Manufacturing an Islamic Political Fault Line

H. Nayyar and Zia Mian begin their highly useful essay “Pakistan and the Islamist Challenge” on the Foreign Policy in Focus website with the pointed words:

Ten years ago, the political thinker and activist Eqbal Ahmad wrote that “conditions for revolutionary violence have been gathering in Pakistan since the start in 1980 of the internationally sponsored Jihad in Afghanistan.” He argued that “revolutionary violence in Pakistan is likely to be employed by religious and right-wing organizations which have not set theoretical or practical limits on their use of violence.” He then warned that Pakistan “is moving perilously toward a critical zone from where it will take the state and society generations to return to a semblance of normal existence. When such a critical point of hard return is reached, the viability of statehood depends more on external than internal factors.”

Their conclusion does not suggest that either Pakistan or the West has learned much in the horrible decade since Eqbal Ahmad made the above-quoted remarks:

Put simply, to effectively meet the Islamist challenge, the Pakistani state must finally accept and fully exercise its responsibility to maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy and participation, and make available in an equitable manner the resources necessary for economic and social development.

Pakistan’s neighbors and the world will need to help rather than compound the problem. The threat of use of military force by India, yet more U.S. missile attacks or commando raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas, and deepening or widening the U.S. war in Afghanistan, as U.S. military leaders and President-elect Obama have proposed, will only make things worse.

Whichever organizations Ahmad had in mind a decade ago in his reference to “religious and right-wing organizations which have not set theoretical or practical limits on their use of violence,” he got it right, and it is important, if we are ever to start going down the road to resolving the crisis laid out so concisely in the conclusion of the Nayyar-Mian article, to understand that those words are not at all synonymous and to understand that the operative words concern the limits they set on the use of violence. So-called “left-wing” organizations (remember when they existed?) sometimes used to have the same addiction to violence, and it was no less bad for being left-wing.

The real import of this valuable article, however, lies not in its review of conditions in Pakistan, though that, given the ill-considered plans of the Obama Administration, more than suffices to make it an important piece for all U.S. decision-makers to read. The real import of the article is that both its introductory quote of Eqbal Ahmad and its concluding recommendations for resolving a problem that has only gotten steadily worse since Ahmad’s remarks a decade ago apply not just to Pakistan but to the whole Western confrontation with Islam.

Can a better statement of how to resolve the Gaza problem be written than:

Put simply, to effectively meet the Islamist challenge IN GAZA, THE ISRAELI [changed by WM] state must finally accept and fully exercise its responsibility to maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy and participation, and make available in an equitable manner the resources necessary for economic and social development?

And what about Iraq and Somalia? Consider:

Put simply, to effectively meet the Islamist challenge IN IRAQ AND SOMALIA, THE AMERICAN [changed by WM] state must finally accept and fully exercise its responsibility to maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy and participation, and make available in an equitable manner the resources necessary for economic and social development.

Madam Secretary of State, if you are confused about Somalia, you could start by reading the above sentence.

The comment also applies to others:

Put simply, to effectively meet the Islamist challenge IN KASHMIR, THE INDIAN [changed by WM] state must finally accept and fully exercise its responsibility to maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy and participation, and make available in an equitable manner the resources necessary for economic and social development.

The following remarks I made in 2007 about an emerging Islamic political fault line are unfortunately even more true today, despite the departure of the Bush Administration, decline in Iraqi conflict, relative quiescence of bin Laden, and retreat of America’s Ethiopian proxy army from Somalia.

An Islamic political fault line is forming from Bangladesh to Somalia. If a unified upheaval does in fact erupt from one end of this region to the other simultaneously, it will present a far more serious threat to the global political system than anything we have seen since the end of the Cold War. Those who dream of a clash of civilizations could, in that case, get what they want.

The threat to the global political system is two-fold: first, instability per se, which will generate all manner of suffering for those immediately involved and financial harm to people everywhere; second, undermining of civil liberties and good governance everywhere, both in regions of violence and even in those Western countries that may be fortunate enough to escape violence within their territory. Populations will panic, governments will overreact, politicians will exploit the fear to gain personal power, and democracy everywhere will fall under attack.

The vicious little invasion of Gaza only underscores the general point. It may well be that certain individuals understand all this perfectly well and are delighted that they have, by refusing to “maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy,” caused a level of chaos that they find profitable. Whether, in any specific case, that is true or not, it remains the case that for those of us who do not seek profit from chaos, an understanding of the causal link between social conditions and violence is the first step toward a solution. General recognition of this linkage in the West could very quickly cut the ground out from under bin Laden and all the other advocates of violence.