STUCK with a pre-9/11 mindset in a post-9/11 world, Pakistan has suffered greatly over the past decade. Here's what the Economic Survey of Pakistan, 2010 released last April has to say in a special section: the 'war on terror' has “cost the country more than 35,000 citizens, 3,500 security personnel, destruction of infrastructure, internal migration of millions of people from parts of north-western Pakistan, erosion of investment climate, nose-diving of production and growing unemployment and above all brought economic activity to a virtual standstill in many parts of the country”. All of this is all too well known for anyone who has lived in Pakistan over the last decade. What is less clear for the average Pakistani is why this country has suffered so much. Driven by paranoia and fear, the blame for all that ails Pakistan is often laid on external powers. Meanwhile, the outside world has increasingly become suspicious and fearful of Pakistan. How can those two opposites be reconciled?

The answer lies in a reckoning with our own past. From the glorification and sponsorship of jihad in the 1980s to the present breakdown of internal security and external credibility, a bloody but fairly straight line can be drawn. Enamoured of the 'non-state actors' that were once cultivated and nurtured to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, the 'low-cost' option for pursuing an India-centric security policy has proved almost impossible to resist. But until that link is severed, completely, totally and with zero tolerance, Pakistan is unlikely to ever emerge from the nightmare it has been plunged into. And to sever that link, Pakistan will have to go back to the beginning, to publicly re-examine whether the policy of jihad ever made any sense. While powerful sections of the state apparatus and swaths of public opinion, cynically manipulated by the state over the years, continue to believe that the war of the 1980s was a good idea, it will be impossible to come to terms with who the enemy today is. The cognitive dissonance of venerating one era of militant Islamists while believing the present era of militant Islamists needs to be demobilised or eradicated is too much — the former is always likely to trump the latter.

Even now there is time to change direction and begin the root-and-branch eradication of the infrastructure of jihad. Unhappily, there are few signs that is what the security establishment and the political elite are willing or able to do. Can Pakistan afford, or even survive, another decade like the last? The answer should be obvious, but are the powers that be willing to acknowledge it?