KHALED Ahmed’s Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan is a book with a mission: over the course of 32 chapters, largely comprised of columns and book reviews published in different periodicals between 2012 and 2015, Ahmed repeatedly and emphatically attempts to analyse and explain the spread of militancy and extremism in Pakistan. There are a few core themes that emerge over the course of this collection of essays. For one, Ahmed is clear about the extent to which the proliferation of non-state actors in Pakistan — mostly Islamist militant groups operating across the country — can only be explained by recognising how the state, particularly the military establishment, has historically cultivated these actors as proxies to be deployed for military and political gains in Afghanistan and India.

Following from this, Ahmed describes how dealing with these groups is complicated by the presence of strong factions within the military, political parties, and society at large that identify with radical Islamist ideology and thus impede the mostly desultory efforts that are sometimes taken to deal with extremism. Finally, the combination of these factors — the existence of non-state actors and the presence of significant societal support for them — creates a cycle of reinforcement in which the former have been able to wrest ever-greater control of the public discourse in Pakistan, shrinking the space available for dissent and creating an atmosphere in which fear, terror, and violence herald the transformation of Pakistan into an overtly theocratic, parochial state embodying their millenarian ideology.

While several chapters in the book deal with other aspects of contemporary Pakistani politics, such as PTI’s 2014 sit-in and Baloch nationalism, the essays largely remain focused on violent extremist organisations, their ideology and their abettors in the formal institutions of the state and mainstream political parties. Much of what Ahmed has to say will not come as a surprise to most readers, given how numerous accounts have been written detailing how the Afghan war in the 1980s, as well as the strategic calculations of the Pakistani military, created the infrastructure and propagated the ideology that underpin current-day militancy and terrorism. What Ahmed adds to this discussion are some interesting insights into more recent events. For example, he provides a reasonably comprehensive account of the history of the infamous Lal Masjid, detailing how and why its links to elements of the establishment have allowed it to operate the way it has, and how pressure from China provided at least part of the impetus for the operation launched against it by Gen Pervez Musharraf in 2007. Similarly, Ahmed does a good job of explaining Pakistan’s reluctance to provide Saudi Arabia with military assistance in its ongoing campaign in Yemen, showing how relations with Iran and concerns about sectarianism at home have led the government to pursue the better part of valour.

Analysing the argument which suggests that questioning extremism and militancy in Pakistan requires a radical rethinking of decisions made at policy levels

These chapters are supplemented by Ahmed’s sketches of the many personalities that have been at the heart of these developments over the past decade. At one point, for example, Ahmed discusses the “seven furies” that have tormented Pakistan, with these including Western journalists who have been blacklisted and castigated in the country for reporting too close to the truth with regards to militancy and its links to formal power and institutions. There are chapters on Asif Zardari, former Jamaat-i-Islami emir Qazi Hussain Ahmed, and even Tahirul Qadri, providing balanced accounts of their successes and failures. Most entertaining and interesting of all, however, are the descriptions of former military personnel, particularly from the crop that presided over the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s and 1990s, who masterminded the cultivation of ‘jihadi’ assets in Pakistan, and whose ideological predilections and misguided worldviews, as narrated by Ahmed, help to explain the monumental folly of the plans they laid.

There is not much to find fault with in Ahmed’s diagnosis of the problem. It is undeniable that Pakistan has become a more intolerant and violent place, and that the unchecked proliferation of extremist Islamist groups does not bode well for the future of the country. As such, Ahmed argues that there has to be a shift in thinking at the policy level, and that the powers that be in the military establishment and civilian government must recognise how their continued tolerance of non-state actors must come to an end. That this would also entail a radical rethink of broader strategic imperatives, such as pursuing durable peace with India based on trade or abandoning notions of strategic depth in Afghanistan, is obvious.

Nonetheless, the more one reads through the essays that constitute Sleepwalking to Surrender, the more it becomes clear that for all his insight and clarity, Ahmed’s approach to the question of extremism and militancy in Pakistan suffers from several shortcomings that, in fact, typify a lot of the problems with contemporary ‘liberal’ thought in Pakistan. Elsewhere, Ahmed has written and spoken at length about liberalism in Pakistan, memorably stating that, perhaps more than anything else, it represents a lack of certitude. This directly pits liberalism against the unquestioned dogma that fuels contemporary Islamist extremism, with the Manichaean worldview of the latter coming up against the pluralism, tolerance, and shades of grey at the heart of the former.

It is necessary to understand why otherwise reasonable people might be willing to endorse toxic forms of politics. If people choose to support anti-systemic movements is it because they genuinely agree with the ideology being peddled, because they want to change a system they think has not served them well, or because they have been brainwashed into believing the narrative being sold to them?

Ahmed is not incorrect in pointing out that the liberals who oppose the religious right, in both thought and action, constitute a besieged minority that flirts with danger every time it makes itself heard. However, as he himself would undoubtedly point out, liberalism is a very broad church and its adherents, both self-declared and otherwise, represent a mélange of political and ideological currents. A lack of certitude may be what differentiates liberals from the religious extremists they oppose in Pakistan, but more often than not it appears that it is this act of opposition, rather than any concrete or coherent ideological programme, that serves as a unifying factor for the former.

This is an important point because it has a direct bearing on the analysis of extremism in Pakistan. While many on the religious right frothily (and baselessly) denounce liberals for their alleged subservience to the decadent, godless West, there is also an arguably more trenchant critique that comes from the left and faults liberalism for its inability to adequately explore the structural factors that have underpinned the rise of militancy and extremism in Pakistan.

Putting it differently, particularly in the context of the liberal elite that Ahmed feels is at the heart of the resistance to obscurantist Islamist extremists, it might be argued that the economic system over which this elite presides, which generates greater and greater wealth for the few at the expense of the many, has some part to play in generating the feelings of frustration and despondency that make the anti-systemic message of radical Islam so appealing to so many people. While much is said in the book about the power of ideas, particularly in terms of their propagation through the institutions of the state, virtually nothing is said about questions related to social and economic justice, and the ways in which poverty, deprivation, and marginalisation have all contributed towards generating militancy and support for it in Pakistan.

In Sleepwalking to Surrender, the absence of concern for more structural factors is not simply a sin of omission. In a chapter on judicial activism in South Asia, Ahmed takes the Supreme Court of Pakistan to task for displaying “[i]ts lack of knowledge of, or opposition to, the free market economic order prevailing in Pakistan when it quashed the privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills undertaken by the Musharraf government”. Earlier, when remarking on populism and democracy in the context of the PTI’s campaign against the PML-N, Ahmed declares that, “if you are a Muslim trying to avoid the obsolete caliphate of history by grabbing its utopia through ‘welfare’, you are indulging in rhetoric no economist following the market mantra will be able to implement”. These and other statements in the book, unquestioningly and approvingly endorsing free markets and capitalism, are certainly representative of at least some brands of liberalism, but the trite dismissal of welfare as a concept and the inability to acknowledge how markets and capitalism go hand in hand with economic and political inequality is deeply problematic in a context where distortions of this kind fuel the fires of militancy stoked by the purveyors of violent extremism.

The problem is compounded by the ambivalent view of democracy that runs through the book. There is a fear of populism that stalks the pages of Sleepwalking to Surrender, and this is not entirely unfounded given how populist movements often rely on appeals to the baser instincts of the electorate to garner support and legitimacy. This is all well and good, but it is necessary to understand why otherwise reasonable people might be willing to endorse toxic forms of politics. If people choose to support anti-systemic movements is it because they genuinely agree with the ideology being peddled, because they want to change a system they think has not served them well, or because they have been brainwashed into believing the narrative being sold to them? All three approaches can explain the appeal of populism, but Ahmed seems clearly to endorse the first view — that the people of Pakistan have undergone an ideological transformation that has led them to sympathise with religious extremism en masse. The notion that there might be structural factors behind this shift — if it has happened on the scale Ahmed seems to suggest — is left unexplored.

More evidence of this fear of the people and what they believe can be found in the book. In the introduction, Ahmed writes that, “by voting right-wing in 2013 against the ever-dwindling liberal elements, the people of Pakistan joined the issue on the side of the Taliban”. Statements such as these are unhelpful to say the least; were voters actually voting right-wing for purely ideological reasons that put them on the same side as the Taliban? Or were voters simply choosing local constituency politicians on the basis of their ability to provide patronage once elected? Much of the research on elections in Pakistan would agree with the latter observation, and many academics working on the question would just be puzzled by the assertion that religious ideology trumped other electoral considerations. Similarly, writing on the Afghan National Army (ANA), Ahmed declares that, “after the Arab Spring and the experience of Pakistan and Bangladesh with representative democracy, an ANA-ruled Afghanistan might actually settle down to better governance”. No explanation is offered for this statement beyond the vague notion that widespread support for Islamic extremism makes democratic politics suspect. Unsurprisingly, all of this is interspersed with calls for the writ of the Pakistani state to be enforced to battle extremism; that such enforcement has, in the past, involved the trampling of civil liberties (the introduction of military courts, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, and the Protection of Pakistan Act 2014) and the unrestrained use of coercive state power (as is the case in Balochistan) goes unremarked.

Finally, the brand of liberalism apparently championed by Ahmed also has a curiously uncritical view of the United States. Readers will be surprised to find that the book endorses drone strikes, and nary a word is said about the way the actions of the US might have led to further resentment and radicalisation in Pakistan. Again, the debate is set up in binary terms: those who support the US and military solutions to the problem of militancy are correct, and those who oppose it are religious bigots. Is it possible to be opposed to the global role played by the US without being a religious fanatic? Ahmed seems to think otherwise, which is something that would undoubtedly come as a great surprise to an entire generation of anti-imperialist thinkers and activists around the world and, indeed, in Pakistan, whose critiques of Empire are accompanied by a deep desire to see an end to exploitation, oppression and discrimination, whether it be based on class, religion, or anything else.

It is difficult to not be sympathetic to the main thrust of Ahmed’s argument, and it would certainly be a mistake to underestimate the extent of Islamist militancy and radicalisation in Pakistan. Furthermore, in an often hostile environment in which voices challenging the orthodoxy peddled by the state and its partners in society are quickly silenced or submerged beneath a flood of abuse and persecution, it is more important than ever to take names, challenge those who have presided over Pakistan’s descent into chaos, and promote an alternative narrative that highlights how another world is possible and, indeed, desirable. However, this is also precisely why it is crucial that intellectual work be undertaken to delve into the variety of factors, structural and ideological, that have given birth to the rising tide of extremism in Pakistan. Ahmed does a wonderful job of demolishing many of the myths propagated by the powers that be, but ultimately remains trapped within a framework of liberal thought that fails to account for its own contradictions.

The reviewer is assistant professor of political science at Lums.

Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan
(TERRORISM)
By Khaled Ahmed
Penguin Random House, India
ISBN: 978-0670088966
470pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 18th, 2016