pakistan’s

Civil Society
Pakistan’s civil society is still weak but is bravely attempting to create a more humane country
that respects human rights, including those of minorities. Activists have not hesitated to criticize
the excesses of official agencies and have risked their lives to raise the issue of the disappearance
and deaths of thousands in Baluchistan. In some cases, activists are being killed for raising this
issue. The assassination of Sabeen Mahmud in Karachi in April 2015 is a demonstration of the
sensitivity of the intelligence agencies and the religious right to the activities of civil society.
Activists have also been severely critical of the application of the blasphemy laws, which has
resulted in the incarceration of many on trumped up charges.
Civil society groups have also advocated for the state’s adoption of a more rational foreign
policy and abandonment of the use of terror by severing links between the state and jihadi groups.
Activists have incurred the ill will of both the state and the jihadi groups but are persevering.
Pakistani authorities are particularly opposed to any criticism of intelligence agencies, especially
to charges that they are indulging in illegal activities.
As of now, civil society groups have not gained enough strength to influence official thinking,
though the state is monitoring their activities. The state apparatus wishes to project Pakistan as
a moderate and enlightened Islamic country. On account of their foreign linkages, civil society
groups can bring pressure to bear on the state both by themselves and directly by their friends
abroad. The jihadi groups are obviously impervious to the rational discourse of civil society.
The Islamic Dimension
While austere and assertive forms of Islam have remained in the Indian subcontinent, the
dominant stream of the faith became moderate and accommodative over time so as to coexist with
the faiths of the majority of the population. Most of Pakistan’s Muslims adhere to this pluralistic
form of Islam common in South Asia. However, since the creation of Pakistan, groups and parties
that pursued “purer” forms of Islam have sought to propagate their faith in organized and active
modes. They have put pressure on the government, for example, to declare heterodox Islamic
groups such as the Ahmediya as non-Muslim.
Since its creation, Pakistan has used Pashtun tribes, covert groups, and increasingly militant
Islamic tanzeems against neighboring countries. It did so in the 1947 operations in Jammu and
Kashmir (J&K) and again in 1965 against India. It also used such tactics against Afghanistan
in the mid-1970s. However, the Afghan jihad against the Soviet invasion of 1979 coalesced the
forces released in the 1970s, concentrating them along Pakistan’s western border. The United
States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China supported the jihadi enterprise, and an exhausted
Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989. The Pakistani state, apprehensive
that the jihadi groups would turn on their former handlers, stepped in to put some of the
militants to use in the disputed territories of J&K, while continuing to support forces such as the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
While the jihadi groups participated vigorously in the insurgency against India in J&K, they
did not abandon their domestic agendas. Some of these groups, dedicated to anti-Shiite doctrines,
adopted violent methods, while Shiite groups responded in kind. Violence against Sunni devotees
at Barelvi or Sufi places of worship by Wahhabi and Deobandi groups has also occurred. Pakistan’s
involvement in the Afghan jihad thus spawned a range of highly motivated Islamist groups that
were willing to become instruments of the state to promote its interests in the region. For its part,
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SPECIAL REPORT u FEBRUARY 2016