Daily Times

For too many in Pakistan, the very word ‘US’ now evokes visions of drones, slogans of “You are with us or against us” or high and mighty pronouncements such as “Do more.” Many now find it impossible to understand how the United States of America that constantly seems to point its big guns at an apparently unending list of ‘Muslim countries’ could possibly engage in a friendly, long term relationship with Pakistan, soon to be the world’s largest Muslim country. The simplistic narrative of ‘the US hates us’ and its various permutations have been used by fringe groups with a variety of nefarious agendas to short-circuit any reasonable, nuanced or balanced public discourse on the Pak-US relationship. In Pakistan, a penchant for conspiracy, one-dimensional narratives and agenda-driven simplifications has prevented a fuller, truer picture from emerging, a picture not only of the country’s relationship with the US, but frankly, with the rest of the world.

On the other side, in the US, Pakistan is introduced to the domestic audience courtesy Newsweek cover stories that show angry faces under bone chilling headlines such as, ‘The most dangerous place on earth’. Every few weeks, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic or The New York Times seem to rotate the responsibility of employing trivialisation to demonise a country that is both incredibly complex and remarkably multi-faceted. Courtesy such coverage, it is no surprise that the ordinary American thinks of Pakistan as an enemy, or at best, a dangerous and untrustworthy pretend-partner. What Pakistanis and Americans both miss by subscribing to these naive stereotypes of each other is the fact that governmental actions, even in democracies, do not always equate to majority public sentiment. Nor do they reflect national character. In the US, this is especially true with regard to matters of foreign policy. According to CNN, until very recently, the percentage of Americans with passports was in the teens. Only in 2011 did it spike to about 30 percent, compared with 60 percent for Canadians and 75 percent for Britons. When you consider that the possession of a passport does not mean that it is being employed for travel, and that the vast majority of Americans use their passports for travel within the North American continent, it becomes plain that, when compared to other industrialised, western countries, Americans do not benefit from a firsthand appraisal of the world. Instead, they almost exclusively rely on news media coverage and the characterisations promoted therein.

If the US wages a foreign war it does not necessarily follow that American citizens are in support of such a conflict. Quite often, the opposite is true. But since the impact of policy is not being felt acutely on the domestic front, foreign wars in some distant land may not be seen by most as issues to understand or bother too much with. Such isolationism and inward focus may have served the US well in the 18th, 19th and perhaps even in the 20th centuries, but today this has become a problem. The rest of the world does experience American ingenuity and generosity, but too often, too many are also introduced to the US in the form of a drone strike, or by way of an unfair policy playing out in their neighbourhood, backed up by a big stick.

If the US is to continue to be a leader in the comity of nations, a role the world would be best served by, Americans cannot remain uninformed about the world any longer. The global citizenry is no longer living on islands separated by oceans and great distances. We are at best 120 milliseconds away from each other by way of Twitter message, and at worst, 14 minutes away via ICBM. That is a level of interconnectedness that requires us to understand each other. And this is especially true for Americans, on whose behalf great power is exercised and whose votes or support of local representatives can often mean the difference between friendship or enmity with a foreign nation, or the life or death of a family at the other end of the world.

Attitudes in Pakistan too, must change. The government, army and politicians in the country have oft employed the bogey of foreign conspiracies. Too long have they cultivated uneducated radicals, sometimes with western support, to serve questionable purposes in theatres such as the Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Sadly, the means of reaching out to and motivating this guerilla cannon fodder has involved the pollution of many mainstream spheres of public life. Universities and colleges in the north-west, and even to some extent in other parts of the country, served as recruiting centres for the Afghan jihad. Saudi money funded the growth of a lunatic fringe. General Zia’s distorted interpretation of Islam was fundamentally in conflict with the tolerant way in which religion had been practised on this soil for a thousand years. All of this mixed with western indifference to the means employed to achieve the end yielded a radicalised and vocal minority. We may claim that this minority, which adorns the covers of US news magazines, is neither sizeable in percentage terms, nor representative of the people of Pakistan, but that it exists at all is a problem. Let us clearly acknowledge this reality.

The question for US policymakers is whether to continue empowering this minority by playing the part of the antagonist their narrative and appeal depends on, or will the US’s — and the world’s — interests be better served by reconsidering policies that seem to be doing nothing more than earning ill will? Perhaps by robbing this crazed lot of their slogans, the US and Pakistan can finally allow moderate and enlightened members of society to seize the momentum from those who are nothing but an evolutionary dead end.

The writer is an inventor and technology entrepreneur involved with businesses in the US and Pakistan. He can be reached at ahusain@gmail.com