Husain Haqqani

Husain Haqqani served as Pakistan's ambassador to the United States from 2008-11 and is widely credited with managing a difficult partnership during a critical phase in the global war on terrorism.

Considered an expert on radical Islamist movements, he is currently Director for South and Central Asia at Hudson Institute in Washington DC. Haqqani also co-edits the journal Current Trends in Islamist Ideology.

Haqqani has been a journalist, academic and diplomat in addition to serving as advisor to four Pakistani Prime Ministers, including the late Benazir Bhutto. He received Hilal-e-Imtiaz, one of Pakistan’s highest civilian honours for public service.

His 2005 book Pakistan Between Mosque and Military was acclaimed for explaining the roots of Pakistan’s foreign and domestic policies.

His 2013 book Magnificent Delusions: US, Pakistan and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, which came out in November 2013, has been described in the media as “the most clear-eyed history of the US-Pakistan relationship yet published”.

Reimagining Pakistan

Right from its inception many saw Pakistan as an anachronism. Pakistan’s leaders assumed India was permanently hostile because its leaders had opposed partition and had predicted the demise of the new nation. Unsure of their fledgling nation’s future, the politicians, civil servants and military officers who led Pakistan in its formative years decided to accentuate the difference between Hindus and Muslims that had been the basis of the demand for partition. Very soon after independence, “Islamic Pakistan” was defining itself through the prism of resistance to “Hindu India.” The attitude of some in India helped create that binary.

Ever since their nation’s creation, Pakistanis have felt compelled to defend their nationhood and to constantly define and re-define their identity. A national ideology that revolves around Islam rather than the concept of shared citizenship is deemed the basis of Pakistani nationalism. Pakistan’s unfortunate history may justify the description of Pakistan as being “insufficiently imagined,” but imagination is by definition not a finite process. An entity that is insufficiently imagined can be re-imagined. Just as the imagination “can falsify, demean, ridicule, caricature and wound,” it can also serve to “clarify, intensify and unveil.”

Husain Haqqani attempts to lay out the grounds for re-imagining Pakistan as an inclusive, pluralist, democratic, modern state focused on the well-being of its people, instead of being preoccupied with endlessly defining and militarily defending itself in relation to its neighbours.

By: Katy Joanna Joyce
Last updated: Monday, 11 January 2016