Pakistan Is Not in Any Way on the Verge of a Theocratic Coup

By Manan Ahmed, Indypendent. Posted May 21, 2009.

None of this matters, we are told, because Pakistan is facing “an existential threat” from “violent extremists,” as a U.S. State Department spokesman said. U.S. generals and media commentators are hinting that a military takeover may be the only way to arrest the imminent “failure” — to combat the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan and keep the dreaded nukes from “falling into the hands” of terrorist groups.

A comically exaggerated version of reality underpins such concerns. There are roughly 400 to 500 Pakistani Taliban fighters in the Buner region (the area deemed too threateningly close to Islamabad) and 15,000 to 20,000 operating in the region between Peshawar and the north-west borders of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the number of active Pakistani army personnel ranges around 500,000, supported by an annual budget of approximately $4 billion.

Pakistan is neither Somalia nor Sudan, nor even Iraq or Afghanistan. It is a thoroughly modern state with vast infrastructure, a fiercely critical and diverse media, an active, globalized economy and strong ties with regional powers such as China and Iran. It is not a “failed state.”

Even if Pakistan is not going to capitulate to the Taliban, it does face grave dangers, and the “failed state” rhetoric — dangerous in its own right — forces our attention away from them. In Baluchistan, as a direct result of Musharraf’s heavy-handed military policies, a civil war has been brewing since 2005, and there is no military solution to that unrest. At the same time, anti-Americanism is rising across the country in reaction to the campaign of missile strikes from unmanned U.S. drones, which have killed nearly 1,000 civilians since August 2008. The drones have emboldened religious conservatives who decry “U.S. imperialism” at work in Pakistan, and they are gaining strength with every tally of civilian casualties.

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalization of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy — and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

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Manan Ahmed is a historian of Islam in South Asia at the University of Chicago. He blogs at Chapati Mystery. This article was excerpted from an article originally published in The National, a publication based in the United Arab Emirates.

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