Subversion of the Pakistani mind

An old interview of a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, has found its way back into the US discourse. Given to G Edward Griffin in 1984, this interview titled “Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press” is widely available online. But until recently, it was a fixture of the forgotten past. The Soviet Union it talks about is long gone, and contrary to the views expressed in the interview, it wasn’t the Soviet Union which brought down the United States but the exact opposite. Still, it is a useful weapon in the American right’s arsenal and is now used to whip up anti-socialist paranoia.

But the methodology allegedly employed by the Soviet Union to subvert the American mind Bezmenov describes deserves your attention. He called it ideological subversion or “active measures”. This method has four stages: demoralisation, destablisation, crisis and normalisation. Demoralisation is the great brainwashing where you sow demoralising seeds of doubt in the minds of the citizens of your enemy country. “A person who was demoralised is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him,” said Bezmenov. “They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behaviour.”

The next step, ‘destabilisation’, targets critical elements of the country like the economy, foreign relations and defence. This stage can take two to five years. The next stage, crisis, is marked by “a violent change of power, structure, and economy”. This small interregnum becomes the excuse to invade the country in the name of ‘normalisation’. He gave the example of the then-Czechoslovakia, which the Soviet Union invaded.

Does any of this sound familiar?

While there may not be any provable link between what Bezmenov described and the country where he was stationed before he defected, I will use it as a jumping-off point because it is important in our case. It was in India that Bezmenov started drifting away from the Soviet ideology and finally decided to defect.

India is interesting because as it progressed, Pakistan constantly kept deflating. Could this methodology be at play here? The words used to describe the first three stages, demoralisation, destabilisation and crisis, are well known to us. If my memory serves me right, in the eighties and early nineties, asymmetries between India and Pakistan seldom came under discussion. In fact, the two countries were often dubbed as Siamese twins and hyphenated. Then suddenly, around the time of Kargil, we started hearing that India was a big country brimming with potential, and Pakistan stood nowhere in comparison. What was the source of this brainwave? I don’t know. It stands to reason if these things were being discussed in our living and classrooms, then the intellectual elite must be preoccupied with the same thoughts. The age of demoralisation had begun.

As India grew and Pakistan plunged into one destablisation cycle after another, in the war on terror, Islamabad found another detractor. Hitherto, the state had convinced itself that the Westernised elite were its most prominent critics. But now, the religious far-right’s rage became the main problem for the state as it came under attack from the newly formed TTP. Still, the state was not programmed to see the religious right as the enemy. Consequently, it took the country nearly fourteen years and a tragedy like APS Peshawar to reach a fleeting consensus against this shade of terrorism. But by then, the real harm was done. The country had lost touch with its closest allies since its inception. Nearly all religious parties had been contaminated. Many actively worked as the TTP’s apologists. Others were, at the very least, not ready to trust the state. Now, the question is whether the state apparatus could remain insulated from such contamination. The obvious answer seems to be in the negative. More of this later.

It looks like the link the state tried to establish between India and the TTP was initially purely utilitarian. There was a ragtag group of hostile and violent coreligionists. When you have made religion an inextricable part of your identity, it is not easy to combat such elements without linking them with your sworn enemy. But as the fight intensified, it was destined to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. India was ready to collect them. And it did.

Now, a word about the link between the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. It is generally believed that the two are separate. This fallacy stems from the belief that, somehow, it was Pakistan’s state policy to sustain the TTA during the war on terror. Senior journalist and Afghan affairs expert Ahmed Rashid believes that General Musharraf resorted to a double game once he was convinced following the US invasion of Iraq that it wasn’t serious about nation-building in Afghanistan. I beg to differ. By then, the contamination had spread within the state apparatus, and when he couldn’t stop it, he turned a blind eye. These elements persisted by biding time and tried to reverse the state’s gains against terrorism during the PTI’s rule.

Just look at the implications. If the TTP had developed close ties with India and was inextricably linked to the Afghan Taliban and certain elements within the state, your archrival had found a backdoor to influence the atmospherics in the country further. The result has been bedlam.

Please, do not think for a second that the country is where it results from a foreign conspiracy. Our myopic policies and rot are primarily responsible for our mess. But the fact that we fail to find a way out of this mess shows how demoralised we are. And that the key components of the crises we are facing today resemble the steps of the methodology mentioned above. It could be purely coincidental, but there is too much here to ignore.

There is light at the end of this tunnel. The grip of the Modi government on power, which sought to use India’s remarkable global influence to convert a covert cold war against Pakistan into an internationally accepted overt one, is slackening. To recover, Pakistan needs a massive rethink. If Pakistan starts the process now, by the time the election cycle ends in India, it may gain enough agency to begin on the road to recovery. But this is a big ask in the age of demoralisation and may need an iron resolve.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 7^th, 2023.

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