“Your actions speak so loudly that I
cannot hear what you say” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s first communication to the Pakistani mission abroad read: “The immediate attention of government will be focused on our neighbours. Unless the region is peaceful, our efforts for growth and development will not meet with success.” Pakistan has troubled relations with both India and Afghanistan. Despite Pakistan hosting one of the world’s largest refugee populations from Afghanistan that fled the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, it is seen as interventionist by the Afghan people. This was pretty evident during my interactions with my Afghan classfellows at Syracuse University, who vociferously opposed any role for Pakistan in deliberations on Afghanistan’s future. The situation is no different in India. With the memory of the Mumbai attacks still alive, which were planned and carried out by non-state actors in Pakistan, even small events can stir strong emotions among Indians. According to a recent poll by Lowey Institute for International Policy on Indian public perceptions about their future in the world, 94 percent Indians consider Pakistan a threat. What has Pakistan done to deserve this perception among its neighbours? It has largely relied on hard power to shape its behaviour to get what it wants.
Professor Joseph Samuel Nye of Harvard University coined the term ‘soft power’ in describing the ability to affect people to do what you want. According to Nye, this can be done in three ways: you can coerce people, you can pay them, or you can attract them and persuade them. Compelling others to act by dint of military or economic strength falls in the category of ‘coercive power’. It is the soft power of attraction and persuasion that prevails today and that works best when used in combination with hard power. In her confirmation testimony, Hillary Clinton had said, “We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural — picking the right tool or combination of tools for each situation.” Soft power is defined by how you are perceived by your target, and this is where public opinion becomes very important.
With the advent of the information age, the dynamics of power have changed tremendously. Ordinary people now have access to information technology that was once considered a luxury. Smart phones, computers and social media tools are not only new sources of information but also the means to express and spread one’s own opinions, to organise and protest. These devices carry different stories from one corner of the world to the other and build public opinion. In essence, the public around the world now has a seat at the table.
Countries that are perceived as coercive have difficulty achieving their objectives through persuasion in the presence of hostile populations. Sounds familiar? Just as many Pakistanis view the United States as the source of their problems because it uses drones to kill militants on its territory, a large majority of Afghans look at Pakistan as the source of their problems because it has exercised interventionist policies by installing or supporting unpopular regimes in Afghanistan. Pakistan continues to use its influence with the Taliban leadership to achieve the desired outcomes in Afghanistan, but how this is shaping Afghan perceptions is outside its control. It nevertheless has impact on any step Pakistan takes vis-à-vis Afghanistan. In India, Pakistan’s inability to deal with militancy creates jitters because it can spill over to the other side of the border and create instability. Any attempt by Pakistan to improve relations with its neighbours must take account of these perceptions.
Governments have little control over the narrative being generated about their respective countries because the relative strength of a society, its policies, cultural appeal, socio-political values and level of development combine to tell their own story of events through the means available to them. This has larger foreign policy implications. The story being generated by Pakistan is that it is the hotbed of terrorism. It is a country where girls are attacked for seeking education, where visiting sportsmen are targeted, tourists are shot dead, polio vaccinators are not spared, minorities are hounded, citizens’ lives have no value and the government does not really care or is too weak to act.
We have positive stories too, but they do not dominate the narrative about Pakistan. For instance, the story of the child activist Malala Yousafzai, which became a big hit around the world, also carried a negative message about the threats girls faced at the hands of militants in Pakistan. It had a massive appeal because it resonated with the core value of education, so much so that Malala Yousafzai has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
From time to time successive governments have launched initiatives at ‘image building’. The Islamabad Institute of Policy Research was established by Nawaz Sharif in June 1999 “in order to counter adverse and unhealthy propaganda by anti-Pakistan elements at national and international levels.” One of the review documents of this think tank reads: “The western media has been highlighting only those things where the image of Pakistan could be tarnished and has been vociferous in demanding more, the ‘doing more syndrome’. This is partly due to the fact that we in Pakistan have seldom given importance to soft power and image building process of the nation (sic). Pakistan needs to promote its domestic and international performance to alter its image in the eyes of foreign media.”
While it is true that foreign governments promote their desired narratives through the media, the real story of Pakistan being communicated through various means cannot be glossed over by adding a positive spin. By allowing terrorists to run amok in the country and using coercive power against weaker sections of the population, we are digging our own graves, figuratively and literally. We have neither countered the terrorists’ menacing narrative by appealing to our Sufi culture and values of tolerance, love and peaceful coexistence, nor used coercive power to send out a tough message that we mean business. Instead, we continue to produce exclusionary and hateful narratives through our education system, mosques, madrassas, media, and through political platforms.
In the process we dried up our resources that could tell a positive story by suppressing artistic expression through theatre, dance, film and music. Perhaps literature and painting are among the very few forms of creative expression that have managed to survive. In comparison, India has a giant film industry that is producing hundreds of films with an audience around the world. Speaking about India’s soft power at a Ted conference, former Under-Secretary General of the UN and India’s Minister of State for Human Resource Development Dr Shashi Tharoor related a story: “I met a young man in New York whose illiterate mother in Senegal takes a bus once a month to the capital Dakar just to watch a Bollywood movie. She can’t understand the dialogue. She’s illiterate, so she can’t read the French subtitles, but…she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action. She goes away with stars in her eyes about India as a result.” And as Dr Tharoor says, “In today’s world, it’s not the size of a bigger army that wins, it’s the country which tells a better story that prevails.”
The writer is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. She tweets at @ishrats and can be reached at [email protected]