Washington-based Niloufer Siddiqui examines the contours of Pakistan's political identity.

I consider myself a liberal. In the United States, where I have lived and studied for the past eight years, such self-identification has been seamless, almost natural. I am, however, becoming increasingly uncertain as to where I would fall along the political spectrum in Pakistan.

Like many other things in Pakistan, distinctions such as the one between conservatives and liberals are much less clear-cut. When a military dictator such as General Pervez Musharraf can be considered a beacon of liberalism, and a party such as the MQM, despite its questionable moral actions, is heralded as liberal because of its secular nature, it becomes apparent that such categories are questionable.

That said, wherever the schism between liberal and conservative falls, blurred though it may be, it is has never been more divisive than it is today. Most intriguing is the difference of opinion held not between the extremes of society, but within the vast ‘middle’, which most policy-makers have in mind when devising long-term strategies. As Ayesha Siddiqa writes in Dawn, the intellectuals and intelligentsia of Pakistan have found themselves divided along these lines, between the right-leaning, ostensibly religious conservatives and the ‘secular’, left-wing liberals.

Much like the Lal Masjid operation in the summer of 2007, the military intervention in Swat has divided opinion in middle Pakistan. I would argue that the majority of people in the country have the same end-goal in mind, or, at the very least, they agree on the broader goal of preventing the spread of extremist and militant elements in the country. Poll after poll has demonstrated that the ‘average Pakistani’ – whoever that might be – does not support suicide bombings or extremist thought or action.

But liberals and conservatives disagree vehemently on the means by which a militant-free Pakistan should be achieved. While the ends may justify the means for many left-wing Pakistanis, who view the threat of Talibanisation as insistent and growing, more conservative elements see the threat as overblown and continue to let anti-Americanism determine their modus operandi.

There is little doubt that notions of liberalism have differed across continents and over time, and each society has witnessed indigenous debates surrounding its political identity. At the time that India’s constitution was being drafted, for instance, Constituent Assembly debates centred around the maintenance of individual liberty in the face of group demands for recognition and protection – a dichotomy that has proven itself inherently complex to this day, not only in India but elsewhere in the region.

In my experience in the US, choosing where you fit on the political spectrum today is usually a package deal: being opposed to the war in Iraq may have little to do with being pro-choice or being a proponent of gay marriage, but is often lumped together in this nebulous grouping. As Nicholas Kristoff’s fascinating piece in The New York Times suggests, differences between liberal and conservatives are deep-rooted – each group does not just think differently, it feels differently.

And these categories do not always translate well across boundaries. In Pakistan, liberals generally see the necessity of the US’s war against terror (though they may not always agree with the manner in which it is being conducted). Conservatives, on the other hand, view it as a neo-imperialist agenda. In the US, the situation is reversed, with American liberals fretting that battling terrorism is the ugly face of America’s foreign policy and conservatives championing the destruction of Al Qaeda at all costs.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Mohammed Hanif accurately argued that despite Pakistani civil society’s ability to drive a military dictator from power and restore the judiciary, ‘when it comes to the Taliban, it seems incapable of speaking with one voice.’

Where does the faultline fall then? Is religion – and the state’s relationship with religion – truly the differentiating factor? Or is this inability to speak ‘with one voice’ the result of a set of assumptions based on contradictory facts? The now infamous image of the woman being flogged in Swat is a case in point: when one segment of Pakistani society alleges that the incident was fake and constructed, the debate is no longer one of morals but of facts. Similarly, the information gap in the events surrounding the Lal Masjid operation largely determined the manner in which one responded to it. Were there foreign fighters in the mosque, or was the government operation conducted against a group of innocent women and children? The list of debated and unanswered questions goes on and on.

As long as the government remains devoid of accountability and legitimacy, and the veracity of accounts and statistics continue to be questioned, a national debate on Pakistan’s identity will remain overshadowed by conspiracy theories.