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Friday March 29, 2024

Daesh: the postmodern non-state

There is one aspect of the threat of non-state actors like Daesh (or Isil, or Isis) that terrifies the imagination above all others. To beat the modern state, Daesh does not need to beat the modern state at being a modern state. Everybody knows that entities like Da’esh have no

By Mosharraf Zaidi
July 08, 2015
There is one aspect of the threat of non-state actors like Daesh (or Isil, or Isis) that terrifies the imagination above all others. To beat the modern state, Daesh does not need to beat the modern state at being a modern state.
Everybody knows that entities like Da’esh have no chance of winning a conventional conflict against coherent and powerful state structures like the Egyptian Army or the Indonesian Navy or the Pakistani Air Force. Daesh knows this too. That is why it doesn’t get into the conventional war racket to begin with. It plays the unconventional game. To win, entities like Daesh simply need to eke out an existence that is parallel to the traditional state’s existence. In other words, the modern state, unless it enjoys absolute sovereignty across absolutely all of its territory, in all realms possible, cannot win any fight that it enters. Or put even more simply, the modern state cannot beat the postmodern medieval non-state – because they aren’t playing on the same battlefield. Daesh will beat the modern state at the game that is being played, because while Daesh is playing and winning that game, the modern state is still stuck in Westphalia, the Treaty of Versailles and the inequities of post cold-war uni-polarity of global affairs.
On Monday evening, US President Barack Obama offered an optimistic profile of the sixty-nation coalition that he believes is making progress in “the fight against Isil”, but for once, his critics are absolutely right. As senior US Senator John McCain says, what the United States and its allies are doing, is “disconnected from any coherent strategy to defeat Isil”.
The problem is that there cannot be and will not be a single coherent strategy that can defeat entities like Isil or Daesh because this is a fight between vastly different entities. The modern state, or any coalition of modern states, or all the modern states put together, have no chance of defeating a postmodern, medieval non-state. Conversely, the state will never truly or fully lose to the non-state, unless that state has already collapsed.
The only countries in which Daesh has real potency are countries where large swathes of territory are no longer shaped by the rules that govern a modern state: Libya, Syria and Iraq. Yet this is no reason for complacency in countries like Indonesia, Egypt or Pakistan. Daesh and what it represents are existential threats to all Muslims societies for the very reason that it cannot territorially overrun these countries on its own. It is the fissiparous, self-defeating dysfunction of Muslim-majority countries that is the biggest ally of Daesh.
Imagine an armoured division full of tanks, attack helicopters and gunships, highly sophisticated, encrypted signals units, heavy artillery and armoured personnel carriers trying to fight a ground war against a virus that can be contracted by breathing. Most armies are going to lose that fight, without any shots being fired. Trying to conceive of a victory over Daesh or any permutation thereof is like trying to imagine this vaunted armoured division of our imagination beating the virus in the air. You can’t buy enough ammunition to guarantee victory.
Pakistan has had a strange and complex theoretical and operational set of relationships with non-state actors. Once upon a time, the state was a proliferator of non-state actors. Given the constraints of resources and capacity that Pakistan faced from its very conception, this was an understandable tactic. Over time, the tactic became a strategy, and over time, the strategy morphed into a national framework. Today, a pervasive contempt for the very idea of the state permeates every level of state and society – with an impact that is difficult to fully surmise.
On the one hand, the constraints and limitations of the state have given rise to an innovation economy that keeps finding ways to do things outside the scope of what is normally defined as regular state behaviour. On the other, the fact that our state and society have become accustomed to using non-state actors to do the work that states should be doing has produced dangerous and unsustainable pressures on the peripheries of Pakistan – one example of this is our enduring relationships with entities like the Haqqani Network, a prime candidate if there ever was one, to adopt or morph into Daesh or Daesh-Light.
Our political discourse is a strange but extremely willing bedfellow of the non-state-isation of Pakistan. Both those inside the halls of power and those outside it contribute to the creeping and insidious delegitimisation of the state with almost everything that they do. Angry members of the opposition tear away at already fragile state organisations and institutions for their limited competence, not realising that their very existence is a miracle, and that without sustained nurturing, those entities are at the precipice of collapse. No better example of this exists than the Election Commission of Pakistan. Meanwhile, those within government, like the prime minister, ache for solutions to problems, no matter where they come from, or who pays for them.
Invariably, because of the administrative structures of the state, no solutions are forthcoming from within the state (except for the very rare instances in which disruption has been cultivated, such as at places like the Punjab IT Board, or Nadra). This means that more and more and more, the state is turning to non-state entities and actors to figure out how to do the business of the state. At one level, this is a remarkable sign of openness to learn and willingness to get things done. At another, it is a terrifying indicator of how far deep our malaise is. If we don’t have confidence in the state’s problem solving and work-doing ability any more, what are we doing sustaining the massive state infrastructure that we sustain?
The terrifying answer of course is that we are slaves to momentum and inertia. There is an inevitable intersection we are headed towards where the traditional modern state will crash into the non-traditional, postmodern non-state. The state cannot emerge from the pile up as the victor because the shape and form of what it is about to crash into is totally different. As the Pakistani scholar Moeed Yusuf keeps warning, the complexity of the challenge of entities like Daesh is that as long as you have a single citizen that hesitates in choosing the Islamic Republic over the ‘Khilafat’, you have a clear and present existential threat to the state, or in this case, our Islamic Republic. How do you then win against Daesh?
For too many people working on countering violent extremism, the answer is in the question: “you have to counter the ideology of violent extremism”. This is a self-defeating loop that we have now been running around in, like gerbils on a hamster wheel. Round and round and round we go. Since at least 9/11. If latter-day post Al-Qaeda terrorists like Saad Aziz, or the Nigerian underwear bomber, or other lone-wolves, were amenable to alternative ideologies, they would have found them on the internet and adopted them. Violent extremists are not simply a product of chat rooms, and madressah sermons. They are products of local and global narratives that produce a brazen contempt for the traditional modern state and its paraphernalia.
This contempt is not hard to find in modern Muslim societies, from Turkey, to Indonesia, from Tanzania to Tajikistan. People hate the things that have come to symbolise the modern state: slow and inefficient processes, cold and heartless outcomes. Bureaucracies that exist to serve themselves and their cadres before they serve the people. Armies that compete with civilians for influence and power. Taps that serve water-borne diseases. Schools that extinguish the light in children’s eyes. Hospitals that proliferate pain and misery. Courts that dole out injustice. Policemen that serve and protect only the rich and the famous.
The contempt people have for the state is not unfounded. It is real and it has long-term potency. Fighting and beating non-traditional, postmodern medieval non-states like Daesh will require a departure from the behaviour profile of the traditional modern state. It will require the reimagining of the modern state altogether. It doesn’t feel like we’re ready.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.