Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power
By Tariq Ali
Scribner, 288 pages, $29.99
Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi and Mehsud. And, of course, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. We now recite effortlessly these inventories of politics and wars, fear and survival, unknown to most of us a decade ago.
But incantation is not comprehension. The focus of our global engagements has moved from old alliances and customary enemies to a vague collection of insurgents, ideologues and borderless forces that is hard to identify and harder to understand. The first years of this violent century have underscored the fallibility of our state system, and the deep fault lines within states. Governments, armies, spies and money - diplomacy’s traditional arsenal - seem weak, unfocused and distressingly unprepared to cope with the passing of everyday global politics.
Like other moments of deep political transformation - the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam in the eighth century, the sack of Eurasia by the Mongols, the rise and fall of European colonialism and the end of Pax Americana - only retrospection illuminates change. French scholar and author (Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam) Gilles Kepel, in Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, and British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker and activist Tariq Ali, in The Duet: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, set out to map this evolving terrain. Exploring the misconceptions that beset policy-makers and powerbrokers in Europe and the United States, the Middle East and South Asia, they depict fundamental and mistaken shifts in the ways that old power has met new political movements.
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom is the more ambitious of these two volumes, and Kepel’s efforts to decipher the meaning of political Islam - or more precisely, the political languages embedded in Islam - frame his treatment of today’s militants. He crisply identifies two narratives, often erroneously conflated, that are rooted in the jihadi tactics of terror and martyrdom. The first, expostulated by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden from their Pakistani mountain retreats, is triumphalist and grand, seeking to bring Islam to its “heralded victory.” The second, a narrative of global Islamic resistance outlined in the writings of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Musab al-Suri, conceived a global Islamist struggle that surfaced in the Middle East and Europe.
Kepel’s detailed analysis of the conflicting tactics, strategies, justifications and goals that underscore these ideologies is among the clearest available to date. His tour of the global political landscape illuminates not only the broad contours of Islamist thinking since 2001, but also the nuanced political theologies that pit sects, tribes, jihadis and governments against one another.
The bin Laden-Zawahiri vision prompted the West’s war on terror, a failed utopian crisis that, as Kepel notes, pitted a quest for universal democracy against one for a universal Islamist state. These failed “transformative fictions,” as Kepel aptly calls them, have nonetheless dramatically altered the way the modern state system confronts challenges to its habitual writ. Zarqawi’s and Suri’s action agenda - a systematic counterpoint to the U.S.-prosecuted Iraq war that underscores the fatal weaknesses of U.S. foreign policy - has targeted Europe’s people and governments as well.
Indeed, the consequences of multiple Islamisms for Europe’s societies leads Kepel to dissect Europe’s immigration policies, its varied models of social incorporation and exclusion, and the effects of distant insurgencies on its Muslim youth. It is not simply that would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid found his religion in England, or that Islamist groups have bombed Spain’s trains, or that Kashmiri immigrants demonstrated against Salman Rushdie in Bradford, England. Europe’s policies and practices toward its own diverse populations - France’s toward Muslim dress, Denmark’s conflict between cartoonists and Muslim sensibilities, Germany’s diffidence toward its Turkish population - have become a part of a complex, global Islamist puzzle. Others, including Ian Buruma, Ruth Mandel and Riva Kastoryano, have treated this question in detail, but Kepel ties together cause and effect, and inward- and outward-looking policies, quite deftly.
This is where Kepel and Ali find common ground. Just as Kepel notes that “the war on terror embodied the same policy objectives that the United States had pursued in the Middle East since 1945,” so Ali tells a six-decade tale of failed governance in Pakistan and failed U.S. policy toward Pakistan.
There was a time when this story was encapsulated in the fractious politics of the post-partition Indian subcontinent, but no more. Ali’s reading of Pakistan’s strangely emblematic place in Islamic politics is no less telling for is familiarity. Pakistan is an exemplar of an intentional state that draws its cultural roots from Islam but its governance from an autocratic and self-defeating colonialism.
Pakistan’s history is its present. “A conflict of myriad wills sometimes results in the creation of something that nobody willed,” Ali writes. As weekly bomb blasts along its Afghan border and in Pakistan’s major cities attest, it is a state quintessentially conflicted, at once home to disaffected Islamists and a victim of the philosophies of both Zawahiri and Zarqawi.
With Pakistan caught between the rock of extremism and the hard place of ill-formed governance, Ali’s “flight path” metaphor has become real: Its relationship with the United States is rocky, militancy has overtaken portions of the state and civil society, and successive governments cannot see their way through the thicket of opportunistic, often duplicitous alliances - domestic and foreign - to notice that its interests and those of its allies are not always the same.
Worse still, Pakistan’s governments rarely have enough public support to change allies, or the conduct of their own politics. When they do - as happened during Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s brief, socialist, pro-nuclear rule in the 1970s - triumph is quickly squandered by political manipulation and downright arrogance.
The Duet has a long reach, from the beginning of the state to this year’s headlines. A breezy, occasionally repetitive read, it chronicles expectations trumped by wars, pieties trumped by politics, and the pieties of politics trumped by a world that often takes account of Pakistan only when Pakistan seems to get in the world’s way.
Ali’s Pakistan - more moderate than outsiders believe, more complicated than accounted for, and increasingly fearful of the toll poor governance will take on its future - sometimes sounds a bit like France as Kepel describes it: a place that has “failed to offer certain marginalized populations full participation in a vast culture.” Pakistan’s problem, of course, is more central to its idea of itself and to the deep failures of imagination that have kept it trapped in the crosswinds of religion and the crossfire of proxy wars. After all, just how do weak, compromised governments tell orthodox Islamists that their religion is getting in the way of a self-professed Islamic state?
Kepel’s response to such questions is to argue for a new multipolarism, a “framework of commitments” for peace and prosperity that overtakes routine enmities and alliances in Europe and the Middle East. His proposal is at once innovative and familiar, a way of extending regional interests without succumbing to the ambiguities of globalism. Mostly, however, he seeks a way to move beyond terrorism and U.S. unipolarism, all at once, and return to a world bound by politics rather than ideology.
Of course, this is easier said than done. The Duet reminds us that “politics in a land of perpetual dictatorships and corrupt politicians is undoubtedly depressing.” Should international relations ever provide this new space, Pakistan should be among its first beneficiaries.
