Back To The Future

Earlier this month, veteran diplomat Ahmad Kamal spoke to agathering of some 150 Pakistani Americans in San Francisco.

He is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation in New York and served asPakistan’s permanent representative to the UN during the tumultuous ninetieswhen governance alternated between the Pakistan People’s Party and thePakistan Muslim League. The participants, who had been brought together by a newpro-democracy group, Mashal, listened intently as the ambassador discussedPakistan’s prospects in 2009 and beyond.

After providing a historical synopsis, and noting that his task was madedifficult by the several assassinations that remain unresolved, the ambassadoridentified six factors that hold the key to Pakistan’s future. He identifiedthem as feudalism, which had long acted as a canker in the nation’s strategicculture; the armed forces, which had performed poorly when they ran thegovernment and even more poorly when they fought on the battlefield; theeconomy, which had problems but official statistics neglected the multitudinoustransactions taking place in the large and significant informal sector;religion, the country having been created as a homeland for the Muslims of thesubcontinent and Islam was the glue that held it together; internal politics,which would decide the future with the game-changer being the replacement of awinner-takes-all attitude with an attitude of reconciliation and tolerance; andexternal politics.

The most salient influence came from Washington which the ambassador noted wascalled the real capital of Pakistan by some analysts. Saudi Arabia and Iran werecompeting for Pakistani influence and it would not be surprising to see Iranemerge victorious in the end. It had always had a much deeper influence on theculture of the subcontinent. And, finally, a lot would depend on how India dealtwith Pakistan and whether it put an end to its history of expansionism.

Against this backdrop, Kamal talked of ways to accelerate positive change. Heexhorted the youth to play an active role in coming up with creative solutionsto Pakistan’s myriad problems and advised them to not let their elders talkthem out of innovative thinking. He cited the inspiring example of a young womanwho used the internet to single-handedly focus the world’s attention on thehazards posed by land mines.

In closing, the ambassador noted that the future of Pakistan would be decidedultimately by the battle that is now going on between those who areforward-looking and those who are fixated on past glories. A lively question andanswer session moderated by Jaiza’s Omar Khan followed. Some of theambassador’s points continued to occupy me in the days that followed.

Take the case of feudalism. Hardly a day goes by without some maven holding thatfactor responsible for all of Pakistan’s travails. Yet, in the pages of the Dawn,S. Akbar Zaidi has shown convincingly that the share of agriculture inPakistan’s economy has declined significantly since independence. Maybe thefeudalism of political commentary is not the feudalism of economists but thefeudalism of sociologists. The term may be best interpreted as a surrogate forelitism, a state of the mind, and not a state of the economy.

On the track record of the armed forces, one would be hard put to disagree withthe ambassador. Even Shuja Nawaz, who hails from an army family and who is theyounger brother of a former army chief, takes the army to task in both civil andmilitary spheres in his encyclopaedic history, Crossed Swords.

Even the most nationalistic of Pakistanis would find it hard to accuse Nawaz ofbeing on the payroll of various foreign intelligence services, a charge thatthey have always laid at the door of other writers who have dared to lift theirpen against the army’s sword.

Change will only arise from within the army. The time will come when aforward-looking commander will realise that it’s time to reorganise andrightsize the army, so it can truly become one of Asia’s finest, a prospectthat was put forth by the silver-tongued Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the early 1970s.

Yes, the informal economic sector is large and unaccounted for. But that doesnot mean the economy is doing better than it actually is. It is in a shamblesand much of this sorry performance predates the global meltdown that began onSept 15. Indeed, it goes back to the last two years of the Musharrafadministration.

As for religion, while there can be no doubt that the country is called theIslamic Republic, it is equally evident that religion as a glue failed to holdthe country together in 1971. As one witnesses the struggle going on for thesoul of Pakistan today, not only in the tribal areas and Peshawar but also inIslamabad, Lahore and Karachi, one is made despondent by the thought that oneday the country may be rent asunder not by a deficit of religiosity but by asurplus.

At the Mashal conference, Dr Erfan Ibrahim asked why people had forgotten themessage of tolerance that was put forward by the Quaid in his speech of Aug 11,1947, where he called on all Pakistanis to regard each other as equal citizensregardless of their personal faiths and beliefs. Time did not allow furtherdiscussion of the question at the conference.

However, it is not difficult to answer. Instead of finding inspiration in theQuaid’s pluralistic and entirely secular concept of nationhood, manyPakistanis have succumbed to patriotism, "the last refuge of a scoundrel" toquote Dr Johnson.

Such fervour has led them to a legerdemain where they trace every problem to theenemy’s hand and absolve themselves of any responsibility. When I wrote aboutDr Abdus Salam’s towering achievements on these pages, a person who identifiedhimself as a senior, award-winning journalist wrote to me that the scientist wasa Zionist spy and that is why he was ordered out of the country by PrimeMinister Bhutto.

It is sad that while the headlines in the world press dealing with Pakistan areabout the kidnapping or killing of foreign journalists, the beheadings of‘American spies’ and the honour killings of women, those about India dealwith the successes of its space programme (which has now landed a probe on themoon) and about the transformation of its agrarian economy into a high-techwonder that will soon be one of the world’s strongest.

An attitude of going forward to the past needs to be replaced with one of goingback to the future, a bright future as envisioned by the Quaid, not the dark andconspiratorial future envisioned by Al Qaeda.