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COPYRIGHT 2007 Professors World Peace Academy
This paper looks at Pakistan's sources of insecurity by examining the role played by the army, and the difficulties Pakistani leaders find to establish a participatory, pluralist and decentralized political framework incorporating linguistic, ethnic and regional diversities and economic disparities. Years of confrontation with India have contributed to rising public debt, declining economic productivity and widespread illiteracy and poverty in Pakistani society.
The paper identifies Islamic extremism and militancy as the main source of Pakistan's instability. It argues the role that Islam should play in politics, a controversial issue, but requires resolution if Pakistanis are to achieve political and economic stability and security soon.
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Pakistan's current political and societal profile is shaped by the cultural and historical influences of the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia as well as the British colonial legacy and the nation- and state-building challenges of the twenty-first century. Religion and nationalism combined to create the demand for the separate state of Pakistan, but these could not serve as the enduring bases of nationhood. Pakistan found it problematic to establish a participatory, pluralist and decentralised political framework incorporating linguistic, ethnic and regional diversities and economic disparities. Additional challenges were posed by the rise of Islamic extremism and militancy, which had implications for Pakistan's domestic politics and foreign policy.
For decades groups that the United States considered terrorist organizations have been supported by Pakistan in order to promote its foreign policy goals in the disputed state of Kashmir, a territory to which both India and Pakistan lay claim, and in the neighbouring country of Afghanistan. The practice of supporting militant groups in Kashmir and Afghanistan contributed to intense political violence in the region and to the proliferation of terrorist networks in Pakistan itself. After one of these organizations, al Qaeda, was accused of directing the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf not only decided to withdraw support from some of Pakistan's former allies, but he also decided to aid the United States in eradicating them. Many Islamists in Pakistan regarded Musharraf's decision as a betrayal, while the most militant opponents of the decision to aid America took to the streets in protest or committed violent acts against the Pakistani government, including a few attempts on Musharraf's life.
The problem of confronting militant Islamists in the wake of America's war on terror is just one of the major issues facing Pakistan at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Years of confrontation with India, including three wars and two skirmishes that could have led to a nuclear attack, have contributed to rising public debt, declining economic productivity and widespread illiteracy and poverty in Pakistani society. The country has a tribal and feudal social structure, an Islamic ideology and a legal and political system that is British in origin. Islamic and secular law battle each other. Tribal loyalties, religious tensions and feudal social structure have distorted the democratic process.
ISLAM, EXTREMISM AND MILITANCY
Pakistan is based on an idea. It came into existence through the efforts of Muslims to protect their dispersed religious community in South Asia from the antagonism of the much larger Hindu community in India. Different people in it will have some sort of ideal that the place is...
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