Security dilemmas of nuclear-armed Pakistan

Pakistan's security environment has deteriorated through its adoption of a declared nuclear weapons posture in May 1998. Internal fissures have widened along regional and sectarian lines as the Pakistani economy falters, unable to sustain even limited external sanctions following decades of internal mismanagement. Tensions with India have also increased as Pakistan's security managers adopt interventionist policies, based on a misplaced belief in the deterrent value of nuclear weapons. The international community, in particular, the USA's failure to reverse South Asian nuclear proliferation, has emboldened Indian advocates of nuclear deployment. If India deploys nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, Pakistan will follow suit. Operation-ready nuclear weapons will increase the prospects of an India - Pakistan conflict that could assume a nuclear dimension. Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability will not prevent an Indian conventional attack nor will the presence of nuclear weapons deter an Indian accidental, unauthorised or preventive nuclear attack. Changed domestic and external priorities alone can buttress Pakistani security.     

Democrats and Minority Marginalization: The Case of Pakistan

Pakistan is the first post-war experiment in political Islam to establish a democratic state. While Pakistan's consistently poor democratic record has disadvantaged every citizen, its religious minorities are especially marginalized. This article argues that this marginalization is a consequence of institutionalized political inequality, which indeed may be the root cause of Pakistan's overall democratic weakness. Again, contrary to the popular perception, this article demonstrates that Pakistan's democratic leaderships are as—if not more—complicit in this marginalization as the Islamist dictator Zia-ul-Haq and others. First, the worldview of Pakistan's ostensibly liberal-democratic founder Mahomed Ali Jinnah and its impact on the constitutional framework of Pakistan is analysed. Second, the political culture spawned by another ostensibly democratic leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in securing the mandate for the new post-1971 constitution is explicated. These two ‘democratic’ processes have profoundly influenced the marginalization of religious minorities in Pakistan. This has significant lessons for ‘democratic’ transition leaderships in the contemporaneously evolving cognate experiments in the Arab Spring regions and elsewhere where similarly small minorities exist.     

Pakistan's Approach to Countering Violent Extremism (CVE): Reframing the Policy Framework for Peacebuilding and Development Strategies

Countering violent extremism (CVE) is one of the central focuses of the government of Pakistan. This article examines the current CVE policy framework and questions the existing paradigm of CVE policies in Pakistan. The article employs R. Kim Cragin's model of “resisting violent extremism” to suggest the need for a paradigm change in Pakistan's CVE policy framework, especially after the launch of another military operation in 2017. After a decade of security-centric counterterrorism policies, such a change requires balancing security-, development-, and prevention-centric policies in order to redefine Pakistan's policy framework.     

The Rise of Militant Islam and the Security State in the Era of the ‘Long War’

This paper distinguishes between political and militant Islam and analyses the latter's current ability to confront empire and to become a social force in Muslim-majority states. This analysis is within the dialectic of collaboration and resistance, starting with client postcolonial states' pivotal role in bringing to fruition the collaboration between political Islam and US imperialism during the cold war era. The post-cold war period signals the imperialist putsch to confront militant Islam in the ‘Long War’ by employing the cold war strategy of ‘permanent war’ and universalising the idea of the security state. Militant Islam's resistance to the Long War and the security state makes this two-pronged imperial strategy a losing proposition for the USA. Paradoxically this strategy has also become the prime mover for militant Islam's ascendancy. The paper addresses the paradox of the USA's continuation with its losing Long War strategy and securitisation agenda which, although providing succour to militant Islam, is also achieving its larger objectives to buttress capitalist globalism; fuel the military–industrial and security–industrial complexes; and support ‘big oil’.     

Ethnic and sectarian violence and the propensity towards praetorianism in Pakistan

This article focuses on Pakistan and its divided society, and on its decades of characteristic irresponsible and unaccountable leaderships. It argues that a culture of mistrust--a product of a society divided along ethnic and sectarian lines--and poor governance has facilitated fluid civil and civil-military alliances which have in turn legitimised praetorianism by either 1) giving rise to inter-ethnic clashes; 2) fomentation of ethnic and sectarian violence; or 3) formidable multi-ethnic opposition to civilian governments. These outcomes have consequently increased the utility of coercion and the saliency of praetorianism (direct or indirect military intervention). As such this article utilises the 'coercion thesis', put forth by scholars of Asian civil-military relations, which maintains that, as the utility of coercion increases, so does the influence and saliency of praetorianism. It is ultimately argued that Pakistan's divided society, with its subsequent ethnic and sectarian violence and fluid alliances, has contributed to the country's propensity toward praetorianism. The significance of this thesis is summarised as the need for both accountable leadership and economic recovery.     

The Terror Speaks: Inside Pakistan's Terrorism Discourse and National Action Plan

This article, employing a poststructuralist Critical Discourse Analysis, reveals cracks, discrepancies, and inconsistencies in Pakistan's discourse on terrorism and practice. I argue that Pakistan continuously constructs a “monstrous enemy” and magnifies it in a way that conceals alternative representations of reality that could show that the state, by presenting itself as a victim of terrorism, is using phenomena of political violence to serve its political objectives inside and outside the boundaries of the state. The article argues that after a militant attack on a school in northwest Pakistan, critical, liberal, and dissenting narratives mingled with the dominant state discourse in a fashion that strengthen illiberal practices in the country, thus undermining the ideals of democracy.     

The politics of the pipeline: The Iran and Afghanistan conflict

A war between Iran and the Taliban's Afghanistan was averted in September 1998. The roots of the animosity between the two sides go much deeper than the killings of Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan and the reported massacre of Afghan Shi'ites by the Taliban. As the Iranians see it, an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban is a threat to Iran's national security and economic and political interests not only in Afghanistan but, more importantly, in oil-rich Central Asia. The article argues that at the heart of the conflict between Iran and the Taliban is the question of whether Iran or Afghanistan should be the route for the export of oil and gas from landlocked Central Asia to world markets, as well as Pakistan's plan to use Afghanistan as a corridor to Central Asia. As explained in the article, for commercial and political reasons the Afghanistan route is preferred by both Islamabad and Washington. However, international oil companies prefer the Iran route as it is the shortest, safest and most economical.     

The ISI Reaches East: Anatomy of a Conspiracy

Operations in India by Pakistan's intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), have primarily been confined to Kashmir, where it actively aids and abets militant organizations. A larger game plan of the ISI has come to light in India's north eastern region with Assam - with its sizeable Muslim population - becoming the primary target of the agency. It is seeking to create trouble in the state by way of direct aid to the separatist organizations there. Although it is not altogether certain whether Pakistan has any territorial designs in that part of India (the state of Assam geostrategically borders Bangladesh, which broke away from Pakistan in 1971) it is evidently becoming clearer that the ISI wishes to set many a "prairie fire" in the area in order to tie down Indian troops from their primary role in Kashmir and elsewhere.     

Repression and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict in Kurdistan

Why do ethnic conflicts spread to neighboring states? This article examines the effect of transborder ethnic groups on the spread of ethnic conflict. It argues that when a transborder ethnic group is in conflict in one state, neighboring states perceive a threat from members of that ethnic group residing in their own territory, leading the state to take preemptive repressive action. This repression in turn changes the ethnic group's security situation within the state and can result in violence and thus ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict spread is not determined by the actions of either the ethnic group or the state alone, but is a product of threat perception and interaction between the two groups. This argument is tested in a set of cases in a region where an ethnic conflict seems to have spread—the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey from 1961–2003.     

The prism of strategic culture and South Asian nuclearization

In this paper, Ken Booth's concept of strategic culture is drawn on to examine India and Pakistan's nuclear policy options/policies. The thrust of the argument is that the perceptions of India and Pakistan's strategic insecurities as interpreted by their security managers, through the prism of their strategic cultures, have, in conjunction with material, domestic and technological factors, defined their nuclear trajectories. In framing the argument, although appreciative of the material (realist) realm, attention is drawn simultaneously to the inter-subjective (constructivist) realm, namely, that productions of insecurities are also ‘cultural’. This constructivist line of analysis, which draws attention to culture ‘as both a source of insecurity and an object of analysis’ in international relations, has implications on the future of a nuclearized South Asia.     

The CIA's Covert Predator Drone War in Pakistan, 2004–2010: The History of an Assassination Campaign

This article provides the first overview of the CIA's secret drone campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas from its origins in 2001's Operation Enduring Freedom to the end of 2010. In the process it addresses the spatial dimensions of the campaign (where are the strikes being directed and where do the drones fly from), Pakistani reactions to this threat to both their sovereignty and an internal Taliban enemy, technological developments and Taliban and Al Qaeda responses to this unprecedented airborne assassination campaign. While the debate on this issue has often been driven by the extremes which either support the campaign as the most effective tool in killing terrorists or condemn it for driving Pakistanis to new levels of anti-Americanism, this article points out a third path. Namely, that many Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen living in the targeted areas support the strikes against the Taliban who have terrorized them in recent years.     

Corruption and the Decline of the State in Pakistan

Pakistan is generally included in most discussions of ‘failing states’ that pose the maximum danger to global security, with the rise of Islamic militancy being the most commonly cited reason for the ‘failure’. However, Islamic militancy is a result of impending state failure, not a cause of it. This article argues that the state's inability, caused by decades of systemic corruption, to provide any appreciable level of public goods or services, broadly defined, is responsible for the delegitimization of the state and its inability to maintain law and order in the cities or suppress Islamist insurgents in the rest of the country.     

Savagery in democracy's empire

This article examines the rise of various representations of postcolonial states to highlight how thinking and practice that arose and prevailed during the Cold War still persists in the present ostensibly post-cold war era. After initially outlining the historical construction of the social sciences, it is shown how the annexation of the social sciences evolved in the early post-World War II and cold-war era as an adjunct of the world hegemonic pretensions of the USA. A critique is then developed of various representations of post-colonial states that arose in the making of the 'Third World' during the cold-war annexation of the social sciences. Yet such practices still persist in the present, as evidenced by more contemporary representations of post-colonial states commonly revolving around elements of deficiency or failure, eg 'quasi-states', 'weak states', 'failed states' or 'rogue states'. A more historicised consideration of post-colonial statehood, that recasts conceptions of state-civil society antagonisms in terms of an appreciation of political economy and critical security concerns, offers an alternative to these representations of 'failed states'. By historicising various representations of 'failed states' it becomes possible to open up critical ways of thinking about the political economy of security and to consider alternative futures in world order.     

Target Malacca Straits: Maritime Terrorism in Southeast Asia

The strategic and economic importance of the Straits of Malacca makes it one of the world's major sea routes most vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The piracy problem that continues to frustrate maritime authorities in the Straits bears proof to this and, given the heightened security concerns post–9/11, has alarmed the waterway's major users. Although international pressure has forced the littoral states—Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia—to up their efforts on improving Straits security, national interests and a reluctance to address the problem as a potential terror threat continues to hinder cooperation. This article attempts to look at how three neighbors in the same Straits came to have such divergent policies on combating maritime terrorism.     

Rethinking “Wana”: A Game Theoretic Analysis of the Conflict in the Tribal Region of Pakistan

The purpose of this study is to analyze the ongoing conflict situation between the government of Pakistan and the tribal population groups residing in the tribal belt along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, while Pakistan aids the United States in its “War on Terror.” The article brings into limelight the political problems being faced by the government of Pakistan while it supports the United States and its allies in their mission to combat and weaken the Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. It further attempts to apply some simple game theoretic models to the situation in Waziristan and tries to accommodate the influence of the third party (the United States in this case) on the strategies as well as on the Nash equilibrium of the players in this situation of conflict. The aim of this exercise is to capture and highlight policy insights that might emerge from this strategic analysis. The possible Nash equilibrium depicts that the presence of the third party in the said conflict complicates the situation in an adverse manner. Moreover, the rebels might find it profitable to rebel and retaliate against the government in the subsequent periods due to the grievances caused by the actions of government in the first period. The government of Pakistan therefore seriously needs to rethink and reform its strategy for dealing with the extremists in the case discussed.     

Dhiren Barot: Was He an Al Qaeda Mastermind or Merely a Hapless Plotter?

This article profiles Dhiren Barot, a convert to Islam who was convicted in Britain in October 2006 on charges of conspiracy to commit murder for planning terrorist attacks in the United States and the United Kingdom. Upon his conviction, much of the British press, and many other observers, claimed Barot was a high-level Al Qaeda figure whose plans were on the verge of execution. Other observers, and Barot's defense attorneys, however, argued that these allegations were exaggerated. Barot, they claimed, had done nothing more than sketch vague plans for which he had no funding and was merely being used by the British government as an example in the War on Terror. This article details Barot's life and terrorist activity. It argues that he was a committed jihadi, was likely an Al Qaeda member, and did indeed represent a security threat. Nonetheless, the lack of public information available on his life suggests that certain allegations about his status within Al Qaeda and the immanency of his plans should be treated skeptically. It concludes by considering to what extent Barot fits the profile of other Islamic terrorists.     

'New regionalism' in Central America

Central American regionalism is in a state of disarray after having been surrounded by great enthusiasm in the early 1990s. This article explores whether a 'new regionalism' framework can improve our understanding of this turn of events. It is argued that Central American integration lacks a series of features assumed to characterise 'new regionalism'. It has not been accompanied by spontaneous societal integration, its main stimulus has come from external actors, and the goal of the process has narrowed from originally being human welfare and security in a wide sense, to primarily being integration in the global economy. This is reflected in the integrationist rhetoric, where globalisation has entered the centre stage and is presented as a threat to which regional action should respond. This change has also rendered regional agreements largely superfluous as the member states pursue policies aimed at global integration regardless of the integration process.     

Anti-Russian and Anti-Soviet Subversion: The Caucasian–Japanese Nexus, 1904–1945

This article examines the little known history of political collaboration between Caucasian national groups and Japan directed against the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The collaboration, begun at the time of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, resumed in the 1920s and continued through World War II. The Caucasian groups (Haidar Bammat's ‘Caucasus Group’ in particular) and Japan worked together to pursue their common goal of dismembering the Soviet Union. Their anti-Soviet subversion was real yet achieved few results in the face of extraordinary Soviet security. Nevertheless, Stalin took no chances and terrorised anyone suspected of any possible link to the subversive activity.     

The Southern African customs union,cereal price policy in South Africa,and food security in Botswana

It is elaborated in this article that external factors may affect food security in developing countries even if these countries are not exposed to price instability in world food markets. This is the case in the Southern African Customs Union where the agricultural price policy in South Africa affects food security in Botswana, Lesotho and Swasiland. It is analysed quantitatively how cereal price policy in South Africa influenced the cereal import sector of Botswana in the period 1969–84. Cereal import prices increased due to Botswana's membership of the customs union, and cereal imports declined. The price increase was accompanied by a price‐stabilising impact.     

Book Review

The madaris located in Pakistan have played an important role in spreading militant jihadist ideologies and some have even labeled the madaris “terrorist factories.” After the War on Terror began the Pakistani government was forced to deal with their violent religious schools. The federal government did produce a plan for reform; however, the already unimpressive strategies have not been followed through successfully and the militant schools still remain a major threat even today. The reform will need to focus on three different aspects of the madaris: the financing, the curriculum, and the state's authority over the institutions. In order for permanent reformation to occur, the Pakistani government will need to strictly implement policies that will demilitarize the madaris.