IF we can change one thing about Pakistan in 2014 can that please be our mindset? Can we cure ourselves of the Pakistan-versus-the-rest paranoia that cultivates the image of a conspiring wicked world ganged up against us? Can we begin appraising our acts and omissions critically and take responsibility for our faults instead of justifying them and reinforcing failure? Can we build a Pakistan that is not infested with rabid intolerance that is dehumanising us as a society?

Paranoia is a mental condition in which one loses touch with reality. If you took Pakistan to a psychiatrist, it would be prescribed a pill. Individuals inspire themselves in different ways: motivation can come from the constructive desire to succeed or from negative emotions such as jealousy. But hatred for others can’t be the source of inspiration leading an entire country towards progress. If our national leadership is united over one thing, it is blaming the world for our failures.

Pakistan lives on false binaries. If we love Pakistan, we must hate the US and the West and India. If we don’t, we are enemy agents who have sold ourselves for financial gain. In public our leaders compete rabidly for appearing more anti-West. But in their personal lives they are rational. They will send their kids to the West for education or to settle down. They will even form a beeline to shake the US ambassador’s hand when possible, but froth at the mouth in public.

Hypocrisy isn’t the key problem here. Our problem is that states don’t exist in a vacuum and embracing angry isolationism is not in Pakistan’s interest. By drumming up hatred against the world as policy, our leaders are squandering the required room and flexibility for security and foreign policymaking. Pursuing policies that allow us more autonomy in an interdependent world is a no-brainer. But North Korea or Taliban’s Afghanistan aren’t models to emulate.

Why not follow China’s example? At some point a few decades back the country decided to throw its head down and singularly focus on building itself up — its economy, its security, its infrastructure — without projecting its power outward. And nothing succeeds like success. India is another example. Over the last two decades it has accumulated the ability not just to pull its weight but also assert its influence.

The defensive US posture in the row over the arrest of the Indian diplomat in New York isn’t about America’s adherence to Indias concepts of honour or India’s willingness to defend such honour. It is all about India’s ability to protect its interests. Twenty years back, mistreating an Indian envoy would have been equally wrong. But with a broken economy and limited leverage, India’s threat of reprisal would have meant nothing. Today, it is not in US interest to mistreat an Indian envoy.

Self-confidence that engenders belief in one’s ability to succeed is healthy. Pakistanis are an intelligent, industrious and hardworking lot with the potential to succeed amidst fierce competition, as established by our students and expats across the world. But such self-confidence need not spring from hatred for others. Today in Pakistan we find our leaders bandy about xenophobia as patriotism. Provoking anger and using rhetoric as substitutes for progressive change and leadership is dangerous.

We are faced with complex problems and the solutions aren’t simple either. Drones, for example, are instruments of execution and can never be justified from a rule of law perspective. But so long as we have terror sanctuaries within our territory that threaten other states (not to mention our citizens) and we want to tell the world to take a hike for it is our land and thus our way, our very genuine case against the use of drones in our territory will find little traction.

Combine the anti-drone drive with an actionable time-bound plan to clean up sanctuaries and we’ll have a sympathetic international audience. We have an indigenous terrorism problem that won’t go away with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan or the end of drones. The solution is again not a binary choice between a full-blown military operation and appeasement dressed up as peace talks. Cleaning up sanctuaries is only one part of the challenge.

We will need to extinguish violent non-state actors by changing our security policy. We will need to shut down hate-producing factories masquerading as madressahs. We will need to introduce a plan to mainstream Fata in phases (initially by extending to them benefits of citizenship and later by introducing responsibilities). We will need to fix our criminal justice system (especially police) to punish criminals. And we will need to do all this simultaneously.

The manner in which we have defined our mission as a nation and our relationship with the world has embroiled us in a vicious cycle of hate, violence and resentment that’s eating us up from within. Let’s focus on building our ability to defend our interests as a nation-state and we will find our honour getting defiled less and less.

If we don’t fix our security we can’t fix our economy. Without a vibrant economy we can’t invest in education and health or preserve our natural resources. Without human and natural resources essential to sustain a population our size and creating opportunities for upward mobility, we will be a cramped, hot, illiterate, angry, scary place in 30 years that will have nothing to feed on other than primitive notions of honour and injured pride.

The writer is a lawyer.

sattar@post.harvard.edu

Twitter: @babar_sattar