Decade of Instability

Decade of Instability

Upon the demise of General Zia in 1988, Pakistan entered a tumultuous decade of political instability, near bankruptcy, international isolation, and a hardening jihadi culture—a period during which it remained dangerously adrift.

The decade saw four consecutive democratic governments—alternating twice under Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif—come 136crashing down before any could finish a full term. The jostling among Pakistan’s power troika—the Army Chief, the president, and the prime minister—kept Pakistan at the brink of a political precipice. Although Bhutto and Sharif’s governments were discredited in large part by their own corruption and malfeasance, as in the past, the intelligence services in collaboration with a range of Islamic parties and other elements undermined them and the democratic process.

The prime example was during the 1988 election that brought Bhutto to power. During this election, the ISI-backed Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) bitterly attacked Bhutto on the grounds that Islam did not permit a woman to serve as a head of state and that she would be unable to safeguard the country’s ideological and national security interests.

Yet Pakistan’s mainstream politicians were not immune to such manipulation either. In 1999, Sharif as prime minister tried to make Shar’ia (Islamic law) part of Pakistan’s constitution. The bill passed the lower house and was slated to pass the upper house in 2000 when Sharif’s party was expected to gain control of the Senate. But Sharif was deposed in a coup by his handpicked Army Chief, Pervez Musharraf, which marked the end of Pakistan’s decade of democracy. During this period, no attempt was made to chart a new course for Pakistan as it swirled in a political maelstrom with stunted development, providing fertile ground for unemployment, illiteracy, and extremism.

Yet, in contrast to its internal political vicissitudes, Pakistan externally pursued a consistent policy of leveraging Islamic proxies against its neighbours to advance perceived national security goals. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the imposition of sanctions on Pakistan in light of its nuclear program, Pakistan entered the 1990s isolated, economically crippled, and, in its view, abandoned by the United States with a jihadi corps in its midst. Many of these elements were redirected to Kashmir to wage a proxy war against India, hijacking the nationalist movement that had emerged in Indian-held Kashmir. Although Pakistan claimed to provide political and moral support to the Kashmiri struggle, the strategic rationale was to tie down Indian troops in Kashmir and bleed it by a thousand cuts in order to bring it to the table to negotiate on Kashmir.

On the western front, keen to avoid at best a continuing descent into chaos in Afghanistan and at worst a hostile regime that might play the 137Pashtun card in Pakistan, the Army, with the civilian leadership fully on board, began to back the military campaign of a new class of warriors that had emerged from Pakistan’s madrasahs-the Taliban. Both in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the goal was to leverage Islamic groups to offset Pakistan’s seemingly hostile neighbours—a policy with clear historical antecedents. Although the goals were rational the means resulted in lethal blowback.

Enlightened Moderation

With Musharraf’s coup and alignment with the US-led ‘War on Terror’ after 9/11, Pakistan once again arrived at a critical crossroads. Forced to confront the spectre of Islamic extremism in the international limelight, the country faced an age-old question: What was its Islamic ethos? Musharraf’s answer was, ’enlightened moderation'.

Beginning with his landmark address to the nation in January 2002 where he called for rejecting terrorism in Kashmir and combating extremism and intolerance, Musharraf throughout his time in power made his plea for enlightened moderation. Enlightened moderation, as outlined by him, was a two-pronged strategy:

The first part is for the Muslim world to shun militancy and extremism and adopt the path of socioeconomic uplift. The second is for the West and the United States in particular to seek to resolve all political disputes with justice and to aid in the socioeconomic betterment of the deprived Muslim world.

Although Musharraf’s formulation was an important attempt to provide an overarching vision for Pakistan and to nationally delegitimise extremism, its execution was deficient and resulted in anything but moderation. While taking some tentative steps in the spirit of enlightened moderation, Musharraf eventually faltered.

Measures such as banning a number of key militant groups and beginning the process of registering madrasahs and reforming their curricula proved tentative: militant groups sprung up under other names, the registration process came to a grinding halt, and longstanding deficiencies in the public education curriculum remained largely unaddressed. Meanwhile, Musharraf’s alliance of political expediency with the Islamic parties and ban of the heads of the two mainstream political parties—Bhutto and Sharif—resulted in a political vacuum that was filled by the Islamic parties and enabled the further flourishing of obscurantism in the country.

Moreover, while decisive in tackling al Qaeda, the Army did not fully sever links with the Taliban or with a number of militant groups operating in Afghanistan and Kashmir, again in the interests of retaining strategic proxies. Compounding the challenge was that some groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating in Kashmir, had over time become part of the social fabric of Pakistan in terms of their perceived heroism in allegedly championing the Kashmiri cause and also in delivering critical social services, for example in the wake of the Kashmir earthquake. Moving against them at the seeming behest of the United States or India could trigger a public backlash.

In sum, Musharraf failed to successfully anchor enlightened moderation, largely due to policies that empowered the Islamic parties and tolerated militant groups. Militant groups that had once trained their guns across the border turned them inward and expanded their control in the frontier region through government-initiated peace deals; fiery clerics and vigilante youth squads who tasked themselves with enforcing Islamic morality proliferated in parts of the country, culminating in the taking over of the Red Mosque in Islamabad in 2007 and its storming by the Army. As enlightened moderation dimmed, it gave way to a darker phenomenon: Talibanization.

Talibanization

Today, Pakistan faces an existential militant Islamist threat that its elected government is trying to combat in collaboration with the Army. Suicide attacks against army headquarters, academic institutions and other public places reflect the critical threat the Pakistani state faces as these extremists strike at both the hardest and softest of targets and instill pervasive fear and insecurity. Whereas once Islam underpinned the state’s flawed narrative of nation building and strategic security non-state actors have hijacked that narrative with an extremist interpretation of Islam for a variety of motives, including the pursuit of a new Islamic order. It is this hijacking of the national Islamic narrative that is a defining feature of Pakistan’s current troubles.

On one hand, there are groups that regard the Pakistani state as an enemy of Islam for having sided with the United States in the invasion of 139Afghanistan and applying force against them. The Army remains locked in a struggle with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)— once a staging ground for the Soviet jihad. The reach of extremism in Pakistan today, however can only be fully understood by examining the presence of a multitude of establishment­spawned jihadi groups in the Punjabi heartland of Pakistan that are turning on the state. These include the Sipah-e- Sababa Pakistan (SSP), Lasbkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Lashkar-e­Taiba (LeT), who thrive in southern Punjab amidst poverty and unemployment. Their recruits come from the more than 3,000 madrasahs in Punjab, many of which have provided foot soldiers for the Soviet jihad, the Kashmir struggle, sectarian conflict, and now al Qaeda’s terrorist operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Alongside these groups are ones waving the banner of an Islamic state and a return to religious purity as the antidote to the Pakistani state’s inability to provide basic services, tackle economic inequities, and deliver justice. Their narrative is a direct function of state failure; their goal is a new if entirely undefined Islamic state. The conflict in Swat is a prime example where a longstanding movement for the implementation of Shari’a law, fuelled by anger at a broken system of justice and an exploitative landed class, violently boiled over with TTP support. Through a series of agreements with the government to cease fire in exchange for the implementation of Islamic law, militants steadily moved within one hundred miles of Islamabad, with one of the leaders claiming that democracy was not an appropriate system of governance in Pakistan. Although the military eventually rebuffed these groups, for the first time their territorial and ideological aspiration vis-a-vis the Pakistani state became clear.

Although the military response to combat these groups is well known and documented, the ideological response is equally important. Here the role of the Islamic parties and clerics is of particular interest. There has always been some tension among Pakistan’s Islamic parties about whether to pursue their avowed goal of an Islamic state through democracy or armed struggle. Although they have never gotten more than 12 per cent of the national vote, and during the Musharraf era, riding a wave of anti-United States sentiment following the invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic parties continue to project influence well beyond their numbers. They have, however, largely bought into the democratic 140process and have periodically spoken out against the violent tactics of insurgents. Alongside the role of the Islamic parties in disavowing such violent means is the question of mounting an ideological defence and reclaiming, if not the narrative, at least a less radical understanding of Islam. The current government has attempted to do this by setting up a seven-member Sufi Advisory Council (SAC) with the aim of combating extremism and fanaticism by spreading Sufism—a more peaceful and less rigid form of Islam anchored in the subcontinent’s history—throughout the country.

Currently, as the state finds itself on the defensive against an array of groups claiming to wave the banner of Islam, it must decisively counter their ideology. In doing so, it must recognise that the core issue is not always a guest for Islamic purity but a reliance on Islamic rhetoric to mask more earthy concerns related to power, poverty, and justice that circle back to the need for better governance in Pakistan. At the same time, jihad—long sanctioned by the state for its strategic security reasons—to achieve these ends must be delegitimised. According to Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North West Frontier Province, ‘The national narrative in support of jihad has confused the Pakistani mind…. All along we’ve been saying these people are trying to fight a war of Islam, but there is a need for transforming the national narrative.’

Yeh Hum Naheen (This is Not Us)

To stave off the ideological inroads of extremism and generate a progressive narrative in Pakistan, the most important constituency is the people of Pakistan. In the Western media, Pakistan is often portrayed as a radicalising society, caught between the mosque and military and teetering on the brink of fundamentalism. The reality is more complex. Pakistan has a robust civil society as seen in the 2007-2009 lawyers’ movement; its media is among the most prolific in the Muslim world. A moderate majority exists that rejects extremism and suicide bombing yet believes in the concept of a Muslim ummah and is anti-US on a host of issues; that condemns the actions of the Taliban as a distortion of Islam yet is uncertain about the means to counter them, particularly the use of force against fellow citizens and Muslims.

Deep schisms exist among ‘moderate’ Pakistani Muslims, tracing back to the divide between the Aligarh and Deoband schools pre-Partition—those who embrace religions and notions of modernity and those who seek salvation 141in Islam’s perceived fundamentals. To understand Pakistan’s Islamic ideology, it is vital to examine this not just at the state level but also at a societal level. The pervasive strand of Islam among the subcontinent’s Muslims has historically been Sufi or Barelvi Islam. Sufi Islam is viewed as more inclusive and flexible, paying no heed to caste, creed, ethnicity, or race. Its physical manifestation in the subcontinent has long been the plethora of shrines across Pakistan frequented by the masses seeking relief from living saints or pirs for their ills, though this insertion of a conduit between man and God has been ripe for manipulation. Since independence, Pakistan’s Sufi culture has come under great strain due to internal and external reasons. Internally, successive regimes have co­opted influential pirs, who, in becoming increasingly politicised and prosperous, came to be viewed by many as part of the hegemonic socio-economic order in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s, more conservative Deobandi and Wahabi views gained greater currency based on four factors: the importation of this ideology by Pakistani workers who went to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to capitalise on the oil boom; the embrace of these views by many in the middle class as Sufism came to be identified with a particular hegemonic order and the state’s failings came to be viewed as only remediable by returning to a purer if amorphous form of Islam; the pan-Islamic revivalism following the Iranian revolution and Saudi attempts to ideologically counter Iranian influence, including in Pakistan; and the aggressive promotion of Wahabi and Deobandi thought in Pakistan during the Soviet jihad through a burst of Saudi financing, madrasahs, and state policy. As such, Pakistani society’s complex Islamic texture has emerged from the top down and bottom up as a more conservative form of Islam and gained currency in a changing socio-economic context.

Over the decades, there has been an increase in conservatism ranging from more women taking to wearing the veil or headscarf; music and dancing being viewed by many as un-Islamic; increased censorship in the name of Islam; and in light of a defunct public education system, madrasahs churning out thousands of students who project a parochial moral zeal and fear far beyond their numbers. A pervasive austerity has hardened across Pakistani society, yet many Pakistanis are cognizant of the distinction between conservatism and fanaticism. One example of this was the strong public support for a military response in the Swat Valley under Taliban sway in the spring and summer of 2009. This was catalysed 142by the release of a video showing a woman being brutally flogged by the Taliban—a video that provoked widespread public anger, highlighting the increasing power of Pakistan’s media in shaping perceptions.

An expression of the public rejection of extremism is the Yeh Hum Naheen (This Is Not Us) movement in Pakistan, with billboards in major cities urging Pakistanis to reject violent extremism and claiming that Islam is a religion of peace. These expressions of civil society even when emanating from specific strata are important to consider in understanding the way ordinary people perceive the role of religion in their lives as well as its distortion. Indeed, a coherent consolidation and injection of such expressions into the national discourse is a vital antidote to the extremism coursing through the veins of Pakistani society.

A New Narrative

From the very creation of Pakistan, Islam has been and will remain a central social and political force. This chapter sought to paint a broad picture of how Islam has been harnessed through Pakistan’s history for everything from nation building to security—an enterprise that was radically escalated during the Zia era. The blowback of this is clear today. The Islamic narrative in Pakistan has been hijacked by an array of groups who use religion as a means to diverse ends: to secure political and territorial power, exorcise corrosive Western influence, engage in class warfare, and redress perceived injustices.

The use and understanding of Islam in Pakistan has always been in flux, evolving in response to time and internal and external events. The question that arises, then, is not whether religion has a role in Pakistan but how it can be channelled as a force for progressive change. What form should an enabling narrative of Islam in Pakistan assume? Part of the answer lies in focusing on building an inclusive and robust Pakistani state invoking progressive Islamic values. The onus lies with the Pakistani leadership and people, but the international community can help in the promotion of good governance, education reform, and economic opportunity, as well as in the resolution of deep-seated regional insecurities and grievances that have led to the cultivation of extremist entities as a matter of state policy.