Daily Times

There is a question that usually sits at the back of my mind but is brought to the fore every now and again. Usually, it happens when we see yet another bit of judicial or political lunacy perpetrated by people who should know better. The current decision by the Pakistani authorities to defend the imprisonment of Dr Shakeel Afridi has made me reconsider that question with a renewed alarm.

From time to time, one hears of strange and unjust decisions in courts in rural Pakistan. Rapists are acquitted because of community influence or wealthy and powerful families use their influence to win cases they should have lost. These sorts of things are common in traditional communities throughout the world. However, when a central government upholds such a decision, despite the evidence in the case, then I believe we have a serious problem and this is exactly what has occurred in the Afridi affair.

A spokesperson for the Pakistan Foreign Ministry claimed, “…the case of Dr Afridi…was in accordance with Pakistani laws and by Pakistani courts.” This may be so but, even if we allow that a guilty verdict is justified, how do we find that Dr Afridi’s assistance to the US merits a punishment of 33 years incarceration when supporters of al Qaeda get less for murders of innocent civilians? There can be no doubt about what is at the heart of this case and there is no doubt about where this sort of incident will lead Pakistan.

When the Americans went into a private compound in Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, there was relief and celebrations around the world that this terrorist would send no more innocent airplane passengers and others to their deaths. Nevertheless, in Pakistan there was a strange mixture of embarrassment and outrage. It was not that bin Laden was very popular but that, once again, the US had brought shame and humiliation to Pakistan. Rather than recognising that Pakistan’s own institutions were incompetent or unreliable, the US’s action was interpreted by many Pakistanis as typical US highhanded aggression.

In Pakistan, a virulent anti-Americanism is leading many Pakistanis, including high government officials, into a form of moral blindness, which is alarmingly similar to the situation that prevailed in Germany in the1930s and led to the rise of Hitler. The National Socialists blamed all of Germany’s ills upon Jews. There were no jobs because Jews had stolen them all; Germany was weak because of a global conspiracy of Jews and so on. This sort of poison was fed to the masses relentlessly until enough people came to believe it to enable the fascists to gain power at the ballot box. The German ruling class was not too concerned as it believed they could control Herr Hitler, whose mad rants would eventually moderate once he had gained power. Germany’s ruling elite believed the army would protect the status quo and nothing would change. The moderates who managed the institutions of civil society were eventually locked up, murdered, or pushed aside, and Hitler started the most destructive war the world has ever seen.

In Pakistan we see the same willingness of demagogues to blame all of the country’s problems on external causes. Pakistan is not failing to keep up with India because of the incompetence and corruption of its institutions of government and education. Pakistan’s problems are caused by unwelcome foreign influence and so on and so forth. The Pakistani ruling elites accept this nonsense rather than to go to the heart of the issue and honestly consider why Pakistan, half a century after it gained its independence, still requires a hand-out of a billion dollars a year from the ‘Great Satan’, as well as untold millions from expatriate workers abroad, merely to stay afloat.

Dr Afridi got 33 years in the slammer not because he committed treason but because he, unwittingly, helped to show that the Pakistani authorities were incapable of finding the most wanted terrorist in history despite that fact that he had been sitting under their noses for five years.

Until Pakistan can look honestly at its own shortcomings and admit the source of its considerable problems is endogenous, its future is in doubt. Pakistan is not failing to develop economically because of western or foreign influences but because of a reluctance to discard intellectually bankrupt ideologies, which are a legacy of the foundation of Pakistan as an Islamic state. For the past 30 years, the rate of growth of Pakistan’s GDP has been trending downwards and while other Islamic states such as Malaysia and Indonesia can develop industrial bases and export industries, it seems too hard for Pakistan. On every measure of economic development, Pakistan is in the bottom quarter of the nations of the world.

Islam can coexist with capitalism in a modern economy, and Islam can coexist with democracy in modern political systems. But the models of coexistence that Pakistan uses are clearly not working and the future for Pakistan looks bleak, unless it can honestly ask why it is falling further behind the rest of the world’s economies.

A good place to start this re-examination will be the case of Dr Afridi, whose role in the end of bin Laden was extremely small. Why should a man who played a small part in the demise of the world’s most wanted terrorist merit 33 years in prison? Why is the Pakistan government not doing everything it can to right what the whole world believes is a massive injustice? Until we get honest answers to these questions, the greater question of the future of Pakistan cannot be answered with certainty.

Pakistan appears to be mired in the politics of the colonial era and the theology of the middle ages. Without a unifying ideology that the body politic can adhere to, or at least accept as a path to modernisation, it will fall further behind the rest of the world and drift towards chaos.

The writer is a freelance writer based in Sydney and can be reached at tony.letford@yahoo.com.au