Counterterrorism: the course of the debate

The writer is an analyst and commentator.

In last week’s piece, I sought to call the readers’ attention to the problem of wealthy, highly-educated violent extremist Muslims that have used mass murder as an instrument of their politics – for example the slaughter at Safoora Goth and the massacre in San Bernardino, California.

This is a vexing problem for public policy, and perhaps an even messier challenge for society-at-large. Public policy has a problem of managing the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, for a growing number of young people, a growing percentage of whom will see this gap as being something that is either a product of discrimination against their religious identity, or something that can be solved by diving into this identity in a dramatic, extreme and violent manner.

Society-at-large, particularly Muslim-majority societies face a more problematic situation. They have very little capacity to counter the arguments of traditional religious narratives in which brute force and violence are privileged above mercy, compassion and coexistence.

What has ended up happening as a result of this twin challenge can be caricatured in two ways. The first outcome is what we might call ‘the apologist, Islam-is-peace mantra’. The second is what we might call ‘the doubling down on 20th century anti-imperialist rage’. On the one hand we lament that the terrorists do not represent Islam, which is absolutely valid and true. They do not. On the other hand, we seek to explain the existential rage and discontent of the violent extremist.

There’s no real contradiction between these two, and Ejaz Haider’s thoughtful blog-entry in response to my article last week identifies the tension quite accurately. Feisal Naqvi also offered his response to the piece, by sharing his thoughtful 3 Quarks Daily piece on the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, and arguing the incompatibility of the modern state with Islamic jurisprudence.

Naqvi’s argument is one that is a favourite of what I would call ‘Pakistan Studies discontents’. Generally speaking, this would be anyone that has had the good fortune and good sense to question the inconsistent and questionable version of history that most Pakistanis are subjected to. All nations are breastfed on myths and half-truths, but in most cases, the mythology tends to strengthen the projects of nationhood. In Pakistan, one could fairly question whether any benefit at all has accrued to state or society from the various half-truths we’ve constructed to seem less experimental and radical than we really are as a nation.

Where one can legitimately diverge from the mainstream ‘Pakistan Studies discontent’ crew is the question of the viability of the original experiment. Pakistan is a geopolitical, historical and sociological reality. Neither the partition of 1971, nor the intense vitality of ethnic and linguistic nationalisms in the country, nor the proliferation of the various malignant tumours of violent extremism in the name of faith can undermine the enduring and enchanting nature of this experiment called Pakistan. The state and society’s various dysfunctions don’t necessarily disprove the wisdom of our nationhood – they are simply evidence of mistakes having been made (and continue to be made).

The principal challenge Naqvi tried to address in his 2011 piece was whether the potential for an Islamic society to be a liberal democracy exists or not. He is not optimistic, and I suspect a big reason for the prognosis is the terrible state of affairs in the one country that has had (relatively) more freedoms and democracy than any other Muslim majority country that could be consistent with a traditional ‘liberal democracy’.

This is a fascinating and never-ending debate. Very few educated Pakistanis can claim not to have ruminated on the nature of the state, and the degree of ‘Islamic’ that is either too much, or too little. Yet, I would argue that the challenge of the highly educated, wealthy terrorist who kills in the name of the faith, has very little to do with how Islamic or not-Islamic the state is.

Is there another democratic, Muslim-majority country that offers the freedoms that Pakistan offers, that has attempted to ‘Islamise’ as Pakistan has? One could argue that on a relative scale, there’s no country that comes close to the concurrent experiment with democracy, freedom and formal Islamisation that Pakistan has indulged in.

In the beginning, there was a degree of humility and thoughtfulness that informed the journey. The scholar Mohammad Asad (formerly Leopold Weiss) was brought in by the government as early as 1948 to contemplate the parameters of governance in this new kind of state, in which Islam was supposed to be a big deal. People like Zafarullah Khan (openly Ahmadi) and the Aga Khan (definitively Ismaili) were part of the central nervous system of Pakistani public policy. Over time, the freedoms offered by Pakistan contracted, and something that calls itself ‘Islamisation’ expanded. The result is a discourse that rejects pluralism and sneers with contempt at any historically accurate version of Quaid-e-Azam or the founding fathers.

Could the phenomenon of the angry Muslim (who happens to be wealthy and well-educated) that is driven to terror not be a result of too little ‘Islam’ in the formal structures of Pakistan, but possibly too much of it?

This of course ignores the more fundamental problem of whether version A of Islamisation (Ziaul Haq’s) is better or worse than version B of Islamisation (Al-Qaeda’s), which could be better or worse than version C of Islamisation (Amir Liaquat’s).

This entire debate should leave reasonable people deeply dissatisfied. There’s no end to the circles we could make, around and around and around this edifice. I think it misses the point altogether.

Public policy has more than enough heft and teeth available to it to prevent and punish terror, no matter how well spoken and wealthy its perpetrators may be because Pakistani public policy, its parliament, its constitution and its laws, are based largely on the legacy of the ultimate liberal democracy (Great Britain). This political and administrative infrastructure is about as Islamic as the ‘all you can eat’ iftar menus at our restaurants in the Holy Month, meaning that it is Islamic enough to be called Islamic, without in any way preventing its being effective.

The societal challenge posed by wealthy, educated, English-speaking terrorists is much more potent, and more complex. Even if the state became 100 percent effective at preventing terror, it would do so at a tremendous, and constantly growing cost. This is because the discontent that drives entitled young men and women to want to kill helpless and innocent fellow human beings is radioactive, and the legitimacy afforded to the discontent has not been credibly challenged at scale. The numbers of those angry violent extremists will keep growing, unless all the constituent elements of their production are addressed.

An Islamic or theological response to terror is only a small portion of the challenge that must be posed to narratives of the religion that compel violent extremist tendencies or reactions. The larger challenge is as secular, liberal and democratic as you can get. Let’s take the problem of sectarian hatreds in southern Punjab as an example.

Several decades of social programming have produced the Sunni discontent that feeds the ranks of groups like the ASWJ and the LeJ. The theological or political sectarian argument is only one part of this programming. The other very potent part of it is the vast economic disparity between the Shia power elite in certain parts of the country and the non-elite Sunni majority in those areas. That potency of scale in turn generates the operational wherewithal to groups like the LeJ to inspire and support the entitled, wealthy, highly-educated terrorist. This loop is elemental.

Counterterrorist kinetic actions can behead organisations like the LeJ in a matter of minutes. But they cannot successfully address the Petri dishes in which hatred becomes an unstoppable virus. Does inoculating against this virus necessitate debates about the degree of Islamic-ness of a state? Or does it necessitate debates about how to generate millions of jobs a year? The national security discussion in Pakistan has been allowed to navel-gaze and ruminate self-consciously for too long – at the expense of pure, unadulterated economic growth. Maybe it is time to change the course of the debate.