Pakistan is a failed state. It’s a fragile state; a failing state; a rogue state; a client state; a garrison state; an insecure state and a greedy state, to name just some of the many representations and categorizations that have been used to try and codify Pakistan’s behavior in international politics. To better comprehend this, let us take the issue of Pakistan’s state failure. The rhetoric of Pakistan’s state failure has remained strong in US policy circles. In 2008, Senior US Congressman Frank Pallone declared that “Pakistan is essentially a failed state. I do not believe the central government controls most of the territory of the country”.1 David Kilcullen, special advisor for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, predicted in 2009 that “Pakistan may fail within six months”.2 President Obama in a public speech “described Pakistan as ‘fragile’”.3 Congressman Rohrabacher, who was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, in a 2012 letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, wrote that, “it has become increasingly clear to members of the US Congress that Pakistan is a failed state and no amount of US aid money will ever change that”.4 Just one year later in 2013, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, discussing the threats facing Pakistan reiterated his stance that “Pakistan is in a state of institutional failure. It’s not a failed state, but you could argue it is a failing state”.5 More recently, Daniel Markey, who held the South Asia portfolio on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the US Department of State (2003–2007) predicted that even though Pakistan “is a failing state in many ways […] it could fail in ways that are far worse than at present”.6 These ‘truths’ about Pakistan has sanctioned consequent scenarios that herald an ominous doomsday. For instance, Cohen argues that “the failure of Pakistan would be a multidimensional geostrategic calamity, generating enormous uncertainties in a world that craves order and predictability”.7 Similarly, Root believes that “Pakistan, in short, is a failing state with an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a dedicated core of Muslim fundamentalists. The consequences for all of us could be dreadful, indeed”.8 The most likely possible dangers of Pakistan’s state failure would be: “a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism”.9 These assertions encapsulate the gist of the dominant political discourse on Pakistan’s state failure.
Many American foreign policy-makers have been vocal about the problematic nature of Pakistan’s identity, but policy-makers, by the nature of their commitments, rarely have detailed knowledge about the issues that confront them. They therefore resort to relying upon different sources ranging from advisors to academic experts, to establish a representational framing of the policy to be adopted. For instance, how would it have been possible to speak of state failure had the concept not been first introduced in Foreign Policy magazine, still one of the widely read sources on International Relations?10 In that sense then, the construction of Pakistan’s multidimensional identity is a representation; hence is discursive, political, relational, and social rather than ‘true’, ‘real’ or ‘objective’. Consequently, to speak of identity as discursive and political is to argue that “representations of identity place foreign policy issues within a particular interpretative optic, one with consequences for which foreign policy can be formulated as an adequate response”.11 While foreign policy-makers play a vital role in the production and reproduction of representational identities,12 the concerns of this research revolve around the sources from which foreign policy-makers draw their representations, which are again based on representations articulated by a larger number of individuals and institutions. This book consequently turns toward the field of International Relations to explore how representational identities are constructed and produced within the field and made cogent for policy-makers.
The negative understanding of Pakistan continues to dominate discourse, despite various challenges to the typological categorization of Third World States, and by extension Pakistan,13 on the grounds that such categorizations are either useless14 or neocolonial.15 However, many of the insights offered by the critics of the dominant discourse on categorizing states are either ignored or overlooked in International Relations literature, thereby naturalizing quite unabatedly a specific interpretation of Third World states (and again, by extension, Pakistan). A similar ontological and epistemological debate between other mainstream positions on Pakistan and their critics ensues. It is through knowledge that a specific identity of Pakistan is constructed and a meaning assigned to it.16 For instance Shaikh’s monograph, entitled ‘Making Sense of Pakistan’, readily affixes an identity to the Pakistani state and its people as a contortion that does not make sense. Similarly, before even beginning to examine the Pakistani state, Ziring establishes from the outset Pakistan’s identity in his exposition entitled ‘Weak State, Failed State, Garrison State: The Pakistan Saga’. Another example is Gregory’s work, ‘Pakistan’s Security: The Insecure State’. The representational practices produced within academic discourse through naturalization and categorization have imbued Pakistan with an identity created through an imposition of interpretation rather than being, as Campbell puts, “the product of uncovering an exclusive domain with its own pre-established identity”.17
How are we to approach these ostensibly different articulations which aspire to affix a certain meaning to Pakistan? The profusion of the literature on the ‘perverse reality’ has, given Pakistan’s often cited geostrategic importance to western interests in the region, given rise to questions about the status and the nature of the Pakistani state, with scholars indulging in extensive inquiries seeking to answer questions such as ‘what is Pakistan?’ and ‘why is it the way it is?’ Within the International Relations literature purporting to understand Pakistan’s reality, there is a propensity to intellectually secure Pakistan within a resolute system of ontological ‘truths’. Scholarship seeking to unravel the supposed intricacies of Pakistan’s ostensibly amorphous identity usually tends: first, to focus on the Pakistani military, its link with extremism inspired militancy and its role in the democratic processes of the state18; secondly, to pursue a research agenda centering on exploring the Pakistani ‘nation’19; lastly, to explore Pakistan’s place in the world specifically through the prism of its relations with the United States, India and China.20
These debates then depend on, produce and reproduce knowledge on Pakistan which consequently generates Pakistan’s ‘reality’. In essence then, Pakistan is what we know about it. Considering that knowledge does not exist independently of our theories, concepts, ideas and language, the ‘reality’ of Pakistan does not exist outside our appropriations and interpretations. This does not however mean that Pakistan does not exist independently of our thoughts and ideas. What it means is that the world “cannot be accessed, understood or rendered meaningful in the absence of speech and interpretation and […] reality therefore ceases to constitute an already given empirical re...