Published April 19th, 2009 by Future Atlas
Social Revolution in Pakistan?
The New York Times reported this week on another potential driver of instability in Pakistan: the Taliban are harnessing the country’s severe social inequities to advance their Islamist cause.
Given that Pakistan is “largely feudal,” the authors write, this “carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants’ main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.”
Pakistan has the classic conditions for social revolution. After independence, notes the article, Pakistan maintained a narrow landed upper class that kept its vast holdings while its workers remained subservient…. Successive Pakistani governments have since failed to provide land reform and even the most basic forms of education and health care. Avenues to advancement for the vast majority of rural poor do not exist.
Poor government and corruption are key aspects of this; Pakistan is rated highly corrupt in Transparency International’s surveys — in 2008, it was 134th out of 180 countries, scoring only a 2.5 out of 10.
Such a revolution could be a disaster for anti-Taliban forces. Instead of chipping away at the state’s control piece by piece, the whole society could shift at once, and everything, including the armed forces and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, would fall into the hands of the radicals.
This would greatly tempt both India and the US to intervene in some fashion, if only to destroy or seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.