Of ‘illegal’, ‘aliens’ and ‘death-world’

 Have you ever imagined waking up one day to the announcement that you are an alien? It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but what if it happened in real life? As you stumble out of bed and frantically check yourself in the mirror, you realize that you look just the same as you did the night before. But then you peek outside and see that everyone else is still human ... or are they? Slowly, it dawns on you that your identity is now in question. Are you an Afghan, a refugee, documented, undocumented ... or something else entirely? The possibilities are endless, and the uncertainty is both exhilarating and terrifying.

This is how nation-states function, particularly after the end of the Cold War, which ironically shoved us into a never-ending “war on terror.” Pakistan plunged headlong into it, to be part of the pack and ended up bruised and bleeding in the ranks of the hunted. Now faced with a myriad of crises—militancy, which has metastasized into terrorism, economic meltdown, and political instability, Pakistan turned on Afghan refugees.

More than 300,000 Afghan refugees have been forcibly sent ‘back’ to Afghanistan, a country most of them have not seen in their life, more are being hounded--literally. Crossing into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the ‘aliens’ of Pakistan find themselves in an ‘alien’ land, a place their elders fled to save their lives, and has now become a death-world. A new and unique form, in the words of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead.

Imagine. An individual is rounded up by the police in Karachi, Lahore, or Peshawar, loaded on a bus, and dumped at Torkham or Chaman crossings before being pushed into Afghanistan—a country unseen, unimagined as a home. In an unfamiliar landscape whose every inch was stomped and bombed by the white saviors in order to de-Talibanize it, they see the Taliban searching for the remnants of the saviors. That is the experience of being an alien.  

Daily humiliations perpetrated by the police have landed Afghan immigrants in-between of life and death, in a state of zoe who like werewolves do not count among any of the two species. They are inside the law and outside the law at the same time. They are “illegal” because they are not recognized as citizens, but it is within the legal right of the State to declare them “alien”. This insider/outsider status makes Afghan refugees, already declared ‘aliens’, into a homo sacer—a person, according to archaic Roman law, whose killing does not constitute homicide.

Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics explains contemporary State-sponsored deaths of humans—citizens, refugees, immigrants, etc. Necropolitical states have acquired the ability to create a group of people who exist on the brink of survival, where their sole focus is to avoid death. Such individuals are considered to have a dispensable life, with no value in the market or even in human terms. There is no sense of responsibility or justice towards this group of people, who are caught in a cycle where life is simply a means to death. This demonstrates an inversion of the usual relationship between life and death, where life is viewed as nothing more than a medium for death.

Under everyday necropolitics, a mass of populations live under extreme precarious conditions and as such, can be exploited and eliminated “naturally”. Mbembe argues that States deploy nanoracism in everyday social relations in order to stigmatize, to injure and to humiliate those considered to be ‘others’, not one of ‘us’. One of the ways for the States to construct the ‘other’ is to stay away from conventions that protect the dignity of humans and to enact laws that deprive ‘them’ of becoming ‘us’. A case in point: Pakistan has opted not to be a signatory of the Geneva Convention or the U.N. Refugee Convention, and the country’s Foreigners Act allows authorities to arrest, detain, and deport any foreigner who lacks proper documentation.

Nation-states, unfortunately, have arrogated the power to render any individual—without any cogent reason—an alien on their own land by blocking their identity documents. The individual loses all rights to a decent life and is exposed to the brutalities of the State, being inside/outside the law at the same time.

The author, a Ph.D. in communication and the author of The Muslim Extremist Discourse: Constructing Us vs. Them, teaches at the University of Peshawar.  

THE NEED FOR A NEW STORY

THERE are competing narratives about the US’s drone war in the Waziristan area, a bastion of militants. These narratives have so far failed to gain traction in the public, inside Pakistan and elsewhere.

The Pakistani narrative goes like this: the drone attacks are a violation of our national sovereignty. They kill innocent people, including women and children, as collateral damage and hence incite suicide attacks across the country in a cycle of reprisal and retaliation, thus killing more Pakistanis, which again includes women and children.

In short, suicide attacks on public places like markets — and even mosques and shrines — are provoked by drone attacks. If there are no drone attacks, there will be no suicide attacks in cities and towns.

The US has yet to publicly acknowledge that the CIA is remotely conducting, with joysticks, a deadly war in North Waziristan, Afghanistan and Yemen. But still, the dominant narrative in the US is that drones are a ‘surgically precise and effective tool’ that ‘take out’ only terrorists with ‘minimal collateral impact’, and thus make the US safer.

The diction of this narrative is tempting: deadly weapons are sanitised by clothing them in non-lethal, curative medical terms. As if all this happens in a hospital’s operation theatre while treating a patient to save his life.

The drone war itself and the narrative of the US are challenged by another narrative, which is spearheaded by international organisations like Reprieve, a UK-based advocacy group, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent journalist organisation in England, and a recent study conducted jointly by Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law.

They argue that the US does not acknowledge civilian deaths and injuries caused by drone strikes; they harm the daily lives of ordinary people beyond death and physical injury and that this secret war may set dangerous precedents for others to flout the rule of law and international legal protections.

However, the reality of this war, like any other war, lies somewhere beyond these narratives. Missiles and bombs are not surgical tools and humans — terrorists included — are not tumours that are taken out. Terrorists cannot be dehumanised.

Militants terrorise both the ‘enemy’ and those they seek to win over; those who seek to win the hearts and minds of people need to occupy the moral high ground.

The US and its allies can gain that by adhering to the Geneva Conventions and other international laws that govern the rules of war. No war is different from any other. Terrorists are criminals who need to be brought to justice, which is delivered in courts of law, not through deadly missile strikes.

By showing a blithe defiance of the Geneva Conventions, the US and its allies are fighting this war on the terms of the terrorists, which is their (the terrorists’) victory.

Similarly, sovereignty comes with responsibility and only the state, and not any non-state actor, has a monopoly on violence, that is, the use of force to defend its borders and maintain order. Pakistan has outsourced, if not lost, its sovereignty in the Waziristan region to extremists like the Taliban who have repeatedly avowed their allegiance to Al Qaeda.

Pakistan’s ‘running with the hare and hunting with the hounds’ policy has brought the country face to face with an existential threat. There are no good and bad Taliban, just like there is no good and bad terrorist. This is the reason why civil society in Pakistan seems confused about this war, while political parties desist from owning it. This confusion has provided a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, which get a new layer with every new terrorist attack or bomb blast in the country.

Influential Lebanese scholar Fawaz Gerges emphasises that jihadists are conspiratorial by nature and ascribe all actions that are at odds with their conventional wisdom to Zionist and American plots (include India in the case of Pakistan). The deliberate confusion at the institutional level has percolated through society as a whole.

As a result of this double game the writ of the state is now non-existent in North Waziristan, which has become an information black hole. Therefore, it is difficult to ascertain the exact identity and number of those who are targeted by drones. It is equally difficult to know the opinion of the people, if it ever counts in the legality or otherwise of a war, especially the so-called war on terror.

Be that as it may, the fact is that the drone war is an illegal war because it is being fought in secret; it is being fought secretly, because it cannot be justified or defended on legal grounds. Public approval cannot justify an illegal war, just like public support for Al Qaeda cannot justify terrorism.

However, the existing narratives have confounded the situation so much that the people who are caught in the crosshairs of the war have lost their voice and their story to tell. Therefore, we need to have a new story that is legitimate and can create solutions for the tough problems that we face.

Who will create this new story and how? Strategic communication expert Amy Zalman posits that since political power intervenes, inevitably, in making the narratives we share by suppressing some voices and elevating others, it is important that we have a responsible political leadership.

We need it to help us forge a new narrative that has exactly three things: it rings true, it has a sense of reality, and it is participatory. Unfortunately, the narratives of the US and its allies and of the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine do not ring true, have no sense of reality, and are not participatory.

Published first here, then here.

Pakistan: another journalist killed

Journalism is a risky profession, more so in Pakistan: For the past two years, Pakistan has been the deadliest country in the world for journalists, according to CPJ research. At least seven journalists were killed in direct relation to their work in 2011, says Committee to Protect Journalists in its January 17 report. Five of them were in targeted killings. Another was killed on Tuesday near Peshawar in Pakhtunkhwa province where in most parts the state has either outsourced or lost sovereignty to extremists in its pursuit of 'strategic interests' in bordering Afghanistan.

Mukarram Khan Aatif was a correspondent for private TV station Dunya News and also worked for Deewa Radio, a Pashto-language channel of the Voice of America. He was praying in a mosque near his home in Shabqadar, a town near Peshawar, when two gunmen entered the mosque, shot him several times, and fled on a motorcycle. 

Taliban spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan called The Associated Press and said the Pakistani group took responsibility for the killing. Ihsan said Aatif had been warned "a number of times to stop anti-Taliban reporting, but he didn't do so. He finally met his fate."

Atif earlier left his hometown in Mohmand, a Taliban-infested tribal agency that borders Afghanistan, when he received threats because of his journalistic work. Journalists, especially those working in the volatile tribal areas, face threats from several actors--intelligence agencies of the state included.

Atif is the 77th journalist killed in Pakistan since January 2000 and till date no culprit has been named, arrested or punished in any of these cases. This has emboldened both the state agencies and the extremists to kill those journalists with impunity who do not toe their line. The high-profile murder of Saleem Shehzad, who wrote about Al-Qaeda's connection with Pakistan's Navy, was probed by a judicial commission. However, the commission filed its report after a six-month inquiry, without naming the murderers.

Daily Express Tribune in its January 13 report says that about the possible reason behind the brutal killing of the journalist was the conclusion that "in all likelihood, the motive behind the incident was provided by the writings of Saleem [Shehzad]. What is not so clear is the question of who had that motive and actually acted upon it."

In other words, Shehzad the victim is to blame for his own killing, which gives a license to everybody with an interest in suppressing the truth to kill with impunity. States have a monopoly on violence, but when state institutions abrogate transparency and accountability in their use of violence, they also abrogate their monopoly on violence.
When states use proxy forces for their strategic and security purposes, non-state actors become states unto themselves while journalists become target to be taken out.

Pakistan at the crossroads, once again

Pakistan army, in a charged political environment, has decided to provide security to Mansur Ijaz when he lands in the country to testify in the memogate case. Pakistan’s military chief met top commanders at the general headquarters Thursday amid a widening rift between the powerful armed forces and the civilian government.

The meeting lasted for 10 hours which was not only attended by the corps commanders but by the Principal Staff Officers of Pakistan army as well. The meeting took place in the backdrop of a standoff between the government and the armed forces over the memogate scandal which is being probed by a judicial commission.

However, it is not clear from whom the army would protect Ijaz, a shadowy character who has blamed Pakistan's former ambassador to the U.S. Hussain Haqqani for dictating to him a memo asking then U.S. army chief Admiral Mike Mullen's help against a feared coup when Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden was taken out by U.S. Marines in Abbottabad on May 2 last year.

But it is clear that army is behaving, instead of a state institution, as a state unto itself by speaking to the government through the media, and that too in a threatening tone. It is one of the rare moments in the history of the country that army is hurling threats at the government instead of toppling it. Many observers are of the opinion that Pakistan's army never wants to usurp power when the state coffers are empty, which is the situation right now.

The May 2 incident rid the world of a high-profile terrorist, embarrassed Pakistan's armed forces, especially its intelligence outfit the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and offered the civilian government an opportunity to reclaim its authority by rolling some key heads heads on many counts. But, in the flush of misplaced nationalism, the whole political disposition became jingoistic in tone.

Instead of taking them to task, the president, the prime minister and the parliament stood by a demoralized army whose ego had been injured not by the presence of Bin Laden but by the U.S. Marine's sting operation. In Pakistan, the strength of a civilian government lies in the weakness of the army--and that was that moment. Now the armed forces are beating the war drums as democracy seems wobbling.

However, leaders can turn their weakness in strength by showing perseverance at a time when the system looks shaky and the adversary indomitable. As the Persian proverb goes: mardee wa namardee qadme fasila daa rud [Manliness and unmanliness are just a step apart]. At a critical moment, like the present one, just a step forward or backwards makes a difference.

It is now a defining moment for democracy in Pakistan. If the prime minister and the president show enough courage by not stepping back, they can save democracy--and their necks too; if they step back, then its a setback both for democracy and their own political careers.

Pakistan, Durkheim and morality

While reading Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the French sociologist, exactly one year after Governor Salman Taseer was gunned down by a demented character, I came across the following note which applies quite more aptly to present-day Pakistan than France of the yore:

When society undergoes suffering, it feels the need to find someone whom it can hold responsible for its sickness, on whom it can avenge its misfortunes: and those against whom public opinion already discriminates are naturally designated for this role. These are the pariahs who serve as expiatory victims. What confirms me in this interpretation is the way in which the result of Dreyfus's trial was greeted in 1894. There was a surge of joy in the boulevards. People celebrated as a triumph what should have been a cause for public mourning. At least they knew whom to blame for the economic troubles and moral distress in which they lived. The trouble came from the Jews. The charge had been officially proved. By this fact alone, things already seemed to be getting better and people felt consoled.

Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish army captain, who had been court-martialled for treason, an act which had been felt by many to be anti-Semitic. Durkheim was deeply offended by the Dreyfus affair, particularly its antisemitism, but he saw it as a symptom of the moral sickness confronting French society as a whole.
To Durkheim, the answer to the Dreyfus affair and crises like it lay in ending the moral disorder in society. Because that could not be done quickly or easily, Durkheim suggested more specific actions such as severe repression of those who incite hatred of others and government efforts to show the public how it is being misled.  He urged people to have the courage to proclaim aloud what they think, and to unite together in order to achieve victory in the struggle against public madness.
If we replace Dreyfus with Taseer, it looks Durkheim is talking about Pakistan: Mumtaz Qadri, the murderer, is being lionized and is greeted with flower petals--not in the 1894 France, but in the 21st century Pakistan. People celebrated as a triumph what should have been a cause for public mourning. Countries and nations pass through their dark periods and march towards a bright future; Pakistani society willfully stumbles into the dark age. Painfully, it does it with a panache of its own: feeling no remorse and taking pride on something it should have been ashamed of.

Taliban gets an address--and recognition too

It is not surprising to know that the U.S. and Pakistan have been in talks with the Taliban of their respective choices.  But it surely is demoralizing for those who want to see extremism defeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

The Afghan Taliban have agreed to open a political office in Doha, Qatar, to kick-start negotiations with the U.S., which wants to pull its troops out of Afghanistan by 2014--come rain or shine. Pakistan is talking to another kind of the Taliban that have 'gone astray' after they were unleashed to find a strategic depth for it in Afghanistan.

The U.S. wants to disengage the Taliban from Pakistan's influence which could make them agree to share power with President Hamid Karzai. Initially, Karzai had been kept out of the loop which prompted him to call back Afghanistan's ambassador from Doha in protest.

Both Pakistan and Karzai look askance at the U.S.'s single-handed overtures to the Taliban: Karzai, sensing betrayal, fears for his power--and his life too--in any new arrangement in Afghanistan. Pakistan does not want to sit on the fence while the fate of Afghanistan is being decided. This can bring Karzai closer to Pakistan and together they can spoil the game for the U.S.

Whether these talks succeed or fail, it has already emboldened extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They have been accorded a recognition by giving the Taliban an address. It does not mean that one does not want a negotiated peace in Afghanistan. But, the U.S. seems to be negotiating only for its in-time withdrawal from Afghanistan.

It seems that the people of Afghanistan are in for another bout of retributive punishment when a victorious Taliban revisit their blighted country after another super power makes a shameful flight. Across the border, the elks of the Taliban will be readying to punish and discipline the people of Pakistan.

And then, people in the U.S. will ask once again: "Why do they hate us?" Better they this time ask this question from their government.

Pakistani Journalism: Dangers of a shared reality

In Pakistan, journalism has become the riskiest profession. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), out of 66 journalists killed worldwide in 2011, 10 died in Pakistan. 

For the second consecutive year, Pakistan has been declared the most dangerous place for journalists — more dangerous than even Afghanistan and Iraq.

In an atmosphere of unabated violence against journalists, where the perpetrators and the reasons for their ire are many, news decisions become more risky; journalists then take news decisions following a different set of values than what most newsmen do worldwide. 

German scholar Wolfgang Donsbach says that news decisions are a highly complex phenomenon. In the case of journalists mainly in the western world, two general needs or ‘functions’ involving specific psychological processes can explain news decisions.

Journalists look for social validation of their perceptions when they decide what needs to be — or does not need to be —reported. They also want to preserve their existing predispositions in the process. These two factors work as a checklist for journalists as they take news decisions.

“Journalists have to decide what is true, what is relevant and what is, in a moral sense, good or bad. They must constantly make factual and evaluative decisions,” Donsbach says.

There are three conditions under which people in general and journalists in particular are most dependent on others. First, when the external reality is ambiguous and difficult to assess. Second, when there is a dualism between the physical and social reality, and lastly, when physical reality takes precedence over social reality.

Therefore journalists and information-seeking people communicate with others to create a shared reality from the competing information. Thus people communicate with each other to get out of undetermined, unpredictable situations and create a shared image of the environment they live in.

However, for Pakistani journalists it is not only a shared reality that is produced in communication. They don’t look for just social validation; they also seek to determine the level of threat, which they think is reduced by diffusing risky information.

In such a situation, journalists don’t strive for scoops or exclusive news stories; instead, they share their information with their colleagues in other news organisations to avoid being singled out by threatening forces.

This need for ‘preservation’ at the expense of a plurality of opinion eats into the vitals of objective journalism. A single opinion and a single narrative prevails across the mass media landscape where people are exposed to only one ‘reality,’ which is created in an environment of fear.

Debate gives way to conformity, while difference of opinion is looked upon as deviant behaviour. Journalists either resort to self-censorship or get carried away by the fervour of patriotism, which is the outcome of a mob mentality.

Nothing is more dangerous than a conforming mass media, which blocks out saner voices just for being different from the mainstream opinion and critical of the status quo.

When a majority of journalists toe the line of the powers that be, it exposes the few who are sceptical of the dominant version of the truth, as they ought to be.

In the US, the agenda for local newspapers is set by big corporations that own newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post. Journalists working for other, smaller newspapers work in undetermined and uncertain situations. They go through a cognitive process where to report an event the way nobody else has reported it or to not report what everybody else reports can be embarrassing and jeopardise their professional standing.

Journalists in Pakistan go through the same process, but for them avoiding a threat to their lives is more important than embarrassment or professional standing. For them, alarm bells ring out if their news stories stand out as different from those of others. They take care to report what everybody else does not only to ward off mere embarrassment or their professional worth, but also to protect their own lives.

That is the reason why stories on the same issue in different newspapers contain the same version of the truth, while for readers browsing through different newspapers become an exercise in repetition and a waste of time. Alternative opinion and competing versions of the truth become scarce. Thus the end losers are the readers and the democratic polity that thrives on a plurality of opinion rooted in debate.

That is the reason why journalists in Pakistan try to stay with the pack and look towards each other for decision-making. Social networks of journalists comprise people of their own profession who work within a ‘frame of reference’ built before an event occurs.

Thus, the decision about reality represents group dynamics and group norms rather than the reality itself. As journalists have similar values and attitudes, it is rather easy for them to develop a shared reality. This shared reality does not constitute the reality itself.

For their survival, journalists need to stick together but at the same time help readers build a healthy opinion; new angles of the truth should guide the structure and contents of news. So how can journalists be different in presenting the reality, which after all is a social construction, and also escape the wrath of those who hate dissent?

For this to happen, journalists need to strengthen their ranks and enhance their professional capabilities by learning how to work in conflict and hostile environments.

Before he was killed, Saleem Shahzad set a good precedent for other journalists by informing them about the threats to his life.

Most recently, journalist Hamid Mir, averted — at least for the time being — threats to his life by disclosing immediately the obnoxious messages he had received. 

The writer is pursuing a PhD in communication at the American University, Washington, D.C.

[Published in daily Dawn on December 30, 2011]