What the occupation of Wall Street means for Pakistan

The relevance of these political events for Pakistan lies in ‘Occupation’ and ‘Wall Street’, i.e Afghanistan and aid.

The newly-conjured, emblematic, grass roots movement which has recently coalesced in the United States under the ugly and somewhat discomforting banner of ‘Occupation’, probably seems like yet another sensational event to international observers. However, as a development that is still only at its onset, this might be something which could turn out to have very real and drastic consequences for Pakistan, especially as the domestic realm of politics becomes increasingly shaky and unsettled for its closest ally.

Initially discounted by the media and the authorities as an outlandish expression and overwritten as largely incoherent, these politically charged demonstrations are gradually beginning to be taken seriously by all kinds of political observers in the United States. Perhaps, observers in Pakistan also need to watch this event — as various occupations unfold and begin to cause unrest in some of the biggest cities of its closest allies — and perhaps as carefully as Washington DC when it observes politically destabilising events inside Pakistan’s urban cores.

What has come together under the social media nomenclature of #OccupyWallSt, is a loosely bound youth-driven movement, which aims to bring together prevailing mass discontent among the American public, not simply over the decrepit state of the economy, but over the way in which their country is being mismanaged as a whole. This micro-level phenomenon spontaneously sprouted up when an unruly crowd first occupied a semi-public space near Wall Street, the (in)famous, US financial capital that houses some of the biggest international lending operations. The movement has now spread to other loosely bound occupations, from Oakland, California to Hartford, Connecticut, inspiring a myriad of interconnected sporadic outbursts where increasingly emboldened protesters are beginning to stare an overly vigilant police in the eye. Recently, the movement has begun to make more politically decipherable waves, unnerving the country’s silent establishment.

How should Pakistani observers interpret these events as they unfold? Although international media is generally trying to treat this as nothing more than an oversized prank, the fact of the matter is that these protests have been successful in sparking a heated internal debate about getting the country’s economic house in order and delivering equitable social justice. The suspicion that the abstraction of finance capitalism might have robbed from the increasingly marginalised American middle class had been brewing all along since the financial meltdown of 2007, but now this reawakening is beginning to gain an increasingly popular hold on political stakeholders.

Also, the fact that the September 17 protests began exactly a week after the mythical landmark of 9/11, is no less significant, especially so for Pakistan. And though the site of Zuccotti Park is only a few blocks away from the haloed space of Ground Zero, this might already suggest an impending shift in the country’s political consciousness. American domestic politics seems to be moving into an entirely new territory that eclipses the paranoiac security concerns of the post-9/11 era in favour of mass emotions that begrudge the economy, while issuing harsh critiques of the state. No doubt this has implications for Pakistan, America’s own often unstable with-us-or-against-us ally.

The relevance of these political events for Pakistan lies in the two concepts that come together to give credence to this powerful political expression, i.e. ‘Occupation’ and ‘Wall Street’. The occupation of a public space where a mass of radically critical and destitute Americans alike camped underneath large, oversized 20^th century metallic, capitalist sculptures is an altogether new kind of political expression, a type of mass-mobilisation that has not been seen on the streets of the United States since half a century. Recently, a group of American anti-war veterans marched up and down the streets of downtown Manhattan, protesting the police assault in which Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, suffered serious injury — at the site of the protest, they issued a statement endorsing that as the only occupation they support.

The concept of occupation need not be overlooked or discounted, especially in this case, because it signals obvious parallels to America’s extralegal occupations stemming out of its overthrow of regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The word ‘occupy’, then, isn’t merely a coincidental choice, rather it signals that Americans have grown weary of being politically deceived through the pretence of national security. The application of the concept of occupation in this context signals mass disapproval of America’s imperialist tendencies in the face of mostly ignored large-scale structural economic issues at home. Pakistan’s political and military establishments have, in the past decade, been specifically geared towards servicing American demands of strategic cooperation in exchange for economic and military cooperation.

The fact that the occupation that underlines these protests is taking place at Wall Street is also quite significant for Pakistan, as it relies heavily on American aid dollars in return for its reluctant cooperation. As toughening economic times signal a mood of austerity across the First Word, it leaves the American government with less and less space to manoeuvre politically, in order to justify the wads of cash it spends on securing itself from hypothetical threats. As budget constraints and the national deficit begin to be taken more seriously, especially in face of the country’s upcoming 2012 presidential elections, it is likely that the US might start further cutting back the already stifling financial compensation it affords in return for Pakistan’s support.

Moreover, political slogans like ‘End the wars! Tax the rich!’ could be expected to gain more and more momentum over the coming months. This might just be the start of a mass-scale popular US anti-war movement, echoing the massive anti-war rallies of the sixties which were responsible for bringing the American occupation of Vietnam to a screeching halt. If Pakistan is to take these signals seriously, then this might be the time for it to start watching out for itself, as the decade that marked 9/11 comes to an unruly end, replaced by a new pervading global political mood. Otherwise, Pakistan might be confronted with the all-too-familiar scenario from the United States 1989 post-Cold War pull out, when US aid got squeezed and IMF loans suddenly became the embattled country’s only friend and saviour.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 21^st, 2011.