Recently, the military establis­hment invited a group of journalists. It emphasised the importance of formulating a narrative that can effectively communicate Pakistan’s position vis-a-vis the turmoil in Afghanistan. Pakistan has been facing a diplomatic onslaught for allegedly aiding the Afghan Taliban’s resurgence. The government and state of Pakistan have repeatedly stated that the country “has no favourites” in the latest Afghan conflict. But the narrative has not worked. This is mainly because of the fact that Pakistan has had a history of backing the Afghan Taliban (for ‘strategic’ reasons).

But if the narrative of having no clear favourites isn’t cutting it and Pakistan is fearing international isolation, what else can the state and government say or do to convince the international community at large? It won’t be easy to formulate a narrative in this context because the narrative would also require the input of stakeholders sitting outside the government, the military establishment and the clique of media personnel close to both. 

The narrative will have to be derived from a wide-ranging consensus, the sort which most political stakeholders and the establishment were able to strike in early 2015, after the December 2014 attack on a school in Peshawar by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Red Zone Files: In the Afghan saga, Pakistan is failing to tell its side of the story

A consensus was achieved for an all-out military operation against the TTP. But why did the government headed by PML-N’s Mian Nawaz Sharif need a consensus? His party had won a substantial majority during the 2013 elections. He could have ordered a military operation on his own.

Now herein lie factors that often see Pakistani political and military leaderships stumble when it comes to addressing problems that involve the use — or rather misuse — of Islam as a political tool. Ever since the 1980s, the Pakistani state and subsequent governments have utilised politics, media and national curriculums to infuse a nationalist narrative that is pointedly tied to what is often referred to as ‘political Islam’ or ‘Islamism.’ 

Pakistan cannot hope to receive international traction for its narrative on Afghanistan if it cannot achieve wide-ranging political consensus within the country. But that will require input from all stakeholders and undercutting the tying of the national narrative to religion

For example, exhaustive studies on the nature of Pakistan’s national curriculum by academics such as A.H. Nayyar, Ahmad Salim and Rubina Saigol, conclude that students are encouraged to uncritically embrace a narrative that explains Pakistan as a ‘fortress of Islam’, surrounded by anti-Islam/ anti-Pakistan enemies, not only outside its borders, but also within. 

Paranoia of this nature, therefore, becomes a preferred behaviour. On the other hand, the state has had a history of sculpting Islamist groups as its proxies, whereas right-wing and centre-right political parties have managed to create large electoral constituencies for themselves by dishing out the same aforementioned narrative. PML-N was once such a party. 

So, naturally, the Nawaz regime refused to budge when unabated terror attacks on military personnel saw an increasing number of soldiers and officers demand a military solution. The then army chief, Gen Raheel Shareef, began to emphasise the urgent need to vanquish the TTP. It took almost a year and a half for PM Nawaz to agree, but he was adamant that the decision to unleash the military against the TTP should be seen as a consensual exercise. What’s more, despite his insistence on a military solution, Gen Shareef too had made it clear that he would not launch an all-out operation until all political parties were ‘on the same page.’ 

There are two main reasons why PM Nawaz took this route. With TTP networks firmly rooted in various regions of the country, the government feared that the operation might end in a failure. Nawaz worried that his opponents would then put the blame for such a failure on his regime that, along with another centre-right party, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), was often seen as being soft in its stance towards the TTP. 

Secondly, the PML-N had been striking electoral alliances with certain militant Islamist groups, though not the TTP. At least till the 2013 elections, the PML-N had built a constituency for itself that was openly sympathetic towards these groups. Yet, such constituencies were not the sole creation of parties such as the PML-N. The constituencies actually began to emerge during the so-called ‘Islamisation’ project of the Gen Zia dictatorship in the 1980s. They were then courted by Islamist and centre-right parties from the 1990s. 

Nation-states require narratives to build their existential raison d’être. According to a study in the academic journal Elsevier, various competing narratives emerge during the creation of a nation-state. But the one adopted by the state prevails and permeates society. The authors of the study add that other narratives do not disappear. Political, social and economic fluctuations may see the state discard the adopted narrative and embrace the one that was initially ignored. 

At the time of its creation, the Pakistani state adopted the narrative formulated by ‘Muslim modernists’, which explained the country as a pluralistic Muslim-majority country which was to be developed through the ‘modernisation theory’ that was all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s. However, after the acrimonious departure of the former East Pakistan in 1971, the state began to gradually shed the modernist narrative and adopt the Islamist narrative that too had emerged in 1947 but was sidelined. 

Read: A perception of conservatism

The Islamist narrative evolved rapidly, permeating the country’s polity. However, once the state was confronted by militant Islamist groups, this narrative became problematic, because there was hardly any difference between the rhetoric of these groups and of those manning state and government institutions.

This is why the 2015 consensus was a giant leap for all involved. But six years later, the country seems to be in a fix again. One of the ideas emerging from the 2015 consensus was to greatly water down the Islamist nationalist narrative. It had become too integrated with Islamist militancy. 

This is the lens from which the larger international community still sees Pakistan. The 2015 consensus began to erode after 2017 with the return of political polarisation, inexplicably fermented by an experiment of the military establishment that has aided one party (PTI) and alienated other major political groups.

Whatever Pakistan’s new narrative regarding the turmoil in Afghanistan is, it will not gain any international — or widespread national — traction if it is conceived by a handful of players, and if the project to denationalise the Islamist narrative is not regenerated.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 22nd, 2021