Pashto Music Video - Nan Pah De Hujra Ke Khushali

زه خو شرابي يم، زه خو شرابي يم شیخه څه راسره جنګ کړې برخې ازلي دي، کاشکې ما د ځان په رنګ کړې

#Pakistan - Imran Khan’s Arrest, the Army and Pakistan’s Perennial Crisis

 By Sadanand Dhume

The current turmoil is unprecedented, but its roots lie in the country’s founding ideology.

The conflict between Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the Army seems to have come to a head after building for more than a year. On Tuesday, a throng of black-helmeted paramilitary forces arrested the 70-year-old Mr. Khan on corruption charges, setting off dramatic protests that threaten to destabilize the nuclear-armed nation of 230 million. On Thursday the Supreme Court declared Mr. Khan’s arrest unlawful but said he should remain for now at a police guest house under court supervision.

It’s still unclear whether Mr. Khan will walk free, but this week’s events have already triggered unprecedented turmoil in Pakistan. On Tuesday, for the first time in the country’s history, civilian protesters breached the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi. In Lahore, pro-Khan mobs looted the official residence of the powerful army corps commander. In Peshawar, rioters attacked the provincial assembly and set fire to the regional headquarters of Radio Pakistan, the state broadcaster. At least eight people have died in clashes between protesters and authorities. Mr. Khan’s supporters have also rallied in London, New York and Toronto to demand his release. So far, neither the coalition government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif nor the army—which is widely believed to be calling the shots—shows any signs of yielding. On Wednesday police arrested senior members of Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party. Authorities have severely restricted access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, robbing the PTI of its most effective means of communication and mobilization.

The immediate question is obvious: Will the army, which has dominated the country’s politics for most of its history, succeed in squelching Mr. Khan’s determined bid to regain power? The former prime minister, a charismatic populist with a large following, has so far refused to bend under pressure. The repercussions of their contest will dominate Pakistan’s domestic politics and influence its relations with, among others, the U.S., the Gulf countries and India.

Ideally, the crisis would force Pakistan to correct its broader self-destructive trajectory. Though this week’s chaos puts a particularly fine point on it, the country has long struggled with the lethal combination of a stagnating economy, rising religious fundamentalism and an outsize military that it can’t afford. Though Pakistan is only the world’s 42nd-largest economy, it boasts the sixth-largest military. The country won’t be able to pull itself back from the brink unless its leaders question the ideas that brought it to its current calamity. There’s a template of sorts in Bangladesh, which broke away from Pakistan in 1971 to become an independent nation. Once derided by Henry Kissinger as a “basket case,” over the past two decades Bangladesh has quietly proven naysayers wrong. It has emerged as one of the world’s largest garment exporters, developed close economic and diplomatic relations with India, and firmly subordinated its army to civilian power.

In 1999 Bangladesh had a per capita income of about $400, slightly lower than Pakistan’s ($420). By 2021, Bangladesh’s per capita income of $2,460 was more than 60% higher than Pakistan’s. Nearly three-quarters of Bangladeshi women are literate, compared with less than half of Pakistani women. Manufacturing—an important measure of a poor country’s ability to boost productivity by moving workers from farms to factories—accounts for 21% of Bangladesh’s economy compared with only 12% in Pakistan. Bangladesh’s foreign-exchange reserves of about $30 billion are almost seven times as large as Pakistan’s.

That Pakistan lags behind what was once the poorer half of the country speaks to more than a failure of specific policies. The big difference is how each country conceives of itself. Pakistan’s problems go back to a founding ideology rooted in arguments used to carve a Muslim-majority homeland from British India, argues former Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani in his 2018 book, “Reimagining Pakistan.” The country “decided to base itself as an independent state on the same grounds that it had sought its creation,” he writes. “Islamic nationalism, pan Islamism and competing with ‘Hindu India’ superseded” a more pragmatic approach that embraced “the ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences” of Pakistanis while also pursuing their material interests.

In Mr. Haqqani’s telling, Pakistan has clung to a counterproductive ideology, championed most fiercely by the military, that includes “militarism, radical Islamist ideology, perennial conflict with India, dependence on external support, and refusal to recognize ethnic identities and religious pluralism.” Mr. Khan’s confrontation with the army may have set off the current conflagration, but the roots lie in a worldview that prevents Pakistani leaders from pursuing more-practical policies such as economic modernization and peace with India.

Mr. Khan’s supporters see his beef with army Chief Gen. Asim Munir as proof that Mr. Khan is the only politician capable of pressing a reset button on Pakistan. But if you examine his record and rhetoric, the opposite picture emerges. Mr. Khan represents a curious blend of traditional Pakistani pan-Islamism with Oxbridge leftist anti-Americanism. He may portray himself as a revolutionary figure, but in a deeper sense he embodies the dying gasps of the old order. It will fall on either a different civilian leader or a more enlightened military leadership to alter the country’s course.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/imran-khan-the-army-and-pakistans-perennial-crisis-tehreek-e-insaaf-imran-khan-shehbaz-sharif-fa368a18

#Pakistan - SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE RISE OF THE ANTI-INTELLECTUAL

Nadeem F. Paracha

Across the 20th century, intellectuals played an important role in political parties and governments, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Richmond University’s Professor of Politics Eunice Goes, intellectuals perform several roles in the policymaking process.

They help politicians make sense of the world. They offer cause-effect explanations of political and economic phenomena, and diagnoses and prescriptions to policy puzzles. They also help political actors develop ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals.

But in this century, politics has often witnessed a backlash against the presence of intellectuals in political parties and in governments. This is likely due to the strengthening of the parallel tradition of anti-intellectualism, which was always (and still is) active in various polities.This tradition has been more active in right-wing groups. It was especially strengthened by the rise of populist politics in many countries in the 2010s. But mainstream political outfits in Europe and the US still induct the services of intellectuals, even though this ploy has greatly been eroded in the Republican Party in the US after it wholeheartedly embraced populism in 2016, and still seems to be engulfed by it. The recent rise of populist politics has greatly reduced the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual.

Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party in the US has always had the largest presence of intellectuals in it. This policy was initiated during the four presidential terms of the Democratic Party’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45), during which time a large number of intellectuals were inducted. Their role was to aid the government in bailing the US out of a tumultuous economic crisis, and to develop a narrative to neutralise the increasing appeal of organisations on the far right and the far left. This tradition of inducting intellectuals continued to be employed by the Democrats for decades.

Interestingly, even though the Republican Party has had an anti-intellectual dimension ever since the early 20th century, it carried with it intellectuals to counter intellectuals active in the Democratic Party. This was specifically true during the presidencies of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-88) who was, in fact, propelled to power by an intellectual movement led by conservatives and some former liberals. This movement evolved into becoming ‘neo-conservatism’ during the Reagan presidencies. Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party have carried with them intellectuals as well, especially the Labour Party. Some totalitarian regimes too employed the services of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The Soviet dictator Stalin was not very kind to intellectuals, though. But intellectuals played a major role in shaping Soviet communism. Hitler’s Nazi regime had the services of some of the period’s finest minds in Germany, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the logician Rudolf Carnap, and a host of others. They helped Hitler mould Nazism into an all-encompassing ideology. Just how could some extremely intelligent men start to both romance as well as rationalise a brutal ideology is a topic that has often been investigated, but it is beyond the scope of this column.

In Pakistan, three governments banked heavily on intellectuals to formulate their respective ideologies, narratives and economics. The Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) carried scholars who specialised in providing ‘modernist’ interpretations to various traditional aspects of Islam. This they did to aid Ayub’s modernisation project. The intellectuals included the rationalist Islamic scholars Fazalur Rahman Malik and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, and, to a certain extent, the progressive novelist Mumtaz Mufti and Justice Javed Iqbal, the son of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. The writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab was Ayub’s Principal Secretary.

Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was studded with intellectuals who remained active in the party during at least the first few years of Bhutto’s regime (1971-77). These included the Marxist theorist JA Rahim who (with Bhutto) wrote the party’s ‘Foundation Papers’ and then its first manifesto. He also served as a minister in the Bhutto regime till his acrimonious ouster in 1975. Then there was Dr Mubashir Hassan, who was the main theorist behind PPP’s concept of a ‘planned economy’. He served as the Bhutto regime’s finance minister. The intellectuals Hanif Ramay and Safdar Mir wrote treatises to counter the ideologies of the Islamists. Ramay also formulated the party’s core ideology of ‘Islamic socialism’. The lawyer and constitutional expert Hafeez Pirzada too was a founding member of the party. He was one of the main authors of the 1973 Constitution.

The Ziaul Haq dictatorship adopted the Islamist theorist Abul Ala Maududi as the regime’s main ideologue. Maududi was also the chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Zia, when he was a lieutenant general in the early 1970s, used to distribute books written by Maududi to his officers and soldiers. Maududi passed away in 1979, just two years after Zia overthrew the Bhutto regime. But Zia continued to apply Maududi’s ideas to his dictatorship’s ‘Islamisation’ project.

Zia also had the services of the prominent lawyers AK Brohi and Sharifuddin Pirzada. Brohi and Pirzada were instrumental in formulating the murder charges against Bhutto. In his book, Betrayals of Another Kind, Gen Faiz Ali Chisti wrote that Brohi and Pirzada encouraged Zia to hang Bhutto, which he did. Pirzada also wrote oaths for judges sworn in by Zia that omitted the commitment to protect the Constitution. He would go on to do the same for the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008). In fact, Sharifuddin Pirzada had also served the Ayub regime. The rise of populist politics in the second decade of the 21st century has greatly diminished the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual. It perceives intellectuals as being part of a detested elite. Therefore, for example, one never expected intellectuals of any kind in Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). This is why the nature of this party’s narrative is ridiculously contradictory and even chaotic.

However, in a January 2022 essay for The Atlantic, David A. Graham wrote that it’s not that intellectuals have vanished from political parties. Rather, due to populism’s anti-intellectual disposition, they have purposely dumbed down their ideas.

According to Graham, “This is the age of smart politicians pretending to be stupid.” If stupidity can now attract votes and save the jobs of intellectuals in parties and governments, then smart folks can act stupid in the most convincing manner. Even more than those who are actually stupid.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1753082

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