“Dear USA, your 9/11 is our 24x7.” Even by the word limit set by micro-blogging website Twitter, this was short. But it spoke volumes about the angst felt by the average Pakistani as the world talked about the 9/11 attacks on its 10th anniversary on Sunday without much thought to the country that has suffered the most in its aftermath.
For many among the Pakistani elite and middle class who love American products while cursing U.S. policies, 9/11 is as haunting as a visit by the soul-sucking Dementors in the Harry Potter books — eating into the very vitals of this country, setting the clock back and robbing people of their hopes and aspirations. Every Pakistani, including the well-heeled with citizenships of other countries, has been singed.
Nothing can be more telling about how bleak the future looks for Pakistanis than parents pushing their children out of the country the moment they finish school, not only because they see no prospects for their children but also to keep them away from the growing trend of radicalisation. Even top-notch institutions such as the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and the Lahore University of Management Studies have caught on what analyst Ayesha Siddiqa calls the “emerging pop culture” of religious radicalism.
But, as the parents of Faizal Shahzad, who made an unsuccessful bid to bomb New York City's Times Square last summer, realised, sending their children abroad does not necessarily insulate them from radicalisation. If Pakistan is getting increasingly “Talibanised”, its students overseas are getting increasingly radicalised, particularly on campuses with fairly active Islamist groups that feed, rather effectively, on the stigma that Pakistanis invariably face.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, even secular and liberal-minded Pakistanis cannot but blame the U.S. for much of the mess that the country is in now. For Pakistan, 9/11 is “a day that never ended” as per a comment posted on Facebook on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
“No doubt 9/11 was a great tragedy but it is the global response — built on that tragedy — that has killed far more innocent people, made the U.S. bankrupt and the world a more dangerous and divided place. The U.S. with all its intellectual, technological and financial resources could and should have come up with a more mature response,” said another post on Facebook.
Since May — a month that saw the U.S. killing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the heart of the country, a 17-hour siege of a naval airbase and the killing of a journalist allegedly under the watch of Pakistan's intelligence agencies — more and more Pakistanis have come to accept, however reluctantly, the duplicitous role played by the security establishment vis-à-vis terrorism. But neither can they ignore the U.S. role in creating the tinder box that is Pakistan today, the perceived lack of American appreciation for what they had to go through for the strategic considerations of another country and, yes, the flawed policies of the Pakistani establishment.
Given that the U.S. has dominated the discourse on global terrorism, Pakistan's government sought to reach out to the American people on the 10th anniversary of the day that changed their carefree lives without security checks and visible police presence. The government placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal detailing the cost paid by Pakistan for the war on terror in human lives and economic loss.
“Since 2001, a nation of 180 million has been fighting for the future of world's 7 billion. Can any other country do so? Only Pakistan,” claimed the advertisement, adding that the nation was making sacrifices that statistics cannot reflect. According to the official estimate, 21,672 Pakistani civilians have lost their lives or have been seriously injured since September 11, 2001 in 3,486 bomb blasts, including 283 suicide attacks. Besides, 2,795 soldiers of the Pakistan Army have been killed and 8,671 wounded. Add to this the internal displacement of 3.5 million people and economic loss of $68 billion.
Not to forget the Afghan refugees who have been living in Pakistan since the 1970s, making it the world's most protracted refugee situation. In fact, Pakistan has been hosting the largest single refugee population in the world since then. Though there have been repatriations, the fluid situation in Afghanistan and the fear that the country will return to civil war when the international forces reduce their presence has made return that much more difficult.
Though world leaders have begun to acknowledge in their speeches that Pakistan is the biggest victim of terrorism, Pakistanis feel the lack of understanding world-over about how much 9/11 has changed this country. In a way this is inversely proportionate to what the world sees as the Pakistan's refusal to see/accept the country's complicity in supporting “global jihad”, earning Pakistan the name “denialistan” among liberals within the country also.
This perpetual state of denial has been further fuelled by the growing acknowledgement world-over that the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan has made the world more insecure. Instead of eliminating or even containing the Taliban and the al-Qaeda, the occupation of Afghanistan made Pakistan the most favoured haven for terrorists, turned areas east of the Durand Line into what is often referred to as the most dangerous place in the world and, worse, turned some of the terror groups viciously against Pakistan. In fact, as against 7,123 people killed in Afghanistan last year, 10,003 were killed in Pakistan in incidents of violence and terrorism.
Though there are ample indicators of the schizophrenic policy of the establishment towards terrorism — categorising them into good and bad terrorists — blaming someone else for all that ails Pakistan is an attitude that has been systematically cultivated, right from the 1965 War with India, and now it has become almost second nature. And the present U.S. policy of attempting reconciliation with the Taliban makes people wonder at the futility of the actions of an entire decade.
No doubt questions are being asked since May on whether terrorists can be “strategic assets” for some future design in India or Afghanistan, but there is very little discourse on the substantial amount of evidence regarding the growth of terrorist hubs elsewhere in the country. This is particularly so in the case of South Punjab, where outlawed terror outfits regularly develop new incarnates in full view of the authorities and which has been described by several analysts as another terrorist hub.
“Pakistanis are unable to see our own country's complicity in supporting the global jihad ecosystem,” rue some while the consulting editor of The Friday Times and relentless advocate of introspection, Raza Rumi, found much to his chagrin that “I exist on the margins of the mainstream. Even my extended family thinks that the U.S. is responsible for everything wrong in Pakistan.”
Repeatedly reminded of the “you are either with us or against us” Hobson's choice offered by the U.S. under the threat to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age”, the common man feels that his country is still being bombed — maybe not by the Americans, though there are enough conspiracy theories on that line — and the resultant security situation has not only resulted in a flight of capital but also set the country back by decades, both materially and in mindset.
One statistic that is often bandied about as an example is the value of the Pakistani rupee, particularly against its Indian counterpart. The Pakistani rupee has depreciated so much that today it is in the vicinity of PKR 87 to a dollar whereas it used to be stronger than INR in the not-so-distant past. Tourism has dried up and the security situation has resulted in all European carriers dropping Pakistan from their grid around 2003, perforce making Arab airlines the main gateway to the outside world.
The state of the economy, the security situation and the radicalisation of society have together squeezed out entertainment opportunities — a cinema hall in the capital itself was burned down — and cultural events being cancelled at the last minute for fear of reprisal are not unusual. Most films are released only in select cities where security is assured and there is limited chance of a rightwing backlash for some imagined assault on what they deem as Pakistan's culture.
As far as the average Pakistani is concerned, the fictional Dementors seem to have taken permanent residence and all they can do is be eternally prepared for the worst as the dregs of hope fade with every suicide attack by alarmingly young boys in search of a better afterlife and an establishment that refuses to mend its ways.
