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.