“Radical Islam: the Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond”

Ambassador Husain Haqqani Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S.

Jeffrey Goldberg The Atlantic

April 2011

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Our speaker is the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States. He’s the author of a highly praised academic book called Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. He is a former journalist, but also a former academic at Boston University where he was an associate professor at the Center for International Relations.

We could not have anyone both as a practitioner and as a scholar better to speak to our subject this morning than Ambassador Haqqani.

AMBASSADOR HUSAIN HAQQANI: Thank you very much, Michael. Let me just start by saying that there are two or three things about Radical Islam that need to be understood and are not all widely understood in the United States.

Radical Islam has to be distinguished from Islam as practiced by over a billion people. One billion Muslims are not radical, and that needs to be understood, nor have many of the things that are associated with Radical Islam been part of normal Muslim practice for 1,400 years.

There is a tendency in the United States these days to try and sort of link things that are happening in the modern times to things that happened in the medieval times, ignoring the fact that in the medieval times whether you were Christian or Muslim, you behaved a certain way which you do not do in the modern times.

The Radical Islam phenomenon has to be understood in its actual context, which is political and not religious. Until recently—I don’t know if it’s still operating—the radical

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 group Hizb ut-Tahrir ran a website which was www.1924.com, and I don’t know how many people in this room would be able to tell me why the website was called 1924.

It’s the year that the Ottoman caliphate or the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the republic was proclaimed in Turkey. So for a lot of Radical Islamists, it is all about restoring a mythical glory from the past. It’s all about a reaction to a world in which the Muslims are not the key players. It’s all about restoring a world in which Islam is not just a religion of private practice, but a faith that drives a community that has global influence. And that needs to be understood.

The big setback in Islamic history was 1258, the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, and it is very interesting that all Radical Islamists today find their theological justification in the writings of a man who in his time was not considered very significant as a religious interpreter or scholar, a man by the name if Ibn Taymiyyah, who wrote in response to the 1258 defeat. And so this obscure scholar was rediscovered at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by people like the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, the Salafist Movement that you have probably heard of, at least the term, and then a man by the name of Abul A’la Maududi, who founded what became the Islamic Party of Pakistan or the Islamic Party of India.

So the Muslim Brotherhood and these Islamic parties that arose at the beginning of the 20th century also saw Islam as the vehicle through which they would reorder the world. And then out of this grew many groups, et cetera, and I always say that somebody, some creative director at the risk of getting a fatwa against him should come up with a new version of Monty Python’s sort of Life of Brian with Islamists, you know, as the protagonists, in which sort of the front for the Liberation of Judea and the Judea Liberation Front have totally different and arcane ideological arguments between them over what happens.

And you see that all the time. You see that between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, between the near enemy and the distant enemy. Who do you topple first? Who do you fight first? A distant enemy is America because it’s the global hegemon. The near enemy are the regimes or the governments, and then there is a nearer enemy which is the guy in the village who plays music, and so that’s a philosophical and ideological debate here.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

The problem in the United States has been twofold. Most Americans didn’t pay any attention to Islam until 1979 when you had the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and then you had people from the Muslim world, mainly political leaders, who had agendas who helped you, quote, unquote, understand the Muslim world. So from ’79 to about until recently, there was a sort of little, simple thumbnail—until 9/11 actually—you had a thumbnail explanation of Radical Islam.

Oh, you know what? The Shi’ites, without going into the history of Shi’ism and Sunnism, the Shi’ites are the bad Muslims. The Sunnis are the okay Muslims. The Saudis are our partners. The Iranians are the bad guys, and you had that oversimplification over time.

And part of it was also politically driven here. For example, the war in Afghanistan, at that time Radical Islam was seen as a potential ally, a recruitment tool for people to fight the Soviet Empire, and again, without understanding the ideological dimensions of it.

I recall I was in a minority, a very small minority that at that time bothered to write in the English language that the United States should pay attention to the decommissioning, disarming and reintegration of the Mujahedeen because in 1989, ’79 to ’89, you armed, trained, supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and you know, in strategic terms, it was not a bad policy. It made sense.

But then you also have to see about what are these tens or hundreds of thousands of people that have been trained to fight in the name of Islam for a global Islamic revival. What are we going to do when you walk away because they are ideologically motivated. They are not like other people who will just go home, and their ideology also has a hereafter dimension. It is not just here.

Last night there was a bombing in Pakistan at a shrine. Now, Pakistan, India, Central Asia, most of them have an Islamic radiation which is essentially Sufi in which you have these— it’s a bit like reverence for saints and thinking of them as interceders between God and yourself, you know, for prayer.

And the Radical Islamists do not consider people who believe that, which is the vast majority, as fellow Muslims. So one approach would have been if they were really fair

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 players, they would say, “We’ll try and convert the others. You know, we’ll tell them that this is not true Islam. Islam is this way. This is not the way to God. This is the other way.”

But, no, they won’t do that. They will blow them up, and so 42 people were killed, but here, how insignificant it is to the understanding of the phenomenon within the Muslim world, to the United States is, the story is just a one paragraph in USA Today on page 10- A, you know, A10, whatever. Because 42 people getting killed at a shrine by Radical Muslims is not the big story.

However, if an American soldier had got killed in Afghanistan, that would have been a page 1 story. So it doesn’t enable you to understand what we are going through, which is actually a civil war of ideas. It’s a civil war of ideas within the Muslim world. It’s a clash between those who consider Islam their faith and those who consider or want to articulate political ideologies in the name of religion.

It is a politically motivated philosophy couched in religious terminology. That’s how I see Radical Islam. Are some of these people religious? Yes, they are, but then they also have other doctrines. For example, Islam prohibits many things specifically, like all religions do, and they justify them on grounds of, oh, this is dissimilation. We can do it. You can lie for the greater good.

Now, that’s a very political view because, you know, in faith usually you do things out of moral purpose, not out of expediency. You don’t do things out of what will help you in a particular political combat. You’re not allowed to kill people just because.

You see, the asymmetry of power between us and the Super Power allows us, you know. A suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16, which is one of the clichés that these guys have, you know. And all of that is essentially political.

So that’s my two cents worth on Radical Islam. That’s what you have to understand, that it’s essentially a big battle within our own societies, within our own communities. Here is where the radicals are much more assertive. There are areas where they are less assertive.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

Then there is a second sort of concentric circle of problems, which is that in some of the societies because of political reasons, again, there is anti-Americanism, and Pakistan is one of the countries where there’s rampant anti-Americanism.

And the widespread anti-Americanism sometimes overlaps with the Radical Islamists because it provides them an opportunity to grow, because they couched their ideology as a variation of anti-Americanism rather than of Radical Islam. So they confuse people in the process, and that’s what you see in Pakistan, the government making an effort with the United States. Sometimes people get very critical about the government’s sort of two steps forward, half step backwards, two steps forward, one step backward, because it’s a slow process. You do not want your society to totally disintegrate under the pressures of a political ideology that has religious ramifications and can affect the lives of millions and millions of people. And you do not want, for example, the Sufis could very easily be organized into fighting back, and they would be blowing up the mosques of the radicals.

But do you really want that in a society? You really do want to be able to disarm them, put them out of business, have a methodical approach, deny them control of territory, which is what the government of Pakistan has been doing.

And sometimes people forget what we have done in the last few years. For example, there were 10,000 casualties in 2009 of our military fighting the radicals. There were at least ten soldiers injured or killed every day of the Pakistani military in 2009, and Pakistan is now, for example, on the Iran-Pakistan border. A lot more is happening than is said.

But it’s a phenomenon. There’s sort of faith, politics, global strategy sort of intersects.

Another damage into the challenge in Pakistan is that historic relationship with India. For example, the Radical Islamists tend to champion the call for anti-Indianism. Now, Pakistan has legitimate grievances, and complaints, and the government would stand for those, and we would like to have a resolution of our outstanding issues with India, but we do not think that under any circumstances terrorism is justified, whether it’s, you know, trying to settle scores with India, whether it’s trying to settle the matters in Kashmir, whether it’s anything.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

But that said, it’s very difficult, again, to win the hearts and minds on this issue because the argument can be completely confused. Now, there are some other interesting numbers that I’ll throw at you before stopping, which is we also have real socioeconomic difficulties and problems. For example, last night over dinner, I said that there are all of these radical madrassas and religious schools cropping up, Jeff will talk about, I’m sure, his experience because he went to a religious madrassa and spent some time there, a radical one actually.

In that madrassa basically the kids are there not for the education. They are there because they get three square meals and they get two changes of clothes a year. And it’s really important to understand that one-third of Pakistan lives below the poverty line, which is a household living on less than a dollar a day, and then another one-third live below two dollars a day, and 48 percent of Pakistani school-going age children, children between the age of five and 15 do not attend school, and so there is a vacuum here that is being filled.

So if you are like the woman that I had once interviewed many, many years ago, and I said, “Why do you send your children to madrassa?”

She said, “I have nine kids. What am I supposed to do? I want them out of my hair. They’re learning something, although they’re only memorizing the Qur’an in some of these madrassas.”

So the madrassas have proliferated. There used to be 241 in the year I was born, and there are 12,000 now and rising and increasing.

For example, if Islam was the reason why people were blowing themselves up, why weren’t they blowing themselves up in the ’50s or ’60s or ’70s or even ’80s? Why did it start in our part of the world only in the ’90s and the 21st century? Something to think about.

Islam came to the subcontinent in 712 A.D., and Muslims ruled from the 11th century to about 1857, which was the end of the Mogul Empire and the British formally took over all of modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

So how was Islam in practice? And then a Muslim minority managed to rule over a non- Muslim majority. Obviously it couldn’t have been without some acquiescence of the populous. They must have had some respect.

This is essentially a proselytizing, politicizing organization, and any effort to deal with it would have to have three components: an ideological component, an institutional component, and an individual. You have to target the individuals who are actually engaged in terrorism. You have to target the institutions that are training and preparing and creating terrorists in the region and radical terrorists, and then you have to combat the radical ideology, bring back the equilibrium in society where those 48 percent children who don’t go to school actually go to schools, but those schools teach them something other than Radical Islamic religions. They teach them how to do arithmetic. They teach them how to read, write, and add, and create some opportunities for jobs.

And it will take a fair bit of time. Of all the many, many qualities of the great American nation, patience is not one, and so you lose patience when it comes to doing something like that, but you brought the Soviet Union down, and that was done through a multi- layered strategy of ideological containment, political containment and military containment.

And you will have to do that with Radical Islam because other than ideological containment there is no option. You will end up, as Donald Rumsfeld once asked, he posed the question: are we killing the terrorists faster than the mothers are producing them? And if the answer is no, then you will not be able to defeat Radical Islam.

So those are the challenges. Thank you very much.

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Thank you, Ambassador. Thank you very much. Well, ladies and gentlemen. You know Jeffrey Goldberg. You may not know that while he’s the national correspondent at Atlantic and for many years was the Middle East correspondent and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, he’s also the Atlanticmagazine’s advice columnist. So that every issue in the back of every issue of the Atlantic you can read questions, and Jeffrey gives advice about matters personal, political, your dating life, your married life.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Thank you for having me, and thank you to the Ambassador, who is a rare figure in Washington. His book is actually a fantastic book. We’re not just up here saying that. If you need to read one thing that explains Pakistan’s predicament, its semi- dysfunctional relationship with the United States, how Islamism rose and sort of grabbed hold of many of the structures of Pakistani life, even though the Islamists represent only a minority of the Pakistani population, this is the book to read.

Ambassador Haqqani is, I think, one of only two Ambassadors in Washington right now who you really can go to for deep understanding of not only his region, but of broader trends in history.

Let me just talk a couple of seconds about Pakistan’s predicament and broaden it out to the moment that we’re in at the very beginning of the Great Arab Revolt of 2011, which has an obviously important and growing importance component of Islamism.

I’ve been visiting Pakistan regularly for years, and there are some people who might be surprised at this, but I have a kind of deep sympathy for Pakistan’s situation in the world. It is a country that was founded to be a refuge for a religious group, a place where a particular religious group, a minority in its region, could figure out a way to express itself in a national way. It is a country that ever since its founding has had its legitimacy questioned. It’s a country that faces various existential threats, some imagined but some real.

It has a deeply uncertain relationship with the United States, a very transactional relationship. Obviously, the conditions that I’m describing also do reflect the conditions in which Israel exists, and I might be the only person in the world who sees the parallels between Israel and Pakistan, but I think they do exist in great numbers. One of the differences is that Israel’s relationship with the U.S. is less uncertain. Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S. has been extremely dysfunctional, and that dysfunction has had great consequences over the years.

The key moment in that dysfunction was in 1989. The Ambassador spoke obviously about the lack of American patience. When you talk about the lack of American patience in the Pakistan arena, you’re really talking more than anything else about 1989. Pakistan was a

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 country that was absolutely crucial in the U.S. campaign. Without Pakistan there would have been no U.S. campaign in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

We won, and as soon as we won, we left Pakistan holding the bag, in essence: millions of Afghan refugees, and an Islamist rebellion that was not demilitarized, as the Ambassador said, that was left in place.

I’m not blaming the United States for the rise of Islamism in Pakistan. That was the product more than Maududi, more than a lot of people. The Ambassador referred to the former President Zia Haq who really grafted onto Pakistani legal and educational structures Islamist thought and ideals and really allowed Islamist thinking to penetrate the military and the consequences of which we’re dealing with today.

But of course, because there was a larger Cold War purpose to this, the U.S. not only acquiesced to the Islamization of many of the structures of Pakistani government and acquiesced to the formation of Mujahedeen groups that then, of course, turned their weapons that we gave them against us, but we actively abetted it because it served a larger purpose.

There is nothing wrong with defeating the Soviet Union. The problem came after the defeat of the Soviet Union when we left these groups in place. So we have done things in Pakistan that have created or help create some of the conditions in which we’re dealing with today.

I want to jump ahead a little bit and talk about Pakistan at this moment and the way in which what we see in Pakistan is reflected now in what we’re seeing in places like Egypt, and we can use Pakistan almost as a warning.

It’s absolutely fascinating to me how when we talk about Pakistan most people don’t realize that the Islamists, the Muslim parties, represent only a small part of the Pakistani polity as a whole. Their influence, of course, is outsized.

And I just got back from Egypt, and in these conversations I was having in Egypt I felt almost as if we were talking about early stage Pakistan. It was absolutely fascinating because what you see and much of this book is about the relationship between the clerics

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 and the military, and what you see in Egypt right now forming is a permanent or semi- permanent alliance of convenience between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. Small D democrats, liberal parties, are being shunted aside, and you’re seeing because of this the army acquiesce to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

We should know this story because we saw this story in Pakistan, and yet I don’t think the administration is fully seized by this issue. Along with Iran, Pakistan is in the top, top tier of foreign policy challenges facing the United States. It is an impoverished state of 200 million people, almost 200 million people, experiencing pockets of civil war in which it has a huge Islamist presence, on which in the territory of Pakistan, of course, lives the leadership of Al-Qaeda central, and it’s a country with nuclear weapons.

Libya is not a national security interest of the United States. It is a humanitarian interest, but it’s not a national security interest of the United States. It’s a sixth or seventh tier problem in comparison to some of the other things that we’re facing.

And our inability to sort of merge all of these issues together and talk about them as an overarching problem, instead to just isolate them and look at one country at a time and move from crisis to crisis is really troubling, and it is really troubling because there are, in fact, lessons that Pakistan can teach us.

The Egypt model is the perfect one. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, like some of the Islamist parties in Pakistan, runs a social service network, an educational network that is more effective than the state run operations. The Ambassador is absolutely right. The signal failure, I think, of Pakistani elites and of the American policy makers who supported them was not to grapple with the madrassa problem over the last 20 years in any significant way.

Ambassador Haqqani mentioned sort of an old experience I had with the madrassas. I went to this particular madrassa, lived there for a month and was struck—and this was before 9/11 actually—by the fact that you had thousands and thousands of kids, mainly Pashtun kids. In this one madrassa—replicate this 1,000 times—in this one madrassa they’re memorizing the Qur’an in a language they don’t know.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

And what does that mean? It means that after the memorization is finished, then deeply politicized clerics will come in and tell them what it means. Their knowledge of Islam is less than our knowledge of Islam, actual knowledge, and this created people who—I would dare say that thousands, maybe hundreds and possibly even thousands of the graduates of this madrassa then went on to Afghanistan and are fighting America right now in Afghanistan, an absolute failure of policy on the part of the Pakistani leadership and a really gross sort of failing on the part of American policy makers of that region.

Let me just talk just for one more minute if I could about what’s happening in the broader Muslim world. I refer to it as the Great Arab Revolt now. Next year we might be talking about it as the Great Islamist Rising if we are not careful.

The one saving grace of people like Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak was that they did suppress groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and their more radical Salafist partners.

We supported them based on a crucial misunderstanding about the way the world works. The realist school of foreign policy holds that you can suppress your way to stability in perpetuity. I think that that philosophy, foreign policy realism, has been discredited by the events of the last couple of months. We could not suppress our way to stability forever, and what we got and what we are getting now, the rise in countries where you wouldn’t expect this of serious organized and savvy Muslim parties.

People who know Tunisia know that this is a fairly unbelievable thing. I was in Tunisia last weekend, and I was with a friend, and he said, “Would you like to go meet the leaders of the new Salafist party?” So imagine a country where very few women cover themselves that has official equality between the sexes; that has very low mosque attendance; is now developing all of a sudden the Salafist party, and it is quite astonishing. Obviously Tunisia is sort of the minor league version of Egypt, which is the majors.

The referendum a couple of weeks ago which passed, which allowed for these quick elections to take place, supported by the military, supported by the mostly discredited Mubarak party and by the Muslim Brotherhood, means that the Muslim Brotherhood is going to have an outsized say in how government is organized in Egypt in the coming years.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

There is a debate going on obviously right now about whether the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is truly radicalized or not and whether it can legitimately be called an Islamist party. I’m in the camp that believes that the Muslim Brotherhood functions as a political party in the sense that it says what it thinks the traffic can bear. It talks about politics in a way that makes people comfortable with their rise. I’m not going to accuse it of dissembling because when you talk to these guys, they’re fairly certain about what they want, but it takes a little bit of doing.

One example, on the question of who can be and who cannot be president of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood has stated that it believes that Egypt’s Christian population— Christians make up ten percent of the country—and that women could stand for president.

But then when you start to have an extended conversation with them, they can’t imagine a situation in which a Christian would dare run for president or a woman would ever stand for president because, of course, we know from the traditional Muslim family organization that the husband would have to give permission to the wife to run for president, and why would a husband give permission to the wife to run for president?

So you scratch the surface a little bit. There’s a lot of hopeful thinking in Washington right now about these groups, that they are going to participate in the system, but their understanding of what democracy is is extremely circumscribed.

In other words, in Iran, to use another example of an actual Islamist government, there is democracy of a sort. People run for president. Multiple people run for president. In the last election, there were four candidates, I think it was, for president.

But what people don’t discuss is that 700 people applied to the Guardian Council to run for president and only four qualified because they subscribe to a certain set of beliefs that put them within a very narrow frame.

In some of these countries, it’s not about Islam and faith infusing politics. It’s about political Islamism coming into mainstream politics. We’re seeing that at a fast clip.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

I think Pakistan, we should be able to look at Pakistan and see some of the down sides of that and work against it.

One final point, and then I will let the Ambassador comment. The policy question that seizes Washington at the moment is what do you do about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood? We mistakenly believe that our allies, our authoritarian allies, could suppress out of existence these feelings and yearnings that the Muslim Brotherhood and organizations like it support. We were wrong about that, and so now we’re left with this essential question: how do we manage the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood? Do we actively oppose the Muslim Brotherhood? Do we acquiesce to it, assuming that maybe it will burn itself out?

Going around the Middle East the last few weeks, the best answer that I’ve collected from various people, including what we would think of as liberal democrats across the Arab world, is that overt and especially covert actions designed to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood will probably backfire. It makes a certain amount of sense, given suspicion about America, given the fact that these groups have an organic role to play in much of society.

The best answer I heard was that what we need to do is we need to expand the space for other types of politics. The amazing thing in Cairo, if some of you have been there lately, to see is you go to the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters, and it’s kind of a humming, thrumming place. You know, it’s like going to the DNC or the RNC. They’ve got offices for this and offices for that, and they’ve got copy machines, and they’re doing their thing in a quietly professional way.

There are just so many groups that are developing, and they’re so incompetent at politics, and that is fine. I mean, that is what you’d expect because Mubarak very cleverly suppressed all non-Muslim Brotherhood political organizations.

But the thing that we can do is help non-Muslim Brotherhood style organizations become competent at politics. It’s not about telling them what their positions need to be, but telling them how to develop a set of positions, how to communicate those positions, how to get voters to support those positions, and that might be the challenge of our age.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

The second challenge, of course, is to support education reform and economic reform in various countries across the Muslim world. That requires, to close this out on a point that the Ambassador was making, that requires a level of patience, a level of attention, and a level of spending that we might not be capable of.

I mean, the only way to stop, for instance, the poison that is spread through the madrassa system in Pakistan is to create alternative educational structures in Pakistan. That costs money that Pakistan doesn’t have and we might not have, but there are no shortcuts. There are absolutely no shortcuts, and we’re going to find this over and over again, and we’re going to have to pay attention in ways that we might not be capable of to Egypt, to Pakistan, to a whole bunch of countries, and if we don’t, we’re going to go through a period like we saw, I think, in Pakistan where the religious parties backed by Saudi Arabia exploit the vacuum.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: Three or four quick comments. One is, the Islamist political groups, they adhere to a philosophy called tiered democracy instead of democracy. Maududi, one of the religious scholars who was the ideologue of the whole movement, has written a whole explanation of what tier democracy means. It basically means democracy in choosing leaders, but not democracy in choosing ideas and policies.

But that doesn’t mean that some Islamic rooted political parties can’t eventually be taken over by people who really say, “You know what? We need to become like the Christian democratic parties of Europe or the conservative wings of conservative political parties.”

Turkey is one example where the AKP has done it. Morocco is another one where also the justice and development parties emerged. Malaysia’s Islamic party has created a similar model of working within the democratic framework and accepting the constitution. Indonesia is exactly identical, and Bangladesh is moving towards that with the Islamic party saying, you know, “We will give up any other option. We will run for office, and while we’re running for office, we will want more conservative religiously oriented policies.”

And that may be a way for the Middle Eastern groups, the difference being, as Jeff rightly pointed out, the Muslim Brotherhood and all these groups, because they were in some

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 ways inspired in the 1920s and ’30s by fascist models, they’re very structured and organized in very sort of methodical ways, and the small D democrats are a little scattered, and they were also suppressed.

Musharraf never exiled any of the Islamist political leaders because he thought he could deal with them because they have never got more than ten percent of the vote in Pakistan, and in fact, the PPP ended up with a majority, a plurality in parliament, but a significant majority in all the legislatures of the various states. And the Islamists got less than four percent of the votes cast this time. So basically if the maximum is taken, that’s ten percent, but then they punch beyond their weight class in the terms of being able to mobilize in the streets, so if they get 10,000 votes, they can also put 10,000 people in the streets, whereas the small D democratic parties cannot do that, and they have had the weight of repression of many, many years under the dictatorships and autocratic rules.

So one policy option for the U.S. in my opinion is that instead of continuing to depend on autocratic allies who have always nurtured the Islamists as, you know, it’s either us or them, which is what Mubarak did in Egypt or Ben Ali tried to do in Tunisia. You actually allow and provide the assistance to small D democrats.

Another policy option is not necessarily for government. There’s something called the ICRD, and I’m forgetting what the C stands for, but I know that the I is for Institute and the RD is for Religious Development.

It’s a Washington-based group, and what they’ve done is essentially they have focused on madrassa reform in Pakistan, and basically what they’ve done is they’ve brought madrassas that are willing to open; they’ve brought them here, and then they’ve taken American sort of people who run seminaries. They are Christians who will help them to say, “You know what? The faith is yours, but the way you learn it and how you educate it should be modern.”

And so read on seminaries in America. You know, I’m a Baptist and I run a seminary, and this is how I run my seminary. And if you can restructure out a curriculum, and then also in the process have a dialogue over this radical business, and certain madrassas have actually been de-radicalized, and it’s a very interesting process that is taking place.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

Initiatives like that, especially for those who come from groups with religious sort of moorings, they should consider pairing up with groups there that are not completely radical but are religiously conservative because you do have something in common with them. Just because they have a different faith doesn’t mean, because you can have a modernization of the process of religious thinking and thereby getting them within the more democratic framework.

The madrassas have become what they’ve become because they just froze. For example, there is no textbook that was written after 1705, and stuff like that. So that really creates a lot of problems, but then there are all of these young kids who are unfit for modern. There is the 48 percent that are learning nothing that are going to no school, and then there are these kids who are only two to three percent of the total population, but still they have something to do which is not normal, functioning part of the contemporary economy. So they end up becoming the radical cannon fodder, so to speak.

KAREN TUMULTY, The Washington Post: I was wondering if you would mind addressing the most recent manifestation that we’ve seen of Radical Islam which was the horrific killings of these U.N. workers on Friday. You know, what is kind of mystifying, I think, for people in this country is most of us were completely unaware of what this nutty pastor in Florida had done until we saw these eruptions on the other side of the world. What kind of responsibility do governments of other Islamic countries feel, whether they should sort of step in here and say something or denounce what’s going on?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: Well, the last time Pastor Jones announced that he was going to burn the Qur’an we actually were very active in trying to dissuade him and also to make it very clear that his actions will not be the actions of the American people and our government even this time did that.

The president of Pakistan said we condemn what he did. We understand that most Americans do not approve of what he has done; that this is just a provocation. And so in Pakistan the situation has relatively been managed.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

But the reason why this happened was because the Radical Islamic political groups sit on the Internet looking for bases on which they can actually provoke the people. So they find this little thing, and then they actually spread it in our society.

And so even though none of you took notice because it was unimportant, it became important because there were clerics in the mosques saying, you know, this is being done deliberately. It’s because the West hates you. It’s because the West hates your religion. It’s because they’re deliberately insulting you.

And it brings us to the origins of Islamic Radicalism, as I keep saying, which is not so much about faith and relationship with God, but about your place in the world. It’s another manifestation of your helplessness, oh, Muslims, that you know, people can insult your prophet.

Prophet Muhammad himself, there’s a famous story in Islamic history which you’re taught or used to be taught when I was a kid about how there was this woman who used to throw garbage on the prophet because she didn’t approve of him, and one day he went and there was no garbage.

So he asked what has happened. Where is the old woman? Has she passed away or something? It turned out she was ill. She had nobody to take care of her. So Prophet Muhammad went and started taking care of her, and for the next few days, she says, you know, “Why do you do it?”

He says, “Because I am the Prophet of Mercy.” Now, this is what we were taught as kids. That’s also Islam.

And here are these people who say, you know, “Kill so-and-so because he’s blasphemed the prophet.” I’ve always asked the people who call for this blasphemy law. I want to know which person in the life of our holy prophet was ever punished for blasphemy, who was beheaded for blasphemy?

But that is the context. The context is Muslims are helpless. Muslims are weak, and our weakness and our helplessness is allowing these people who have more missiles than us, more power than us, more economic power than us, who are dominant, who are global

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 hegemons and who are occupying your lands in the form of an army in Afghanistan, an army in Iraq, and that narrative is now becoming the meta narrative of the Islamic world.

Have you ever looked at [Afghanistan literacy figures]? You have 80 percent plus illiteracy. So there are all of these illiterate persons, and the literate include the madrassa people who know nothing except being able to read the Qur’an. It is a lot of people who can just be provoked.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The president of Afghanistan, our crucial ally in the War on Terror, Hamid Karzai did a magnificent job of stirring this up and is directly responsible, I think, for the deaths that occurred. He spoke about it and he said it publicly. He called it an insult to Islam. I mean, it was obviously an extremely cynical move on his part.

PAUL FARHI, The Washington Post: I have a question about suicide bombing. This is about Radical Islam turning literally radical and turning violent. Why does it start in the ’90s? What are the conditions? And what are the circumstances in which this turns from a war of ideas into a war?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: For one thing, in Sudan there was a military takeover. The United States left in 1989 Afghanistan and Pakistan. So all of these groups are now looking for a new cause, and they come up with the whole thing that we defeated one superpower. Now it’s time to defeat the other.

But here there’s a difference. There they could engage in conventional war and the other superpower was supporting them. So what do you when you’re defeating the superpower that had originally supported you? You use asymmetrical methods, and that’s when they adopted suicide bombing and terrorism completely.

Of course, to be very accurate, even against the Soviets they used similar methods. I mean, they did blow up sort of Soviet military people who were in Afghanistan or Soviet aid workers, et cetera. But we all at that time sort of let that pass. But it was the same method.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

I mean, it’s interesting that I have found at least one report of a beheading of a Soviet. So they’re doing exactly the same things now, you know, which is beheading people in a ritual manner and all of that. So it was definitely part of their ideological composition even then, but we didn’t pay attention to it because we were focused totally on defeating the Soviet Union.

So then they turned around, and in Sudan there was a military takeover that brought an element of the Muslim Brotherhood to power. So they got a little base there.

There is the development in the Middle East that had already taken place and by now Mubarak is firmly in charge in Egypt, and he is really being repressive towards the Muslim Brotherhood at that time, and so a lot of them are saying political struggle is no longer possible. It has to go to the next level. And then there are some ideologues who actually wrote very interesting tracts during the early ’90s which became the basis.

There’s a new wearing off. Muslim Brotherhood begets Islamic Jihad which begets Al- Qaeda, and that phenomenon starts taking place. And then when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda ended up in Afghanistan because they were driven out of Sudan as part of a bargain between the U.S. and the Sudan. But nobody paid attention to their arrival in Afghanistan.

And it is only after the USS Cole was attacked that actually the U.S. started taking Al- Qaeda seriously, but…the word “Al-Qaeda” means the base of the global Islamic transformation.

So we started noticing their emergence in ’91, ’92, ’93.

JEFREY GOLDBERG: Well, in the ’30s and ’40s you see the marriage of Islamist, theocratic ideals with European modes of totalitarian thought. I mean, that’s where I think a lot of our problems stem from, from the literal marriage of Nazism and certain Muslim ideologues, the Mufti of Jerusalem most notoriously. But this is when some of the ideas crept in.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: But then because of the Cold War it becomes convenient for them to piggyback on the Cold War and spread influence. And so in that period they are kind of allies. So they are not doing this kind of thing. But it is on the asymmetry of power in the 1990s that makes them do this or that makes them think that they can do this. And then, of course, some theologians come up with these new arguments because suicide was never accepted in Islamic theology historically.

So it just kind of progressed in terms of people coming up with new methods of asymmetric warfare. And then the attention they got, Al Jazeera, et cetera, that enabled them to kind of glorify some of this because until 9/11, none of the networks that are represented here and none of the media that’s represented here actually paid any attention to these guys in that sense, of understanding their ideology.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: Mr. Ambassador, I’m just wondering if you can talk to us a little bit about the spate of assassinations of Christians in Pakistan and what you do about this. I mean, how do you address this issue? And, Jeff—is there something of a war against Christianity in this area?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: It’s a recruitment tool for the extremists in Pakistan because it’s a wedge issue. You know, this is a minority. For example, the ruling party right now has almost all of Christian representation in parliament is from the Pakistan People’s Party. And so it’s a way of sort of pointing the difference, you know: Pakistan for Muslims only. And the government has taken a firm stand on protecting Christians, especially where there are significant numbers.

But individual assassination is something that threatens me, my wife, the president, the prime minister. The governor of the Punjab was killed. So it’s something that you have to be prepared for while at the same time trying to find ways of reducing it.

But there are, as I said, splinter groups. There’s one particular splinter group that targets the Christians, but more Shias have been targeted, for example, by other groups because they are seen as heretics by these people. So it’s a hierarchy of targets. As far as they’re concerned, they’re equal opportunity haters. So they hate everybody, and they’ll hit at everybody.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

And as far as the Christian community is concerned, the key thing is to make sure that they are treated as equal citizens, and that’s what the government is hoping to try and do by protecting the communities.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, it’s true that the PPP, the party of President Zardari, is trying as hard as it can to protect Christians, and the truth is that we hear more about the attacks on Christians in Pakistan. In the hierarchy of enemies of purist Salafist Muslim groups, Christians are lower than Shia or the close enemies, the people who claim to be Muslims, but aren’t according to their view.

But if you look at what’s happening and the sheer numbers, I mean, obviously Hezbollah’s rise in Lebanon means a certain future for Lebanese Christians; the Copts in Egypt, ten million people, eight, nine million people are under intense pressure.

You know, we have to also understand the limits of politics. We want these governments to respond the way we would respond to the oppression of a particular religious group. The extremists have been so adept at manufacturing hatred that these governments, such as Pakistan’s government, have a hell of a hard time combating the things that we want, such as the blasphemy law. So the problem is so daunting as to be sort of unfixable.

SALLY QUINN, The Washington Post: Ambassador, you touched briefly on Sufism. I know that there are a lot of members of the [Pakistani] government who are Sufis, and you basically said that the Sufis could have the power if they wanted to. Why is it that Sufis can’t prevail over what you say is like a ten percent of the population which is really radical?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: Sufis because they are pacifists by temperament, they can prevail in a democratic situation, for example. I mean, the Prime Minister of Pakistan comes from a Sufi order, from the cadres. About half a dozen members of the cabinet come from different Sufi families, well known Sufi families. They just aren’t kind of emotionally, psychologically equipped to become retaliating suicide bombers.

People forget the number of Muslims in Pakistan and the number of Muslims in India is more or less equal even though in Pakistan we have 97 percent of the population. In India

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 they are just 14 percent of the total population, but the exact number is more or less the same, 180 million and 180 million.

And there they get subsumed in the political culture and the process because of that. So in the case of the Sufis, first of all, they have been totally clobbered with the radical movements, et cetera, resources. They don’t have the global networks of the kind that the radical movements have. As Jeff explained, you know, go to any of the Sufi places. There’s a shrine and there’s a mosque and there’s a drum line there somewhere for Sufi chanting at some point, et cetera, but they don’t have the modernized computers and sort of the wherewithal of a modern political force, whereas the radicals do. That’s the only reason.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It’s one observation about how nothing in the Middle East is forever or nothing in the Muslim world is forever. You know, we forget, but until 1979 or the late ’70s, Shi’ism was a quietist movement, an apolitical movement, very, very passive, which is one of the reasons it found itself in such a downtrodden position. Ayatollah Khomeini essentially invented political Islam, the Shia branch of political Islam. So obviously, there are aspects of Sufism built in that militate against the idea of radical Sufism, but anything can happen if a community is pressured long enough.

FRED BARNES: Jeffrey, how do you get all of these people from the Muslim Brotherhood? What do you do? I’ve always found that sometimes you just show up and ask a question and people will answer it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, when I went to this madrassa that we were talking about, I literally just went. It was actually a great moment. You know the head of it is really the spiritual godfather of the Taliban, and I asked to speak to him, and I said I wanted to study here and I’m very interested.

And, you know, everybody believes that they’re doing the right thing in the world. You know, Danny Pearl is the tragic exception to the rule where the murder was the message, but most of the time they want the messenger to carry the message.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

FRED BARNES: Well, let me ask the Ambassador a question, and I’m interested in the subject of anti-Americanism in Pakistan and whether it is just the generalized anti- Americanism that you find in lots of parts of the world or whether it’s specific and modern. Is it religious? Is it merely political? What is it? What’s the source of it?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: There was no anti-Americanism during the ’50s, ’60s in Pakistan, at least not so significant. ’89 was the turning point. First of all, your support for Zia ul-Haq had consequences inside Pakistan. If you remember, Zia ul-Haq was a very brutal dictator at home. And so a segment of the population resents the fact that you chose each time there was an attempt to have a build at Pakistani democracy. It didn’t happen that way, but that’s how it’s perceived.

Zia ul-Haq didn’t come into power with American support, but he lasted in power through American support, and then Musharrif as well, and Musharrif is another dictator who ended up, you know, because it was just convenient that he was there. So you suffer from that there in Pakistan.

There is the religious parties’ driving anti-Americanism, and then what has happened is that as the media opened Musharrif always thought that Benazir Bhutto and the small D democrats and small L liberals were his main opponents. So he opened the air waves, but he gave licenses to groups and individuals who thrive on conspiracy theories.

Now, a nation that is fed on those conspiracy theories day in and day out is not going to be pro-American, and then the government that is also described by the New York Times as pro American all the time also ends up.

It’s just those kinds of things. It is just a series of mistakes on both sides and a pot that gets stirred frequently with conspiracy theories, a very hostile domestic media, a feeling of abandonment, and a regional environment in which, you know, Iran is anti-America and then you have sort of propaganda coming from the rest of the Muslim world, and that all plays into—and you have not cultivated a pro-American constituency as your friends.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

It’s a typical kind of, you know, I’m your friend. Well, I should be grateful that you’ve allowed me to be a friend rather than you sort of occasionally giving me a pat on the back for being your friend. That makes your friends not as enthusiastic about fighting your battle.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There’s an obvious analogue between this experience and what happened in Egypt, and this is really about the price you ultimately pay for supporting dictatorships in the Zia style.

What Mubarak did was very clever. He allowed no criticism of his regime in the media. He allowed the most outrageous criticism of America and the most outrageous expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism in his media; perpetuation of incredible conspiracy theories. Obviously the idea that the CIA was behind 9/11; that 3,000 Jews left the World Trade Center on 9/11.

I mean, I was in Cairo right after. This is where they were born. Mubarak did nothing obviously to stop that, and then what he did which was genius, I mean, if you’re a dictator looking to stay in power, was he went to his American benefactors and said, “Look at how much you’re hated. Look how much Israel is hated. Look at how much Jews are hated. I’m the only thing standing between you and this level of hatred.”

So that level of hatred which he fomented and allowed and encouraged created conditions in which endless series of American policy makers who should have known better said, “Well, look. It’s either Mubarak or the lunatics.” And that’s how we got to this day.

CLARE DUFFY, NBC Nightly News: Mr. Ambassador, you talked about the need for America to provide assistance of some kind to small D democratic parties. Given what you’ve just said, what would that look like? I mean, what exactly can be done to encourage this sort of Pakistani polity to more accurately reflect what are the influences that are at play, but really what can be done that doesn’t get tarred with that anti- American brush?

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: I mean, that’s the challenge that we’ve been dealing with, but I think more of it is training. It’s equipping them with the ability to run up because under military rule, the political parties were nominally tolerated, but they weren’t allowed to raise funds.

The National Endowment for Democracy makes a great contribution, things like that. The two, you know, the IRI and the NDI, they bring training, et cetera, et cetera. So that the parties know how to maintain computerized. I mean, in 2011, there is no reason why a major political party with four million members should not have a computerized record of its members, et cetera, et cetera, especially if there is not going to be another coup and all those four million people are not going to be hounded.

So I think those are the things that you need to build, because since the 1960s Pakistan’s politics has always had the military taking over and then repression of one kind or another. If there’s going to be a genuine opening, then we, the political actors in Pakistan will need the tools and the resources of running a modern, 21st century political party.

I mean, India has it because they’ve never had the banning of political parties, and we want to get there. And that’s the area where you don’t have to worry about spending enormous amounts of money. It is a lot cheaper than what you will have to do if, God forbid, you have to go to war when the cost is going to be $15, $20 billion a month. This is a low cost operation.

CLARE DUFFY: And the people who run those parties aren’t going to be concerned about taking a teleconference system or a copier that says, you know, with thanks from the people of the United States of America?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: There are ways of working around that. What we need to do is kind of an understanding and alliance. It’s just enabling them to cover the gap of when they were put out of business by dictators.

And, very frankly, the democracies that are going to emerge, and this is a point I need to say because the democracies that are going to emerge in the Muslim world, whether in Egypt or in Pakistan, et cetera, will be more like the GOP under Chester Allen Arthur.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

They’re not going to be, you know, parties as they are today. The democracy that it going to emerge is going to be Louisiana under Huey Long, you know, and you have to be prepared for it.

And this is something I notice all the time. There’s this desire. Since we’ve contributed $40 million to this country, then somehow they should overcome 100 years of nation building or culture evolution of democracy. Just get out of this kind of thing that, you know, either they do it exactly the way we’ve done it and in a shorter frame of time and on our time frame or they’ll never be able to do it. Let’s find some idiot who went to a college or university here and find him and install him and let him control everything. That doesn’t work.

SHELBY COFFEY, Newseum: This goes to your remark, Mr. Ambassador, on the meta narrative and how to deal with it. The Internet, which we knew had potentials for radicalization, has accelerated in the last couple of years in being something that propels the meta narrative, tells the story. Why can’t the U.S. government tell a different story?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: I’ve advocated a war room. I’ve said all of this stuff before becoming Ambassador. I’ve said that you guys need to do it. It’s just a function of how you do government and how you do politics in this country. Look, this is a nation that made sort of fizzy black sweet water into a global thirst quenching drink. So you think you can’t market the idea of America, the concept of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that appeals to everyone?

I mean, you did it against the Soviets and the communists in the Cold War. You did it. You found allies who spoke the languages. You had Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and you had the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and you had all this stuff. And you went and you engaged in battle and you prevailed.

And just because there’s a religious dimension to this, you kind of get confused about, you know, God, this is somebody else’s religion. Do I need to touch it? Then there are lawyers.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

There is a global congress of Radical Islamists, you know, and they have an annual meeting. They have a mechanism. Why can’t there be a Congress of Muslim World Democrats and Muslim world sort of modernizers, reform sort of thing? And you know, I traveled as a professor to Turkey, got the Turks to agree to it; got the Moroccans to agree to it, and you know, we could have it in Istanbul or Casablanca with an American presence and some non-governmental and possibly even governmental support from the United States for a major meta narrative effort.

And so it’s basically a failure. You have these massive machines that are still there, but they were for another era. It’s like Detroit refusing to reform. You know, they don’t make as good cars as they used to, and so, you know, Voice of America, Radio Free—I mean, Radio Free Europe now needs to be Radio Free Middle East, you know. It just needs to be reoriented.

They don’t need to have Russian language broadcasts anymore. Some people will become redundant. They need to have Arabic language broadcasts. What you need is—have you ever watched Al Jazeera? Just do it for me if you never have. The Israelis have their point of view on Al Jazeera much more than the Americans do. They have Arabic speakers. There is no issue relating to Israel that goes on Al Jazeera unrebutted.

So they have an English spokesperson who comes on Al Jazeera in English, on the English side, and in Arabic on the Arabic side, and they have their spokesperson, the Arabic language spokesperson does eight-hour shifts. So there’s always one spokesperson at any time of the day or night.

I just do not understand why it can’t happen, except bureaucratic sort of, you know, inertia, and an unwillingness to deal with it the right way.

PETER DAVID, The Economist: I’d like to ask a follow-up to the question about anti- Americanism in Pakistan. One thing that went unmentioned in your answer was the impact of the war in Afghanistan next door. Is the whole enterprise there essentially misconceived from the point of view of winning over opinion in Pakistan? I can see an argument that says it’s important for Pakistan to see the Taliban or Al Qaeda tendency

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 defeated by the Americans, but I can also see how this is a constant fuel for those who would politicize Islam inside Pakistan itself.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: Absolutely, absolutely it is. So you have a massive enterprise going with the number of troops increasing, with trucks going down Pakistan’s relatively beaten down highways with thousands of tons of supplies for troops in Afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera, and nobody explaining to the people if there is any benefit from this that comes to them. I mean, so it’s two ways. It’s the enterprise itself, and then total failure to explain the enterprise. Both have a negative effect.

So it’s the presence. You’re absolutely right. It infuriates. Nobody likes that massive foreign presence next door, and it’s also a factor in Afghanistan. People don’t like all of these guys. And second, the failure to explain the presence which could have been mitigated somewhat.

PETER DAVID: If the Americans left Afghanistan early, would this be a shot of adrenaline into the Jihadist cause regionally?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: Yes. It’s not bad to stay if you can actually explain what you’re doing and then do it well. There will be some who will never want you, but there will be others who will say they are here for a specific mission, to help us, and will go, and try and avoid the Ugly American kind of image with sending people who have no clue.

There are incidents that can be avoided. You know, you don’t need sort of 17, 18 year old GIs who sort of stand on top of civilian bodies and get themselves photographed. That’s something you have to work very hard to avoid. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that plays into the propaganda.

You have to understand the nature of the war. Part of the war is actually fighting the enemy, but part of the war is actually convincing more and more people that you’re there to help and not to harm, and there you have to be very careful.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

Now, there is an argument that some people make that maybe you’re not capable of doing that, and so therefore cut and run. But that is not supported at this moment either by the Afghan government or by us because we understand the security implications.

PETER DAVID: Right at the outset of your presentation, Ambassador, you said there were many people who had a false interpretation of Islam, who had sort of hijacked the faith in order to pursue a political agenda. It seems to me that at least in Sunni Islam one of the problems here is that there are no longer any sources of authority who can say, you know, this is the appropriate true faith and this isn’t. Is there any chance of re-infusing the Sunni Islam with some sort of areas of authority where, you know, the edicts of Al Azar or some other sort of respected place of learning can come to reclaim from this rather chaotic, democratized domain the true faith as you see it?

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: First of all, I deliberately avoided the term hijack, et cetera, et cetera, because as far as I’m concerned, somebody has a perfect legitimate right being a Sunni Muslim. I think a person has a right to have a politicized interpretation. I just without judging the very fact of it, I was just putting it in context that what we really have a problem with, the people in this room and probably outside and everywhere, is with the ones who have the politicized interpretation and not with the others.

So they can have it as long as they play by the same rules that they want me to play by, which is I have the right to explain my faith to you. You can adopt it. You cannot adopt it. The problem comes from the fact that they are not willing to accept my right to live just because I don’t agree with their interpretation of faith, and that causes a problem. So it’s not about hijacking or not hijacking. You know, it’s about the methods. It’s the totalitarian nature which bothers me.

I mean, the reform preachers have been there for a long, long time. You haven’t heard of them because they’re not the ones who are preaching sort of fire and brimstone against you and, therefore, they don’t make it to your stories, but they’re there with millions of followers. There’s a man in Pakistan who has only recently been on CNN and Britain TV. It’s a man called Tahir-ul-Qadri. He has millions of followers in Pakistan. He is totally like, you know, we need to embrace all modernity and faith. And there are others who are

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 unknown to you—they support reform. They have written extensively on it, there are millions of followers, they are not noise makers, not out there marching, burning flags. These people have their tapes and they have their DVDs and their CDs, et cetera, et cetera. They will take a while before all of it comes out, and you can actually find Tahir- ul-Qadri online, but Kardavi was doing online fatwas 15 years ago.

TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE, Patheos.com: I’m a Christian, and even I have to confess that there are substantial threads within Christian scripture and Christian tradition that under the wrong circumstances can be interpreted and appropriated to support violence. So I worry that the attempts to differentiate the religious from the political short circuits the conversations that we need to have about religion and violence and why some religious communities have been maybe more successful than others recently at marginalizing and even defeating those ultraviolent interpretations.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: I think it’s a valid concern and it’s a valid point. But at the same time all I was talking about were the drivers. I was saying that the driver of Radical Islam is politics, and so in a way it’s comparable to sort of, you know, during the crusades, for example. A lot of the people in junctions of that era, et cetera, were politically driven, but couched in religious language, and that is similar in the Muslim world.

And so it’s just that given the political context, it’s really difficult to talk about the movements within the faith that are not radical. That’s the only point I would like to make, without disagreeing with you that there are elements and they will always be picked up, and in history they were different. It is just that we are at a different era of our history, at a different point in our history.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Muhammad was, in addition to the leader of the faith, he was his own Constantine in a way, and so he lived the life of a warrior, and he lived the life of an expansionist. You know, we just have to acknowledge this when we talk about this because when we say that a radical Muslim is hijacking his religion by engaging in some sort of violence, well, he has his sources, I mean, and he has a history that’s different than Christian history.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

And so one of the base reasons that we have the problem that we have today is because you can as a Muslim interpret certain facts of Muhammad’s life in a way that allows for violence, and it’s a little bit harder, as an outsider, again, but it’s a little bit harder, I think, to take Christianity and derive the same lessons.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: The two traditions have a long history, I mean, of those who used the religious argument to fight and those who used the religious argument. So it’s the same. It’s pick and choose, and both trends have existed. It’s just that at this particular time, the whole post-colonial environment, the whole politicized environment in the Muslim world, building new countries, new societies, et cetera, et cetera has led to this whole notion that it’s all about the warrior faith rather than the non-warrior faith, which have both existed over history over the last 14 centuries.

DR. BRADFORD WILCOX, University of Virginia: I just had a question about the issue of demography, and I’m wondering if either of you have any thoughts on, the issue of very large numbers of young men who can’t get married or can’t find decent work to allow them to get married in portions of the Middle East, and how that may be implicated in the kinds of topics we’ve been discussing this morning.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The amazing thing in Egypt and why it probably won’t work very well for a long time is that the number of jobs that have to be created to fulfill the demands of the youth bulge or the 20-something bulge are extraordinary. I mean, they need an eight percent or nine percent growth rate. Obviously they are kind of negative right now.

And the thing about conservative societies is that a male can’t get married until he has the wherewithal to support his marriage, but he can’t have sex either or at least licitly, and there’s a lot of frustration of all sorts that builds up in a society when you have that combination.

And then when a man who is 24 years old, who is a graduate who has a crappy degree in engineering from a crappy university in Egypt can’t get a job and can’t get a wife and can’t find any satisfaction in life, you know, it’s an obvious formula for disaster, which is why unfortunately we in the West and those in the Gulf who have a lot of money now because

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 of what we’re paying at the gas pump need to be putting extraordinary efforts into trying to create that kind of job growth.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: The demographics actually need a lot more attention than people have actually been paying it because it’s not just that. It’s also the male-female ratio. Because, for example, the ability to predict or know, foretell the gender of the child has resulted especially in India both among Muslims and non-Muslims, a tendency to sort of have the male child and not have the female child, and that has really driven the male- female ratio into an adverse number.

And Al-Qaeda and the extremists are, again, ahead on this one because if you notice, this whole business about 72 virgins, et cetera, in the hereafter, which is not really historically part of the mainstream Islamic discourse—it’s like, you know, it’s one of those little classic things. But they play up the sensuousness, if you read some of their texts, they are very sensually written, and they’re appealing to the sensuality that if you blow yourself up as a volunteer, as a suicide bomber, a lot more sensuality awaits you in the hereafter.

So a 24 year old with a crappy degree, et cetera, et cetera, as Jeff described, he has this temptation, and there is nobody dealing with that side effect.

CARL CANNON: Ambassador, you alluded to the dispute between India and Pakistan. You mentioned Kashmir. That was the only thing you mentioned. This is something you see it in the American newspapers. Everybody at this table has written it ourselves, but it also is elusive to me.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: Both Pakistan’s leaders and India’s leaders recognize the value of working things out, but we have to get our people to understand the value of peace more than the value of conflict, and it’s not always easy. There are many people in Pakistan who feel it’s an issue of survival because there are certain people in India who never reconciled to Pakistan’s break away from India. So in a way it’s a kind of what if the South had won the Civil War, and you actually had a Confederate States of America and the United States of America. How would have they felt towards one another?

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011

I always say in the end Pakistan is the worst divorce you know in the world, both with nuclear weapons. They just can’t sit in the same room talking about the future. They always have to talk about “and do you remember when you were nasty to me?”

And there are people in Pakistan who say, “Look at them. You know, we broke up 63 years ago, and they still won’t let us survive on our own. They’re nasty and they’re mean and they don’t want us to be prosperous and happy.” And so that dynamic needs to be overcome, which is why something like discussing and understanding and finding formulas for things like Kashmir.

CLAIRE BRINBERG, ABC News: There was a perception that [President Obama] would be a lot more popular in the Muslim world than he’s turned out to be. I want to know what the perception of him is and how it compared to the perception of other American Presidents.

And then as a corollary to that, everybody paid attention to the speech that he gave in Cairo, but the State Department also decided to divert civil society and pro-democracy building funds in Egypt from those groups to groups that were sanctioned by Mubarak. I’m wondering how that decision was received and how it affected the perception of America there then and continues to affect it.

MS. MILLER: I was struck, Mr. Ambassador, by your comments about Al Jazeera and how Al Jazeera, like our own cable news programs, prefers Pat Robertson to Rick Warren. I was also reading all of the fallout of the Terry Jones debacle, and I wonder what your advice for us is.

Where you live in a world driven by SEO and cliques and conflict is what makes a story, and yet this whole session has been about sort of illuminating the corners that we don’t often talk about. So how do we deal with Terry Jones? Do we not mention his name? Do we not cover it in hopes that, you know, it won’t get picked up and then spread around the world in an instant?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, there’s a couple of contradictions of this moment. One is that America is said to be in decline, and yet across the Arab world people are looking to

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 build their political systems in the manner of our political system. Nobody is trying to model themselves on China.

With Obama, there is disappointment because I think there were heightened expectations. He is seen in the Muslim world the way Donald Trump sees him, as one of their own in a kind of way. In a positive sense. They don’t believe that he’s a Muslim. I also don’t believe that he’s a Muslim, but they see him as someone who really could understand them.

But your point on Egypt is actually true. Obama came into office, and we can figure out why this was. He came in as sort of an Avatar of stability. He was responding to what he saw as the neocon adventurism of the Bush administration. So he said, you know, Mubarak is our guy here and Ben Ali is our guy there, and we’re not going to push democracy, and I mean, that period now is over probably for good because the people disagreed.

So on that level in the reform circles there are real doubts about his commitment to that. Obviously his decision on Yemen yesterday, that narrative will slowly shift.

Just one final point, which is that the amazing thing about traveling around the region in the last couple of months is this feeling of longing for America. Every conversation starts with a litany of, you know, America’s sins, but it’s all ultimately couched as America is the indispensable country to us. We need America. We want American approval, and we want to like America.

It’s so complicated, and it’s so tied up in real history and also false history, and that’s the final point I would make, which is that in most of these countries which are not democratic, which didn’t have free presses, obviously the role of conspiracy and conspiratorial thinking has been huge, and it’s going to take time to unwind and unravel all of that. So the feelings are incredibly complicated.

But you know, it’s complicated and ambiguous, but the one overarching truth is that they’re all thinking about us all the time and waiting for us to respond to them and waiting

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Radical Islam: The Challenge in Pakistan & Beyond” Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Jeffrey Goldberg  April 2011 for us to help them, and if there is this American decline that people talk about, you don’t actually sort of experience it in the Middle East.

AMBASSADOR HAQQANI: The sentiment in most of the Muslim world is sort of “Yankee, go home, but take me with you.” That’s the story, and you have to do it, and you have to do it with what happens in our part of the world as well, you know. And I think people, really good reporters and writers, can do it.

Second, for people like you, you can find a lot of people who write in the English language. The day when you actually needed to travel to Egypt and find a translator is gone. You don’t need that anymore. You have somebody in Egypt who actually writes very good English who’s local, who can actually contribute to you. And you need to find those people so that they can explain local phenomena to your audiences much better than somebody who has kind of grown up in the American Midwest and travels there and with the help of an interpreter is trying to figure out what’s going on in the country.

And similarly, when you write for a global audience, think global. I’m amazed at how many people in this country actually write for a global audience but think so locally that they assume—there’s every now and then a nerd like me who knows, you know, your local politics, et cetera, but there’s a lot of allusions, et cetera, with no explanations for people out there, you know. So that’s what you do.

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Thank you, Ambassador. Thank you very much.

 END 

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]