We should guard against being smothered by negative orchestrated media reports about Pakistan being a failed state.
RAWALPINDI: This is with reference to Mohsin Raza Malik’s letter “Seeking the state’s statehood” (November 12). The writer has fused two issues, state failure and state breakdown in his letter. Certainly, states are less stable than tribal societies. States like Mesopotamia, Harappa, and China broke up. In recent history, British India, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and, of course, Pakistan itself broke up in 1971.
As of now, if Pakistan is weak, then the US also is weak because of its fragmented ideological composition. Foreign Policy Magazine cooked up an index of failed states, which included Pakistan, on the basis of some questionable indicators. Of course, Pakistan is weak in some or several respects. But, it is a democratic country. Hitlerite Germany and Stalinist Russia merit to be called failed states, although they were not weak countries (Noam Chomsky, Failed States, 2007, Allen and Unwin, Australia, p. 10).
We should not lose sight of the fact that the basis on which a state is classified as ‘failed’, ‘outlaw’, ‘rogue’, or as part of an ‘axis of evil’ is subjective. To quote Chomsky again: “In 1994, Clinton expanded the category of terrorist states to include rogue states. A few years later, another concept was added to the repertoire: ‘failed states’, from which we must protect ourselves and which we must help, sometimes by devastating them. Later came the ‘axis of evil”, which we must destroy in self-defence … ”.
We should guard against being smothered by negative orchestrated media reports about Pakistan being a failed state. Chomsky mentions two characteristics of a failed state. One, such a state being an ‘outlaw state’, its leadership dismisses international law and treaties with contempt. Such instruments may be binding on other states but not the outlaw state (p. 38). Secondly, such a failed state does not protect its citizens from violence and perhaps, even destruction, or that decision-makers regard such concerns as lower in priority. Pakistan does not qualify fully as ‘failed’ on Chomsky-defined criteria.
Amjed Jaaved
Published in The Express Tribune, November 18th, 2013.
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