Bangladesh and Pakistan in Nicholas Kristof's Bent View

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a piece that dealt with Pakistan and Bangladesh’s parralel and diverging moves on Islamist socialization and education.  The piece, published in the Times editorial page, has set off a run of  commentary.  To some extent this is a welcome development; considered another way, it is an unnecessary set of talk backs on a fairly uninspired and ill-reasoned piece.

The nugget of logic in Kristof’s piece seems, on the whole, misdirected.  His point is that  Pakistanis have been  responsible for a large share of international terrorism in the past two decades.  Secondly religious fundamentalism in Pakistan emerged through investment and indoctrination in a way-ward set of beliefs and historical interpretation through the madrasa system. Therefore, somehow, those two stylized facts are connected.  Therefore, “it came as little surprise that the suspect in the attempted car bombing in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, is a Pakistani-American.”  Indeed, it did come as a surprise.

What is the connection here, between Pakistanis and Pakistani Americans and terrorism?  The sociological account that might show how some in Pakistan seek out a wider role for Salafism and Wahhabism, through whatever spare education he or she might have received,  is not necessarily the same one that might apply to a Pakistani American.  In fact, educated people are committing these acts in rich democracies.  The poor in Pakistan and Bangladesh are simply and unjustly suffering and dying. Even if for some reasons some small set of poorly educated boys become radicalized men and commit local acts of violence and terrorism, those acts and their associated reasons have little to do with the troubling reasons why Faisal Shahzad, an educated Pakistani American, did what he did.

Kristof then compares Pakistan’s outcomes to Bangladesh and argues that the focus on education, specifically education of girls has helped prevent Bangladesh from sharing in Pakistan’s fate.  The poor cousin has beat out its formerly more powerful relative.  Given the mutually shared history and similar trajectories, what explains the divergence?  There seems little in the piece to answer that question.

Kristof’s focus is on Pakistan and its links to terrorism through education.  The argument, again, is that there have been many acts of terrorism perpetrated by Pakistani or individuals associated with Pakistanis.  Therefore we must think hard about education in Pakistan, a country that is ostensibly an ally to the United States.  This is, baldly, illogical.  Yes, attention must be paid to Pakistan’s horrendous system and infrastructure of public education.  But not because, some Pakistanis have grown up comfortable and then have killed people.  Attention must be paid simply because little children are suffering in Pakistan and in Bangladesh through absolutely no fault of their own. The government is failing them.  The government is failing to realize the promise that these babies have by not offering them the opportunities for the exercise of their intelligence and abilities.

Kristof writes, to try and explain the decimated state of education in Pakistan:

“One answer, [to the quandary of Pakistan’s development trap and move towards Islamicism] I think, is that Pakistan’s American-backed military leader of the 1970s and 1980s, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, drove the country off course, seeking to use fundamentalism as a way to buttress the regime. Instead of investing in education and infrastructure, he invested in religious sanctimony.”

Given that Kristof martials the state of education in Bangladesh, it only seems fair to suggest that Bangladesh’s President Ziaur Rahman, is guilty of the same move.  A military general who became the dictator and President of Bangladesh in the 1970’s Ziaur Rahman invested his entire tenure in power with the heaviness of recalling Islam into Bangladesh’s political life. It is solely through his maneuvering in power that Islamist parties were able to capture much of the social agenda of successive governments.  That, Jamaat-e-Islami, a party aligned with Pakistani sympathizers became the third most powerful party in the country and thereby became mainstream is testament to the current of Islamist thought and practice in Bangladesh.  That that a leader of the party was once in charge of the Ministry of Social Welfare and through that portfolio, helped redirect the stream of education is testament to the reach Islamists had– and, through their grassroots involvement, have–in Bangladesh. If Bangladesh has done well in terms of its education outcomes, specifically girls’ education, it has done so in spite of Islamicization of Bangladesh’s politics and culture.

The problem is not fundamentalism, or Wahhabism; rather it is the Pakistani government’s incompetence and its inability to deliver its writ to regions it had written off like the Northwest Frontier Province.  One must surely assign some blame to the sheer size of the country and its rocky terrain.  Fundamentalism emerged step-wise with nationalism in Peshawar and other places and has only now been associated with the virulent blow back that has disrupted cosmopolitan life in Islamabad, Karachi and London.  That blow back must be explained on its own terms; Pakistan’s anemic educational system cannot explain it.

Indeed, that the military should now come under suspicion for harboring fundamentalist beliefs is consistent with the observation that since the British Raj ended, Pakistanis on the street and within government and military leadership have sought to maintain a socialist Islamic form of democracy, no different in principle than the strain of democracy practiced and lived in Bangladesh.  One need not martial Zia-ul Huq investment in madrasas as the obvious culprits for Pakistan’s woes.

Indeed, the Bangladeshi government is as much a victim of intolerant political Islam as is Pakistan.  The sons of political leaders in Bangladesh have been implicated in acts of terrorism designed to penetrate and destroy American interests. Madrasas, often, are the only game in town in Bangladesh, as Kristof writes of the case in Pakistan.  Teachers in Bangladesh are equally likely to not show up to classes.  The young girls who make up the majority of workers in Bangladesh garments industry are just as likely to be uneducated as they are likely to have some experienced a few formative years of schooling. There are rumors that a generation of military leaders now appeal to a higher authority, perhaps a more important historical regime, than the constitution.  Indeed, from 2001 until 2006, Bangladesh was governed by a coalition government that included explicitly Islamist parties.

Bangladesh is not immune to Pakistan’s problems, therefore.  It happens to have been blessed with a fairly navigable tography and a small expanse over which its politics has spread–though that has delivered its own problems.  Successive governments have maintained order, however corrupt in form and inefficient in action.  Islamicism, and an explicitly Islamicist education system is not the main culprit, though it shares significant blame for Pakistan’s woes.

Similarly, calling out Faisal Shahzad’s heritage as the locus of his bent beliefs does not square with the life he (once) led.  It does not square with his modern, liberal education.    Kristof cites the number of men who have attempted or perpetrated acts of terrorism in recent history.  It is a sobering fact that some people would still harm others no matter how lively their own home lives.  But those people, those terrorists, are part of the educated leadership of countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan. Their lives are run through with success and fulfillment, yet they seek annihilation.  The terrible lives of Bangladeshi and Pakistani school children are epochs away from those lives of capability, expectation and promise.  Mr. Kristof must lay the blame for those terrorist acts squarely on those leaders, those educated middle-class trained professionals, like Faisal Shahzad and Mohammed Sidique Khan, the eldest of the London 7/7 bombers.  What we require is to know why they did what they did, and then try to figure out how they associated their own lives with the impoverished lives of children in the countries of their fortunate parents.

One can argue about the terrible state of education in Bangladesh and Pakistan. One could write volumes, though those volumes have yet to be written.  That argument, however, will be a different one than one that tries to blame acts of terrorism in wealthy cities to the miserable life of a child in some village in some poor, hopeless country.  Mr. Kristof has done a commendable job to highlight these issues; were it that, he had not hitched up the cause and motivation of education in Pakistan and Bangladesh to an easy, pat, game blame, associating squarely and completely the actions of a terrorist to the problems of his country of descent.