Resilient Pakistan Defies Doomsayers

Pakistanis are no strangers to the oft-repeated apocalyptic forecasts of imminent collapse of their nation that have been regularly dished out by many western leaders, leading analysts and mainstream media over the years. The 2009 Swat valley insurgency and 2010 summer floods sent these pessimist pundits in overdrive yet again as the images of the victims of these crises were widely distributed and discussed at length.

Let's briefly review the hysteric predictions about Pakistan's imminent fall made in the last two years:

Swat Valley Taliban Insurgency 2009:

It was early 2009 when the Taliban appeared to be in control of Pakistan's Swat valley, and the US politicians and media were deeply concerned about the insurgents closing in on Islamabad.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Pakistan was “abdicating to the Taliban”. Various western commentators and pundits went further by predicting Pakistan's "imminent collapse", and the usual foreign policy rags chimed in with their shrill talk of Pakistan as a "failed state".

"We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today", said David Kilcullen, George W. Bush's Iraq adviser, on the eve of Pakistan Day in 2009.

Others, such as Shahan Mufti of the Global Post, argued that Pakistan was dying a slow death with each act of terrorism on its soil.

Devastating Summer Floods of 2010:

As the massive floods inundated large swathes of Pakistan's rural landscape in summer of 2010, the western media fretted yet again that the natural disaster "could spark political unrest that could destabilize the government".

Experts cautioned that "the state itself could collapse, as hunger and destitution trigger explosions of popular anger". As the water began to recede, there was more doom and gloom about spread of epidemics like cholera and dysentery.

Pakistanis' Response to Swat Violence and Nationwide Floods:

We are now in 2011, and Pakistani have demonstrated their extraordinary resilience in defying dire predictions of "imminent collapse" in 2009 and 2010.

Pakistani military has cleared Swat region of the Taliban. Millions of refugees have returned home to resume normal life.



Businesses and schools are open and the hills are alive with the sound of music and entertainment. Swat's Malam Jabba ski resort is open for business, and visitors to the beautiful valley are struck by the extraordinary resilience of the people who were forced by Taliban insurgents to flee by the millions amid dire predictions of the imminent collapse of Pakistani state in early 2009.

In 2010, Pakistani military led the rescue and relief operations in the flood zones, followed by civilian officials of Pakistan's National Disaster Management Agency(NDMA) and many local and foreign NGOs. And seven months after the onset of the floods, only 160,000 of the original 3 million refugees remain in camps, mostly in Sindh province which was the last to be hit by flood waters. The worst fears expressed in summer of 2010 have not materialized. Pakistani state has not collapse, nor have the predicted second wave of deaths in the camps for the millions of internally displaced persons. None of the predicted epidemics (such as cholera and diarrhea) took place. While some of the affectees have had to deal with malnutrition which is chronic in some rural areas, Pakistan has managed to stave off the worst of the expected food insecurity.



Life is returning to normal in the rural areas of Pakistan, and the rural economy is showing signs of strength. The transfer of additional Rs. 300 billion to Pakistan's agriculture sector during the current fiscal year 2010-2011 by higher prices of agriculture produce and direct flood compensation is boosting economic confidence in the countryside. It is already generating rural demand tractors and for consumer items including consumer durables such as fans, TVs, motorcycles, cars, refrigerators, etc.

Technology to The Rescue:

In an unprecedented branchless banking operation mobilized for the flood victims by EasyPaisa and UBL-Omni, the Pakistani state has given away Rs. 28.6 billion to 1.483 million affected families using one of the the world's largest biometric databases maintained by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). Each family received a cash card (called Watan card) through NADRA loaded with Rs.20,000 to help with the recovery. With over 83 million registered citizens so far, the NADRA tech network is now used for everything from getting a passport to paying utility bills.



Several organizations used mobile phones in innovative ways unrelated to branchless banking during the floods. Ushahidi, an open source project that allows users to crowdsource crisis information via mobile, set up pakreport.org a mapping service that enabled anyone in the country to text information about the flood. Information was collated and made available to the emergency services and disaster response organizations and NGOs via a web-based interface.

Summary:

Pakistan continues to face major problems as it deals with the violent Taliban insurgency and multiple crises of stagnant economy, scarcity of energy and the lack of sense of security. The recent assassinations of the ruling PPP party leaders Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti are a reminder of the daunting challenge posed by the violent religious fanatics. The bumbling political leadership of Pakistan is incompetent and corrupt. However, what the prophets of doom and gloom often discount are key factors that keep the nation going, including the resilience of Pakistan's people, the extraordinary capabilities of its large and growing urban middle class, and the stabilizing influence of its powerful military. Pakistan is just too big to fail. I fully expect Pakistan to survive the current crises, and then begin to thrive again in the near future.

Here's a video titled "I Am Pakistan":



Here's a CNBC Pakistan video on January 2011 events:




Related Links:

Haq's Musings

What Pakistan Did Right

Branchless Banking Responds to Pakistan Floods

Pakistan's Rural Economy Recovering

Pakistan's Growing Middle Class

Pakistan is Too Big to Fail

Pessimism is the Ultimate Kufr

The news media and the commentators are quite busy making apocalyptic forecasts ranging from the demise of America as a superpower to the imminent collapse of Pakistani state. For example, Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, has said that by 2012 America will be an undeveloped nation, marked by squatter rebellions by those who refuse to give up their homes or else take over the homes of others. Former Bush administration adviser David Kilcullen has opined that "We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today." The conversation appears to dominated by Chicken Littles screaming "the sky is falling". In my attempts to understand the prevailing pessimism, I found the following article written by American Muslim activist and former Nixon adviser Robert D. Crane which lays out the Islamic perspective. Here is the article published by The American Muslim website late late year:

One of the most astute Saudi investors has expressed concern about the forecast by Gerald Celente shortly before Christmas, 2008, in an interview with Fox News that a social revolution will be sparked during the next four years by the collapse of the American economy followed by an ensuing inflation in a continuing downward spiral unlike anything in American history.

Celente, who is CEO of Trends Research Institute, has the best track record in the professional forecasting industry, so when he speaks people listen. He was almost alone in predicting well in advance the 1987 stock market crash, the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, and the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis. More than a year ago, in November, 2007, he told the UPI that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants would tumble to their deaths,” as indeed happened with Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and other untouchables. He forecast the sub-prime mortgage collapse and a massive 90% devaluation of the dollar from a failed rescue effort.

His credentials are respected by everyone. CNN Headline News says, “When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.” CNBC comments, “There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.” The Wall Street Journal advises, “Those who take their predictions seriously consider Gerald Celente and the Trends Research Institute.” The New York Times explains that, “Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic, and business trends for corporate clients.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution adds, “Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark.” The Los Angeles Times asserts that, “The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of popular culture.” The New York Post opines that, “If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”

What has especially caught the attention of both economic and political leaders around the globe is Celente’s forecast of a social and political revolution sparked by the economic devolution. He predicts food riots, accompanied by a tax rebellion. We may see this as early as April 15th, 2009. He says that by 2012 America will be an undeveloped nation, marked by squatter rebellions by those who refuse to give up their homes or else take over the homes of others. “There is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of what we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.” Christmas as a retail bonanza will be a distant memory, reflecting a situation that he says will be “worse than the Great Depression,” because the so-called safety net will collapse.

As a forecaster of sociological change, Celente warns that “there’s going to be a lot of crime” at all levels “worse than in the last 1929 depression” and that the growing wealth gap between the rich and the middle class will threaten social order because the middle class everywhere in the world will become a revolutionary class using knowledge, resources, and skills “to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” He warns, “There will be a revolution in this country, and we’re going to see a third party in response to the bloodless coup by Wall Street” supported by “a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

This all sounds like the sky is falling, but the prediction both in its parts and in its whole is fallible and has been forecast before. Celente’s horror scenario was actually expected and welcomed 23 years ago by Norman Bailey, then assistant director for international economics in President Reagan’s National Security Council, who was the principal supporter of the Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice, for which I served as Chairman of the Financial Markets Committee until the necessary remedies were dropped as too controversial and therefore premature.

Norm Bailey said that only a real financial catastrophe could make possible the shift from debt to equity in finance and from concentrated to broadened capital ownership as the only means to narrow the wealth gap and as the only means to avoid a revolution that would take from the existing haves and eventually destroy global civilization.

As a lifetime professional long-range global forecaster, it has amazed me that anyone could be surprised by the “crisis of 2008,” other than by the fact that it took so long. Two and a half years ago, Norm Kurland and I founded The American Revolutionary Party (http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us) precisely to reveal the most fundamental flaws of Keynesian economic theory and of NeoCon political theory and to advocate equally fundamental remedies based on the theoretical foundation of binary economics developed by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler half a century ago. These have been further developed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (http://www.cesj.org) during the past quarter century, and in practice by its investment banking arm, Equity Expansion International, of which I was one of the five founding principals.

The problem of Celente and of almost all of the 100 forecasting and 100 planning techniques that I summarized as chairman of a big study on the subject in 1980 for Charles Williams Associates in a contract for the National Security Council is that they rely so heavily on existing trends and on trends that are already so observable that they cannot be ignored. They ignore the exogenous variables that are still under the radar and may be entirely outside the paradigmatic parameters of establishment thinking.

Celente is right on the mark when he predicts the rise of a major third party, but he does not envision any solutions that can make a difference and invalidate his conclusions. More specifically he ignores the universal principles of what may be called Islamic economics, not the glitsy stuff of the so-called Islamic banks but the maqasid al shari’ah or universal and essential purposes of justice as taught principally in the haqq al mal of classical Islamic thought, first revived in the modern era by Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur’s book, Maqasid al Shari’ah, published in 1946 and translated by the International Institute of Islamic Thought in 2007. These provide a new paradigm ready to replace the bankrupt paradigm of concentrated power that dominates in both socialism and capitalism.

At a most fundamental level the catch phrase, “Islam is the Answer,” is true, because it teaches that the spiritual and the material can and should be mutually reinforcing. Without specific content, however, it is meaningless and serves only to marginalize the key role of the human person in the maqsud of haqq al nafs (the duty to respect the human person or soul) as the basis for judging human responsibilities and rights, and the key role of the means of production (capital) in producing wealth, elaborated in the maqsud of haqq al mal, and therefore the need for new institutions to actualize the universal, individual right to capital ownership as the key to both economic and political justice.

Celente’s forecast of the next four years is trend bound, which guarantees that it is wrong, since trends never continue independently of unanticipated events and forces. This is especially true in an era of paradigmatic unraveling, when the negentropic or dynamic power of a new paradigm, according to the laws of chaos theory, suddenly replaces the old dying or entropic one.

Perhaps we are not yet at the point of paradigmatic revolution, because President Obama’s advisers seem inclined to focus on saving the old paradigm of concentrating power in order to achieve stability. Perhaps the paradigmatic shift will come too late to avoid global civilizational collapse, but there is hope in the fact that human beings often deviate unintentionally from the expected, both individually and in groups, as shown by the major study that I directed at Charles Williams Associates for the National Security Council in 1981-82 to determine why all ten of the major, long-range, global forecasts had proved to be grossly wrong.

Predicting the future is playing God, which is why the mathematical modeling that drives Wall Street is so polytheistic. Forecasting the future, on the other hand, can serve merely to warn and/or to inspire by posing and perhaps ranking alternative futures through the use of more holistic techniques, such as scenario building. Since reality exists in quality more than in quantity, quality usually drives quantity over the long run. Since the present is bound by the past, but the future is not bound by the present, Celente’s pessimism is unnecessary. Celente’s warnings may turn out to be accurate over the short run of a single U.S. presidential term of office, because quantitative projections right now are all downward by almost every indicator. Nevertheless, over a longer period of time, and even within as few as four years, the revolution that he forecasts may be qualitatively self-correcting before it becomes destructive of civilization.

Such counter-intuitive optimism, otherwise known by skeptics as naivete, is in accordance with the Qur’anic principle known as “facilitation,” whereby God facilitates both the downward spiral known as istidraj, from which at some point there can be no return, and the upward spiral known as ma’ al usri yusra, “with every difficulty there is relief” Surah al Inshirah 94:5. This is designed to teach us that we have the free will to determine our own future both as persons, as nations, and as entire civilizations. There is no excuse for pessimism, because Allah is beyond time and space and therefore knows the future, which includes our free will to determine it.

Pessimism is the ultimate kufr, because it results from reliance on ourselves as the only power in the world. Optimism is the product of taqwa, which results from divinely given awareness and love of God and leads to our reliance on a transcendent power beyond ourselves, which is the very definition of Islam.

Related Links:

Pakistan's Demise Imminent

The American Muslim

The Trend Research Institute

Pessimist Pundits Gaining Strength in Pakistan

Lahore cricket attacks appear to have unleashed yet another wave of pundits of pessimism and prophets of doom and gloom about Pakistan. In spite of the obvious differences, most find it convenient to compare Lahore and Mumbai, just as they compared Mumbai with 911 attacks. While it was clearly a significant security lapse, the parallels with Mumbai are only superficial. Here are some of the obvious differences between the two tragedies:

1. Unlike the Lahore attackers, the Mumbai attackers were on a suicide mission and fought a determined and long battle killing lots of civilians while mocking Indian authorities for almost three days.

2. Unlike Mumbai police, ATS and Indian commandos, Lahore Police were able to protect their charges from hostage taking or being killed while sacrificing their own lives.

3. Unlike the Mumbai attackers, the Lahore attackers staged an ambush and ran away when the police responded. The fact that all of them were able to flee without a serious chase is still something to be very seriously concerned about and it requires better preparation and training for the future.

The nature of the attacks and attackers appear to be very different leading one to conclude that Lahore is not the work of the known Jihadi groups operating in South Asia. Some domestic radical groups in Pakistan could be the perpetrators but it is more likely the work of mercenaries hired by external elements for carrying out a covert action to terrorize Pakistan as supposed pay back.

After writing fairly positive and optimistic articles about on Pakistan following his earlier visits in 2007 and 2008, British writer William Dalrymple has thrown in the towel and joined the hordes of pessimist pundits. Here's his latest assessment published in the Guardian:

Just over a year ago, in February 2008, I traveled by car across the length and breadth of Pakistan to cover the country's first serious election since General Pervez Musharraf seized power in 1999. The right wing press had been predicting violence and bloodshed, but at the time I traveled in safety throughout the country and was struck by the country's fortitude in the face of adversity. The story I wrote at the time for the New York Review of Books was optimistic.

"Like most other people given the option, Pakistanis clearly want the ability to choose their own rulers, and to determine their own future," I wrote. "The country I saw over the last few days on a long road trip was not a failed state, nor anything even approaching 'the most dangerous country in the world ... almost beyond repair' as the Spectator (among many others) recently suggested ... By and large, the countryside I passed through was calm and beautiful, and not obviously less prosperous-looking than its subcontinental neighbor. It was certainly a far cry from the terminal lawlessness and instability of post-occupation Iraq or Afghanistan."

A year on, however, the situation could hardly be more different, or more grim. In just over a year, Asif Ali Zardari's inept government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Yesterday's ambush of the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, which killed six policemen and injured seven players and officials, combined with the defeat of the Pakistani army in Swat and the subsequent capitulation to the Taliban there, and the recent kidnapping of John Solecki, head of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Quetta, during an attack that killed his driver, underscores the seriousness of the situation.

Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notorious playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place on his watch has amazed almost all observers. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province - around a fifth of Pakistan - women have now been forced to wear the burka, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards and more than 140 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down. From the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city's elite, along with its musicians, have decamped to what had, until yesterday's attack, been regarded as the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semi-autonomous tribal belt - the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) that run along the Afghan border - have fled from the conflict zones, blasted by missiles from unmanned American Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships, to the tent camps now ringing Peshawar.

The tribal areas have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but they have now been radicalised as never before. The rain of armaments from US drones and Pakistani ground forces, which have caused extensive civilian casualties, daily add a steady stream of angry foot soldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-western religious and political extremism continues to flourish, and there are increasing signs that the instability is now spreading from the Frontier Province to the relatively settled confines of Lahore and the Punjab.

The most alarming manifestation of this was the ease with which a highly trained jihadi group, almost certainly supplied and provisioned in Pakistan - probably by the nominally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organisation that aims to restore Muslim rule in Kashmir - attacked neighbouring India in November. They murdered 173 innocent people in Mumbai, injured more than 600 and brought the two nuclear-armed rivals once again to the brink of war. Now Lashkar is being named as the principle suspect in yesterday's attack in Lahore.

Four months ago, in November on a trip to Pakistan, I tried to visit Peshawar, which functions as both the capital of the North-West Frontier Province and the administrative centre for Fata along the Afghan border. But for the first time in 25 years, I was warned by Pakistani journalist friends not even to attempt going. In one week, an unprecedented series of events made up my mind for me.

On the Monday 11 November, some 60 militants identified with the Pakistani Taliban looted 13 trucks carrying military supplies and a fleet of Humvees going up the Khyber Pass to US troops in Afghanistan. Twenty-six people were kidnapped. The next day, a suicide bomber narrowly missed killing the governor and some of the ministers of the NWFP as they left a stadium. Three people were killed in the attack. On Wednesday of that week, unidentified gunmen killed Stephen Vance, a US aid worker, and kidnapped an Iranian diplomat, who joined the Chinese engineers, Pakistani truck drivers and senior Afghan diplomat being held in Taliban captivity. On the Thursday, two journalists - one Japanese, the other Afghan - were shot and wounded. And this was just one week in one single provincial town. Peshawar suddenly seemed to be becoming as violent as Baghdad at the height of the insurgency three years ago.

All this took place in the vacuum created by the temporary flight from the province of the chief minister and leader of the NWFP's ruling Awami National party, Asfandyar Wali Khan. This followed a suicide bombing on 2 October that killed three guests and a member of his staff while he was greeting visitors during Eid celebrations marking the end of Ramadan. Immediately after the bombing, a rattled Khan fled from the province in a helicopter sent to him by Zardari, then flew straight on to Britain. He was persuaded to return only with some difficulty.

In February 2008, Khan's party had been elected with a huge majority, breaking the power of the MMA Islamist alliance, a coalition of Islamic groups that has been a major force in frontier politics, and that had ruled the province for the previous five years. The election seemed to mark a moment of hope for Pakistani secular democracy; but that hope was soon shattered by the apparently unstoppable advance of the Pakistani Taliban out of Fata.

Since then there have been several more suicide bombings and a number of attacks on US convoys and depots in and around Peshawar, including one that led to the burning of 200 trucks and dozens of Humvees and armoured personnel carriers, and another that led to the capture by the Taliban of 50 containers of supplies.

Far from the frontier, in Pakistan's artistic capital of Lahore, the scene of yesterday's attack, the usually resilient members of the liberal elite were more depressed than I have ever seen them, alarmed both by the news of the Taliban's advances and by the economic difficulties that have recently led Pakistan to seek a $7.6bn loan from the IMF.

The night I arrived, I went to see Najam Sethi and his wife Jugnu, editors of the English-language Daily Times and Friday Times newspapers, who now found themselves directly in the Taliban's crosshairs. Three weeks earlier, they had begun to receive faxes threatening them with violence if they didn't stop attacking Islamist interests in their columns. The two have survived years of harassment by various governments and agencies, but now felt powerless to respond to these anonymous threats.

Another old friend in Lahore, the human rights campaigner Asma Jahangir, had also received faxed warnings - in her case to desist helping the victims of honour killings. Jahangir, who had bravely fought successive military governments, was at a loss about what to do: "Nobody is safe any more," she told me. "If you are threatened by the government you can take them on legally. But with nonstate actors, when even members of the government are themselves not safe, who do you appeal to? Where do you look for protection?"

These events dramatically illustrate the central contention of Descent into Chaos, the latest book by Ahmed Rashid, who is widely regarded as the best-informed writer on both the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani counterparts. He emphasises the degree to which, seven years after 9/11, "the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001".

Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the wreckage of Iraq, with more than two million external refugees and the ethnic cleansing of its Christian population, the rise of Iran as a major regional power, and now the implosion of Afghanistan and Pakistan, probably the most dangerous development of all. While laying part of the blame for the current disaster on the "arrogance and ignorance" of the US administration, Rashid is also well aware of the large share of responsibility that must be put at the door of Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or ISI.

For more than 20 years, the ISI has, for its own purposes, deliberately and consistently funded and incubated a variety of Islamist groups, including in particular Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Since the days of the anti-Soviet mujahideen, the Pakistani army saw the jihadis as an ingenious and cost-effective means of both dominating Afghanistan - something they finally achieved with the Soviet retreat in 1987 - and bogging down the Indian army in Kashmir, something they succeeded in achieving from 1990 onward.

The army's top brass were convinced until recently that they could control the militants whom they had fostered. In a taped conversation between then-General Musharraf and Muhammad Aziz Khan, his chief of general staff, which India released in 1999, Aziz said that the army had the jihadis by their tooti (their privates).

Yet while some in the ISI may still believe that they can use jihadis for their own ends, the Islamists have increasingly followed their own agendas, sending suicide bombers to attack not just members of Pakistan's religious minorities and political leaders, but even the ISI's headquarters at Camp Hamza itself, in apparent revenge for the army's declared support for America's war on terror and attacks made by the Pakistani military on Taliban strongholds in Fata. Ironically, as Rashid makes clear, it was exactly groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which were originally created by the ISI, that have now turned their guns on their creators, as well as brazenly launching well-equipped and well-trained teams of jihadis into Indian territory.

The speed with which the US lost interest in Afghanistan after its successful invasion and embarked on plans to invade Iraq, which clearly had no link with al-Qaida, convinced Pakistan's military leaders that the US was not serious about a long-term commitment to Karzai's regime. This in turn led to them keeping the Taliban in reserve to be used to reinstall a pro-Pakistani regime in Afghanistan once the Americans' attention had been turned elsewhere and Karzai's regime had crumbled.

By 2004, the US had filmed Pakistani army trucks delivering Taliban fighters to the Afghan border and taking them back a few days later, while wireless monitoring at the US base at Bagram picked up Taliban commanders arranging with Pakistani army officers at the border for safe passage as they came in and out of Afghanistan. By 2005 the Taliban, with covert Pakistani support, was launching a full-scale assault on Nato troops in Afghanistan.

As Rashid notes in his conclusion: "Today, seven years after 9/11, Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Taliban Shura still live in Baluchistan province. Afghan and Pakistani Taliban leaders live on further north, in Fata, as do the militias of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. Al-Qaida has a safe haven in Fata, and along with them reside a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into Europe and the United States."

The foot-dragging response of Zardari to the attacks on Mumbai last November shows the degree to which the two-faced dual-track policy of courting both the US and the various jihadi groups remains effectively in place with the Pakistani military. For the last decade, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, has been allowed to operate from Muridke, near Lahore. Although Lashkar has officially been banned in reaction to US pressure after 9/11, widely thought to continue to function under the name of Jamaat-ud Daawa, while Saeed is accused of continuing to incite attacks on India and western targets.

Even now, after the mass murder in Mumbai - although Saeed is himself now under house arrest on suspicion of masterminding the attacks (an accusation that he denies) - his organisation's madrasas and facilities remain open and appear to benefit from patronage offered by Pakistan's authorities. Only this year, the Zardari government cleared the purchase of a bulletproof Land Cruiser for him. Zardari does indeed seem to be in what the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, calls "a state of denial" about the involvement of Pakistani jihadi groups in the Mumbai massacres.

Yet, viewed in the light of Pakistani power politics, Zardari's position has a certain dangerous logic. Army insiders say that General Ashfaq Kiyani, the current chief of staff, who is already involved in a full-scale conflict with the Pakistani Taliban in the frontier tribal areas, does not feel sufficiently strong to open a second front with the jihadis in the Punjab; while Zardari, even though he may wish to be rid of Lashkar and the Punjabi jihadis, cannot afford to be seen to cave in to Indian pressure. It is a classic South Asian catch-22, which allows Lashkar to continue functioning with only cosmetic restrictions, whose main function is to impress the US. Yet the fact remains that until firm action is taken against all such groups, and training camps are closed down, the slow collapse of the Pakistani state will continue, and with it the safety of western interests in the region.

Several factors will determine the future. Rashid makes it clear that only a radical change of policy by the US under Barack Obama can hope to begin turning things around. He writes: "South and Central Asia will not see stability unless there is a new global compact among the leading players ... to help this region solve its problems, which range from settling the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan to funding a massive education and job-creation program in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan and along their borders with Central Asia." As Obama has hinted, such an approach could be coupled with negotiations with some elements of the Afghan Taliban.

The second factor, of course, has to be reform of the ISI and the Pakistani military. The top Pakistani army officers must end their obsession with bleeding India by using an Islamist strategic doctrine entailing support of jihadists, and realise that such a policy is deeply damaging to Pakistan itself, threatening to turn Pakistan into a clone of Taliban-dominated Afghanistan rather than a potential partner of a future Indian superpower.

A third factor is somehow finding a way to stop the madrasa-inspired and Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam, which is directly linked to the spread of anti-western radicalisation.

On my last visit to Pakistan, it was very clear that while the Wahhabi-dominated north-west was on the verge of falling under the sway of the Taliban, the same was not true of the Sufi-dominated province of Sindh, which currently is quieter and safer than it has been for some time. Here in southern Pakistan, on the Indian border, Sufi Islam continues to act as a powerful defence against the puritanical fundamentalist Islam of the Wahhabi mullahs, which supports intolerance of all other faiths.

Visiting the popular Sufi shrine of Sehwan in Sindh last month, I was astonished by the strength of feeling expressed against the mullahs by the Sindhis who look to their great saints such a Lal Shabaz Qalander for guidance, and hate the Wahhabis who criticise the popular Islam of the Sufi saints as a form of shirk, or heresy: "All these mullahs should be damned," said one old Sufi I talked to in the shrine.

"They read their books but they never understand the true message of love that the prophet preached. Men so blind as them cannot even see the shining sun."

A Delhi friend who visited shortly before me, the former Guardian Africa correspondent James Astill, met a young man from Swat, in the NWFP, who said he had considered joining the militants, but their anti-Sufi attitude had put him off: "No one can deny us our respected saints of God," he said.

The Saudis have invested intensively in Wahhabi madrasas in the NWFP and Punjab, with dramatic effect, radically changing the religious landscape of an entire region. The tolerant Sufi culture of Sindh has been able to defy this imported Wahhabi radicalism. The politically moderating effect of Sufism was recently described in a Rand Corporation report recommending support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam". Here is an entirely indigenous and homegrown Islamic resistance movement to fundamentalism, with deep roots in South Asian culture. Its importance cannot be overestimated. Could it have a political effect in a country still dominated by military forces that continue to fund and train jihadi groups? It is one of the few sources of hope left in the increasingly bleak political landscape of this strategically crucial country.


Robert Prechter Jr., the author of "The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socionomics" and "Conquer the Crash", says, "Until panic, capitulation or exhaustion are in evidence, all rallies, spirited though they may be, are likely to be rallies within a larger downtrend. We look forward to the day when we will put our cash back to work in the investment markets, but that day has not arrived yet." Of course, Prechter is referring to the interaction of human psychology and performance of investment markets. As Pakistanis edge ever closer to "panic, capitulation or exhaustion", I believe the same could be said of them and their change of fortunes for the better.

Related Links:

Foreign Visitors Pleasantly Surprised in Pakistan

Jinnah's Pakistan Booms Amidst Doom and Gloom