one of its missiles ‘George III’). Ever since Ayub Khan, the first military dictator, declared Pakistan to be the United States’ ‘most allied ally’, the military has successfully fanned regional conflicts and traded this state of tension for international patronage from the United States. To hedge its bets against American inconstancy, the military has also cultivated militant Islam groups and the oil-rich Middle Eastern states as alternative clients. Civilian rulers have similarly sought the patronage of outsiders to justify their own basis for power. In his lust for power, Zulfiqar Bhutto precipitated a crisis with the

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Bengali party that won the 1971 election: the result was the creation of Bangladesh out of the country’s eastern wing and a prime ministership for Mr. Bhutto. He then initiated Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and, as peddler of the first ‘Islamic bomb’, assiduously courted the Middle East. Today, the military and civilian arms of government are jockeying to position security and democracy, respectively, as the basis for patronage from the United States. The Pathans have had a fundamentally different attitude towards the waves of conquerors of the subcontinent. In the past, Afghans (including Pathans) led by charismatic and militant leaders, have conquered large parts of India, only to relinquish control within a matter of generations. And, by and large, the Pathans have fought fiercely for their independence and been antithetical to being fully absorbed in a larger state identity. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, they have been torn between greater integration with Pakistan and the pull of a greater Pathan nationalism, fed prodigiously by the cross-border traffic of guerillas, militants, refugees and fortune-seekers. The present Taliban movement represents one of the periodic expansions of Pathan power which will, no doubt, exhaust itself either into the fold of a larger militant state or, less probably, settle into a semi-antagonistic force within a progressive and positive Pakistani state. Notwithstanding the Pathan emphasis on autonomy, the accommodative Punjabi attitude towards foreign control has expanded into a national perspective, and fully permeates political thinking and foreign policymaking. And, if the attitude of the country’s elite towards sovereignty is robustly pragmatic, their attitude towards their own people has been profoundly predatory. Through much of their empire, the Mughals had perfected the Mansabdari system under which military commanders would be provided revenue rights over designated tracts of agricultural land in exchange for the obligation to maintain military forces for the service of the empire. As the Mughal empire weakened, the commanders became overlords of the land and its farmers, with no real responsibilities to the state. The British, with their Whig preoccupation to find holders of property in fee simple, settled these overlords as landowners in exchange for their pledge of loyalty to the Raj. Incredibly, the feudal system has carried through to modern-day democracy: traditional landowners have a disproportionate degree of control over Parliament and secular political parties essentially serve as fiefdoms of prominent families. The business sector in Pakistan (which in India has been a major driver towards its transformation into a world power) has also adopted this feudal posture. It has relinquished the challenges of being internationally competitive in exchange for the comfort of access to governmentally endowed licenses, funding and privileges. And so, at least since the decline of the great Mughals, the dictum has held true that proximity to power ensures wealth without responsibility. The government of Pakistan does not exist for the people; it delivers to the people only the barest shreds of identity, security, justice, education, health and welfare. While most Asian countries are surging forward in terms of human development, Pakistan ranks below Myanmar in the indices and only slightly above Mauritania. Rural power lords tolerate the existence of over two million people who live in conditions of near slavery, and are traded with their debts of $300 when the lands they

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till are sold. Members of Parliament explain away the gang-rape of women as unchangeable tribal custom. Policemen extort car owners after stuffing car boots with the dead bodies of miscreants killed in fake encounters. Major cities suffer power cuts for 4-6 hours each day and stock market activity has almost ground to a halt. The economy survives on handouts from wealthy donor countries and the IMF and, like a junky donating blood, the country derives its most reliable foreign exchange earnings from the export of some of its most talented manpower. And everywhere, government-appointed tax collectors, judges, grain merchants, bankers, utility engineers and airline executives work a massive machine for bleeding the people for the personal advantage of its controllers. To live without power and wealth in Pakistan is to live in the hell of feudal thralldom. It is nearly impossible to bring about change from within the current civilian-military dynamics in the country. Shrouded in secrecy, the military budget soaks up a massive portion of national resources and, still, the military requires generous contributions from the United States. Such a monstrous budget may only be justified by maintaining a state of constant tension in South Asia and handouts from concerned powers. If the security dynamics in the country were to change, the military would need to undergo a drastic Unwilling to losing its privileges through real restructuring in terms of its size and orientation. change and fearful of being dragged into a And, of course, the institutional resistance to medieval nightmare, the country’s leadership is in a state of paralysis. change created by this dynamic is reinforced by individual incentives to perpetuate a bloated military. Today, a lieutenant general in the Pakistan army is likely to retire, on average, with a net worth of around $5 million, derived from concessionary land grants, positions in government-controlled companies and other wealth generation opportunities that come the way of power. As a senior military officer said to me: “Its difficult to focus on killing your own people in some remote part of Waziristan when you are trying to make sure that a decent plot in the latest housing society in Lahore is allotted to you. What would you have me do? Risk my life for an American cause and, if I am not killed, come home to live on handouts from my son?” If corruption is a powerful lubricant for the military, it is the essential life source for a feudalistic civilian democracy. A parliamentary seat costs a politician at least $2 million in campaign financing. And, unlike Barack Obama, a parliamentary candidate in Pakistan has access neither to party funds, nor to public finance, nor to popular contributions (the religious parties are among the few parties that actually function on more or less modern party lines and actually provide election funding). A political candidate must come up with election funding from his or her own resources and needs to take as a first priority a return on investment for his or her backers. And, of course, a structurally corrupt political leadership can neither prevent wider corruption nor focus on serving the people. Systemically constrained from serving the public interest, the military and civilian systems in Pakistan form symbiotic arms of a coherent system of governance in which

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each arm periodically replaces the other while whitewashing the other’s excesses. The military has never been taken into account for its killings in Bangladesh and Baluchistan, just as fourteen years of civilian political criminality were washed clean by General Musharraf through a “National Reconciliation Ordinance”. And so, while life for the ordinary people of Pakistan grows ever more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, the military and civilian arms of government regularly replace each other to create the semblance of change as a mask for their structural impotence in bringing about genuine change. Democracy and dictatorship are merely results of the operation of a more subterranean, feudal algorithm of power. As Zulfiqar Bhutto, the scion of the sequestration of democracy by feudalism, once put it: “Have you ever seen a bird sitting on its eggs in the nest? Well, a politician must have fairly light, fairly flexible fingers, to insinuate them under the bird and take away the eggs. One by one. Without the bird realizing it.”1 From the perspective of the people of Pakistan, the true scourge of the country is not religious fanaticism, nor military dictatorship, nor civilian corruption, but a deeply ingrained system in which political leadership is defined as the bartering of national sovereignty and public interest for personal power and wealth. If the system is incapable of bringing about a deeper form of political leadership then, perhaps, Sunni militancy, no matter how bloodthirsty, is a positive outcome. Sunni militancy is, after all, despite its harkening to the past and its hatred of all that is different, a thoroughly modern system which has a deep sense of sovereignty, a well developed ideology, a commitment to bringing out the best in humanity, a military agenda beyond self perpetuation of an armed force, a wealth of political parties that are not mere clusters of personal alliances, a consummate capability to deliver public goods such as education and an openness for talent to rise based on merit. Anyone who wishes to seriously study the situation in Pakistan (and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and much of the Muslim world) must study the dynamics of the Iranian revolution. A revolutionary new order requires deprivation, ideas, commitment, organization, funding, guns, battles and victories for its realization. But, critically, a revolutionary new order also needs psychological acceptance by the people, a realization that the new order will come to pass, whether now or next month or a year from now or five. The Iranian revolution occurred not in April 1978 but some weeks, months or years before that, when the people of Iran began to foresee a life without the Shah. The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution. The military and ISI officers who have been supporting the rise of Jihadistan, the politicians who have exchanged their evenings of whiskeys and prostitutes for prayer sessions at tableeghi (proselytization) centers, the children at government schools who are learning in their 6th grade science classes the difference between Islamic halal (permitted) and haram (forbidden) foods, the villagers who have started treating their local mullahs (priests) no longer as functionaries over the rituals of marriage and death but as power brokers who can deliver outcomes in this world and the next, the bazaar merchants who have 1

Interview with Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976, page 209. 9

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taken to shutting their shops to attend daily prayers, and the society women who have started flocking to fundamentalist therapy sessions, are all preparing for the coming of Jihadistan. And so, within weeks, months or years, change will come. And, just as the Prussian military machine folded into the Wehrmacht under Nazi Germany, the Pakistan military will in double time fall in formation behind the government of Jihadistan, grateful for a new client that will protect and expand its franchise. Perhaps Sunni militancy is the only effective agent for change in Pakistan. Perhaps the militants’ price of change must be accepted. Perhaps five generations of Pakistanis must be soaked in blood and repression. Perhaps a blood-dimmed tide of hatred and violence must engulf the world. But change will surely come. The 5% Solution. Pakistan is nothing if not schizophrenic. Regularly, amidst the cynicism and despair, one experiences glimpses of a different, radiant national personality. The Punjab that staffs the country’s armed forces absorbed into its being from the 14th to the 17th century the Bhakti movement, a mystical movement of universal love which infused Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam alike. Today, even as the country is slipping into the grips of fundamentalist militancy, over 30 million of its people implicitly follow the mystical paths of Islam which serve to lead man to God through the heart. The country lives in near continuous tension with its Eastern neighbor but its people thrill at the same stories, tragedies, recipes, competitions and a thousand other points of connection with the people of India. The country is unable to teach its children to read but regularly produces individuals able to leave a worldwide mark in fields ranging from physics to rubber bridge. Tax evaders have helped create an unregulated ‘black economy’ at least the size of the formal economy, yet people give generously to charitable causes and flocked to support the victims of the 2005 earthquake. The country regularly subsides into martial law but enjoys an incredibly vigorous free press and lawyers’ movement. And, at every turn, one comes across remarkably committed people, such as the senior politician who is building a block of legislators committed to corruption-free politics, the army general who believes that Pakistan should achieve a lasting peace by relinquishing its nuclear weapons and designs on Kashmir, the central banker who is committed to implementing high standards of governance, the technologist who has relocated from the United States to lead an innovation incubation fund, the founder of a girl’s school in Swat, who is quietly struggling to reintroduce education for girls in his verdant, Taliban-cursed valley, the local bodies councilor who is setting up secular coeducational schools in his mountain district close to Swat, the senior lawyer who is leading a struggle to ensure the rule of law and the restoration of judicial integrity, the young activist who gave up a corporate career overseas to advance civil rights for downtrodden minorities, the media magnate who pursues with equal zest his dual mission to expose political corruption and expand cultural appreciation, the serial social entrepreneur who is starting up her second bank for women microentrepreneurs, the poor farmer who is trying to organize a cooperative in his village for the processing and sale of walnuts and the trade union leader who has raised funds for a tanker to deliver clean water to hundreds of families in his neighborhood. Yes, the people of Pakistan have the spirituality, the culture, the talent, the intellectual vitality and entrepreneurial drive to create a very different country, a country that can

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be a leading example of a modern Islamic nation. The essential contours of the new Pakistan are as follows: •

The Rule of the 20 Good People. The least politically developed countries in the world (such as Afghanistan) have neither coherent political leadership nor effective governmental institutions. By this yardstick, Pakistan is merely halfcursed. Its political leadership is indeed deeply fractured and ineffective (consider that the President of the country cannot so much as push through an effective investigation of the assassination of his wife). But, despite suffering sixty years of depredation, Pakistan still has a reasonably functioning set of governmental institutions, a civil service with a tattered capability to process decisions, a more or less intact chain of command in the military, a muchabused but still functioning legislative process, a partially independent central bank, a judicial system that could relatively easily be invigorated and a free press. The country’s divided political landscape and reform-ready governmental institutions present the ideal conditions for the emergence of a small group of inspired, effective and honest leaders to lead a national transformation. The conditions are ripe and the leaders exist, but these leaders need: (1) sufficient personal wealth and political financial capital; (2) the backing of strong international and national forces; (3) a common vision and execution capability forged through the experience of coming together to solve some of the country’s many problems; and (4) a scalable model for good governance and economic development. With a concerted effort, all this can be pulled together to initiate a deep reform based on the remaining institutional coherence in the country. But if this leadership team is not pulled together by the time of President Obama’s next election, this institutional coherence will have been absorbed by the militants or will have been shattered. And, as Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the national poet, put it: “There is no messiah for shattered glass.”

•

The New Governance Package. From the very beginning, the group of twenty could implement a new idiom of leadership based principles of responsibility, justice, honesty, realism and the rule of law. This is what every man and woman I have ever met in Pakistan seeks most ardently of their leaders: good governance will lead to a flood of popular support from the people and will pave they way for deeper constitutional reform. Since its adoption in 1973, Pakistan’s constitution has been amended 17 times (and modified by 31 martial law orders) in slap-dashes attempts to address four key constitutional relationships: (1) the president and the parliament; (2) the civilian and military arms of government; (3) the federal government and the provinces; and (4) Islam and the state. As the new leadership acquires political strength it could, initially in practice and later in law, implement a thoroughly considered governance package which involves a stronger Presidency, more formal inclusion of the military in governance, greater autonomy for the provinces and a more liberal interpretation of Islam. And a government based on the principle of responsible realism will in its core orientation be inclusive, not exclusive, of the dazzling variety of opinions and interests that today bedevil Pakistan and tomorrow could be its source of great strength.

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•

The Restoration of the Region. Pakistan’s hostile relationship with its neighbors has its wellspring in the need both for legitimacy and economic sustenance. As the principle of responsible realism takes root in government, the legitimating role of foreign threats will begin to wither away and lasting and positive relations with India, Afghanistan and Iran will become possible. But such a salubrious state of affairs will only become possible when the economic sustenance derived by Pakistan as ‘front line state’ is replaced by a new and positive set of economic relationships with its neighbors. And the two most important aspects of this new reality are robust commercial relationships with India (tilted favorably towards Pakistan until its economy can gather strength) and an Indian-Pakistani-Afghan-Iranian regional strategy towards energy, water and transportation. These eventualities will require great statesmanship from outside Pakistan. India must be able to view itself as great power and rise above the fray to take medium term security risks and make medium term concessions to embrace Pakistan commercially and culturally in order to gain longer term benefits. And, most critically, the United States must overcome its deep neuroses about Iran and foster energy and trade interdependence between India, Pakistan and Iran. A new regional reality is indeed possible but it will require new thinking from all participants.

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The Sustainable Economy. Pakistan is an economic dwarf that is, relatively speaking, shrinking with every passing year. While military and civilian governments have alike failed to develop a sustainable model for economic development, if the track record of the militants is anything to go by, Jihadistan will only deepen the economic deprivation of the people. At no point can the new Pakistan distinguish itself more effectively from Jihadistan than by developing an engine for economic success which unleashes the country’s entrepreneurial potential while ensuring economic well-being for every household. The new Pakistan will systematically realize a vision, based on a realistic appraisal of its challenges and prospects, which proliferates prosperity through: (1) development of the country’s agricultural and agriprocessing sector; (2) development of the country’s infrastructure base; (3) fulfillment of the country’s energy requirements on a cost-effective basis; (4) development of the country’s considerable human potential; (5) intensification of regional trade and investment; and (6) curtailment of governmental spending and waste.

•

The Islamic Renaissance. Pakistan’s two founding fathers, the lawyer Jinnah and the poet Iqbal, held contrasting views of the role of Islam in Pakistan. Jinnah argued for a secular homeland in which people of the Islamic and other faiths would be free to practice their respective faiths without persecution. Iqbal dreamed of a community which enabled individual believers to flourish at such a level of spiritual realization that, before making any decision, God would first seek the opinion of man. But both Jinnah and Iqbal converged on a view of Muslims that, in Iqbal’s words, were free to mold the future based on their interpretation of the past: “The teaching of the Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its

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own problems.”2 Tragically, the militants are now creating a new version of Islam by using images from the past that have transfixed liberal Muslims in a paroxysm of intellectual helplessness. The people of Pakistan must break through this death vice and reach deep into their mystical, poetical and intellectual resources to fashion a new vision of Islam that celebrates individual self-realization and denigrates communal repression and hatred. Ultimately, the defeat of Jihadistan must come about through a triumph of the spirit. The Nature of Militant Islam A defeatist new line of thinking on dealing with Pakistan and Afghanistan has been gaining momentum in Washington, a line of thinking that replaces the old confusion on the nature of the fight (the ‘war on terror’) with new confusion on the nature of the enemy (the ‘war on Al-Qaeda’). This line of thinking is based on ossifying the enemy into Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, distinguishing between the two and further distinguishing between the Taliban with whom one can deal and the Taliban with whom one cannot deal. It is Al-Qaeda, the argument runs, who are internationalist in their orientation and therefore only Al-Qaeda which needs to be defeated. While that is being done (principally through redoubled military effort), the United States can open a dialogue with and perhaps even provide soft support to the reasonable Taliban and ultimately make a graceful exit: Mission Accomplished! This line of thinking prides itself as being grounded in a new realism: America cannot be the world’s policeman anymore; it must preserve its resources and simply protect its own. Unfortunately, this line of thinking will not accomplish its aims, just as the neoconservative blitzkrieg on Islam failed to accomplish its aims. If every member of Al-Qaeda is hunted down and killed, the United States will barely have advanced its aim of securing itself against Islamic militancy. For Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are simply children of a broader revolution, a revolution that will devour these very children as it spreads and gathers strength. For the real enemy is the closing of the doors of reason by an extremely powerful religious tradition, the real enemy is the new ideology that has appropriated the symbols of Islam while an intellectually supine mass of a billion people clutches at a ritualistic dispensation, the real enemy is the colonial treatment of the Muslim people by Britain, Israel and the United States, the real enemy is the uncaring leadership of the Muslim world, boastful of stealing eggs from nesting birds, the real enemy is the ignorance and poverty nurtured by generation upon generation of feudal tyranny, the real enemy is the packaging of all these realities into a highly replicable praxis of hate and violence, the real enemy is our own failure of leadership towards a brave new world. Indeed, by compromising the fight against the Taliban, the new line of thinking in Washington will only accelerate the fall of Pakistan and the rise of Jihadistan, and so hasten the coming of age of the 17-year old kid in a basement in New Jersey, 2

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Sir Mohammad Iqbal, Sh Muhammad Ashraf Publishers, 1988, page 168. 13

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scheming to bring down his hometown power grid as his contribution to the worldwide jihad. The so-called realism behind the new line of thinking simply involves trading away the pain, to be suffered within the span of the Obama administration, of an achievable victory, for the terror, to be endured for decades, of a confederacy of militant states feeding hatred around the world. In trying to understand the nature of militant Islam, it is instructive to compare it with the Soviet system, because, of the four principal characteristics of militant Islam, two are shared with the Soviet system. When one peers into the heart of America’s last great geopolitical victory, the defeat of the Soviet Union and the rollback of communism, one finds a missive on the centrality of time. “[W]e have seen,” wrote George Kennan, in his famous Long Telegram, “that the Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry. Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient.”3 Kennan could have been writing of Al-Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups when he observed: “The Kremlin has no compunction about retreating in the face of superior forces. And being under the compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for such retreat. Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. 4 Even more so than the Soviet, and even more so than the Chinese, the militant Islamic mind is capable of thinking in terms of greatly extended time horizons. For, divine inspiration conflates all temporal distinctions: through the militant conception of jihad, a soldier of God can conjoin his tawdry battle against a present enemy with the founding battles of the faith, and imagine himself shoulder to shoulder with the Companions of the Prophet, forming a single temporally extended battlefront against the forces of infidelity. A battle lasting century upon century and consuming generation upon generation may be a necessary price to pay for bringing about in this too, too solid earth, a divinely regulated society. And, like the Soviet Union, militant Islam is “predominantly absorbed” with securing power against its internal opponents. Over the past hundred years, a Muslim world seeking to find itself in a modern, post-Caliphate age has unleashed a degree of internally-directed religious, ethnic and political savagery that entirely eclipses the violence of its encounter with the West. The murderous suppression by the Turks of the Kurds, the ruthless consolidation of Baathist power in Iraq and Syria, the systematic elimination of communists in Indonesia, the Pakistani massacres leading to Bangladesh, the black September killings in Jordan, the Iranian revolution, the IranIraq war, the violent power struggles in Algeria, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the gang warfare in Somalia, the killings among Sunni and Shia groups in Pakistan, the and murderous power struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all instances of violence within and internal to the Muslim world. Within the context of societies for which violence is the principal dynamic of change, the principal aim of militant Islam, at least over this century, is to consolidate its hold over the Muslim world: the battle against the West is simply an essential front in the 3 4

George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, 1947, Part II. George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, 1947, Part II. 14

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struggle towards a Pax Islam. As Kennan had reminded us, the threat of the external world becomes a means for justifying ruthless internal aggression. And, of course, treating the external world as an enemy has its own self-fulfilling logic: the aggression of the American response to 9/11 has dramatically accelerated the spread of Islamic militancy around the world. It is only the solipsistic turn of American thinking that transmutes the aggression of militant Islam into, principally, aggression against the United States. Regrettably, the quality of our solutions can be no greater than our understanding of our problems. But militant Islam has substantially improved on the Soviet style of totalitarianism. The Soviet system was a highly centralized, command and control system: occupy the centre and you control the whole; crack the centre and you fracture the whole. Militant Islam is ideologically totalitarian but organizationally decentralized. Like the Internet, militant Islam is capable of rapid expansion while being substantially impervious to destruction by force. A militant Islamic package of strategy, ideology, leadership, training, outreach, networking and finance has been brilliantly perfected into a meme, a coherent code that can be replicated with astonishing speed and efficiency. Consider, for example, the growth of madrassahs in Pakistan. During the roughly fifty years it has taken McDonald’s to grow to 31,000 stores, the number of madrassahs in Pakistan has grown, with no centralized planning or financing, from under 250 to over 50,000. (And keep in mind that it takes considerably greater intellectual resources to establish a madrassah than a burger franchise.) If you were to visit today the town of Naran in the austerely beautiful Kaghan Valley, you will find a large, relatively new madrassah geared for success through a highly trained and motivated leadership core, a large and impressive building in the centre of town, a package of learning programs for boys and girls who walk up to two hours a day to attend class, a reliable stream of funding from a mix of local and foreign sources, and a growing network of connections with the local leadership. Under the surface of scholastic and religious activity, yet another qaeda (“base”) for militancy is being established; yet another node in the network is falling into place. In the meantime, the new talk in Washington, D.C. is of “dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism”: an industrial age, civil engineering metaphor being press-ganged into combating Internet era, social networking dynamics. How does one dismantle the infrastructure of the Internet? How does one dismantle the infrastructure of a meme? The collapse of the Soviet system was brought on by its own economic weakness in the face of dynamic American capitalism imbued with military and political will. No great intellectual struggle preceded this collapse: after all, Soviet ideology was a factbased ideology which posited that the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to its demise. And, when, the facts turned out be transparently different: exeunt ideology. Islamic militancy is, of course, a faith-based ideology, which posits a divine imperative for its proposed ordering of society: factual circumstances alone are an insufficient basis for defeating such an ideology. Accordingly, Islamic militancy, and the fundamentalism that acts as its intellectual and popular foundation, is able to withstand incredible defeats and yet retain its legitimacy and affective power. And the ideological power of Islamic militancy is heightened by the position of traditionalist faith: almost all Muslims accept at some level the validity of the militant

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and fundamentalist claim on their religion, for their faith provides them with no clear vision of a progressive, tolerant and modern Islam. In the traditionalist view, men who grow beards and pray five times a day are obviously Muslims and, if, in the name of Islam, they burn down girls’ schools or kill fellow Muslims, so be it. In a world denuded of critical thinking, form necessarily prevails over substance. The Muslim world will only truly begin to roll back militancy and fundamentalist through a revolution in thought or, to put it more precisely, a revolution back to thought. The Muslim world is long overdue its Martin Luther. Core Principles of American Response The West is in a dilemma, for, of the three root causes of Islamic militancy – the structurally deep failure of responsible leadership in the Muslim world, the intellectual death of Islam around the time of the Mongol invasions, and the failure of the West to generate positive outcomes for a longstanding colonial enterprise - two are not of its making. And the four principal characteristics of militant Islam – the long term view of its mission, the aggregation of internal power through an engagement with the West, the perfection of a multi-nodal, self-generating form of organization, and a non-falsifiable, faith-based millenarian ideology – fuse medieval, modern and post-modern elements in a manner that will require a profound reorientation of thinking to defeat. We will need to move beyond Sun Tzu’s maxim that, “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles”5, and consider too, the wisdom of Al-Ghazzali, the great medieval Islamic philosopher: “Honey does not become impure because it may happen to have been placed in the [blood-stained] glass which the surgeon uses for cupping purposes.”6 The United States will not only need to understand Islamic militancy but adopt the intelligence and economy behind its success. A tally of the imbalance of forces between militant Islam and the United States reveals no greater deficiency in the American inventory than that of time. Indeed, America’s paucity of time is the central crisis of globalization: American consumers, in their rush to consume, have sucked in the world’s resources and stymied global development; American bankers, in their rush for obscene bonuses, have present valued non-existent future earnings into bankrupting the world’s financial system; American companies, in their rush for quarterly earnings, have one too many times resold creaking technologies which throttle the environment and America’s own prodigious inventiveness; and American politicians, in their rush for solutions within their term of office, have grasped at militaristic fixes that have ratcheted up the level of hate and violence in the world. Barack Obama can provide to the American people no greater bailout than helping them regain the capacity for the proper use of time. The challenge of extending the temporal boundaries of the American mind is, of course, neither new nor previously unsurmounted. After analyzing the sources of Soviet conduct, Kennan had prescribed, “In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive 5 6

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Edited by James Clavell, Delta, 1983, page 18 Al-Ghazzali, The Confessions of Al-Ghazzali, Cosimo Classics, 2007, page 38 16

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tendencies.”7 Forty-five years lapsed from the transmittal of Kennan’s telegram to the self-dissolution of the Supreme Soviet, but America found in itself the time and patience to see it through. It is time once more to think and act long-term. As a geographically isolated and militarily great power, the natural axis of American geopolitical thinking has been along geographical and militaristic lines. Kennan’s metaphor of containment was translated in Washington into a geographical and militaristic doctrine that drained into the quagmire in Vietnam. But Kennan’s stress on patience was not lost and, ultimately, a different calculus of power defeated the Soviet system, a calculus which subsumed military considerations in a broader engagement involving: (1) the assertion of irresistible economic power (both through trade and investment alliances and military build up); (2) the effective communication of the message of globally achievable prosperity; and (3) the high-impact and lowcost support of military resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And, although Bush’s preemption doctrine represented a catastrophic retreat into militarism, at its core it also represented a critical breakthrough in American geopolitical thinking into the temporal dimension, for preemption involves thinking in time, and changing the future before it arrives. Yes, honey may be contained even in the neoconservative cup of blood. The extension of the temporal perspective on the American engagement with Islamic militancy automatically foreshortens the core mission as presently conceived: if AlQaeda exists at the level of a meme capable of infinite replication, it makes little sense to adopt as a core mission the killing of every member of Al-Qaeda. Over time, Islamic militancy and its expression in forms such as Al-Qaeda will only wither away if the conditions of its perpetuation and growth are eliminated. Appropriately, then, the core American mission should be the elimination over time of the conditions that enable the perpetuation and growth of Islamic militancy, including through the formation of a major Sunni militant state. But, one cannot cross the Delaware only halfway: the expansion of the American mission to a scope and temporality that could engender a successful outcome may also doom the mission to failure for its very amorphousness. Indeed, the United States can only successfully engage with Islamic militancy on a broader and more temporally extended front if at the same time it transforms its economy of engagement. The three key principles of the new economy of engagement are: •

7

Focus Only on Strategic Victories. In an extended engagement, the United States does not need to control every territory or engage in every potential battle: it needs to concentrate its resources on controlling the territories and winning the battles that have a critical impact on the long-term outcome. In the present context, the criterion for selection needs to be the extent to which, at any given point in time, control over any given territory or victory over any potential battle, will either most substantially retard the formation of Jihadistan or most substantially advance the development of secular, progressive forces in the region. Applying this criterion, perhaps Kandahar is unimportant and perhaps Kabul is important, perhaps defeating the Taliban in

George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, 1947, Part II. 17

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a given territory is more important that striking against Al-Qaeda in another territory, perhaps both preemptive strikes and defensive battles make sense, just as both military and non-military initiatives make sense: what is critical is to ensure that all strategically important battles are identified and won at the lowest possible cost. •

Create a Strong Defense. One may legitimately subscribe to the view that keeping Al-Qaeda ‘on the run’ abroad is critical to America’s safety at home and that a more selective and fluid policy of engagement may have the short term consequence of increasing the risk of a terrorist attack in the United States. Without needing to debate the plausibility of this perspective, in any event, the new economy of engagement would involve substantially greater emphasis on building highly intelligent and lower cost long-term lines of defense against terrorist attacks, including through building up networks of alliances, investing in local intelligence-gathering, implementing national identification systems, promoting international and inter-agency coordination, strengthening internal security systems in the United States, monitoring container shipments and policing money laundering.

•

Prioritize the Political, Economic and Ideological Jihad. To secure a longterm victory over Islamic militancy, the new administration must not simply bolt political, economic and ideological initiatives on to an existing military policy. Military engagement is highly expensive and least likely to provide longer term results unless such an engagement is integral to a political, economic and ideological jihad (struggle) within the Muslim world in which the United States serves as a catalyst but not a prime actor. The new economy of engagement involves the United States promoting such a jihad by: (1) bringing the point of struggle to its proper locus as an inter-Muslim struggle; (2) creating a new meme of good governance and economic development that may be replicated across the Muslim world; and (3) promoting fresh and positive new thinking on what it means to be a Muslim in the modern age.

The engagement against Islamic militancy must, most critically, be won and lost by the people living in the Muslim countries. No amount of American diplomacy, funding or military action can ultimately determine this outcome and, indeed, the front line position of the United States in the region is doing as much harm as good. Each American soldier on the ground justifies a hundred new militants, each Predator strike galvanizes a village into bitter hatred and each misspent USAID Dollar creates ever-greater suspicion of American motives. While the United States government well understands the importance of reducing its footprint in the region, torn between the paucity of effective local leadership and its own drive for control, the government continually equivocates on a robust implementation of this objective. However, an American leadership that is committed to transferring ownership of the problem of Islamic militancy to the Muslim countries (especially in the case of an institutionally developed country such as Pakistan) and to creatively supporting new leaders who are committed to creating new realities in their countries can achieve much, much more than more thousands of additional drones, humvees and grunts.

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A cohort of strong, responsive, progressive and clean leaders at the local level can be identified and supported almost immediately in a country such as Pakistan, who can form the backbone of a new national leadership. While the strategy for devolving military power varies greatly from country to country, a combination of requiring greater accountability in exchange for funding, the provision of counterinsurgency equipment and training and a demonstrated willingness to use paramilitary forces, can yield substantial results in most countries. At the regional level, specific initiatives for cooperation on energy, transportation and trade are likely to quickly create new compulsions for dealing with terrorism. The opportunity for creativity is the greatest in the economic arena, where the United States could provide ‘fulcrum capital’ to substantially leverage funding from the oil-rich Middle Eastern countries and the $500 billion in underutilized assets held by Islamic banks. And innovative linking into the media industry proliferating throughout the Muslim world could generate profound awareness of the possibilities and urgency for each country to overcome its challenges with Islamic militancy. As I traversed Pakistan last year, spending time with people from every walk of life, I rarely heard pleas for an Islamic state – all over the land, people talked of the burning need for jobs, financing, market access, stable prices, food, clean water, electricity, education, technical knowledge, hospitals, good policies, security, peace, justice and representation. As of yet, while militant Islam has morphed into a meme that is capable of rapid replication, it has not fully developed a model for what people in Pakistan and every other Muslim country are truly, desperately seeking: good governance and economic development. But the situation is changing fast. In Pakistan, one increasingly hears the argument that militant justice might be better than no justice at all. And Taliban redistributive efforts, already underway in Swat, are adding a small measure of populist support to the militant movement. Over time, no doubt, as militant control grows over the settled areas and governmental institutions in countries such as Pakistan and Egypt, fundamentalist political parties will become increasingly radicalized, on the one hand, and will funnel the energy of the movement into more sophisticated legislative and institutional transformations of the state, on the other hand. The dynamic of tribes from the hinterlands revitalizing morally decaying urban civilizations through their martial capacity and ideological fervor was chronicled by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century; the analysis still applies. Through the interplay of the forces of radicalization and absorption, the presently crude militant forays into governance and economics will be replaced by far more totalitarian solutions. It is accordingly vital that, while militant Islam is still weak in these areas, the forces of tolerance and progress actually bring about good governance and economic development in key states such as Pakistan. If the United States, using its considerable influence on government policy and leveraging regional and international support, could help implement a model for good governance and economic development, the space for the growth of militant Islam will shrink dramatically. To win this battle, the current approach to international assistance must radically change. Today’s initiatives are uncoordinated and unfocused, operate at the national or provincial level and are implemented through corrupt and ineffective foreign

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consultants and local government agencies. Filtering through layers of misconception, dispersion, bureaucracy, waste and corruption, precious little foreign aid gets through to actually help the people or create new economic and social realities: the first $43 million of the Bush Administration’s $750 million planned assistance program for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan was earmarked for a Washington consultancy to develop a plan to spend the rest of the money on other consultants and ‘build capacity’ at a provincial government development authority, which would no doubt direct into the pockets of corrupt administrators whatever crumbs were dispersed locally by the international consultants. The new paradigm must concentrate all bilateral, multilateral and private sector development activity through local leaders and social entrepreneurs to create a comprehensive, sustainable and scalable model for good governance and economic development in a single district or set of districts in each country. The promotion of local leaders and social entrepreneurs (rather than foreign consultants or government departments) will both generate relevant and cost-effective solutions and widen the base of responsible social and political leadership. The focus on developing a comprehensive, sustainable and scalable model will both generate visible benefits for the relevant communities and create a reference which will draw other communities into the paradigm. And the concentration of resources and efforts on a small administrative and geographical area will force coordination and ensure success of the model. Just as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are working to create Jihadistan district-bydistrict, a progressive new political order and economy may only be built district-bydistrict. In his inaugural address, President Obama did well to remind the world that America is populated by Muslims, as well as by Christians, Jews and non-believers. America’s Muslim population, and the Muslim populations of other Western countries, can either serve as the vanguard in the struggle against, or become the transmission media for, Islamic militancy. If this population is not allowed to become a vanguard against militancy, it may well become a transmission media for militancy. Martin Luther did not engender the Protestant reformation simply by posting at a church in Wittenberg a set of theses as to man’s relation to God and the Church’s relation to man. He was part of a vigorous intellectual movement which included many other great thinkers such as Erasmus, Calvin and Zwingli. He studied for years at an Augustine monastery and drew extensively on the thousand-year old writings of St. Augustine. He engaged in intense debates with representatives of the Catholic Church and other Christian sects. He and his companions were protected and funded by the Elector of Saxony or by other German and North European principalities confident in their growing economic and political power. His translation of the Bible became a best seller through the invention of the printing press. And thousands of priests worked ceaselessly to popularize and institutionalize Lutheran doctrine and practice. From its very dawning, an intellectual and religious revolution is a perilous act: its success requires debate, definition, ideology, institutions, political patronage, funding, technology, staffing, dissemination and popularization. As a faith-based ideology, Islamic militancy will only be decisively defeated when members of the faith begin to hold it as self-evident that militancy, violence,

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intolerance and hatred is categorically not part of their faith and that people who espouse such messages cannot preach and pray in their midst. But, militancy feeds on extremism, which feeds on fundamentalism, which feeds on ritualistic traditionalism. To separate itself from militancy, Islam needs to undergo a deep reformation. And the West needs to act as the Elector to this reformation, for it is only in the West that there is sufficient freedom of thought and speech to enable this reformation to gain momentum. The West cannot ensure that the synaptic leap that occurs during a revolution will in fact occur across the Muslim world, but West can through its own Muslim populations incubate the revolution and support it with funding, initiatives, institutions and media. Today, most Western-originated thinking about Islam is either anti-Muslim or developed with a view towards a Western audience. Much work needs to be done to understand, from an Islamic perspective, the role of knowledge and freedom in man’s relationship with God and the role of religion in the affairs of man; much work needs to be done to bring into the centre of the religion the tolerance and love in the words of the Quran, in the actions of Mohammad and in the writings of great Muslim thinkers; much work needs to be done to comprehend the points of failure in the religion which have enabled intolerance and hate to be so widely expressed in its name; much work needs to be done to relate the spiritual message of Islam to the nature of humanity in an age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. These are all good thoughts to think and the space must be created for Muslims to think these thoughts. We return to Sun Tzu: “Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe he is facing.”8 Islamic militancy is a brilliantly modern form of social dynamics: it is fluid yet coherent, it is nodal yet networked, it is scalable yet cost-effective. We live in a paradoxical age: a medieval world-view has acquired a protean post-modernity while a progressive word-view is moribund in industrial-era inflexibility. American policy towards Islamic militancy needs to replenish itself from the wellsprings of modernity: success against militancy will come through the proliferation of strong nodes and vibrant networks that out-compete the militant web of hate and terror. The New Strategy for Pakistan How, then, should the United States work towards the elimination of the conditions which are transforming Pakistan into the world’s first major Sunni militant state? It is not as if the United States has not been trying. The United States already has in place a multi-faceted strategy which includes: (1) funding and support of the military; (2) Predator strikes against ‘high value’ targets; (3) support of the economy through bilateral and multilateral means; (4) promotion of democratic elections; and (5) encouragement of greater cooperation between India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But none of the prongs of this strategy seem to be working: the military is hedging its bets between the United States and the militants, the Predator strikes are decimating the chances of rehabilitation of the Northern and Western areas without reducing the 8

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Edited by James Clavell, Delta, 1983, page 29 21

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strength of the militants, the economy is sucking in foreign funding instead of developing an engine for growth, USAID programs are almost invisible in their impact, the promotion of democratic elections has led to a vicious cat fight between established political groups and the regional diplomatic effort is foundering fast. The essential problem with the current strategy is that it is geared towards strengthening the forces of the status quo against the forces of Jihadistan and, accordingly is, for the reasons previously discussed, doomed to failure. The most recent additional strategy of appeasing the less virulent Taliban groups is misguided in its aims: if the objective is to kill the present Al-Qaeda leadership and exit as quickly as possible, then this strategy might have some merit. If, however, the objective is to address the conditions leading to militancy and avoiding its longerterm effects in the United States and around the world, then this strategy will not work just as, it would not have worked, during the heat of the Russian Revolution, to have supported the Mensheviks in the hopes of stemming the rise of the Bolsheviks. The weaker children of a revolution are the first to be devoured. With due regard to the importance of a well-managed policy reversal and implementation of appropriate transitional measures, the United States needs to entirely reorient its policy towards Pakistan. If the United States does so, it will, within what I expect will be the two terms of Barack Obama’s Presidency, with much greater economy of engagement, ensure the creation of a stable, peaceful and progressive state and substantially advance the cause of liberal Islam throughout the world. The seven key elements of the new policy are: •

Concentrate Military Engagement on Strategically Critical Battles, Beginning with the New Paradigm Districts. In a long-term war, every battle need not be fought and won. However, it is vital to win the battles that will either most critically slow the advance of the militants or that will most decisively advance the cause of progressive leadership in the country. In today’s Pakistan, there is no more strategically important military objective that securing the front-line districts of Buner, Shangla, Batagram, Swabi and Mansehra, as well as the districts of Abbottabad, Haripur and Attock (I will refer to these Districts the ‘New Paradigm Districts’) from Taliban occupation. Accordingly, military efforts should be focused as a priority on fully securing the New Paradigm Districts.

•

Refocus the Relationship with the Pakistan Military on Counter-Insurgency and National Development Through the Promotion of Local Militias. The Pakistan military can play a vital role in rolling back Jihadistan and building a new Pakistan, but only if its focus radically shifts away from battling illusory external threats from India to solving real problems within the country’s borders. The most effective way of bringing about this transformation is the creation of a cluster of localized dual-purpose militias, as a skunk-works within the Pakistan military, which are controlled by the military and are focused on both counter-insurgency and development works. The first such localized militia should be created for the New Paradigm Districts.

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•

Support a Small Group of Local and National Leaders Who Work to Transform, First, the New Paradigm Districts and, Next, the Country. Instead of promoting democratic processes in the abstract, the United States needs to identify and support a small group of local and national leaders who are brought together to solve problems of good governance and economic development in the New Paradigm Districts. By leading the transformation of the New Paradigm Districts, these leaders will forge an effective working alliance and create a demonstrable model for governance and development. Within a short span of time, these leaders will be in a position to lead the country to a bright, new future.

•

Advance the New Paradigm Districts Initiative as an Islamic Nations Initiative. Consistent with the larger objective of resituating the problem of Islamic militancy as an inter-Muslim problem, the initiative for the transformation of the New Paradigm Districts should be handled by a consortium headed by countries such as Saudi Arabia and institutions such as the Islamic Development Bank. With the United States playing a thought leadership role and providing fast-track mobilization capital, the Islamic members of the consortium will be important spokesmen, financing sources, investors and markets for the initiative and will also thereby also create a template for a broader, more effective form of engagement between the Muslim countries.

•

Concentrate Development Effort on Incubating a New Agribusiness Model in the New Paradigm Districts. The economic transformation of Pakistan, like all economic transformations, will come about area-by-area and sectorby-sector. Concentration of development work on reengineering agriculture and agribusiness in the New Paradigm Districts will lead to the economic transformation of the districts most at threat from the militants and will create a model of economic success that can then be replicated across the country.

•

Create a Strong Regional Tie-In Between Pakistan, India and Iran Through the Three-Nation Pipeline. There is nothing like a concrete, mutually beneficial project to cement regional relationships. India needs gas, Pakistan needs gas (as well as revenue from the transmission of gas) and Iran needs to sell gas. A pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistan makes eminent sense and is supported by all three participants. By reversing its position and supporting the pipeline, the United States will help improve regional ties, create greater economic and political stability in Pakistan and start to bring Iran in from the cold.

•

Drive for the Rapid Transformation of Education. If the Taliban are burning down girls’ schools in Swat, why not promote virtual schools so girls can learn from home? The Taliban can close down schools but they cannot close down learning. If the madrassahs of Pakistan are churning out students with deficient skills in coping constructively in this world, why not proliferate schools which equip students to have fulfilling, constructive lives in this world? The militants can make all kinds of linkages between behavior in the world and rewards in the next, but they are unable to meet the basic human

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yearning for engaging openly and fully with this world and our time. The United States, by supporting local social entrepreneurs and helping to incubate a local learning solutions industry committed to the advancement of progressive education in Pakistan, can within a few years transform the state of learning in the country. Through these strategies, the United States will begin to create a series of nodes and networks that will overlap and compete with the nodes and networks created by the militants. Well-protected areas for the incubation of new models of governance and development, militias controlled by the Pakistan military which are focused on counter-insurgency and nation building, teams of leaders who work together to solve real problems in governance and development, consortia of leaders within the Muslin world who begin to understand and help each solve other’s problems, social entrepreneurs who optimize new supply chains in agribusiness, NGOs that create new models for building skills in selected districts, investors and buyers who leverage a platform of risk management created by multilateral funding, regional alliances that promote stability by advancing national self interests and thought leaders and media experts who collaborate to create a new educational reality – these are the nodes and networks that the United States can help proliferate within a few years at much lower cost in money and lives than required by its present strategy – and these are the nodes and networks that will turn back the tide of militancy. The following districts are proposed to be included in the New Paradigm Districts: District

Province

Shangla Buner Battagram Mansehra Swabi

NWFP NWFP NWFP NWFP NWFP

Abbottabad Haripur Attock TOTAL

NWFP NWFP Punjab

New Paradigm Districts Area (Sq Km) Population Critical Districts 1,586 434,563 1,865 506,048 1,301 307,278 4,579 1,152,839 1,543 1,026,804 Core Districts 1,969 881,000 1,725 803,000 6,857 1,274,935 21,425 6,386,467

Principal Language(s) Principally Pashto Principally Pashto Principally Pashto Pashto, Pahari, Hindko Principally Pashto Punjabi, Hindko, Pashto Punjabi, Hindko, Pashto Principally Punjabi

The New Paradigm Districts and the Military The day that the United States starting bombing Afghanistan, my father, who fought three wars for Pakistan and for a period commanded the Khyber Rifles when the militia still had teeth, said to me: “They are bringing down the hammer without having created the anvil – this will not go well for them.” I don’t know whether America militarily botched up Afghanistan because the United States military has never really had any experience with serious, sustained mountain warfare, or because Rumsfeld bullied his commanders into adopting his own delusional view of armed conflict, or because the military felt that their technology had rendered irrelevant the experience of the Russians and British in Afghanistan, but the military has consistently underestimated the importance of controlling high ground in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. To borrow Wayne Gretzsky’s turn

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of phrase, it is imperative to go to the high mountains and valleys where the militants will be, not where they are. Today, there is no more strategically important military objective in the Pakistan front against militancy than maintaining firm control over the districts of Buner, Shangla, Batagram, Swabi and Mansehra. If these districts fall, the militants will: (1) have free range to move men and supplies between Baluchistan, the North West Frontier Province and Kashmir; (2) complete their control over all the non-Kashmiri rivers of Pakistan; (3) create a direct linkage with the militant groups in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir; (4) extend their campaign from Pathan-majority areas to Hazara and Punjabi areas; and (5) threaten the capital of Pakistan from a highly advantageous extended mountainous front. It will only be a matter of time before the entire country will fall. By retaining strong military control of these districts, and the neighboring districts of Abbottabad, Haripur and Attock I have included in the New Paradigms Districts, the Pakistani forces can create a classical forward triangle of defense East of the Indus river, ensure Kashmir is kept separate from the insurgency in Swat, protect the capital and, as I have proposed, create a zone for the implementation of a new model of governance and development which will serve as a palpable, proximate reference case for the eventual reoccupation of the Talibanized parts of the country. Asserting such control will not be an easy task. Militant groups are already powerfully entrenched in these districts (the Mumbai attackers received weapons training in Mansehra district) and can only be broken through pitched battles in urban and semi-urban areas. And then there is the task of vigorously monitoring a territory that, at its Northernmost extremity, is blanketed with 20 feet of snow in the winter. But these tasks nonetheless remain easier than fighting and winning in the tribal areas or in Swat. These tasks, as well as the task of cleaning up major urban centers such as Peshawar, will need to be left until later. Unfortunately, even leaving aside questions of motivation and discussions around its Talibanization, the Pakistan military is not up to the challenge. To begin with, any institutional military has an extraordinarily difficult time operating through formal command structures and established bases against a fluid enemy indistinguishable from the population at large. And, then, the Pakistan military has created conditions that exacerbate this structural level of ineffectiveness. When my father was commandant at the Frontier Force Regiment Headquarters in Abbottabad District, military personnel and civilians alike would regularly walk into our house to ask for assistance on one matter or another. Today, that very house has an eight-foot wall and an armed guard and is located a kilometer inside a military zone off-limits to civilians. Everywhere, the Pakistan military has garrisoned itself away from the civilian population, even as it has extended its reach into the body politic through the ISI and political and economic encroachments. A military at a remove from its people has an exceptionally difficult challenge in containing insurgency. Pakistan needs to develop, as a skunk-works within the existing military, a new model of a military force for the New Paradigm Districts and, in the future, other clusters of districts. And the model being used by the American military in Iraq of outsourcing work to local armed groups will not work (the Pakistan military will not accept it and, in any event, this crude colonial model of control will create severe long term

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problems even in Iraq). The new model involves recruiting and training a local militia within the New Paradigm Districts, highly conversant with local conditions and capable of rebuilding the bridge to the local population that the military has been steadily surrendering. The localized militia would have a military arm (which would engage in counter insurgency operations, border patrol and intelligence gathering) and a development arm (which would engage in infrastructure development, emergency relief and medical assistance). Operating within the command and control of the military, the militia would also derive funding from and be subject to oversight from a civilian committee responsible for the rejuvenation of the New Paradigm Districts. The tradition of using local militias controlled by a central force has been in effect for hundreds of years and the military has been using local militias in FATA since the inception of Pakistan. Accordingly, the extension of this strategy will be readily accepted by the military, the civilian government and the people. The redesign of the militia as a dual-purpose force is, however, a critical objective that must be achieved. Such a dual-purpose role for the militia is essential to ensuring greater local acceptance, instilling an ethic of responsible government, enabling cooperative civilmilitary relationships and optimizing utilization of limited resources. Such a militia, of the people yet highly trained and well-disciplined, an armed force but also a helping hand, separate from the military yet reliant on its firepower and technical capabilities, controlled by the military yet answerable to civilian overseers, will empower the districts from which it is born with the capacity to turn back militancy. When the militants attack the militia, they will be attacking the local population, when the militia rolls back the militants, its victory will constitute a local victory, when a member of the militia implements a clean water solution for a village or rescues a frost-bitten family from certain death, he will be treated as a local hero. Through such a militia, the choice of accepting or rejecting militancy will be driven to where it rightly belongs: the communities most affected by this scourge. Leadership and Alliances Pakistan’s crisis of sovereignty and leadership is reflected in the many challenges of governance and administration facing the country: the deep divide between the different arms of government, the dearth of honest, solution-oriented leadership, the near-complete breakdown of control at the district and local level and the pervasive lack of effective governmental communication and coordination. It is virtually impossible to successfully address these challenges all at once at the national level. However, at the level of a cluster of districts, these challenges are capable of being substantially addressed within a two-year time frame. If resources are concentrated on addressing these challenges at the level of the New Paradigm Districts, a new class of leadership and network of alliances can be incubated which can then take on the broader challenges of creating a new Pakistan. To address these challenges even at the circumscribed level I have proposed, several layers of leadership and networks will need to be implemented. In the first instance, a steering committee would need to be established, which would find representation from: (1) concerned nations (most, importantly, Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait (the

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Ambassadors of whom have already been deeply involved in the earthquake rehabilitation work in the Northern Areas), China (the increasingly important power in the region) and the United States); (2) senior representatives of the Pakistani military and national and provincial civilian governments; (3) bilateral and multilateral agencies; and (4) Pakistani and non-Pakistani nationals with deep experience in fields such as national security, development, education, energy, finance and law. The steering committee would set the overall agenda, raise financing and channel resources, oversee the initiative and manage governmental and multilateral relationships. The inclusion of a broad array of supporters of Pakistan would help to ensure that bilateral and multilateral development support is coordinated and effectively leveraged for purposes of the initiative. A carefully selected executive team with backgrounds in business and professional services, military service, civilian government, politics and religious affairs would lead the initiative. Their express mandate would be to design and implement models for governance and development which, on the one hand, emphasize the identification and promotion of promising local administrators, politicians, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and social workers and, on the other hand, are sustainable and scalable across the country. The executive team would have substantial authority and funding support and the capacity to move decisively. Implicitly, of course, the executive team would be forging a platform for national leadership. The executive team would be supported by various support groups, the most important of which would be highly empowered representatives of the military and the civilian national and provincial administrations. Through these high-powered support groups, the executive team would be able to ensure compliance and effectiveness at the district and sub-district level. Other important support teams would include USAID and other bilateral and multilateral aid agencies and their consulting firms. Equally importantly, a range of resident and non-resident Pakistani entrepreneurs and professionals would be on call to provide support on specific initiatives. And, of course, the real drivers of the initiative would the local leaders, professionals and entrepreneurs who would find opportunities to grow as leaders of a new governance pact with the people, as leaders within a local militia, as engineers rolling out the implementation of new infrastructure projects, as entrepreneurs capitalizing on new funding and business opportunities, as farmers with new markets for their produce and as social workers with effective missions and means. I have discussed the idea of a highly concentrated local governance and development initiative with a number of well-positioned people in Pakistan. They have almost unanimously concurred that such an initiative is both critically important and likely to succeed. Most have questioned, however, whether such an initiative can lead to meaningful change at the national level. My own belief is that meaningful change at the national level is not possible without an effective model of local governance and development. Mao Tse Tung and the Chinese Communist Party truly developed momentum when they developed effective relationships and solutions at the local level in Shaanxi province; Gandhi took control of the Congress Party by first conducting a series of highly localized Satyagraha movements to establish a model

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for protest within the legal framework of the British Raj; John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government builds the case for liberal national politics on the premise of a pre-existing social order which respects local property rights; the Islamic militants do not have a well-designed national or international party platform but they are winning because they excel at the politics of local control. Today’s Pakistan offers a surfeit of opportunities for regime change and the fractured state of Pakistani politics makes it highly likely that a small group of leaders, with good intentions and clean records, international and military backing and the demonstrated capacity to work together to realize an effective governance and economic model, will at least have a chance at national leadership. And, if they don’t, they will nevertheless make an important contribution to the country. It is less important at this stage to worry about the precise pathways to national power for such a leadership than to incubate such a leadership in the first place. And, like honey in a cupping glass, the militants have already established the priority we must now adopt: political power must grow from local success. Agriculture in Pakistan About 1.5 billion people in the world scratch out a living on less than $1 a day; of this population, over 530 million (over 33% of the world’s poor) live in the rural areas of South Asia (i.e., Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). The agricultural sector in South Asia represents the single greatest poverty trap in the world; by the same measure, optimizing agricultural productivity and supply chain dynamics in, and bringing enterprise to, rural South Asia represents the single greatest opportunity for poverty alleviation in the world. If anyone wants to concentrate on generating scalable solutions for big problems, it doesn’t get any bigger or more scalable than fixing the rural economies of South Asia.

Gul has the drive and charisma to become a social entrepreneur and an important node in a network of productivity and goodwill.

Gul (his name has been fictionalized) lives with his family of seven in the hills above Balakot, a picturesque town that was the epicenter of the October 2005 earthquake in Northern Pakistan. Over 60,000 people died in Balakot alone and, although a substantial amount of relief funding was raised, little has been done to rehabilitate the region. Gul owns 12 acres of lush, well-watered and well-drained hillside land. He leaves the farming to his wife, who cultivates about 2 acres with corn and vegetables for selfconsumption and tends to their ten walnut trees and twenty apricot trees.

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In a good year, the family produces 800 kilos of walnuts and sells the entire output in the local market for about $600. If the walnuts were sold in the wholesale market in Lahore (over 200 miles away), they would fetch over $1,200 and, if the family, which at present uses stones to break open walnuts, were to engage in some simple processing, the processed walnuts could be sold over $2,000. Half of the apricots from the farm fall on the ground to rot or be eaten by the The Balakot hospital where Gul works was funded by the Canadians; at some cost USAID donated a largely unused board goats and the other half are sold in the for the distribution of healthcare leaflets among a largely market for a few hundred dollars. illiterate population. Last year, Gul took a 24-hour bus trip to Chitral to review a small apricot processing unit set up by a Swiss group and aspires to establish a cooperative with 25 similarly-positioned farmers to engage in walnut and apricot processing and marketing. In the meantime, to supplement his farm income, Gul works as a janitor at the local hospital for $600 a year and spends three hours a day walking to and from work. In another world, Gul’s farm would generate tens of thousands of dollars from the growth and processing of specialty crops such as walnuts, apricots, strawberries, avocados, mushrooms and pine nuts – indeed, the farm is so beautiful and the weather so salubrious, the farm would probably be converted into a highly profitable health centre. But, in the here and now, Gul does not have the know-how to properly cultivate his land and add value Gul’s farm overlooks the Kunhar River and could to his produce, nobody around him seems become a prime target for Taliban forces and, following to know any better (an Italian had come by them, Predator missiles. a year ago to make some suggestions, but hasn’t been back), the government provides almost no assistance, NGOs provide funding for rural health centers that don’t really function and a stipend for farmers to attend cooperative meetings which don’t lead anywhere, the cooperative exists at the level of chats among friends, the wholesalers in town are only interested in buying produce at the lowest prices, there is almost no financing available for entrepreneurship, there are no substantial fruit processing or cold storage facilities in the entire valley, the most basic of fruit processing equipment is unavailable and Pakistan has not seriously developed either the domestic or the international market for the high quality produce that could be generated in the region. The incredible dissonance between the potential of Gul’s farm and his economic reality is writ large at the national level. Agriculture is the largest sector of the

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Pakistani economy, contributing 21% to the GDP and employing 44% of the workforce. Its actual role in the economy is even greater as several key industries, such as textiles and leather goods, also have a basis in agriculture. For a country that prides itself on its agricultural capacity and a region that was an important breadbasket for one of the world’s richest empires when Ben Franklin was a little boy, the country’s agricultural sector is in shockingly bad state. Annual food imports exceed exports by over 1.5 billion precious dollars. When Alexander the Great swept through the lands that constitute Pakistan he remarked that these were the first peoples he had encountered that eat ‘cereal with cereal’: it is shameful that, today, the country which still refers to food in the vernacular as ‘daal-roti’ (lentils and wheat bread), needs to import a billion dollars of lentils and wheat each year. The country has one of the highest levels of consumption per capita of vegetable fats and tea, but has not figured out how to produce these domestically in sufficient quantities (in the current fiscal year, edible oil imports may run at over 20% of the energy-poor nation’s petroleum imports). The country has one of the largest citrus growing belts in the world, but its total exports of citrus equal that of a mid-sized Californian company and wastage for most kinds of fruit crops runs at over 40%. The country is among the ten largest milk producers in the world, but is forced to import milk to meet growing urban demand. The country has one of the largest canal systems in the world, but problems in the efficient distribution and utilization of water will reach crisis proportions within a decade. PAKISTAN EXPORTS AND IMPORTS (USD Millions) Provisional for Jul-Apr 2007-2008 EXPORTS Foods Rice 1,211 Fish 166 Fruit, Vegetables, Seeds, Spices 214 Meat 41 All Other 375 All Foods 2,007 Textiles 8,650 Petroleum Products 931 Other Manufactures 2,891 All Others 777 TOTAL 15,256 IMPORTS Foods Milk Wheat Edible Oils (Soy and Palm) Tea Pulses Spices All Other All Foods Machinery Petroleum Consumer Durables Raw Materials Telecoms All Others TOTAL

64 819 1,309 167 152 64 949 3,524 4,224 8,670 1,704 5,326 1,890 6,723 32,061

SURPLUS (DEFICIT)

(16,805)

Government of Pakistan, Ministry of Finance, Pakistan Economic Survey, 2007-2008.

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The entire nation, other than small and landless farmers, has conspired to bring about this pathetic state of affairs. Government investment in agriculture is exceptionally low: America subsidizes its farmers, Pakistan squeezes it farmers. Pricing policy is tilted towards benefiting the urban sector, textile companies and sugar mills. The government rice export company purchases high quality ‘basmati’ rice at unfairly low prices so as to expand the space for corruption. There is a systematic shortage of electricity, seeds, fertilizer and pesticide. The country has virtually no greenhouses, cold storage facilities, drip irrigation systems or modern farming infrastructure. After a major scandal in the 1990s during one of Nawaz Sharif’s tenures in office, cooperatives have remained moribund. A complex network of middlemen combine marketing prowess and financial muscle to squeeze profits out of farmers. Large farmers generally see themselves as feudal lords above the fray of having to invest and work, preferring to barter their political power for financial benefits. And business groups view agriculture as too feudal for investment. Pakistan desperately needs an engine for economic growth and a model for economic success. In the 1970s, it started exporting manpower and, while worker’s remittances remain one of the largest sources of foreign exchange earnings, unlike in the case of India, the Pakistani diaspora has not become a substantial source of investment, commerce and expertise for the country. The textiles sector is the largest manufacturing sector in the economy, but businesses have sought to concentrate on low value-add segments such as gray cloth, linen and towels and rely for profits on low cotton prices and illegally ‘subsidized’ electricity bills, loans and taxes. Today, Pakistan is poorly placed to compete in manufacturing not only against giants such as China and India, but also against Vietnam and, in textiles, cotton-starved Bangladesh. The technology and outsourcing wave, which has led the ongoing transformation of the Indian economy, has largely passed by Pakistan and is unlikely to be a major driver for growth in the mid-term future. Hence, agriculture remains the one source of economic hope for Pakistan. If Pakistan could reduce its food dependency on foreign markets, attract some of the Middle Eastern investment going into this sector around the world, boost agricultural productivity, develop agricultural infrastructure, infuse the sector with know how and best practices, develop efficient market dynamics and open up new markets for its produce, if Gul’s income from farming can be quadrupled and the potential of his farm realized, Pakistan can begin to address some of its balance of payments problems, generate wealth at every level of society and acquire a self-confidence that will radiate across all sectors. And the progressive government that brings about such a situation will find it easy to fight Islamic militancy. Every major change must start in a specific, targeted way. China’s overtaking of the United States as the world’s largest agricultural producer did not happen simply through free market forces. Over a number of years, inputs were poured into selected provinces such as Shandong and Anhui; the experience in these provinces was progressively extended to other provinces. The Malaysian palm oil industry started in one estate in the State of Selangor; beginning in the 1960s, specific government land grant schemes, initiatives to assist plantations to diversify away from rubber and incentives for small and landless farmers to grow palm oil led to the dramatic increase

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in palm oil production: Malaysia is now the world’s largest producer and exporter of palm oil. The New Paradigm Districts constitute an ideal region from which to launch the agricultural and agribusiness transformation of Pakistan. Fertile, well-watered and well-drained, the area is already a substantial producer of vegetables and fruits. Because, in general, pricing for these crops is not government controlled, agricultural reform in the region will not require the government to deal with the widespread impact of a change in its pricing and procurement policies towards major crops such as wheat, rice, cotton and sugar cane. Both the quality and quantity of vegetables and fruit produced in the region could be substantially enhanced through improved farming techniques and investment in seed varieties, pest control systems, drip irrigation, water storage, greenhouses, cold storage facilities and processing plants. Produce from the region could help Pakistan eliminate its dependence on foreign tea and pulses and investment in corn processing plants could substantially reduce the country’s dependence on imported edible oils. And the region could contribute to exports of high quality vegetables, specialty fruits and mutton. The opportunities for transformation of the region are exciting and widespread. Through a mix of traditional business, social enterprise and social welfare models, the region could incubate a range of new businesses: collectives to rationalize supply chains and enable greater value to be retained at the farm level, banks to provide financing at every level of the supply chain, agricultural colleges to promote learning and dissemination of seed varieties and best practices, standards bodies to facilitate adoption of fair trade and other standards, equipment manufacturers to produce farm equipment, computerized markets to facilitate trade and price discovery, distributors to open up export markets and innovative entrepreneurs to develop branded product strategies (including a ‘New Dawn’ or similar brand that could be extended to other regions being freed from militancy). Boosting sales of agricultural produce from the region by as little as $100 million a year could do far more to stem the growth of militancy than an ‘investment’ of $1 billion in annual Predator strikes. And Gul could, within two years, become a highly successful agribusiness social entrepreneur rather than a janitor scrubbing a hospital floor caked with blood spilled by Taliban Kalashnikovs or American Predators. The Three-Nation Pipeline A country cannot live in state of continuous tension with, or isolation from, its neighbors. If it does, weird things begin to happen. Its cost of imports rises dramatically, its defense spending balloons, its markets shrink, its ability to absorb regional best practices atrophies, its sense of place and being gets distorted, its imagination begins to run wild and it starts accepting strange bedfellows. This is particularly true of a country such as Pakistan, which is essentially a cultural cipher: its national language has a predominantly Hindi vocabulary and a Persian script, yet its judges, anxious of the cultural influence of India, ban the use of ‘henna’ in wedding ceremonies and its people, afraid of not being recognized as Muslims, forsake the Persian ‘Khuda Hafiz’ (‘God be with you’) for ‘Allah Hafiz’ (‘Allah be with you’). Cut off from India and Iran, Pakistan is a lost country, a ready victim to the latest fantasies about the nature of Islam and its own destiny.

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For every good reason under the sun, Pakistan needs to normalize its relationship with India and Iran. But these are dark times, and normalization appears an ever-receding dream. Of all the hundreds of things to bind neighbors that should and could be done, we may have to concentrate on one: and that one is the three-nation gas pipeline. This is because, of all the things that should and could get done, this one will get done. The pipeline makes perfect sense. It makes perfect economic sense as it provides Iran a cost-effective outlet for its gas and it provides energy-starved India with gas. For energy and foreign currency starved Pakistan, the pipeline offers the single quickest, most substantial means of bring down its $8 billion energy import bill (through about $300 million in savings through gas purchases and $500 million in revenue from gas transmission revenues), alleviating its economically crippling 5,000 megawatt power shortage and rejuvenating gas-dependent industries (such as fertilizers and specialty chemicals). And the pipeline makes perfect political sense as it is easy to push through in all three countries, will increase dependencies in the region and will force neighbors to start dealing with each with maturity and understanding. The only real obstacle to the pipeline is America’s unwillingness to accept the logic of the pipeline and the deeper logic of bringing Iran in from the cold. Later colonial powers almost invariably view their domains from the experience of prior colonists: the Mughal system of government profoundly influenced the British Raj, just as the French tended to view Indochina from the perspective of Hanoi. Similarly, America’s neo-colonial relationship with the Middle East is deeply influenced by Israel’s experience. But the United States needs to form its own view of Iran and would do well to recall that the 9/11 terrorists were neither Iranian nor Shia. In the war against Islamic militancy, Iran, with its Shia orientation and Persian culture, is a critical balance to the increasingly virulent Sunni and Arab militant movements; this is particularly true for Pakistan, which is 75% Sunni and 20% Shia, and has historically always had closer ties with Persia than the Arab world. And, in any event, the isolation strategy just does not work: the United States would be in a substantially stronger position of leverage by enabling Iran to interlink with the world economy, such as through the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. The Transformation of Education Alam Ali was 10 years old when his father died, leaving Alam Ali in charge of his mother, two younger brothers, two goats and a small patch of land. In the late 1950s, the fourteen-year old boy lied about his age to enlist in the army. In between serving on the front, grooming horses and cooking robust Punjabi curries, Alam Ali taught me to handle a horse, bicycle and car and, upon leaving the army, joined our family as our cook and driver. Although he could have educated his four sons for free in a government school, my wholly illiterate mentor spent $30 of his $60 in monthly income to give his sons a slightly better private sector education. And Alam Ali’s sons honored their father’s sacrifice by studying hard. A few years ago, one of his sons graduated with an MBA from a business school in England: Alam Ali would have been proud. Most Asians will be able to relate from personal experience a dozen such stories. Nowhere is the value for education as great as it is in Asia, and, in this respect, Pakistan is just another Asian country. The militants well understand this thirst and how to tap into it.

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For some reason, South Asians have a knack for setting up and running learning enterprises. In Pakistan, in addition to the fast growing madrassah sector, the private schooling industry is booming. Beaconhouse, a for-profit serving the upper end of the market, is possibly the largest private school system in the world and has an enrollment of over 160,000 students through 380 campuses, while The City School has over 150 campuses in 42 cities. Not-for-profit school networks (such as DIL, a US non-profit with 150 schools in Pakistan) are also beginning to grow and, given the generous response of donors so far, I expect that there is a substantial untapped reservoir of private sector charitable funding available for education from resident and non-resident Pakistanis. Substantial additional amounts of funding could be tapped from both Western and Middle Eastern philanthropic and governmental sources and, recently, a private equity fund made the first international equity investment in the Pakistan schooling sector. Tragically, despite the strong demand, private sector execution capability and potential for funding, Pakistan’s education system, controlled largely by its political leaders and public officials, is in a crisis. Of the approximately 60 million people of school-going age, less than 35 million actually attend school and several studies indicate that the percentage of school-goers among the school-age population is actually on the decline. Girls are, of course, the most badly affected: although girls tend to score the highest in national examinations, the ratio of enrolment of girls to boys is 3:4. Today, as many as 15 million girls and 10 million boys in Pakistan receive no formal education whatsoever. UNICEF reports that, of annual central government expenditures during 1995-2005, on average, 1% was expended on education and 20% on defense (in India, where state governments also invest substantially in education, comparable central government statistics are 2% on education and 13% on defense). According to one government task force, as much as 50% of Pakistan’s paltry education budget is pilfered through means such as ‘ghost schools’ (i.e., schools that exist only on paper) and padded construction contracts (during the 2005 earthquake, the schools were the first to collapse, resulting in exceptionally high deaths of school-going children). It is commonplace for teachers to pay bribes to secure jobs at government schools and then fail to show up for work; and those who do fulfill their teaching obligations are, in general, highly deficient in teaching skills and subject matter knowledge. As a result, the children fortunate enough to be enrolled in a government school score extremely poorly on tests for reading, writing, comprehension and mathematics. If Alam Ali had to make educational choices for his four children today, with inflation expected to average 20% this year, perhaps a madrassah education would not look so bad.

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In any event, the engine for the transformation of Pakistan’s educational system has already gathered momentum, and it is passion. The religious brotherhoods and secular groups that have been progressively privatizing the system share a common passion to educate. While the government system traps and sucks out the passion of teachers, the madrassahs and the private schools elicit and reinforce the passion of their participants, whether religious enthusiasts, These little girls study in a co-ed school militants, educators or social entrepreneurs. The established by a social entrepreneur in Kaghan question remains open as to which passion will Valley; in Swat, the second valley over, the Taliban are burning girls’ schools. prevail: the passion to mold children into robotic soldiers of a militant Islam, unable to function effectively in this world, but promised salvation in the next by their dogmatic tutors, or the passion to enable children to think independently, capable of engaging responsibly and effectively as citizens of this world and finding their individual pathways of the spirit. The odds don’t look good for the modernists, but the battle has been joined. Sadly, the United States has been focusing its energies far from the battlefield of the passions. During the Bush Administration, USAID spent some $250 million on education in Pakistan. While much of the money went to pay for US consultants, some good work has been done to improve teacher education and student performance in selected government schools but, when funding dries up for these initiatives, it is likely that the impact of American intervention will wither away as does the influence of the water that seeps though the desert sands of Cholistan. The paradigm of foreign bureaucrats deploying foreign consultants to reform local bureaucracies and government-controlled systems is doomed to failure because the critical challenge Pakistan faces is not one of ‘building capacity’ within these institutions and systems. Let’s not forget that, when it found the political will, Pakistan readily built a nuclear weapons development and delivery capability. As the militants well understand, what is needed is not to build the capacity of the dead hand of government, but to unleash and reinforce the passion of new forces capable of changing the realities of Pakistan. The United States needs to redirect in efforts in the field of education to supporting local social entrepreneurs and incubating a local learning solutions industry committed to the advancement of progressive education in Pakistan. Consistent with the logic of the Internet era, American support can flow along two axes of good: mobilization of models, funding sources and institutions that will advance progressive education and scaling of learning solutions through new media and technology. We live in an exhilarating new age in which the educational prospects of every human being on the planet can be entirely transformed through the harnessing of worldwide interest in education reform, innovative new learning practices and highly scalable new technologies. Our challenge lies within ourselves to embrace this potential and help committed people in Pakistan realize this potential within their country. The

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watchword for the United States needs to be to enable people closest to the ground to deliver solutions, not to take over the task of delivering solutions in strange lands. Mobilization initiatives include: (1) directly supporting for-profit and not-for-profit social enterprises involved in the educational sector; (2) coordinating the efforts of numerous bilateral, multilateral and private philanthropic efforts underway in Pakistan; (3) enhancing funding possibilities for private sector education in Pakistan (including through regionally and internationally financed educational funds and financing programs); (3) promoting the development of community-based, privatepublic and franchising models for education; (4) enabling local peace corps initiatives through which college students are provided stipends to teach in local schools for stipulated periods; and (5) intensively developing educational districts (including in the New Paradigm Districts) in which enterprises, social enterprises, community projects and public-private partnerships are optimized to create a replicable model of a new education paradigm. Scaling initiatives include supporting a cluster of local learning solutions enterprises which focus on: (1) delivering to each student, for a few dollars each, a ‘clicker’ or student response system that constitutes his or her first link to a technology-enabled world of education; (2) equipping each classroom with one low cost projector and laptop (connected, in more advanced settings, to the Internet); (3) developing interactive content and adaptive learning technologies to massively improve student performance at an increasingly low cost; (4) leveraging the highly creative television industry in the country to produce educational content and game shows; and (5) facilitating support and certification programs for the use by teachers of new media and technologies. Believe, America, believe, in the youth, the good people and the social entrepreneurs of Pakistan! Help them acquire a platform and a network to address their nation’s educational challenges in a constructive manner and you will not be disappointed! Conclusion For too long have the decision-makers of Pakistan failed to become leaders of their people and treat power as an exercise in responsibility. Now, they are likely to be desiccated by a new group of decision-makers desperate to propagate their intolerance and hatred. And while the United States may not be able to stem the tide of militancy, the solution is and always has been the same: the coming to power of a responsible leadership.

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