Pakistan and Susceptibility to State Failure

Ranked 13^th on the 2013 Failed States Index, Pakistan is considered a “critical” state, according to Foreign Policy/ Fund for Peace. Scoring highest on the group grievance (9.7), security apparatus (9.8), and external intervention (9.6) indices, it’s interesting to explore why Pakistan is considered by some as critically susceptible to state failure.

To begin, according to the World Bank, Pakistan had a 92% school enrollment rate in 2011 and, in 2012, a GPD (current dollars) of $231.2 billion which grew 4.1% year-over-year. It would be interesting if we could see the school enrollment rate broken down by gender and age, though that information is not provided. Also detailed in the profile, the state’s life expectancy has been on an upward trajectory and consistently above the South Asian region as a whole, at 65; though in 2006, 22.3% of the population existed below the poverty line. To move into a more qualitative analysis, according to a BBC profile of the state in June 2013, Pakistan has been engaging in an intermittent military campaign since 2009 to rid the tribal areas along the Afghan border of Taliban-linked militants, and has denied U.S. allegations that al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are present along the border areas. As the report mentions, the U.S’ raid on Osama bin Laden in April 2011 in Abbottabad definitely kicked off this current period of tension between the two states.

A recent news article (July 11) by Al Jazeera highlights just this, days after the almost 400-page Abbottabad Commission report was leaked (and provided in an Al Jazeera exclusive). The author of the article, Akbar Ahmed, explains that the Commission report is very critical of the intelligence and government agencies of Pakistan, stating they “failed to fulfill their responsibilities finding ‘culpable negligence and incompetence at almost all levels of government,’” in regard to bin Laden’s undetected presence in the state. As Ahmed’s article details, the Commission report “makes strong recommendations for transparent civilian control in the government over the nation’s security and defense,” seemingly embarrassed over the entire situation and honing in on the state's complete lack of security apparatus; while, on the other hand, Pakistan’s head of intelligence has declared the raid an “act of war”. In regard to how the people of Pakistan responded to the raid, as the Abbottabad Commission report states on page 18, the Pakistani people demanded an explanation as to how the US was able to “execute a hostile military mission” without any form of military resistance or response from the state. Nonetheless, Ahmed closes his piece through poignantly mentioning that the 2011 raid did absolutely nothing to impede violence across the Muslim world, and that the war on terror has in fact, completely changed his hometown of Abbottabad beyond recognition. This leads to the question of to what extent external intervention has exacerbated Pakistan's current impediments to stability, and if that can honestly be quantified in a legitimate way.

It’s interesting to compare Pakistan’s ranking of the 13^th most susceptible state to failure to Patrick’s (2011) table and its ranking of 33^rd in his index of state weakness. According to Patrick, the state scores lowest in security, though scores relatively high (in the top quintile) on the economic scale and in the second quintiles in political and social welfare. It’s clear the methodology employed behind the two indices varies widely. While the Failed State Index appears to weight Pakistan’s lagging security apparatus much more significantly than Patrick, Patrick appears to do the same with Pakistan’s economic health. Either way, lack of cohesion in Pakistan’s top governmental and law enforcement agencies has perpetuated mass group grievance in the state, driving perceptions of instability among the public. Without the consistent ability to provide security for its citizens and maintain sovereignty over its borders, I believe that Pakistan is certainly poised for increased violence, though don't find the critical susceptibility to failure presented in the Foreign Policy/FFP Index particularly convincing.