Pakistan Not Yet a Failed State

Is Pakistan a failed state? This is becoming a favorite parlor game, both in the West and in Pakistan’s Doppelganger, India.

My answer is no, not yet, but things are getting perilously close.

The recent assault on the Sri Lankan cricket team (quite likely by the same group that attacked Mumbai) in the heart of one of Pakistan’s most prominent cities provides further proof of the state of disorder in that country. Not only were the terrorists able to hone in on such a high-profile target, all fourteen of them were able to get away. Even though team members miraculously escaped with only minor injuries, eight people were killed, including six cops trying to bravely fend off the attackers.

Much of Pakistan is in a state of shock. Cricket is semi-jokingly referred to as the second religion of Pakistan (leading some to offer that as a reason), and what has happened is a national humiliation. The sense of something sacrosanct being hit—and Pakistan’s reputation being sullied forever—has produced a cry of anguish among many Pakistanis.

“The attack on the Sri Lankan players and their security detail is not an isolated horror, nor is it the worst thing to happen to Pakistan in the last few months,” writes author Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian in a piece titled “This Attack Struck Pakistan's Last Redoubt of National Pride.” “But the reason so many of us are knocked sideways by this particular attack is that the terrorists have reached into that place we always thought of as refuge, that place in which Pakistan could compete with the best in the world, that place where we had space to believe that a man running in to throw a red sphere at another man holding a piece of wood was the most vital matter to which the nation had to attend.”

As Shamsie points out, this isn’t the only front on which Pakistan has faced trouble just in the past few months. There has been the mystifying capitulation of the Pakistani government to the Taliban in the agreement to set up Shariah law in the Swat valley region. (The best spin is that a mild version of Islamic law has been reintroduced in an area where it traditionally held sway—not very reassuring.) And as if setting out to prove that they can act more moronic than even their worst detractors make them out to be, Pakistan’s politicians are embroiled in a vicious intramural dispute. Pakistan’s ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother have been barred from electoral politics in a judicial decision that some claim was handed down at the behest of current President, Benazir Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari. There have been massive street protests by Sharif’s supporters.

On top of everything, the Pakistani economy is in such parlous shape that a few months back the government had to go hat in hand to the IMF. Inflation hit 25 percent last year.

So why exactly is Pakistan not a failed state? Well, it has several attributes that should prevent it from coming apart at the seams or being taken over by a bunch of ragtag jihadists. The Islam that is followed in Punjab and Sind, the two most populous provinces in Pakistan, has a heavy Sufi flavor, quite different from the puritanical Wahhabism that the Taliban and their ilk favor. The Pakistani army, in spite of infiltration by fundamentalists, is quite a cohesive body, and the current chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, will not countenance a Taliban takeover. And in the urban areas, Pakistan has a large and vibrant civil society that has proven to be vocal and active about protecting its rights. The most famous recent manifestation of this is the lawyers’ movement that played such a pivotal role in ousting General Pervez Musharraf.

And what about the fabled nuclear weapons, the subject of often-hysterical commentary by Western analysts? Even as big a critic of the Pakistani nuclear program as Pervez Hoodbhoy says that they are not in danger of falling to the Taliban.

“As far as the weapons themselves are concerned, I don't believe they can be obtained by fundamentalist groups like Al Qaeda,” Hoodbhoy told the BBC. “The days of smuggling centrifuges out of Kahuta [Pakistan's main nuclear research facility] ended with A.Q. Khan [the infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist/peddler].”

Still, all this is little comfort when the nation is degenerating rapidly. While the Pakistani politicians squabble among themselves, problems from jihadist violence to a wretched economy just keep on getting worse. If not quite a South Asian Somalia, as India’s ruling party has alleged it to be, Pakistan doesn’t currently present too pretty a sight.