Pakistan’s main problem is not that it has many Muslim extremists or a weak economy. Rather, it is Pakistan’s dependence on the West and especially the U.S. that prevents it from fulfilling its potential.

As a developing country, Pakistan’s main concern should be to modernize. The cause for Pakistan’s lack of progress is the backwards state of the country as a whole: the government, society, customs, education, the economy and so on. A weak economy, having many extremists are not more than symptoms of this larger problem.

Pakistan’s government has historically made the mistake to confuse symptoms for causes.

• The West was richer, so it should be befriended and, to a degree, imitated.
• The West was stronger, so Pakistan’s military had to be reformed and equipped with modern weapons.
• The West had more money, so Pakistan should borrow some and use it to improve its own economy.

The problem with all these grand approaches was and is that they did not deal with the root of the problem.

Unlike what Pakistani (and those of developing countries in general) leaders seem to think the West did not become rich and powerful overnight. Becoming ‘modern’ took centuries, not years. Imitating the West, then, would mean one has to take centuries to modernize. Only such an approach could create the same amount of stability.

Since politicians don’t have centuries they cramp those centuries into years, and somehow expect society as a whole to be able to deal with all the changes. This isn’t more than pure idiocy. What was achieved in centuries, cannot be achieved in years.

At least, not if one tries to copy these systems that took centuries to develop.

Rather, Pakistan’s leaders should look at other countries that were once in a similar position. The best example of such a country is Turkey. In 1920 this country was nearly destroyed, highly dependent on foreign ‘aid’ (which came against a heavy price) and searching for way to close the gap with the West. The men who in the end succeeded in modernizing Turkey and the Turkish people, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), understood that he had to come up with a brand new parable of modernization, for those of ‘developed’ countries were not applicable on the Turkish people and situation. Read more »