Pakistan in the extreme by Sayeed Hasan Khan and Kurt Jacobsen

Too many Westerners view Pakistan as a dark fantasyland populated by nothing but duplicitous politicos and religious fanatics. This faraway country of which most Westerners know precious little is, the media assures them, a "sanctuary" for rabid terrorists.

The term "sanctuary" implies that mountainous areas were created for the single nefarious purpose of threatening innocent Westerners.

That even the British empire long ago learned to leave inhospitable border regions alone is a fact omitted from many a sputtering indignant account. So reputed analysts get away with peddling any fear-mongering image they please in Western mass media. In his latest book even the estimable Ahmed Rashid sadly has given in to hysterical images of Pakistan.

Pakistan contains plenty of whopping woes and afflictions from which to take your pick for the very worst one. True. But meddling external actors rarely are deemed to be major contributors to the plight that these well-paid and well-positioned experts decry. So the horrific flourishing of ‘Kalashnikov culture’, drug dealing and jihadis since the 1980s is regarded as having absolutely nothing to do with the whims of fickle US foreign policy.

 Americans, like imperial elites earlier, love to say to the world, and to each other, that everything is your own fault. It’s a handy device by which elites manage to pretend today that the economic crisis was caused by a greedy public and not by slick financial manipulators, such as themselves.

Obama accordingly reckons that Pakistan’s border region "the most dangerous place in the world", while the CIA chief and former General, David Petraeus, dubbed it the apparently everlasting headquarters for al-Qaeda. A RAND report links several utterly loony post-9/11 attempts to bomb Manhattan to Pakistan-based plotters (RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy through research and analysis).

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also opined that most plots against Britain had Pakistani origins. Apparently, masterminds in Pakistan are absolutely essential to conjure the procession of thoroughly bungled and amateurish plots since 9/11, usually nursed along by planted informers and spies. If so, the West ought to feel extremely secure indeed. It’s been all downhill for Islamic terrorists since Khalid Sheikh Muhamed allegedly boasted that he trained the 9/11 hijackers. The enemy the West faces is not often a cut above the sorry lot of goofs in the satirical film, Four Lions.

The main US interests in the region are to: (1) destroy the al-Qaeda; and (2) stabilise the area. That a ruthless pursuit of the first aim endangers the second remains the American/Nato quandary. At the end of Bush’s administration in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council warned that escalating commando and drone attacks in North-west Pakistan generated more enemies than they eliminated and risked "destabilising the Pakistan military, which might divide over the policy."

Only the Taliban (and the US weapons and energy industries) thereby prosper. That, for a refreshing change, was an intelligent intelligence report. But a typical way the foreign policy elites solve this kind of problem is by defining it out of existence.

RAND experts, for example, decided that militant groups represent a constant threat to Pakistan, as though cruel counter-insurgency tactics were not a factor in recruiting sympathisers. Yet what actually are Pakistani public attitudes towards extremism? You would never guess from reading most experts that recent elections repudiated extremist parties.

Highly welcome then is a recent study of Pakistan political attitudes, part of a series of academic investigations, which might dispel obstructive and unhelpful Western beliefs. The survey, deftly conducted (if not always admirably interpreted) by Princeton and Georgetown University researchers, in conjunction with local Sedco, punctures a ballooning myth.

The researcher surveyed 6000 people across the four provinces with tactful and tactically worded questionnaires. What they found won’t be news to astute local observers but it is revelatory to most outsiders.

They found that the mass of poor people, especially the rural poor, in Pakistan are not inclined to support religious militants. The poor acutely suffer the consequences of the Islamic militants’ actions, and suffer the reprisals by authorities afterwards, at no discernible gain to themselves. So they accordingly are not queuing up feverishly to enlist in vengeful jihadic enterprises. This is not the same thing as saying the rural masses would not change their conditions if they could. Islamic forms of militancy offer no such hope.

The sober finding, however, is bound to be misread as the lesson that punitive actions will force the population into line, which is a perpetually popular notion in higher circles. Many moronic studies of the Vietnam War said exactly the same thing about the South-east Asian peasantry, who were regarded as stupid or stolid, or both. Those disgraceful analysts of course were wrong, though it usually didn’t hurt their careers.

So poverty allegedly does not contribute to militancy, Islamic or otherwise, even if an unspecified portion of recruits, the study allows, do come from these strata. The vast majority of poor Pakistanis are not aching to conquer, convert, and enslave Nato powers, they just don’t want to be bothered by the latter (which appears to be too much to ask).

The researchers find that "poor and wealthy districts are less supportive of militants on average than those from middle-income districts." Violence is "heavily concentrated in urban areas", if one skirts major exceptions such as campaigns in Swat, Baluchistan and the Frontier.

The minority middle class, brimming with educated under-employed people, are more likely to be supportive of religious militants, in word if not in deed. In developmental studies this strata has always posed a worry because, if growing, they are tinder for radical solutions. This phenomenon deserves attention. Yet the study concludes that "it is unlikely that improving the material well-being of individuals will reduce support for violent political organisations."

The study answers not to concerned Pakistanis but to the agenda of outside powers. They advise their audience not to indulge in poverty programmes. For these researchers a broad consensus on the link between poverty and violence is proving elusive: though we recommend they consider, for example, James Scott’s incisive studies of peasant resistance to get a few clues.

Whether aid reaches the intended people, after everyone in between has taken a cut, is a different question. (In our reading of the voluminous counter-insurgency literature, by the way, it is anything but a truism that poverty is linked to discontent.) Poverty is briefly mentioned and swiftly whisked away to focus on military means.

Clearly, corruption, poverty and exploitation are not problems to authorities until they become opportunities for militants to exploit, which tells one a lot about the mindset of both analysts and authorities.

The writers are freelance journalists and researchers.

(Statesman/ANN)