The real danger in Pakistan

The last few days have seen headlines of the Pakistan army’s attacks on the Taliban strongholds in Swat valley. The danger is that the army will succeed in taking over Mingora. This is a danger for the Pakistan polity because this military success will likely divert attention away from what really is the real danger to the country- the spread of Talibanization. For at heart the real danger in Pakistan is not the attacks of the drones or the shady antics of the ISI nor even the Al Queda cells spreading into Punjab and other parts of Pakistan. The real danger- the real cancer eating the society - which will lead Pakistan to being a failed state are the Madrassas. These madrassas are spawning millions of young people who are brain washed into a belief system that is not only medieval but even worse- it is violent and justifies the use of murder in the name of religion.

Here is a country of 180 million where over 37 % of the population is below the age of 15. According to the Pakistani ambassador, only 50 % of the young go to school and the literacy rate is less than 50%. It is not that the young are not going to schools, it is just that they are going to madrassas and not the government run secular schools. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. Their own ministry of education estimated that about 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas in 2005. By 2008 the number of madrassas had doubled with the number of students being correspondingly larger.

It is true that not all madrasas in the country are active centres of jihadi militancy but even those without direct links to violence promote an ideology that provides religious justification for such attacks. Given the government’s half-hearted reform efforts, these unregulated madrasas contribute to country’s climate of lawlessness in numerous ways – from illegal land encroachment and criminality to violent clashes between rival militant groups and use of the pulpit to spread calls for sectarian and jihadi violence. The Pakistan government has yet to take any of the overdue and necessary steps to control religious extremism in the country. These madrassas may be called religious schools but they are in reality the heart of the Pakistan long term dilemma because in essence these are breeding grounds for jihadists with a few exceptions. Exploiting the military government’s weakness, the religious parties and madrasa unions have countered all attempts to regulate the madrasa sector. Do the math in your head- these madrassas have been around for the past 15 years and so have spawned a large number—counted in millions- of young people who have no skills other than knowing Koran and building bombs to kill their enemies. This is the real cancer at the heart of the problem.

But what needs to be done?

The first step has to be a clear eyed diagnosis of the problem. Exactly three decades ago, in the spring of 1979, an uprising against Afghanistan’s then-Soviet-backed regime drew the US into discussions about how to assist the region’s Islamist rebels. Ever since, the United States has been struggling to grasp the patterns of cause and effect in its own policymaking. The miscalculations across five Administrations are by now generally understood: near-unequivocal support for anti-American militias during the nineteen-eighties; averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions; the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties; erratic investments in Pakistan’s democracy, economy, and civil society; and, most recently, a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs. While this recognition of foreign culpability has been finally recognized, the intelligentsia in Pakistan itself has been slow to accept the internal impact of the growth of the jihadi culture and the madrasas that have perpetuated it. In the past few weeks, however, a number of Pakistani journalists have courageously pointed out the monster that the madrassas have created. Nasir Abbas Mirza, a free lance Pakistani journalist in a perceptive piece titled, A monstrous experiment, lays out the long term dangers of neglect. “ At full steam ahead in Pakistan” he writes, “ this is a monstrous experiment in brainwashing and it is on a par with, if not worse than, Nazi Germany’s eugenics. They did it in the name of science; here, it is being done in the name of God and religion”. Recent editorials in Pakistani newspapers have finally started realizing the long term danger these Taliban represent to their dream of an independent, modern state.

The army attack on the few major known eruptions after a decade of denial has to be the next step. But it is important to understand that taking back the Swat valley is only a small part of the problem. Because as the latest missives from the Jihadists point out, these attacks will continue in other population centers including Lahore, Multan and Karachi. Ultimately the country will realize that there is no way this war is going to be won militarily. You simply cannot kill your way to peace so long as the system that produces the jihadists is allowed to continue. The fact is that the madrassa system provides the main fodder for the jihadists and so the lifeline of these madrassas, money needs to be brutally cut off. But choking off the flow of funds to these madrassas has been made more difficult since these contributions from abroad are now disguised as charity. But the control of these external funds is essential to any strategy. The government could clamp down on these flows- both through the banking system and the havvala- by declaring that all money flows to the madrassas must be routed through a government agency specially set up and that any madrassa that receives these contributions must comply with the minimum educational curricula of the government. The International Crisis group provides specific recommendations on what the government can do

Pakistan needs to adopt an effective, mandatory and madrasa-specific registration law that bars jihadi and violent sectarian teachings from madrasa syllabi; requires the disclosure and documentation of income and expenditure based on an annual, independent and external financial audit; requires the documentation of students and their areas of origin and monitors living conditions of students in madrasas; and establishes controls over financing from domestic and foreign sources, accompanied by regular and proactive monitoring. It could also establish a single Madrasa Regulatory Authority, headed by the interior minister, operating under parliamentary oversight and with the necessary resources and powers to: suspend registration of madrasas until such a new law is in force that also includes a new, mandatory registration regime and contains meaningful financial and curricular regulations; and commission an independent, comprehensive survey to obtain authentic data on the number of madrasas and the size of the student body. It certainly needs to close all madrasas affiliated with banned organisations or with other sectarian and jihadi organisations; take legal action against the administration of any mosque or madrasa whose leader calls for internal or external jihad; take legal action against the administration of any mosque or madrasa or religious leader responsible for issuing an apostasy fatwa, whether verbal or written; and enforce existing laws against hate-speech and incitement of communal violence. Finally it needs to reform the public education system by purging material that promotes religious hatred, sectarian bias or historical accounts that justify jihad.

The Taliban on their part have long realized the importance of the madrassas to their long term ambitions and have sought to attack any competitor. Thus the attacks and razing down of 400 government run schools in swat valley. They have also realized that education of girls will in long term upend their brand of religion and hence the attacks in particular on girls schools. It is for the government to take a hard line on these attacks by laying down that for every government schools razed by the Taliban, the government will take over two madrassas removing the teachers and principals. In addition of course the government will have to massively accelerate its own education program. Pakistan today spends less than 2.5 % of its GDP on education while other countries spend twice as much. Pakistan has not seen the mushrooming of Teach Pakistan or Each one teach one movements but it is time for the civil society to move towards this. The example of Indonesia with its myriad islands and multiple languages in the fifties provides an inspiring model how literacy can be brought to large Islamic countries in a relatively short period of time.

And there is yet one more issue that will tend to get lost and that is the reeducation of the talibs who have already gone through the madrassa system. Left alone these could continue to provide an uneasy underbelly of violence in the country. As Mirza points out “remote madrassas may be turning boys into drones but then there are thousands of madrassas spread all over Pakistan’s urban centres that are producing millions of neo-drones who may not become suicide bombers but are totally unfit to live in this world. These kids need to be rescued”. Pakistan will have to systematically track down these budding jihadists and re educate them.

The fact is that this cancer has already taken root in the body politic of Pakistan. The real danger is that people of Pakistan will move too late or do too little to root it out.