Pakistan: Now or Never?

Egypt and Pakistan; something borrowed, something new

The Egyptian uprising contains much that is familiar to Pakistan – the dark warnings of a coup, in Egypt’s case delivered by Vice President Omar Suleiman, the role of political Islam, and a relationship with the United States distorted by U.S. aid and American strategic interests which do not match those of the people.

President Hosni Mubarak cited Pakistan as an example of what happened when a ruler like President Pervez Musharraf – like himself from the military - was forced to make way for democracy. ”He fears that Pakistan is on the brink of falling into the hands of the Taliban, and he puts some of the blame on U.S. insistence on steps that ultimately weakened Musharraf,” a 2009 U.S. embassy cable published by WikiLeaks said.

Comparisons with Pakistan tend to make you somewhat sceptical about the chances of Egypt’s uprising turning out well.

Yet there is something quite new coming out of Egypt that has the potential to be transformative across the Muslim world. And that is the rejection of all forms of old authority, including, significantly, religious authority.

“The revolution was not just directed against the autocratic, repressive and corrupt Egyptian regime, which relied on an alliance of money, power and corruption. It was also directed against the official religious establishment and its discourse that supports this regime, either directly or indirectly.” Hossam Tammam writes in Egyptian paper Al Masry Al Youm. (scroll down to see the story as the link opens a page with a lot of space at the top).

“The Egyptian revolution has completely reconfigured the religious scene and clarified the public’s position towards religious institutions and discourses in the country. The result has been surprising. No one expected that religious Egyptians are capable of overriding the powers of religious institutions and of challenging religious discourses that they suddenly perceived as part of a corrupt and repressive regime. The official religious establishments–both Islamic and Christian–have been the biggest losers in the revolution.”

Such a trend, if it were allowed to flourish, would be tremendously important in the context of Pakistan, where political parties and the military alike have both used, and been held hostage by religious parties whose power by far exceeds their poor showing at the ballot box.  In a conservative society (as both Egypt and Pakistan are) few dare face down the accusation of “not being Muslim enough” by challenging the religious establishment. The last well-known figure to do so in Pakistan, Punjab governor Salman Taseer, was gunned down last month over his call for a reform to the country’s blasphemy laws, and his death celebrated by the religious right.  Many of the voices speaking out against his killing came from young Pakistan bloggers.

Army, Allah and America: on Pakistani pitfalls and the future of Egypt

All countries are unique and comparing two of the world’s most populous Muslim countries, Egypt and Pakistan, is as risky as comparing Britain to France at the time of the French Revolution. But many of the challenges likely to confront Egypt as it emerges from the mass protests against the 30-year-rule of President Hosni Mubarak are similar to those Pakistan has faced in the past, and provide at least a guide on what questions need to be addressed.  In Pakistan, they are often summarised as the three A’s — Army, Allah and America.

Both have powerful armies which are seen as the backbone of the country; both have to work out how to accommodate political Islam with democracy, both are allies of America, yet with people who resent American power in propping up unpopular elites.

As my Reuters colleague Alastair Lyon writes,  Egypt’s sprawling armed forces — the world’s 10th biggest and more than 468,000-strong — have been at the heart of power since army officers staged the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy. Mubarak’s announcement that he was naming his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as vice-president was seen as a move towards an eventual, military-approved handover of power.  And Egyptian protesters have sometimes tried to see the army as their ally — an institution that puts country first before personal gain.

Yet armies, as Pakistan has discovered over its many years of on-again off-again military rule, are not designed for democracy. They are designed to be efficient, and with that comes the hierarchy and obedience to authority that would seem alien to many of those out on the streets of Cairo.

In his book about the Pakistan Army, defence expert Brian Cloughley writes about how the British general, the Duke of Wellington, responded to democracy in his first cabinet meeting as prime minister: ”An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.” The story is told as part of an argument about why the Pakistan Army has never been particularly successful at running the country.

“All Pakistan’s army coups have been bloodless, successful and popular – but popular only for a while,” he writes. “The trouble is that military people are usually quite good at running large organisations, even civilian ones, but generally fail to understand politics and government, and the give-and-take so necessary in that esoteric world.”

It is a lesson that may yet need to be learned in Egypt.  As Amil Khan wrote from Islamabad in his Twitter feed,  “Love the way Pakistani twitterers puzzled by Egyptians’ trust in army. Guys, you’re kinda similar, but kinda different.”

from FaithWorld:

Lots of advice for Obama on dealing with Muslims and Islam

President-elect Barack Obama has been getting a lot of advice these days on how to deal with Muslims and Islam. He invited it by saying during his campaign that he either wanted to convene a conference with leaders of Muslim countries or deliver a major speech in a Muslim country "to reboot America’s image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular”. But where? when? why? how? Early this month, I chimed in with a pitch for a speech in Turkey or Indonesia.  Some quite interesting comments have come in since then.

Two French academics, Islam expert Olivier Roy and political scientist Justin Vaisse argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on Sunday that Obama's premise of trying to reconcile the West and Islam is flawed:

Such an initiative would reinforce the all-too-accepted but false notion that “Islam” and “the West” are distinct entities with utterly different values. Those who want to promote dialogue and peace between “civilizations” or “cultures” concede at least one crucial point to those who, like Osama bin Laden, promote a clash of civilizations: that separate civilizations do exist. They seek to reverse the polarity, replacing hostility with sympathy, but they are still following Osama bin Laden’s narrative.

Instead, Mr. Obama, the first “post-racial” president, can do better. He can use his power to transform perceptions to the long-term advantage of the United States and become a “post-civilizational” president. The page he should try to turn is not that of a supposed war between America and Islam, but the misconception of a monolithic Islam being the source of the main problems on the planet: terrorism, wars, nuclear proliferation, insurgencies and the like.

Also on Sunday, the Istanbul newspaper Sunday's Zaman ran a piece by sociologist Dogu Ergil who spelled out what he thought "moderate Muslims" expected of Obama.

Moderate or non-ideological Muslims expect Mr. Obama to support democratic trends in their countries, but not to push them from above using ruling elites that will never adopt a democratic agenda but rather will simply play for time, making only cosmetic changes. This will, in turn, further reinforce the power of autocratic regimes that are threatened by genuine democracy.

Muslim moderates look at religion as a cultural affair, wanting to render it autonomous of politics so that it will be protected from political power and in the same way, preventing it from seeking political power. So they want the Obama administration to press their governments to enact reforms that will pave the way to democratic politics and legal changes that will allow for more individual freedoms. They do not want a hypocritical stance from an America which advocates democracy but supports the most authoritarian regimes in the Arab world for the sake of oil deals and other strategic ends. The Bush administration set a very bad example of paying lip service to democracy, which, in fact, worked as a vehicle to blackmail Arab regimes and served America's strategic interests.

Michael Fullilove at the Brookings Institution made a pitch for an Obama speech in Indonesia in the New York Times while several Moroccan blogs have been running a campaign (including a petition with a long list of reasons) to have him speak there. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an exiled Egyptian sociologist and human rights who is a visiting professor at Harvard and Indiana universities, made the case for Indonesia or Turkey in the Washington Post.

Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador in the United States and Britain, has a long list of suggestions for a reformed U.S. policy towards the Muslim world in the Harvard International Review.  The list is fairly extensive, although it would have been even more informative if it had included suggestions for what should change in the Muslim world.

U.S. military a threat to Pakistan -poll

U.S. government and military leaders worry that  the next attack on the homeland will emanate from western Pakistan, believing al Qaeda to have reconstituted there.

But Pakistanis worry too for their security and their fear is  the U.S. military itself.

A couple of polls on what ordinary Pakistanis think of the  U.S. campaign against al Qaeda makes for interesting reading,  coming as it does ahead of the second  U.S. presidential debate between candidates Barack Obama and John McCain where Pakistan will likely figure high on the foreign policy agenda, as it did in the previous round.

More than four in 10 (45 percent) of those polled by Gallup said the U.S. military presence in neighbouring Afghanistan was a threat to Pakistan.  Only 17 percent said the United States did not imperil their country while a sizeable 38 percent did not have an opinion

Pakistanis appear to be worried about a  U.S. military presence in Asia itself, suggesting the distrust that has crept into the relationship between the two allies runs deep and is not just about the war along the  Afghan-Pakistan border.

Forty-three percent of residents said a U.S. military presence in Asia threatens Pakistan and again only 17 percent said it did not.

Gallup carried out the poll in June, much before the United States intensified cross-border attacks on militants inside Pakistan including the first known ground assault in  September. So, for a significant proportion of Pakistanis  some of those fears are coming true.