The Long Winter

After all, the post-Cold War triumphalists who treated democracy and liberalism as absolute values were left heartbroken when many of Fukuyama’s wagons broke down on the road to democracy’s El Dorado.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: Newsweek | Pakistan
By Mehreen Zahra-Malik | From the March 14‚ 2011‚ issue

Pakistanis longing for a revolution should be careful what they wish for.

Twenty-two years ago, Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history, only to be disappointed. Today, it seems the end of history is here again with the revolutionary wave that’s sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, washing away regimes old and oppressive. The Arab street has been seized by the crowds, and longstanding rulers of Muslim countries are quivering in their thobes. So, as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and the Red Cross fear, is Pakistan next?


The Muslim Question, or concerns about political Islam, has occupied Western minds and media since 9/11. In the last few weeks, the slate of old stereotypes—Muslims are hardwired against democracy; they don’t care much for freedom and liberty; Arabs are supine and spiritless—has been wiped clean. The world has rediscovered young Muslims as intelligent fighters and plugged-in pioneers of freedom. But tempting as it is to view Muslim-majority countries as a single entity, their individual political, social and cultural realities make them strikingly different. These countries are not primed for a one-size-fits-all revolution.

There is, then, a curious folly implicit in this question of whether Pakistan will be next. After all, the post-Cold War triumphalists who treated democracy and liberalism as absolute values were left heartbroken when many of Fukuyama’s wagons broke down on the road to democracy’s El Dorado.

Two weeks ago, about 150 young men gathered at the Liberty roundabout in Lahore to demand that Pakistan’s democratic political system be replaced with an Islamic caliphate. This is the opposite of Tahrir Square, where protesters had conspicuously replaced “Islam” in the Muslim Brotherhood’s longstanding slogan—“Islam is the solution”—with “freedom, justice, and equality.” In January, tens of thousands gathered in Karachi and Lahore in support of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer’s assassin and to protest against any amendments to the country’s controversial blasphemy laws, which have targeted Christians and Muslims alike. Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the largest political party in the country’s most populous province, participated in the Lahore protest. Compare this to Egypt where Christian protesters holding Sunday mass were protected by Muslims, and Christians formed a protective cordon around Muslims at Friday prayers. Afterward, a chant would ring out: “We are one.”

Pakistan is also different because its civil society, media, and political parties are far more developed than either Egypt’s or Tunisia’s. We have had a lawyers-led revolution in 2007, and national elections, generally viewed as free and fair, the following year. What kind of revolution then is possible in Pakistan? Daniel Markey, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells NEWSWEEK Pakistan: “Revolution in Pakistan is not a high probability event and would not end well. Under most circumstances, political ‘evolution’ is likely to be less bloody and more constructive than a revolution.”

Let’s face it. Any revolution here is unlikely to depose the entrenched military, political or economic elite. One is also hard pressed to name effective and incorruptible new leaders who could steer a revolutionary movement. In the best-case scenario, we could see relatively centrist political faces installed into power with military and some popular backing. The worst-case scenario: an Islamist movement or a takeover by a rebellious and radicalized section of the Army. These scenarios are undesirable, if not catastrophic, because both could hasten polarization along ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic lines with conflict or civil war a spark away. Pakistan’s contradictions and the range of differences among its people could manifest into such violence that it would undermine even the Army’s capacity to keep order. In the absence of a strong sense of nationalism, it is highly unlikely that the Pakistani state could then be pieced back.

Extreme conditions work best for the extremists. Al Qaeda would not let slip the opportunity to leverage a Muslim revolutionary movement to advance its own radical agenda in Pakistan. When that happens, the Arab Spring will have become a long despairing winter for the world.

ZAHRA-MALIK is a journalist and political scientist. 


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