On April 14, the Atlantic Council held a public forum on the causes and consequences of Political Islam in Pakistan. The forum featured Dr. Haroon Ullah, a member of US Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, and former Pakistan Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States, Husain Haqqani, who is now researching Political Islam in Pakistan at the Hudson Institute. In the talk, Dr. Ullah underscores that for most Arabs, it is easy to look to Hassan al-Banna and the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 as the origins of modern political Islam, while few take note of Pakistan's central role. An American born Pakistani, Dr. Ullah had lived in Pakistan for years while researching his PhD thesis on Political Islam. His research revealed that for those wishing to understand the role of Islam in politics, "Pakistan provides a perfect crucible to look at". Ambassador Haqqani agrees. As a youth he was a political Islamist; however, he has since become disillusioned about Islam's role in politics. He observed that Pakistan has long been a testing ground for the weaving of Islam and politics, starting first with the creation of the Muslim League in the early 1900s. While most look to the Zia al-Haq regime in the late-1970s and 1980s as the foundation for Islamist influence over the Pakistani government, this is not accurate. Pakistan's very foundation in 1947 was rooted in Islam, which has always been central to the state's national identity. Indeed, "All the major Islamist groups in Pakistan existed before the country was founded". At the time of partition, Ambassador Haqqani explained, most Islamist groups were opposed to Pakistan's creation because they saw the military elite that ruled as being too Western. However, they quickly recognized their influence as power brokers. This, in turn, has led to their outsized influence over Pakistani politics. Key to the success of the Islamists' strategy in Pakistan today has been their ability to dominate the public discourse on every major issue. "Organized Political Islam in Pakistan is about negatives and not necessarily the positives," said Ambassador Haqqani. "[Islamists] agree on what they do not want; how they do not want society [to be]." As it turns out, this emphasis on the negative was the core of Dr. Ullah's research for his book, Vying for Allah's Vote (Georgetown University Press, 2013). In his analysis of why people vote for Islamist parties, he found that fear was a major factor. He explained that contrary to popular belief, extremists groups in Pakistan are very pragmatic and use violence strategically. For instance, he found that extremist Islamist groups would threaten community and business leaders to vote for their party or bear the cost of political violence. Because a single political party rarely receives enough parliamentary seats, Pakistan is typically government coalitions. According to Dr. Ullah, Islamist groups purposely target key electoral districts in order to ensure that they will be a swing vote needed to form a ruling coalition. This kingmaker role in Pakistani politics, Dr. Ullah argues, is why Islamist groups maintain such a disproportional degree of influence and helps explain why they have dominated the political discourse or narrative. Given this, an important question to consider is what actions can be taken to roll back the Islamists influence in Pakistan. Both panellists strongly believed that the key to answering this question is the development of counter-narratives. As it turns out, this is precisely what Dr. Ullah's job at the State Department entails. "If we are going to combat [the influence of the political Islamists]," he argued," what we have to do is to develop counter-narratives that are able to use authentic local narratives" to reveal to the Pakistani public the hypocrisy of these extremist groups using "their own words". Ambassador Haqqani agrees, but points out just how bad the US government has been at achieving Dr. Ullah's objectives because of its poor language skills and lack of cultural understanding. Moreover, he questions why America is central to this problem. "Why is it that Pakistanis always try to say: ‘What is America doing to counter this narrative?'" To him, this is not an American problem but a Pakistani one. "Let us stop framing this question in terms of ‘what is America going to do to change our narrative, but what are we [as Pakistanis] going to do to change our narrative?'" he asked. "We need to change our narrative for our sake, not America's."
