Reflections from the Fieldwork

My fieldwork allowed me to reflect upon the deep insights that I captured, beyond the data gathered through the interviews. These insights are as important as, if not more than, the data themselves, because they help to give sense to the data and a complete picture of the local voices.

72 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (London: Longman, 1995).

1.6.3.1 Sovereignty is sensitive

One observation I made was on the subject of sovereignty and the way it is a sensitive issue for the people in postcolonial states such as Pakistan. However, the issue of sovereignty is paradoxical. The members of the civil–military establishment that I interviewed defined sovereignty in a very specific and uniform way, as ‘the ability of a state to exert its authority over its people and territory through an independent and autonomous policymaking free of Western influence and interference’.⁷³ It was interesting to note that in their definition, the interviewees unconsciously saw external influence as being that of the West, more specifically the US and UK, ignoring the fact that sovereignty could be breached through other influences from the East, including China or India. However, none of the interviewees saw the growing presence of China and its ability to manoeuver policies in Pakistan as a threat or an act against that country’s sovereignty. In fact, the growing Chinese presence in Pakistan has been welcomed and celebrated across the country.⁷⁴ Even the influence of Indian cinema, music and dance (the soft power) did not seem to bother the officials from civil and military institutions. To most of the interviewees, the idea of a coloniser was a gora⁷⁵ coming from the West; Asian people did not fit into the profile of a coloniser.

Another interesting observation was that the conversation on sovereignty noted heightened sensitivities in Pakistan. For instance, one of the senior civil servants at the Economic Affairs Division mentioned:

For the last 70 years, we are under an illusion that we are truly independent. Truth is that we are still ruled by the Western powers through their security and development aid. It is not the country that is dependent on aid; it is the Pakistan’s elite that is dependent on Western aid.⁷⁶

This was further corroborated by a military official that I interviewed who said:

We never had an independence; we only had a change in masters from the British to

73 Interview with a senior politician of Pakistan, Islamabad, 22 May 2016.

74 Under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative, China has invested over $60 billion in Pakistan in energy, infrastructure and numerous other projects. According to the Government of Pakistan estimates, around a million Chinese nationals have arrived since 2013 in Pakistan to work under the CPEC agreement.

75 Gora is a term used for white people. The word literally means ‘fair skinned’.

76 Interview with a former secretary of Economic Affairs Division, Islamabad, 10 June 2016.

the Americans.⁷⁷

These responses to the conversation on sovereignty do not come from nowhere. They are deeply tied into the region and its people’s historical experiences with, first, British colonisation and then, later, in the postcolonial setting, with American hegemonic policies throughout the Cold War and more so after the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US. Hence, it is no surprise that in my interviews with the officials of civil and military institutions of Pakistan, the issue of sovereignty was the main source of anxiety with regard to the KLB Act.

1.6.3.2 The burden of history

Another important observation I made during my fieldwork, which resonated with Meera Sabaratnam,⁷⁸ was the sense of burden of history on the developing countries.

For instance, the conversations on sovereignty in Pakistan covered from the British colonial era all the way up to the KLB Act. In contrast, my interviews on sovereignty with donor officials and officials of the US Government drew ahistorical and shallow responses. The US officials were not at all confident in their knowledge of Pakistan, which they repeatedly brought to the attention of the researcher during the interviews.

The lack of in-depth knowledge of Pakistan was attributed to the fact that most of the officials had spent only a year in Pakistan, which allowed them to have only a superficial understanding of the country.

Similarly, while the interviews with the officials of the Pakistan Government always started with an historical account of US–Pakistan relations and aid, the exact opposite occurred in interviews with US and other foreign officials. They could not place US–

Pakistan relations before the 11 September attacks and, in some cases, even before the Obama Administration took over the White House and drastically shifted its policy discourse over Pakistan. This difference in culture is very important because I believe that local actors in Pakistan are able to exert their agency from a position of weakness by clutching onto their historical experiences and integrating them into the institutional and public memory. Conversely, the local actors saw the suppression of their history by the foreign and donor countries as a deliberate attempt to undermine their misgivings

77 Interview with a major general of the Pakistan Army, Rawalpindi, 1 August 2016.

78 Meera Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique (London:

Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

about the past and to present a ‘new start’ to history, with same old exploitive colonial techniques under a new name.

Despite their diverse views, the local actors in Pakistan tended to view the actions of the powerful countries through their historic lens, which brought them to the conclusion that they were being snubbed by the Western powers. This was particularly prevalent in Pakistan, where donor countries tend to discredit local voices that go against the colonial discourse as ‘delusional’ and ‘conspiracy theories’. In reality, there is a deep-level truth in the so-called conspiracy theories, as discussed in more detail in the next chapter. For instance, for years the people in the tribal areas of Pakistan complained about unidentified flying objects hovering over their skies during the early years of war on terrorism. These voices were mocked as being wild conspiracy theories until both the US and Pakistan Governments revealed, years later, that the flying objects did exist and were actually the drones operated by the CIA inside Pakistan. Similarly, the presence of Blackwater, the notorious American private security firm in Pakistan, was a subject of controversy and rejected as a conspiracy theory in Pakistan, but was revealed years later to have conducted joint operations in Pakistan.⁷⁹ Essentially, having the sense of history and ‘word on the street’ in Pakistan considered a conspiracy theory or irrelevant is significant in shaping the national discourse.

1.6.3.3 Two-sided answers

One issue that arose from my fieldwork and had a major effect on my research questions and the structure of the thesis was the two-sided responses of the interviewees. In my initial interviews with the officials of civil and military institutions in Pakistan with regard to the KLB Act, they went to great lengths to blame the US for attacking Pakistan’s sovereignty by influencing national security policies and meddling in civil–military relations. However, in second, and in some cases third, interviews with the same officials, I noticed a shift, with another aspect of the KLB Act starting to emerge, helping me to frame the question around the level of agency that recipient countries like Pakistan are able to exert in terms of co-producing and using the nexus in their own favour. For instance, at some point after learning that I worked in the

79 Michael Kugelman, ‘Four Pakistani Conspiracy Theories that are less fictitious than you’d think’, War on Rocks, 25 March 2014.

Government, eight of the officials suggested that I should have told them earlier so they could have provided their candid opinions on the KLB Act.

I believe this shift and nuance arose not only because of the comfort level developed by the officials but also because of their ability to relate to the researcher. In a society such as Pakistan, an individual is identified through family bonds, kinship and other associations. In my case, when the interviewees discovered that I had a military background and had worked in the Government, it was an ‘anchor point’ for them to develop the confidence and trust to present opinions that would otherwise not have surfaced with individuals with whom they had no common connections. This reveals that not only the interview sample but also the researcher’s own positionality has a significant effect on the nature of data extracted in interviews and the eventual research conclusions.

1.6.3.4 Feelings of prejudice

The interviews that I conducted in Pakistan with the officials of civil and military institutions revealed a very strong sense of discrimination and prejudice with regard to the way Pakistan is depicted and framed abroad. Words like ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’

were repeatedly used to explain the way the conversation regarding Pakistan portrayed only negative images of the country. The civil–military officials in more than a dozen interviews compared the situation in Pakistan with that of India, suggesting that while both countries have similar problems, India is presented in the global media as ‘rising India’ and Pakistan is presented as a ‘failed state’. They complained that foreign journalists and researchers were only interested in writing about rape, murder, terrorism and brutalities in Pakistan and did not want to balance these stories with other good things happening in the country. Some of the interviewees suggested that Pakistan has recently been talked of as a place that is dangerous for women, yet Pakistan was one of the earliest countries in the world to elect a woman prime minister and National Assembly Speaker, as well as other important roles in which women have flourished. Of course, Pakistan does have issues; however, the officials of civil and military institutions complained that by amplifying the problems in Pakistan, Western media and academics have created a negative discourse on Pakistan that is reinforcing the dire conditions in the country by blocking the foreign direct investment, tourism and sporting events in the country that are necessary for economic and social progress. As a

result, the civil–military officials felt an automatic need to participate in the discourse and to counter it as the ambassadors of the country, from a personal sense of pride in presenting the good side of Pakistan.

These reflections on my fieldwork served a useful purpose in placing the discussion in the discussion chapters and giving sense to the ways the government officials thought or felt about the security–development nexus. Essentially, they gave a context for understanding the voices of the local actors.