ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has said national security is all about human security, directly associated with inclusive growth, and not just a military subject.

No country could be secure where a small segment kept getting rich and those at the bottom were left behind and the same applied to certain localities and cities that continued to develop while other areas were left behind, said Prime Minister Khan while opening The Margalla Dialogue-2021: Breaking Past, Entering Future on Monday.

Addressing the event, organised by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) in collaboration with National Security Division, PM Khan said inequality and disparity in development became the basis for a discord in society. “It is a very important issue of national security that how can we have equitable [and] inclusive development,” he pointed out.

Mr Khan called for strengthening national security through an indigenous course of action by exploring the tangibles of society, but regretted that society was unable to build a narrative of its own due to lack of interest in research and reliance on second-hand research from abroad.

Maintains pro- and anti-US lobbies in Pakistan did great injustice to country

Referring to the national security, the prime minister said in the changing environs, national security is “all about human security, and it is not merely a military subject. It is directly related to inclusive growth, as disparity in development leads to a sense of neglect.”

Mr Khan highlighted the need for focus on human development, lamenting that three parallel systems of education were running in the country: English-medium schools, Urdu-medium schools and religious seminaries. “Do we think there will be no fallout of this?” the PM asked.

He said English-medium schools were subject to further segmentation, while Urdu-medium schools had seen a decline in quality and there was a lack of job opportunities for students of religious schools. He attributed this imbalance to lack of research in the country and reliance on second-hand research from abroad. “This is why it is important to have an all-encompassing national security dialogue,” he asserted.

Think tanks

He also lamented that since the Salman Rushdie affair, foreign media and think tanks concentrated on Pakistan’s extremes and generalised the whole society. “If you concentrate on any society’s extremes then you will speak a lot of bad things about it,” he observed.

Holding the ‘unjust three-tier education system’ as being majorly responsible for the extremes in Pakistani society as it produced three groups that had no connection with each other, the PM said: “I expect that now the time has come to research, bring original thought and define our country instead of someone from outside doing it [for us].

“The more the credibility of your think tanks increases, the easier it will be for us to define ourselves in the world,” he said.

The problem of a lack of state narrative was not unique to Pakistan, the PM said, adding out that the rest of the Muslim world also lacked think tanks with the result that it could respond to western criticism or Islamophobia. The Muslim population in the West had to face hardships due to lack of response from the Islamic world’s leadership, he added.

“If there were think tanks in the Muslim world, then they would have taken up the issue.

“It is our misfortune the kind of racist government that is there [in India] and the fascist policies it has and what it is doing with its minorities and especially in Kashmir. Unfortunately there are no think tanks in our Muslim world that can project this issue,” he said.

In the context of Afghanistan, the premier said despite becoming the worst victim of decades-long civil strife, Pakistan was blamed for all that had gone wrong. “Pakistan is the biggest victim in the decades-long civil strife, and had to bear the collateral damage. Yet we were blamed for double standards, and this is all owing to our policy of appeasement,” he noted.

State narrative ‘defaced’

Regarding the US aid received by Pakistan for ‘war on terror’, Mr Khan explained: “The miniscule aid that came our way was nothing as compared to the sacrifices and services that Pakistan had rendered. We lost 80,000 people, 40 million people displaced and a suffered loss of around $100 billion. This is what we had to pay and yet Pakistan was blamed for all that went wrong.”

He also hinted at pro- and anti-US lobbies in Pakistan who did a great injustice to the country, and its narrative was defaced.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2021