Daily Times

The Lahore terror attack on Wednesday last in which four soldiers of the Pakistan Army lost their lives once again reinforces the general belief that the social and physical terror infrastructure in the country has by and large remained unscathed notwithstanding the notable successes of the Zarb-i-Azb or of the recently launched Raddul Fassad.

As a result of the successes of these military missions the frequency of terror attacks and the extent of their carnage have certainly come down greatly. But the ensuing successes of terror attacks in taking a terrible toll of security forces and the sectarian and minority targets seem to have increased in proportion.

The official rhetoric that follows such tragedies goes something like this: It was a suicide bombing planned in Afghanistan. The TTP trained perpetrator had travelled all the way from our war-torn neighbor to Lahore in Punjab or Sehwan in Sindh or wherever deep inside Pakistan (without having been apprehended on the way despite having been identified as a threat) with the relevant security agencies having been alerted to the possible terror threat being on the way and his general whereabouts well in time.

This is too laughable, to say the least. The purpose of this elaborate make-believe is clearly to cover up the failure of those responsible for the eradication and elimination of the social and physical terror infrastructure that still exists intact inside Pakistan and which provides the wherewithal for carrying out such seemingly lone-wolf attacks.

Indeed, it defies logic to think that a young man of 18-22 having just arrived from Afghanistan in one of Pakistan’s cities or towns could carry out such a deadly targeted attack successfully without local assistance and thattoo without a pre-planned plot hatched and perfected after several days and weeks of trial runs.

It is this infrastructure that needs to be pulverized if Pakistan wants to get rid of the menace of terrorism for good. But then it is next to impossible to even make a dent in this infrastructure without first eliminating the mind-set that has over-taken a critical mass of our population.

And this mind-set is not cultivated in the madrassas alone. Even our so-called public and private schools construct such a mind-set through not only the syllabus that is taught in these institutions but even most of the members of the faculty of these schools seem to have drunk from the same poisonous fountain.

So, the centre and the provinces urgently need to review key principles of shaping curriculum, and for developing it, there is a need to establish dedicated permanent research and educational centres. To question and to be able to think critically should be among the purposes of education.

The subjects of ‘citizenship’ and ‘civic education’ should be compulsorily added in primary-level institutions, especially public and private schools and madrassa; and the nurturing of a good citizen in the light of concepts drawn from Quaid-i-Azam’s August 11, 1947 speech. In fact this speech should be made part of the Constitution replacing the Objective Resolution.

Higher educational institutions, such as colleges, universities, and higher-tier madrassas, should uphold the modern requirements of research and critique, which in touch, should be accorded central status in the education system.

But abhorrence to research and critique is perhaps rooted in this obscurantism filled mind-set as our culturally influential elite continueto suffer from illiberal dogma, intolerance, bigotry and parochialism. This perhaps is the main reason why Pakistan is lacking in research activity.

Not only this.  Since our cultural elite have developed an entirely puerile standard based on religious obscurantism against which they measure success in career and life, our research workers do not get the national recognition that they deserve.

Joel Mokyr, an eminent economic historian defines “culture” in his book (A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy) as “a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.”

Although Enlightenment thinking was always a minority viewpoint, in early modern Europe, it was one held by culturally influential elite who became convinced that general progress through increased knowledge was both possible and desirable and that their new knowledge should be spread in order to enlighten the people.

The most important observation of Mokyr which needs to be studied in some depth in Pakistan concerns what he calls ‘culturally influential elite.’ And he mentions Thomas Becon and Isaac Newton as part of these culturally influential elite.

But then since Pakistan has been in a state of war now for nearly 40 years, most of our culturally influential elite tend to be military-related rather than art, literature, academia and other knowledge based intellectual subjects-related which has compounded further the problems of militancy that we are facing today.

However, even on the military subject as well we seem to be missing the trees because of the forest as we have so far shown no inclination to probe the new concept of national security called the Comprehensive National Power (CNP), notable for being an original Chinese political concept.

The CNP is calculated numerically by combining various quantitative indices to create a single number held to measure the power of a nation-state. These indices take into account both military factors (known as hard power) and economic and cultural factors (known as soft power).

The author is a senior journalist based in Islamabad. He served as the Executive Editor of Express Tribune until 2014