Reimagining Pakistan Quotes

“At least part of Pakistan’s quality of education problem stems from its ideological orientation. The goal of education in Pakistan is not to enable critical thinking but to produce skilled professionals capable of applying transferred information instead of being able to think for themselves. To produce soldiers, engineers and doctors indoctrinated with a specifically defined Islamic ideology, the country has ignored liberal arts and social sciences.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“An army is a vital national institution but a nation is more than its army. It needs a vibrant economy, an educated and competitive workforce, as well as intellectual and scientific curiosity and creativity.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Many of Pakistan’s problems—from falling behind in secular education to the rise of Islamist extremism—can be traced to the country’s founding on the basis of religious nationalism.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Pakistan has been unfortunate that its leaders and
rulers have repeatedly chosen ideological wooden-headedness over pursuit of reasonable and viable options.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“In popular sentiment, just as conspiracies have made Pakistan weak and vulnerable, its destined economic greatness has been thwarted by corruption, not poor policy choices.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“The exigencies of maintaining the West Pakistani political, bureaucratic and military elite in power were the major reason why, after Jinnah’s death, the secular Muslim nationalist path was hurriedly abandoned.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Pakistan’s view of itself as a ‘citadel of Islam’ has created an environment in which violence is normal provided it is committed in the name of Islam.”
― husain haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“For Jinnah, Partition was a constitutional way out of a political stalemate, as he saw it, and not the beginning of a permanent state of hostility between two countries or two nations. This explains his expectation that India and Pakistan would live side by side ‘like the United States and Canada’, obviously with open borders, free flow of ideas and free trade. It is also the reason why Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam insisted that his Malabar Hill house in Bombay be kept as it was so that he could return to the city where he lived most of his life after retiring as Governor-General of Pakistan.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Pakistanis often recount how civil servants in Pakistan’s early days worked out of makeshift offices, lived in tents and ran the government with limited stationery supplies. While the account is generally accurate, and the sacrifice of the officials admirable, it is equally important to understand that the difficulty was the result of a poor choice. Pakistan’s founder had selected the country’s capital to be located in a city lacking adequate facilities, preferring it over another provincial capital with a better establishment.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“One can sympathize with the sentiment of Pakistanis who must constantly defend their country against criticism ranging from questioning of its very creation to its current policies. But it is equally important to understand that mere survival does not equate success and that progress often requires uninhibited introspection.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Ironically, support for the idea of Pakistan was strongest in regions where
Muslims were a minority and Jinnah, as well as most of his principal lieutenants, belonged to areas that would not fall in Pakistan. To emerge as chief negotiator on behalf of Muslims, Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League had to prove their support in the Muslim majority provinces. ‘Such support’, Jalal points out, ‘could not have been won by too precise a political programme since the interests of Muslims in one part of India did not suit Muslims in others.’ Jinnah invoked religion as ‘a way of giving a semblance of unity and solidity to his divided Muslim constituents’.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“But insecurity remains the hallmark of Pakistan’s political and intellectual conversation. Even a comment about, say, Pakistan’s relatively low ranking among nations for book readership, is portrayed as an attack on the idea of Pakistan.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Bengali leader, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (who served as Pakistan’s prime minister in 1956) had noted as early as March 1948 that Pakistan’s elite was predisposed to ‘raising the cry of “Pakistan in danger” for the purpose of arousing Muslim sentiments and binding them together’ to maintain its power.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“According to the Munir Commission, no one who had ‘given serious thought to the introduction of a religious State in Pakistan’ had failed to realize ‘the tremendous difficulties with which any such scheme must be confronted’. It pointed out that before Partition ‘even Maulana Abul Ala Maududi of Jamaat-i-Islami was of the view that the form of Government in the new Muslim State, if it ever came into existence, could only be secular’.45 Although a consensus has been imposed with the help of the military over the last several decades that Pakistan must be an Islamic state, the issue remains, ‘which version of Islam should the state adopt in becoming Islamic?”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“the ideology of Pakistan that has been fostered in the past seventy years has had two major consequences. First, it opened the door for endless debates and schisms around Islam that prevent discussion of more pressing and practical governance issues; second, it conflated an Islamic Pakistani nationalism with anti-Indianism, putting Pakistan in foreign and national security policy straitjacket.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Contrary to what Pakistani children are taught in schools, the Islamic ideology currently in vogue in Pakistan did not give birth to the country; it was born after Pakistan’s creation in its present form.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“According to the account of a British diplomat, Liaquat had to respond seriously to a California businessman who asked him at a luncheon ‘whether the blank space between the two parts of Pakistan as shown on the menu card was Africa’.1”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“There is robust debate in American society over the extent to which the US lives up to its goals, but no one considers such debate as a threat to America’s current existence. The evolution of America from a slave-owning society that limited franchise only to white men of European origin to a diverse, multi-ethnic nation is a result of argument and deliberation.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“A narrative of persecution also runs through the psyche of Pakistan as a whole,’ he wrote. ‘The public, whipped up by the military and mullahs, is led to believe that the nation’s problems are the work of “hidden hands”. I noticed how often leaders blamed conspiracies by India, Israel and America—that is to say, Hindus, Jews and Christians—for undermining the country, rather than owning up to social and economic ills of Pakistan’s own creation.’8”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Independent observers believe that the Pakistan Army killed between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand Bengalis in a nine-month period, whereas Bangladesh puts the figure at three million.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“There are forty-three countries in the world that are poorer than Pakistan on a per capita GDP basis45 but twenty-four of them send more children to primary school than Pakistan does.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“As of 2014, Pakistan is home to the third largest illiterate population globally and there are only fifteen countries in the world with a lower literacy rate than Pakistan. 34”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“National pride should not deter Pakistanis from confronting the fact that education has not been their national priority the same way as, say, acquiring nuclear weapons.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Pakistan could continue to survive as it has done so far and defy further negative predictions. But if it does not grow economically sufficiently, integrate globally and remains mired in ideological debates and crises, how would its next seven decades be any different from the past seventy years?”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“To end its march of folly, Pakistan needs to reassess its core beliefs about a religion-based polity, reconsider the notion of permanent conflict with its larger neighbour, recreate political institutions to reflect its ethnic diversity and rebuild its economy without reliance on the largesse of others. Only then would it be able to reliably get rid of the spectre of failure or fragility and low international standing by all non-military benchmarks.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“The obstinate refusal to consider reform proposals and the insistence on rewriting history rather than learning from it have trapped Pakistan in a vicious circle. Instead of acknowledging bad decisions and moving away from them, Pakistan’s policymakers deny their bad choices; they then make further wrong decisions to support their denial, with further consequences and further denials. It is, based on the criteria defined by Tuchman, classic folly.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Pakistanis have constantly forgotten that offers of autonomy and recognition of linguistic and cultural separateness is often a better option than imposing greater centralization by force.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“The pervasiveness of distortions of history and the tendency to discuss even the sciences in the context of Islam’s glory or Pakistan’s security, crafts a mind that sees things not as they are but as it would like them to be. The consequence of using education as a tool of ideological indoctrination has been to undermine the quality of Pakistani education. Although Pakistan has produced many individuals who have done path breaking work in the sciences and even social sciences, these are the exceptions, not the norm.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“The average Pakistani student is brought up on a mix of dogma and mythology that does not encourage respect for facts or empiricism.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Pakistan views itself as a strategically located country needed by the world’s major powers and as home to descendants of mighty Muslim warriors. This view of the self, coupled with the dominance of a narrow elite, accounts for Pakistan’s inability to address its periodic economic crises.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State