Opinion | Columnists
A question of trust in Pakistan
The country's new president has to convince his countrymen to believe in him rather than conspiracy theories or religious extremists.
- By Isambard Wilkinson, raph Group
- Published: 23:35 September 25, 2008
Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, met President George W. Bush last Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York.
Zardari is seeking to mend fences with his ally in the "war on terror'' after his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, was less than candid about the Muslim state's covert support for the Afghan Taliban.
But Zardari faces an even greater challenge at home, where many Pakistanis see the rising tide of Islamist violence as part of a foreign conspiracy or, even, something to be supported if it harms America.
Western observers thought that last Saturday's bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed 53 people and wounded more than 260, would shock ambivalent Pakistanis into supporting their government's crackdown on home-grown terrorists. But it has merely highlighted just how confused and conspiracy-riddled is Pakistan's popular opinion.
Many I met on the streets of the capital believe the blast was caused by a "foreign hand'', a reference that usually denotes anyone from India, Afghanistan, Israel and Russia to the United States.
"They have taken revenge for the attacks in Delhi,'' said Allahditta Maleek, a shopkeeper whose windows were shattered in the blast, referring to recent terrorist attacks in India.
A cleric from the south-western city Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban has its headquarters, said he could not condemn the attack because it was an attack aimed at "America and its accomplices''.
Newspaper reports have speculated that the presence of American military personnel in the hotel at the time of the blast points to a US covert operation whose aim could be anything from the capture of Osama Bin Laden to the seizing of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
Pakistan is fertile territory for conspiracy theories. Those behind the assassination of its first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, in 1951 were never identified, nor were the circumstances of the death in an air crash in 1988 of the military dictator Zia ul-Haq. Some question whether members of the political elite colluded in the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, by a suicide bomber last year. Why, they ask, has there been no official inquiry into her death?
It is a part of the world where shadowy foreign influences - real or imagined - have played a major role since the Great Game of the 19th century.
And today countries such as the US, China and Saudi Arabia have adopted shadowy but palpable roles in Pakistan's domestic politics.
Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College London, said that the extent to which conspiracy theories dominate Pakistani political debate may seriously damage "effective policymaking''.
Around 1,500 Pakistanis have died in bombings and suicide attacks in the past year. But one opinion poll found that only 48 per cent of Pakistanis support their army's action against the Taliban; and nearly 80 per cent opposed the US pursuing Al Qaida or Taliban fighters from Afghanistan into Pakistan.
Reality
But each time Al Qaida or the Taliban bomb the capital or Punjab, Pakistan's political heartland, the reality of the threat posed by militant groups - many founded by military intelligence to fight as proxies - becomes harder to ignore.
"The blood of the dead and wounded in Islamabad had barely dried before the conspiracy theorists in Pakistan started churning out reports about US responsibility in the terrorist attack,'' noted one e-mail written by a Pakistani. "It seems the country's intelligentsia has become collectively blind to the jihadi threat and the mayhem created by Taliban terrorists,'' he wrote.
Najam Sethi, a newspaper editor who leads the campaign persuading Pakistanis to abandon their denial over the militant threat, said: "They [who are not supporting the war on terrorism] cannot convincingly argue, after we have pulled out [from the alliance with America], that either the Americans will stop attacking Al Qaida or Al Qaida will stop attacking us if Pakistan does not capitulate to it''.
Zardari has said he will hold a parliamentary debate to forge a national consensus on a counter-terrorism policy.
His first attempt to win over the opposition, he has pledged, will be to relinquish dictatorial presidential powers, such as the power to dismiss parliament.
Zardari will need to devise a strategy that satisfies a US administration frustrated by lack of progress and that sidelines pro-Taliban hardliners within the military.
In an editorial, The News newspaper said that reports linking the Marriott attack with suspected jihadis "once more focuses attention on the dangerous nexus between our intelligence apparatus and extremist outfits.
"Until this relationship between agencies and militants is ended, we can be certain that there will be yet more violence within a country torn apart by terrorism that has claimed thousands of lives.''
But Zardari's most pressing task is to convince the millions of Pakistanis who put greater faith in conspiracy theories or in Islamic fundamentalism that they should place their trust in him.
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