Confusing Cause and Effect in Pakistan

[Valin]

Commentary :

Max Boot

5/31/13

 

In this New York Times op-ed and in a book he has written, Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani official now teaching at American University in Washington, tries mightily hard to blame U.S. drone strikes for the growing radicalization in Pakistans tribal areas. He thereby confuses cause and effect.

 

He notes correctly that tribal authority has weakened in the frontier regions of Pakistan. The same thing has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Yemen, Somalia, and other lands where violent Salafist organizations such the Taliban, al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Shabaab have tried to substitute their own form of militant rule in favor of the traditional structures that have governed tribal life.

 

But in the case of Pakistan, Ahmed chooses to place the blame not where it belongson a corrupt and ineffectual Pakistani state that cant govern its own territory and on a violent movement called the Pakistani Taliban which has been taking advantage of state weaknessbut rather on Americas program of drone strikes. He does so by clever juxtaposition of timelines, which implies causality where the evidence for it is actually tenuous.

 

(Snip)

 

But at the same time I dont for a minute believeas Ahmed and other critics of the strikes implicitly suggestthat if we simply stopped the drone strikes, then the tribal elders would re-establish their authority and the threat from the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups would recede. Quite the opposite: The drone strikes are one of the few effective measures keeping these extremist groups in check. Stop the strikes and the threat to the Pakistani state will grow. And that, in turn, means that the threat to the U.S. will grow because we cant allow Pakistans nuclear arsenal to fall into the wrong heads.