Pakistan News And Discussion-12

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Radicalised youth brewing danger</b>
FT
Moeed Yusuf
<b>Were the 105 million Pakistanis presently below the age of 24 to become increasingly inclined towards radical ideologies, the country could end up choosing the Talibanisation course </b>
   
Sixty years after independence, the uncertainty surrounding Pakistan’s future is just as great as it was at the country’s birth in 1947. At independence, many feared that the ‘idea of Pakistan’ would flounder. Today, concerns about Pakistan are even graver; the most pessimistic predictions suggest that Pakistan will ‘completely fail’ by 2015.

There is a virtual consensus that the most probable cause of Pakistan’s future decline – and indeed its greatest challenge – will be internal extremism.

Current discourse on Pakistan has maintained a focus on immediate threats from extremists and says little about Pakistan’s medium to long-term prospects. It would be more pertinent to look at aspects that may push Pakistan to a point of no return.

There are two channels that could take Pakistan down the ‘Talibanisation’ route. Either a prolonged period of ideologically driven violence in the face of the state’s inability or unwillingness to tackle radical elements could allow the latter to establish control; or radical elements could permeate their message into the society, a large majority of which could then choose to support the modelling of the state on that ideology.

Most literature on Pakistan seems to converge on the fact that a violent takeover is unlikely. A fully functional state, with a secular, civil bureaucracy and military, acts as a strong buffer against the possibility of a sudden, forced overthrow reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The potential for the radical message to permeate society is more likely. This can only be a gradual process. Arguably then, the key to the country’s future direction is held by the coming generation: the Pakistani youth. Were the 105 million Pakistanis presently below the age of 24 to become increasingly inclined towards radical ideologies, the country could end up choosing the Talibanisation course. This will be the time when an overwhelming electoral victory for Islamist parties would become a realistic possibility. At such a point, even the bureaucracy and military are likely to be overcome by ideological fervour.

But how likely is the prospect of radicalised Pakistani youth?

Literature on youth violence converges on four ‘warning signs’ and an ‘exacerbating factor’ whose presence points to the likelihood of young males (the focus of youth-violence literature is overwhelmingly centred on males) becoming radicalised. The signs – the high number of young males as a proportion of the total population, economic deprivation, a chasm between expectations and reality and a perceived sense of deprivation – point to an increased possibility of ‘negative mobilisation’ of the youth. The ‘exacerbating factors’ often act as the tipping point, and turn the possibility of radicalisation into reality. Countries that exhibit the first four characteristics are at a high risk of implosion but can manage the situation by employing policies that act as safety valves. However, in the presence of strong exacerbating factors, negative mobilisation is inevitable.

<b>An analysis of Pakistan’s situation against these benchmarks paints a worrisome picture. The youth cohort in Pakistan is the highest in any country besides Yemen. With two-thirds of its population officially classified as ‘youth’ and ‘children’, Pakistan is likely to remain amid a ‘youth bulge’ well beyond 2020. While not a sufficient condition for youth violence, historical evidence does point to a positive relationship between the number of young people in a society and radicalisation.</b>

The question of economic deprivation is intrinsically linked to educational attainment and labour market conditions. In Pakistan, while poverty numbers have fallen, the number of poor in absolute terms remains high and inequality continues to rise. According to official figures, the ratio of consumption of the richest 20 percent versus the bottom 20 percent has increased further. The sense of economic deprivation is all but natural when we also consider that the majority of youth in the country are living in households from the lower economic strata.

The abysmal state of the education sector is well known. Public-sector schools, which cater to 70 percent of the population, are in an advanced state of decline. The contribution of madrassas in preparing students for employment is negligible compared to their role in producing indoctrinated ‘to-be militants’.

Private-sector schools, although varying in quality, are the only centres that produce students who are relatively well-grounded in modern literature. However, traditionally, most of these have maintained entry barriers, in terms of high fees and student background profiling. This is gradually changing with the rise in the number of private schools in rural areas.

Poor educational quality and a constrained labour market imply that the majority of students educated in public schools remain either unemployed or underemployed. Products of premier private schools – mostly children of the elite – on the other hand find employment with relative ease, not only because of their superior education but also because of the their socio-political connections.

For a large segment of the youth then, the expectations raised by attaining education are almost always shattered. A manifestation of this frustration is the increasingly common sight of young, well-dressed and often fairly articulate males begging in the streets of cities like Lahore and Karachi. They explicitly state that their post-secondary or higher education degrees have not been able to land them respectable jobs, and are then forced to beg. Such scenes commonly preceded a number of African civil wars.

Economic deprivation naturally generates a sense of grievance and alienation among the average youth. A number of studies are now showing that young males from lower economic strata are growing increasingly resentful of the secular elite, who they view as predators seeking to maximise their own gains without allowing the larger populace a share of the pie. Poor governance, high corruption levels, nepotism, and lack of peaceful political outlets for the youth continue to exacerbate such sentiments. The reverse trend is also evident. A survey of educational institutions pointed to disdain among students from English-medium schools for their Urdu-medium and madrassa counterparts: children of the elite consider these students backward.

All of this points to the presence of all the ‘warning signs’ of youth radicalisation in Pakistan. The imminence of the threat, however, is reflected by the existence of an active apparatus that is working to lure disgruntled youth towards radical chores; this constitutes the ‘exacerbating factor’.

Specifically, examples of exacerbating factors in Pakistan include: Islamic parties who have used the Islamist discourse for political expediency since the Afghan jihad; the highly organised grassroots communication and penetration network of the Islamists; physical infrastructure and safe havens for militant training; the propensity of the state to remain complacent about the risk involved in creating an alliance with the extremist enclave and tolerating youth recruitment for years; the state’s use of Islam as the unifying force and thus its inability to challenge ‘Islamist’ indoctrination from the extremist cadre; and the widening fault lines between the conservative and secular elite.

Few other countries can boast of an Islamist enclave that has successfully managed to use the state to its advantage in an environment where majority of the society does not advocate an Islamist system.

<b>While there are still a number of positive aspects in the Pakistani society that could delay the process of youth radicalisation – lack of mass support for Islamists; a challenged, yet vibrant, civilian enclave; the growing role of women in society; strong disapproval of mass violence and suicide attacks; a secular leadership; and deeply divided Islamic parties are some pertinent examples – their utility is limited to delaying, and not eliminating , the potential for radicalisation</b>.

Although the four ‘warning signs’ and ‘exacerbating factors’ are intrinsically linked, they require varying, but simultaneous policy responses. Population control, reduced levels of inequality, and comparable education and employment opportunities for the entire youth cohort are all goals the government is currently pursuing through multifaceted policy interventions.

While these are likely to redress the situation with regard to the warning signs, the nature of these problems suggests that dividends are only likely in the long run. In the interim, the much more important objective ought to be to eliminate the exacerbating factors.

Here, until the state’s own use of Islamic discourse and its alliance with the Islamists remains intact, the latter will continue to frame the ‘us versus them’ paradigm in a religious idiom and resultantly maintain their support base.

If the state remains complacent, an irreversible process of negative mobilisation of the youth may well reach an advanced stage before policies regarding population, education, employment, and polarisation begin to bear dividends.

<i>The writer is a research fellow at the Strategic and Economic Policy
Research (Pvt Ltd.) in Islamabad </i><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I think education doesn't matter, recent Indian Muslim terrorist in UK had proved, education and upper middle class Muslim family can produce terrorist, Ideology or Islam is a problem.