Pakistan News And Discussion-11

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Internal Security Threats: Suicide Bombings    FT.com
<b>Threat perceptions of an unstable state </b>
Khaled Ahmed
The theocratic state will be internally stable through coercion. It will however come to an end after being attacked from the outside for endangering the world 

Pakistan has always suffered from what is termed as ‘domestic political malaise’ and possessed some of the traits of ‘disorder’ common to third world states; but some characteristics have been specific to it right from the start. Also, the trouble it faces relating to the definition of the state is specific to all Muslim states.

<b>The challenged state: </b>The Pakistani state was challenged on the day it was born. The challenge came from the clergy historically in charge of the process of bestowing legitimacy on the state. T<b>he earliest diplomatic messages that went from Karachi to Washington spoke of the ‘internal’ clerical threat more than the ‘external’ threat from India.</b> The ulema taxed the state with the erection of a utopia based on sharia even though there was intra-clerical disagreement over the lineaments of this utopia.

Pakistan responded by initiating a journey away from its Low Church (Barelvi) origin to a High Church (Deobandi) identity with a promise to legislate on the basis of Islam.<b> India-driven revisionist nationalism began to mix with Islam, and an army moulded to fulfil the demands of this revisionist nationalism was fed with the concept of jihad. The army became an ‘externaliser’ of the internal threat.</b> Its generals were forced by revisionism to be ‘tactical’ rather than ‘strategic’ in their thinking. National wars with India were ‘applied’ on internal disorder as a weak poultice.

<b>The clenched fist of the state:</b> Pakistan misunderstood the nature of the modern nation-state. It coercively clubbed together the regions it should have permitted autonomy to; and it ‘separated’ the citizens it should have allowed to merge in one Pakistani identity capable of containing multiple sub-identities. The creation of One Unit as a device to stop the provinces from ‘uniting’ against the Centre laid the foundation of Pakistan’s internal insecurity that was to lead in time to Pakistan army ‘conquering its own people’.

Lack of pluralism, buried in a wrong interpretation of separate electorates, led to insecurity at the level of the individual.<b> The ‘separation’ of the non-Muslim from the Muslim sowed the seeds of another strife that was to undermine state security. It created ‘excluded’ communities whose loyalty to the state was called in question; it also created potentially ‘excludable’ communities, which led to violence as a permanent trait of the state</b>. Because of the function of ‘exclusion’, Pakistan also became a sectarian state after the empowerment of the clergy in jihad. Pakistan’s internal threat in the 1990s, and later, sprang from its sharing of internal sovereignty with the non-state actors it used in jihad.

<b>India as source of internal insecurity:</b> Revisionism of the ‘lesser state’ is extremely self-destabilising. The onus of altering the status quo includes the waging of a just war against an enemy that cannot be defeated. Pakistan has always expressed fear of an ‘external’ threat to its security. This has invariably meant India, a state ‘not reconciled to the existence of Pakistan’. But this ‘external threat’ was of imagination rather than reality. Often it was linked to the military calculus of the ‘imbalance of force’ with India.

India was indeed a factor in Pakistan’s internal insecurity. Pakistan had to regiment itself in order to remain revisionist. Human rights remained suspended even when there was no martial law in the country. State paranoia forced certain elements to be considered pro-India and seen as a threat. Intelligence agencies symptomatise a state’s paranoia. Whole political parties with vote banks big enough to rule Pakistan were dubbed ‘security threat’. In short, it is the ‘straining’ of the lesser revisionist state that creates internal instability which in turn looks like ‘security threat’.

<b>The unstable Islamic state:</b> A Muslim state will always be internally threatened by what may be called constant ‘exemplification’. It will be required to declare Islam as its touchstone, which means it will always be found wanting. It will always be judged relative to a literalist sharia based on the perfect city state of Madina run on the basis of revelation. A nation-state will fail to contain the transnational emotion of its population. It will remain internally threatened by its own declared objectives.

The internal threat pattern will describe the following trajectory. The clergy will become empowered through its informal ‘arbitrage’ between the people wanting sharia and the state preferring pragmatic governance. Popular rejectionism will result from the endemic malfunction of the state in most areas of service delivery. This rejectionism will become violent through the financial and armed empowerment of the clergy. The state will be unstable until it finally becomes theocratic. The theocratic state will be internally stable through coercion. It will however come to an end after being attacked from the outside for endangering the world. Pakistan is embarked on this trajectory, like Iran after Imam Khomeini and Afghanistan under the Taliban that actually accomplished the journey
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