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PERVEZ HOODBHOY (QUAID-E-AZAM UNIVERSITY) – 25th October 2009

GEORGE NEGUS: Doctor, thank you very much for your time. It seems that every day we look at the news coming to us from Pakistan. Somebody's got an even more colourful, unfortunately, way of describing what is going on in your country. One I saw this week said that Pakistan was now a country that's a total war-zone. The entire country is a war-zone. How would you describe the state of your country at the moment, in terms of the, if you like, insurgency, civil war - call it what you will - between the military and the Taliban?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY, QUAID-E-AZAM UNIVERSITY: It's not just the military and the Taliban. It is a war against the people of Pakistan and you see this every day now. Just a couple of days ago, there was a massive suicide attack - a duo of suicide bombers who came and blew themselves up in the Islamic University. And they would have come to the university that I teach in, except that it was closed for internal reasons. But every day we've seen these devastating attacks. We saw the general headquarters of the Pakistan army, which was considered to be the most secure of places in Pakistan, infiltrated by 10 terrorists, who then shot their way in and took prisoners, took hostages, and for 22 hours they were able to hold out, until they were killed.

GEORGE NEGUS: So are we talking a civil war here? Is that what we're talking? Is it a guerrilla war? It's almost impossible to get our minds around the situation as you describe it.

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: I wouldn't characterise it as a civil war, because a civil war means that one part of the population is actually fighting the other part. What we have over here is a few tens of thousands of insurgents - the Taliban, very hardcore, ideologically trained, militarily trained people, who have been in close contact with al-Qaeda and with the Afghan Taliban as well, and they were initially pampered by the Pakistani state. They were created, in fact, as a means by which to fight the jihad in Kashmir and in Afghanistan. And then it got out of control of the Pakistani state.

GEORGE NEGUS: You seem to be saying that the Pakistani Government has created its own enemy. It is almost as though the Taliban, who they were encouraging, rightly or wrongly, have come back to bite them.

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: Yes. Let's go back into a bit of history. 1979, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, and Pakistan, together with the United States and Saudi Arabia, launches the great global jihad. And we get these hardened fighters from all over the world who come and fight the Soviets. But when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, these jihadists didn't go away, because the Pakistani Government, the Pakistani state, wanted to keep them, wanted to use them in Kashmir, to liberate it, and also to keep Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan. And that's really the sad thing - that these are monsters that were created by the Pakistani state.

GEORGE NEGUS: You mentioned tens of thousands of these Talibani monsters, as you describe them, but correct me if I am wrong. We're looking in Pakistan's case as having about the sixth largest and strongest army in the world - over 500,000 trained military troops. How can these Taliban insurgents be having such a destructive, daily impact on the country faced with that sort of opposition from the government?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: First of all, this is territory that is ideally suited for guerilla warfare, for insurgency. You can see that the American army, which is far more efficient than the Pakistani army, and it's got a lot of force multipliers, it is finding itself trapped in Afghanistan. Well, it's even worse for the Pakistani army. The Pakistani army has to deal with a much wider, larger territory, and it also has to deal with elements that lie within the Pakistani population itself, and I don't just mean those who live in the mountains, I mean those who live within the cities. Although I said this is not civil war, it's not a civil war as yet, but it could become one in the future, because there is a large constituency of the right-wing political parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, etc, who refuse to condemn these suicide attacks. In fact, I had just a couple of days ago a televised debate with the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, and I asked him if he condemned these suicide attacks on the Islamic University and the other places - civilian population of Pakistan. And he accused me of being a schoolmaster and said, "I will not answer that question." So he refused to condemn these suicide bombings.

GEORGE NEGUS: Who's calling the shots in his war, however way you and I decide to describe it, and what is the American involvement in all of this? And is that a positive or a negative, or is that contributing to the situation?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: This is being done by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan - that is to say, the Pakistan Taliban movement which proudly claims that it was behind the attacks on the general headquarters, on the attack on the police in Lahore, and other attacks as well. And of course, the Americans are extremely worried that this is destabilising Pakistan and then they see this chaos spreading and eventually Pakistan's nuclear weapons being affected by this, possibly stolen and so forth, but it is the Pakistani Taliban who have squarely claimed responsibility, but in spite of that, there is a good fraction of the population which continues to believe that it is the United States which is behind these terrorist attacks.

GEORGE NEGUS: So the Americans are not known as a friend or an enemy?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: There is an enormous amount of confusion. We have television commentators who after every terrorist attack say, "Oh, it couldn't have been Muslims who did this. "It couldn't have been the Taliban. They couldn't be so brutal. "It has to be somebody else," and so it has to be the Indians or it has to be the Americans, or maybe the Israelis, and so we still continue to live in a state of denial.

GEORGE NEGUS: Some people have gone as far as to say this is not just a Pakistani problem, not even a Pakistani-Afghan problem, but this is a potential flashpoint for World War III. Hillary Clinton herself, the US Secretary of State, said earlier this year that the government is basically abdicating to the Taliban. She went on to say that Pakistan "now poses a mortal threat "to the security and safety of our country and to the world." In other words, people are predicting that World War III could find its genesis in Pakistan.

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: Well, that might be a bit far-fetched, I think, to say that World War III will come from Pakistan. I personally doubt that, but there's no doubt that this issue has become internationalised, and the internationalisation doesn't just come from the US, which sends its drones to attack the Taliban in places like Waziristan and the federally administered tribal areas. It also comes from the Uzbeks and the Arabs and the Chechens and other Islamic jihadists, who have come in from countries surrounding Pakistan, and even across the seas, to come and fight the Pakistan army, and by doing so, they think they are fighting the Americans, because the Pakistan army is seen as just a pawn of the Americans, and so this has become another cause celebre for jihadists across the world.

GEORGE NEGUS: Doctor, I'd like to bounce this quote off you, from David Kilcullen, who happens to be an Australian, but an expert on insurgency. He said this, to us, in fact, on this program: "If Pakistan collapses, and what we are looking at here is the potential for a state collapse and extremist takeover, this is a problem that would dwarf any of the problems we have seen in the war on terror to date." Would you agree with him, that that potential is there?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: Again, I think that's a little stretched-out. I do not think that collapse is immediate. The Pakistani state is strong and the military...

GEORGE NEGUS: Despite appearances?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: Well, yes, there was this attack on the GHQ, but on the other hand, the Pakistan army is 600,000 strong, and I don't see it collapsing. These are pinpricks, really. Now, of course, if they cause a lot of bleeding, then I'll change my opinion next month, or maybe next year, but I don't see that state collapsing today.

GEORGE NEGUS: What about the suggestion that if the jihadists, the Taliban, were to get hold of Pakistan's nuclear weapon - whether it exists or whether it doesn't, and most people believe it does - what danger would that spell for the rest of us?

DR PERVEZ HOODBHOY: If you ask the government, they say, "There's no danger, we've got all these electronic locks in place, "we've got perimeter fencing," and so on and so forth. I personally remain worried - not about a complete nuke being hijacked or stolen - I'm more worried about fissile material being stolen and there is, I'd say, a non-negligible possibility of that, because fissile material, especially highly enriched uranium, if you steal that in sufficient quantity, then you can fabricate a simple kind of weapon, and that could be really very dangerous, so I would like, ideally, all nuclear weapons to be eliminated, but until such time, I would want at least the production of fissile materials to stop, and that can be done globally, and if it's done globally, certainly it will be done in Pakistan as well. I want to see all nuclear weapons gone.