Pakistan: When The State Loses Control

Christian Caryl

AP Photo/B.K. Bangash

Supporters of Pakistani religious party Sunni Tehreek chanting slogans in favor of Mumtaz
Qadri, alleged killer of Salman Taseer, and throwing rose petals while waiting for him outside
an Anti-Terrorist Court in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, January 6, 2011

In his great book of reportage on the revolution in Iran, Shah of Shahs, Ryszard
Kapuscinski describes that mysterious tipping point when a demonstrator loses his
fear of the Shah’s security forces and refuses to listen when the once all-powerful
police order him to step back. Suddenly, all involved realize that the power of the state
to cow people into obedience has been broken. I was reminded of that episode by the
tragic January 4 murder of Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, by
a member of his own security detail, in a public shooting just a mile from the
presidential palace in Islamabad. As with Kapuscinski’s demonstrator, the killing
seemed to mark an epochal shift in the political landscape—though here the poles are
reversed. In the case of modern Pakistan, it is now the tyranny of fear that is reaching
into the heart of the political system. It has become extremely hard to see how anyone
can pull the country’s political culture back from the brink.

It’s not just that Taseer was an advocate of a secular, pluralistic Pakistan who stood
up, on a number of occasions, to the forces of intolerance—a man who was, on various
occasions, imprisoned, tortured, and beaten for publicly defending the rights of
minorities and the urgent need for freedom of expression. It’s not just that he was the
head of Pakistan’s richest and most populous province. And it’s not just that he was
an example of someone from humble origins who managed to rise to one of the
highest offices in the country by dint of his own hard work.

No, what’s particularly worrisome about this case is the failure of the Pakistani
political system to protect one of its own. When the state surrenders its monopoly on
violence to those who stand outside of it, it can no longer be described as a
functioning state. Pakistan’s political institutions are supposed to represent the many
different parties and groups that participate in the country’s civic life, yet now state
power is succumbing to the demands of an exclusionist view of the world that can
benefit only a particular few. In the weeks and months preceding his assassination,
Taseer had been courageously campaigning—in the face of direct threats—to overturn
an anti-blasphemy law that had been frequently abused to condemn people of
minority faiths.

Yet no one within Taseer’s own political party—the

Pakistan People’s Party, whose members include the
current president, Asif Ali Zardari, and which is
supposedly a bulwark of this system—has defended
his efforts in any meaningful way. (Zardari did not
even attend his funeral.) Five hundred scholars of the
Barelvi movement—the branch of Sunni Islam
followed by many Pakistani muslims that has often
Salman Taseer talking to reporters after meeting
claimed to stand for a more tolerant vision of Islam
with a Pakistani Christian woman, Asia Bibi, at
and has condemned Taliban violence in the past— a prison in Sheikhupura near Lahore, Pakistan,
November 20, 2010
have greeted his killing by praising his assassin.

As a member of Taseer’s own elite security detail, his murderer, Malik Mumtaz Qadri,
was a man who decided that his oath to protect an official of the state was superseded
by a “higher” oath that commanded him, instead, to kill. That Qadri had been
assigned as a bodyguard to Taseer despite his dismissal several years ago from a
police unit because of his extremist views raises yet further questions. All of this is
why I find myself agreeing with Huma Imtiaz: “This is the end. There is no going
back from here, there is no miracle cure, there is no magic wand that will one day
make everything better.”

I am not a Pakistani. But I can’t help feeling that the killing of Salman Taseer is a
calamity for everyone who lives in the country—including the people who are now
strewing flowers at the feet of the man who allegedly pulled the trigger. Those who
support the takfiri worldview don’t seem to understand that this is an ideology that
cedes the definition of “true Islam” to the self-declared defenders of religion—and that
these definitions shift according to the political wind, to selfish agendas and narrow
factional interests, rather than to the uncorrupted dictates of faith. And that means
that those who consider themselves right-minded believers today can easily find
themselves on the wrong end of a Kalashnikov tomorrow.

The West, and especially the United States, should also take notice. It is time for
policymakers in Washington to understand that Pakistan is not simply a vexing
sideshow to the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan—populous, chaotic, and nuclear-armed
—needs to be taken seriously in its own right. An imploding Pakistan promises
immense pain and turmoil to itself and the world at large. Let’s hope that this
realization doesn’t come too late.

An earlier version of this post appeared on Gandhara, Radio Free Europe’s blog about
Afghanistan and Pakistan.

January 6, 2011 12:45 p.m.