The idea of the nation state as such is of fairly recent vintage. Relatively few of them (not none, not only a couple, but it’s a minority) have succeeded in having a stable, non-corrupt, harmonious nation state among a grouping of people who have significant and (to them) important differences in mother tongue, tribe, and religion, and asking them to do it in a democracy, with fairly widespread poverty and illiteracy rate, is adding almost ridiculous degrees of difficulty to the proposition. Italy and Belgium, with considerably less diversity of wealth distribution, language, ethnicity, religion, etc. are doing an average to below average job of hanging together as a nation, good governance, non-corruption, etc. To me, knowing what we know now, I would say the Pakistan experiment has worked out . . . as well as, or slightly better than, we would have expected if we ran the simulation a few thousand times on the historical/existing fact pattern.
In short, just as in the thread about corruption in the Muslim world, one of our baseline conceits/errors is the very recent, Western, idealistic paradigm/assumption that assumes that democracy/nationhood should/will/does lead to a coherent, stable, non-corrupt, non-basket-case, good citizen nation state, when there are far more counterexamples than examples, especially in ethnically, economically, religiously divided areas of the world. (The dangers of this conceit have implications that some still have not grasped for everything from our wars in the ME/S. Asia to Western immigration policy, but that’s a topic for another day).
Oh, and to the question a couple have posed as to why India, which is messed up itself in many ways, gets a comparative free pass I would suggest:
(a) vague perception among Westerners that the Indian part of the Raj was more permeated with Western/British ideals/mores/administrative/good government culture than the Eastern part;
(b) less vague perception that Indian=Hindu=pacifist/mystic=non-threatening. I don’t have to equate Pakistani=Muslim=jihadi (and I don’t) to note that few if any in the West have any concept of Pakistanis/Muslims as affirmatively embracing pacifism/universalism (I guess Sufis get some of the same warm fuzzy vibe the Hindus do, but how many people think of Sufism when they think of Islamic nations?) versus militarism/tribalism.
Ok, so what about Zias dictatorship throughout the 80’s and his Islamisation movement?
Iran had a large industrial and agricultural base and a large educated middle class (the bazaars had major influence in the acension of the Islamists) How is this different. It’s a known fact there was immense suppression of opposition by the Shah I’ll grant you that, this doesn’t however, excuse Pakistan from the same threat of violent overthrow of it’s nominally democratic institutions.
Pakistan does not have a free press or independent judiciary. If it had a free press, the repealing of the blasphemy law wouldn’t be a big deal, or it would but people would show their discourse through other actions other than killing the opposition.
These are all self qualifiying remarks without any meaningful comparison,
1.FREE? compared to what?
INDEPENDANT, compared to where?
LARGE, compared to what? What ratios of middle class are we talking about, and what do you define as middle class?
Compared to what?, what are the relative sizes of agrarian business compered to other places, what is the GPD of Pakistan? and how does this compare per capita to other nations?Who controls it?
In other words, you actually have not said anything whatsoever, you might as well have just made a post with no writing in it at all.
Using IRAN as any sort of yardstick is meaningless, since we are on a US message board with posters from around the globe who have completely differing outlooks to yours.
I also would not make proud of my country by making comparisons of it to IRAN, pre or post revolution, heck I can make Mexico look good when comparing it to IRAN.
Imagine the tv advert, Pakistan - not the best place on earth, but better than Iran!
I’m hoping not to let a debate about Pakistan deteriorate into a debate about whether or not I was born there or raised there (I was). The first language I learned (simultaneously with English) was Urdu because the folks who raised me spoke it. It was you who told me to “come back” when I had some sort of idea of what was going on, and now, having told you why I think I have more expertise than an ordinary Westerner, I’m uninterested in debating that point. I have an interest in protecting my anonymity on the Dope, and obviously personal details detract from that. I assure you Urdu was the commonest common language for every day life in our towns in Hazara district, along with a generous amount of Pushto (not so much Hindko, as I recall). Have you traveled there much? It’s not like I’m representing that I was born in Chitral or anything (although I have traveled there).
I can’t figure out where you think I got the NWFP mixed up as entirely synonymous with “Tribal Territories” since I’m really using KPK as a shorthand for a general part of the country. If you want to catch me on a fine point in the hope of exposing a bluff, you should point out I referred to it in the plural…I guess that’s just how we used to say it. It’s really “Province” but it contains a number of subdivisions, as you know, and I guess that influenced how we used to say it. Most of the time you’d just see “N.W.F.P.” without the full words, and our car license just said “Ha.” (for Hazara District).
You are entirely wrong about Urdu. It is, along with English, one of the two current official languages of Pakistan. From here, for example, as a reference: “Urdu is mostly learned as a second or a third language as nearly 93% of Pakistan’s population has a mother tongue other than Urdu. Despite this, Urdu was chosen as a token of unity and as a lingua franca so as not to give any native Pakistani language preference over the other. Urdu is therefore spoken and understood by the vast majority in some form or another, including a majority of urban dwellers in such cities as Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Multan, Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Jhang and Sargodha.”
I assumed you were questioning Urdu has his first language because when he said he was going to bow out of speaking it you said:
I took that as a sarcasm implying that he was lying.
I think that looks reasonably like someone who could be from Pakistan.
I was wondering about this myself. Google turned up two things I thought were interesting. This article states that while the press is mostly free in Pakistan, journalists have been “disappeared” (the article is three years old and so was talking about Musharraf)
This article
talks about how certain internet cites were blocked in Pakistan due to their anti-Muslim bent.
So, could be freer but a press that can criticize the government does seem to exist
AK84 brought up the comparison w/ Iran because someone else asked him him about it.
Yes, Pakistan has a “free press.” God bless 'em. But… on average you’ll see an incredible Islamic bias (PBUHs for any reference to Mohammed, for example) and you won’t see any “freedom” in expressing anti-Islamic views. It would not be prudent, and for large parts of the country would be very unsafe, to go against the prevailing Islamic views. The press is only free within a straitjacket of Islam.
It’s a fantastic country. It’s my homeland. It’s part of who I am. But, like most Muslim-majority countries, it is not “free” or “democratic” in any Western sense of the word. And that Islamic influence over the civil government has become very destabilizing.
I think I’m still waiting for your comments around the recent Mullah statement over the assassination of Salman Taseer, and how that fits in with a notion that Pakistan is “free” and that my claims regarding the influence of Islam upon stability are exaggerated somehow. I just came from a conference of nearly 200 people gathering to talk about Pakistan–all natives or workers there–and listened to a US government official talk about some of the work alongside NGOs in some of the more remote areas. I’m not hearing that things have changed much, and in fact it’s a common perception that they are worsening as conservative (“radical”) Islam strengthens its chokehold on freedom of expression.
Most of the major newspapers in the country or their direct predecessors came into being during the worst period of the British Raj; and while they are factious, and riddled with rivalries, any Government that has ever tried to crackdown has seen that measure backfire badly, as Nawaz Sharif found out in 1999. The press then tends to forget feuds and band together with the result that Governments have long since resigned to the fact that patronage works a lot better.
I think you’re confusing Middle Class rise with an actual rise in Urbanism in Pakistan.
And in regards to the examples of free press and judicial practices, you may well show me examples, however you and I both know that nepotism and cronysim as well as endemic corruption in all levels of Pakistani society is a fact, and the inability of the judiciary and free press to hinder that speaks volumes of their impotence.
According to 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2010 surveys, the majority of respondents consistently view the police as being the most corrupt sector of Pakistani government. In the 2010 survey, 31% of 4,224 respondents reported paying bribes to the police.
In 2010, 69% of those surveyed reported that they or someone in their household was subjected to an act of corruption when interacting with the judicial system. Of 339 affirmative respondents asked to identify the actors involved in corruption, 119 said court employees, 84 said a public prosecutor, 50 said a witness, 44 said a judge, 29 said an opponent lawyer, 16 said magistrates, and 12 said others.[5][6
AK84, do you think there’s a divorce between the official government line and the beliefs/behaviors of the mullahs and population?
I agree with you that Pakistan has at least the framework for a constitutional democracy. I know that Jinnah was very modern/secular/westernized, and I’m sure many in the government and ruling elite are not very religious. Also, it seems like Benzair Bhutto and Musharraf were not super duper religious. However, it seems like Pakistan is going through a very unstable time right now, and a rise in fundamentalism may have something to do with it.
As an example of the discrepancy in attitudes between the government and the people, this wikipedia entry talks about how even though there is no law requiring hijab, many women in urban centers are starting to wear it due to growing Middle Eastern influence, and it says that the same influence is making the Islam practiced in Pakistan more orthodox.
So you deny there is a problem of corruption and nepotism in Pakistan, you deny that basic civil society and freedoms are threatened and that a conservative majority denies the rights of the liberal minority, you deny the poverty which in turn fuels this conservatism and is in turn manipulated by the religious establishment for their own ends, which in turn has created this mess of religious fundamentalism threatening the very foundations of Pakistani society?
I’m non Pakistani and non Muslim, and even I can see the glaring holes which desperately need filling if the average Pakistani is going to live a normal relatively free life.
You came onto this debate deriding fellow posters about their linguistic skills and background, and did it on a high horse of which you knew everything which is happening in Pakistan, I ask you to contribute, you declare you cannot be bothered, you eventually contribute, and then don’t like various rebuttals, if you cannot face this, you have no place in this thread, it’s up to you, however I have little faith in you actually doing this, and will predict that you most likely retort to veiled insults or open ones.
So, I was thinking about this too. ISTM that the articles (save the first, which doesn’t really seem to be anti-Islam) are more anti-radical Islam or anti-terrorism. That is to say, there’s not an article there that just says, “Islam as a whole sucks and this is why.”
That being said, I think that’s nitpicking and the sampling of articles show that it is possible in Pakistan to publish articles that are critical of certain elements of Islam.
Well, since you started this discussion by comparing Pakistan to India (which I think is a completely valid comparison), according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_india Wikipedia a lot of the same problems exist in India. However, India is ranked 87th in the world for corruption, compared to 143rd for Pakistan, so it’s less corrupt. This difference might partially explain some of the problems Pakistan is having right now, although honestly my opinion (gleaned from various news sources, all American, over the years) is that the rise of Islamism, particularly in the West, is probably more to blame for Pakistan’s current troubles.
1 In Which we learn that the blasphemy law caused a young Christian to be condemned to death, and that “Cases have ranged from the Kasur case to the more recent Gojra case, from the mind-boggling row of cases between 1988-1992 against 80-year-old development guru Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, to the case of the son of an alleged blasphemer, an illiterate brick kiln worker who was beaten to death by a frenzied mob.”
2 In which we learn that issues regarding the status of minority rights “are of a grave nature.”
3 In which we learn a mob of angry Muslims torched 40 houses and a church.
4 In which we (the country and/or the International News) learn “we” revere the Prophet as the “last messenger of God.”
How are you helping your case, here?
Yes, there is a “free press.” But I assure you it’s a free press within a fairly narrow straitjacket of Islamic religious culture.
And these are just the “English language newspapers,” largely for consumption by that educated, largely liberal (by Pak standards) audience. Get into the Urdu ones, or the ones from the Khyber Pakhtunkwa, to get an idea of how widespread “radical” Islam is.
And these are your cherry picks to show us Pakistan.
largely for consumption by that educated, largely liberal (by Pak standards) audience. Get into the Urdu ones, or the ones from the Khyber Pakhtunkwa, to get an idea of how widespread “radical” Islam is.