Salmaan
Taseer's alleged murderer is a twenty-six-year-old security guard, named Malik
Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. Qadri was hired by the Punjab Constabulary in 2003 as an
18-year-old recruit. In 2008, he joined the "Elite Force," where Punjab's best
cops end up, and was working for this elite force on the security detail for
the governor of Punjab when he killed Taseer. His motivation was allegedly
Taseer's vocal opposition to the provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code that
deal with blasphemy.
Given the
infamy of these legal provisions, the discussion about Taseer's assassination
is going to be dominated by an examination of how Pakistan treats blasphemy.
That is a long-needed national discussion, and in his death, it may be that
Taseer will have stimulated an honest and serious national introspection about
how the country treats its minorities.
Unfortunately,
what is more likely is that Taseer's death will not only not stimulate a more serious examination of how the Pakistani state
deals with the highly toxic issues of blasphemy, but it may help mute the
already nervous voices within the thin sliver of Pakistani society that seek to
amend these kinds of legal provisions.
Whatever
ramifications it has for the blasphemy law, Taseer's death should bring home a
much more urgent set of realizations. The disturbing reality is that the
continued existence of the blasphemy laws, his assassination and the varying
shades of reactions to his murder all point to a set of very deeply embedded
structural problems within the Pakistani state and Pakistani society.
Long-time
advocates of an optimistic outlook for Pakistan like myself have based a
positive long-term prognosis on the country's size and the concomitant economic
potential it has. However, the ability of Pakistan to align itself with any
kind of transformative economic activity is contingent on a baseline of minimum
human and social capital, a minimal ability within the state to absorb and
leverage that capital, and a minimum baseline of rational rigor within
political discourse.
Those three
qualities are in desperately short supply in the Pakistan of 2011.
The state of
human and social capital can best be surmised by some of the chilling
statements of support for the assassination that were visible on social media
like Twitter and Facebook, mere hours after the assassination. Regardless of
the normative problems with misguided religiosity, nationalism and deep-set
political polarity, it is quite clear that some Pakistanis, those celebrating
this kind of horrifying assassination, are fundamentally incapable of engaging
with the rest of the rational world.
The level of
state capability can be measured by the mere fact that the assassin was a
long-time, regular state employee. This was no Lee Harvey Oswald. It was Beant
and Satwant Singh all
over again. Of course, Sikh extremists killed Indira Gandhi in retaliation
for Operation Blue Star, at the Golden Temple in Amritsar -- an attack on a
holy site. Qadri supposedly killed Taseer for standing up for a Christian woman
convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death. The Elite Force that Qadri was a
member of was established in 1998 to counter, of all things, the wave of
extremist violence in the Punjab in the mid and late 1990s. The motto of the
Elite Force, according to a Wikipedia entry, is "Kill all the terrorists."
Like many other instruments of the Pakistani state, the Punjab Elite Force
seems to have a clear and present competence deficit.
As an advocate
of realistic optimism, Taseer's assassination for me, and many among the small
English-speaking urban community in Pakistan, is gut-wrenching and
heart-breaking. It is a reminder that the realities of Pakistan in the New Year
are stark and intimidating.
Focusing on
any one aspect of all the holes in Pakistan that this assassination exposes
would be myopic and misguided. Pakistan is in desperate need of a viable
counter-weight to the irrational and frankly un-Islamic voices of religious
extremism that dominate religious discourse in the country. That is not a year-long
fight. It is an intergenerational struggle.
Pakistani is
also in need of urgent reforms to the legal and judicial system that allows and
in many ways encourages mindless vigilantism. That too is a not a fight that
can be won quickly. Enabling parliamentarians to feel secure and confident in
making changes just got even harder with Taseer's assassination. This is also
an intergenerational struggle.
The cancer of
fanaticism that consumed Taseer's life is a product of two generations of
Pakistani state actions, starting with General Zia-ul Haq's offering up the
country as an assembly line of warriors for the war in Afghanistan against the
Soviet Union in the 1990s, and continuing with General Pervez Musharraf's
offering up the same country as a staging ground for a war against those very
warriors. The role of the war in Afghanistan and America's presence in the
region is inescapable. It has helped catalyze and deepen the pre-existing
groundswell of a radicalized the mainstream Pakistani narrative. This mess has
been more than thirty years in the making. It is clear that no amount of
externally-stimulated counterinsurgency or counterterrorism will do the trick.
More is needed, much more. And all of it has to be organic and local. This,
more than any other, is the greatest of intergenerational struggles.
Salmaan
Taseer's assassination raises legitimate questions about the viability of this
struggle and its success. On an already cold and tragic day in Islamabad, that
represents a devastating reality.
Mosharraf Zaidi has served as an advisor on
international aid to Pakistan for the United Nations and European Union and
writes a weekly column for Pakistan's the News. You can find more of his writing at www.mosharrafzaidi.com.
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