Daily Times

Aristotle defined man as a rational animal using the conscious mind. Sigmund Freud however, redefined man as a product of the subconscious mind: man behaves and acts as per the dictates of the apprehensions and assumptions imbibed through his subconscious mind. The subconscious explains the reason for rational people living irrational lives. The same is true for a state such as Pakistan.

In 1947 the partition aired the message of liberty and independence for Pakistan, it also brought along a sense of insecurity that was repeatedly reinforced one way or another. This insecurity has become in grained in the national psyche. For instance, despite assuming the posture of a de facto nuclear power in 1998, Pakistan still thinks that it needs to sustain a large conventional army.

The Cold War (1947-1991) educated Pakistan in two ways. First, whereas the Cold War not only assigned Pakistan the role of a proxy, it also trained Pakistan to launch proxy wars to achieve certain (national) interests as foreign policy objectives. Secondly, the Cold War trained Pakistan not only to disturb a given balance of power but also to create a new one through proxies. In this way, Pakistan not only internalized the role of a proxy to watch national interests of other countries but also its own. In the post-Cold war era, Pakistan is failing to unlearn these lessons.

The anti-Hindu beginning of Pakistan soon embraced the anti-Communism exigency. Taken together, both contexts elicited Islamic fundamentalism, which offered sufficient leeway to religious bigots to thrive on this dual narrative. Where one context was wanting, the other complemented the deficit. In the anti-Communism context, the state used a selected part of Allama Iqbal’s poetry to exploit pan-Islamic tendencies in its Muslim citizens. The select part of poetry, which was actually written to enflame sentiments of Indian Muslims for the Khilafat Movement of early 1920s, offered legitimacy to the state to stretch the domain and dimension of its national interests through proxies, even at the cost of impinging upon the sovereignty of other countries.

Gradually, non-state actors also became independent of the state’s financial and material help to decide on their own what objectives they wanted to achieve. This is how several militant organisations grew public welfare wings to collect money and do social work, besides meeting their own expenses

With the end of the Cold war, though the dissipation of the anti-Communism context allowed the opening of socio-political life to a democratic order, religious parochialism as the legacy of the Cold war continues unabated.

Moreover, Pakistan is now over-conscious about both its enemies and friends. Pakistan apprehends that other countries may also use counter-proxies or they may turn Pakistan’s former proxies against it to meet certain objectives. This is one of reasons for retired generals and retired diplomats peddling their own fears against some countries somehow encircling Pakistan. The guilt smites the actor. Conspiracy theories are now part of the national narrative in Pakistan’s relations with other countries. The fear is that Pakistan, as a state, may get ready again to be a proxy for some other bloc.

During the Cold war, Pakistan was a state actor for the Capitalist bloc. Its purpose was to defend the bloc’s ideological frontiers regionally. On the other hand, Pakistan, as a state, was using non-state actors to watch its own national interests. This message of abuse travelled from a larger whole to a smaller entity. The end of the Cold war in 1991 allowed Pakistan to act independently as a state and decide whether or not it could foster non-state actors. This realization of independence travelled downwards. Gradually, non-state actors also became independent of the state’s financial and material help to decide on their own what objectives they wanted to achieve. This is how several militant organizations grew public welfare wings to collect money and do social work, besides meeting the running expenses of their organizations.

Philip Bobbitt writes in Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, that “Modern terrorism is a secondary effect of the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence, a monopoly ratified in law”. Some states use their legitimate right to resort to violence externally in order to construct and reconstruct a balance of power of their liking. This is the point where a state values the latitude non-state actors offer for exploitation. For instance, in 1999, in the initial days of the Kargil war, Pakistan easily justified the war by foisting the blame on to the action of non-state actors (Mujahideen, in this case) until it transpired that the then Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Pervez Musharraf was lying to the nation including the sitting government. The blame desecrated the sanctity attached to the word Mujahid. In the post-9/11 era, the word Mujahid lost it relevance further. The Mujahideen of yesterday are the terrorists of today.

On 12 January, 2002, shortly before the visit of US Secretary of State Collin Powell to South Asia, through a televised address to the nation, President General Pervez Musharraf banned Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaishe-e-Mohammad, which had been blamed for the attack on Indian parliament on 13 December, 2001. Musharraf acknowledged Pakistan’s turning into a soft state by saying “Pakistan has been turned into a soft state where law means little if anything”. He also denounced the militant groups which were launching militancy in the name of religion from the land of Pakistan. In the post-Cold war era, this was the first official acknowledgement of the presence of militant organizations and it was the first official denouncement. With that, the era of the state’s monopoly over launching operations through its proxies, besides airing spurious claims of national interest even in the context of having strategic depth external to its boundaries, was over. By August 2009, Pakistan had banned about 25 militant organizations and their affiliated welfare organizations for their involvement in terrorist activities.

Though Pakistan is in the throes of denuding itself of proxies, Pakistan has yet to rid itself of the obsession with proxies, and this cannot happen unless Pakistan gets better at dealing with its insecurities.

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at qaisarrashid@yahoo.com

Published in Daily Times, December 26^th 2017.