PAKISTAN AND FAILED STATE CONCEPT

By Kazi Anwarul Masud (former Secretary and ambassador of Bangladesh).

 

By the accounts published in Pakistani newspapers the Mumbai attackers were trained by former officers of Pakistan army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence though no specific connection has yet been found between the terrorists and the Pakistani government. Visits of Condoleezza and Admiral Mike Mullen to India and Pakistan are to ease tension caused by the terrorist attack. Ms Rice has, however, warned Pakistan that it “needs to act with resolve and urgency and cooperate fully and transparently. This message has been delivered and will be delivered to Pakistan”. “The terrorist blitzkrieg on Mumbai” writes Sitaram Yechyry (CPI-M Politburo member) “has chillingly numbed and outraged the nation. The anger, revulsion, distress, shame and initial helplessness, rising to a crescendo of revenge, have all been captured in images that will continue to torment each one of us”. Yechury urges India to invoke  UNSC resolution 1373 mandating obligation of all countries to deny “safe havens to those who finance, plan, support or commit terrorist acts” in marshalling international support to face terrorism. Pakistani nuclear physicist Parvez Hoodbnoy reviewing Stephen Cohen’s book The Idea of Pakistan asked the enigmatic question “can Pakistan work” because dispelling the idea of Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah to form a secular country, Hoodbhoy writes, “But with time Jinnah’s Pakistan has become weaker, more authoritarian and increasingly theocratic. Now set to become the world’s fourth most populous nation, it is all of several things: a client state of the United States yet deeply resentful of it, a breeding ground for jihad and al-Qaeda as well as a key US ally in the fight against international terrorism, an economy and society run for the benefit of Pakistan’s warrior class, and an inward- looking society that is manifestly intolerant of minorities”. If the reports that the Mumbai terrorists were trained by former army officials is to be given  credence then possibility opens up of the army’s reluctance of accepting the present democratically elected civilian government, of the existence of  terrorist training camps in areas  beyond the writ of the government,  that the entire territory of Pakistan is not under the control of the government or  that a part of the governmental institutions continues hate-India policy, the raison d’etre of the creation of Pakistan, with the firm belief that Afghanistan shall provide strategic depth in case of war with India. The worst case scenario for South Asia will be if Pakistan were to become a failed state.

Helman and Ratner described the failed nations as “utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community”. William Olsen expanded the definition by including states facing serious “internal problems that threaten their continued coherence” or “significant internal challenges to their political order”. Events of nine-eleven have given acute importance to the problems of failed and failing states as they can both be hospitable and can harbor non- state actors—warlords and terrorists—and of the need to understand the dynamics of the nation-state’s failure as being central to the war on terrorism. Robert Rotenberg (New nature of national state failure—The Washington Quarterly—Summer 2002) finds failed states as tense, deeply conflicted, having intense and enduring violence against the government or the regime caused, among others, by appalling living standards, decaying infrastructure of daily life, greed of rulers, patronage based system of extraction from ordinary citizens etc. Effectively failed and failing states are unable to deliver political goods—security, education, health services, economic opportunities, law and order and a judicial system to administer it, infrastructural facilities—to its citizens.

Failed states are unable to provide security, a most basic demand of the citizens. Though a structured law enforcement authority exists yet crimes are committed with impunity.  It is often fallaciously assumed that failed states are generally asphyxiated dictatorships like Taliban’s Afghanistan, Mobutu’s Zaire or Barre’s Somalia. Though these were undoubtedly failed states, some are adorned with democratic institutions though flawed. As Robert Rotberg explains if legislatures exist at all they are rubber stamp machines. Democratic debates are noticeably absent. The judiciary is derivative of the executive rather than being independent and citizens know that they cannot rely on judicial system for redress or remedy especially against the government. The bureaucracy has long lost its sense of professional responsibility and exists only to carry out the orders of its political masters. Indeed promotions to higher posts or transfers to coveted posts largely depend on passing the DNA tests for loyalty to the party in power.

Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw enumerated some of the characteristics of failed states. In general terms, Straw said, a state fails when it is unable: (a) to control its territory and guarantee security to its citizens, (b) to maintain the rule of law, promote human rights, and provide effective governance, and (c) to deliver public goods to its people (such as economic growth, education and health care etc). In Straw’s analysis it is possible to identify indicators of each of these elements of failure. For example, security criteria could be assessed by finding out if there are areas beyond the control of the government or presence of significant ethnic, religious or inter-group conflicts.  As regards economy, the indicators could include the stability of the state’s economy; its dependence on certain industries or on agricultural sector; effective economic management; per capita GDP; literacy; life expectancy etc. The logical question asked is why do states fail? Robert Dorff of North Carolina University traces the failed state phenomenon to the collapse of the colonial order following the Second World War. Suddenly many state without having the required institutions and without the experience of self-government as they were colonies found themselves free from external dominance. Even before this phenomenon weak states were not unknown as Walter Lippman wrote in 1915 that the overwhelming problem of diplomacy was due to weak states that were industrially backward and politically incompetent to prevent outbreak of internal violence. The cold war competition compounded the malaise as competing super powers showered the failing states with economic and military assistance. They thus ignored the fundamental premise of “democratic peace” which stipulates that democracies do not generally go to war against other democracies because internal democratic norms promote external democratic behavior and institutional checks and balances of democracies place constraints on the aggressive behavior of the leaders. The end of the cold war that dried up economic assistance pushed many of the failing states into the black hole of politico-economic disaster. Ironically the end of the cold war also brought along the “democratic moment” when many erstwhile dictatorships were suddenly wearing the garb of democracy. Because many of these states had known only authoritarianism for decades their sudden introduction to democracy brought forth a challenge to both the rulers and the ruled about how to strike a balance between enjoyment of rights with duties and obligations to the state. Besides the disappearance of a strong central authority encouraged pockets of chaos and anarchy along ethnic and religious lines or among minorities who had felt asphyxiated in the past regimes. Taking the advantage of the weakness of the central authority gangs and criminal syndicate assumed control over streets of cities. Ordinary police force either became paralyzed or was infected with the contagion of criminality. Since anarchy became the norm the ordinary citizens turned to godfathers/ warlords or other strong figures for protection. Since failed states by definition denote ungovernability the consequent rampant criminality gives rise to sweeping despair and hopelessness. But when national ungovernability becomes global it starts to adversely affect the neighboring countries and as nine-eleven demonstrated even powerful distant lands. Oslo Conference on Root Causes of Terrorism found, among others, failed or weak states leaving a power vacuum for exploitation by terrorist organizations to maintain safe heavens, training facilities, and launching terrorist attacks. Because of the direct causal relationship between failing states and terrorism having been established long before nine-eleven Boutros Ghali in 1992 addressed the issue of reduced significance of sovereignty in the post-cold war world and the concomitant possibility of UN intervention in the domestic affairs of member states. He suggested that such intervention would be appropriate in the face of a collapsed domestic governing authority, displaced populations and gross violations of human rights or when developments in failed states threaten international peace and security.

 

One hopes that with the reestablishment of democracy in Pakistan, despite the preeminence of the army that Stephen Cohen would consider a constant factor in Pakistani body politic, President Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani would heed global demand for full and transparent cooperation with the Indian investigation into the Mumbai terrorist attack. Pakistani territory  cannot be allowed to be used for the training of terrorists for cross border infiltration into India simply because the twisted ideology of the Islamic extremists pose a problem for Bangladesh as it does for India and no less for Pakistan itself. For India restraint is called for because multifarious communal and ethnic disaffection is embedded in the country. South Asia cannot afford to waver in its path to give the poverty stricken people a better life than what they have been used to for generations.