Madiha Afzal
Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
Madiha Afzal is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She was previously the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program. Her work focuses on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, Pakistan’s politics and policy, and extremism in South Asia and beyond. She previously worked as an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Afzal is the author of “Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State,” published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2018 (the book was also published in South Asia and Afghanistan by Penguin India). Afzal has also published several journal articles, book chapters, policy reports, and essays. In addition, she writes for publications including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, Dawn, and Newsweek. She is regularly interviewed by media outlets including BBC, NPR, and PBS. In addition, she has consulted for international organizations including the World Bank and UK’s Department for International Development. For her writing on education in Pakistan, she was named to Lo Spazio della Politica's list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013.” Afzal received her doctorate in economics from Yale University in 2008, specializing in development economics and political economy.
Affiliations:
Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), fellow
Institute for Economic and Development Alternatives, Pakistan (IDEAS), fellow
Madiha Afzal is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She was previously the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program. Her work focuses on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, Pakistan’s politics and policy, and extremism in South Asia and beyond. She previously worked as an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Afzal is the author of “Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State,” published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2018 (the book was also published in South Asia and Afghanistan by Penguin India). Afzal has also published several journal articles, book chapters, policy reports, and essays. In addition, she writes for publications including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, Dawn, and Newsweek. She is regularly interviewed by media outlets including BBC, NPR, and PBS. In addition, she has consulted for international organizations including the World Bank and UK’s Department for International Development. For her writing on education in Pakistan, she was named to Lo Spazio della Politica’s list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013.” Afzal received her doctorate in economics from Yale University in 2008, specializing in development economics and political economy.
Affiliations:
Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), fellow
Institute for Economic and Development Alternatives, Pakistan (IDEAS), fellow
Pakistan Under Siege
The book details the rise of religious extremism and explains how the state has been both complicit in extremist violence and victimized by it. . . . Afzal’s book offers a useful survey of the many pressures—cultural, religious, economic—that add to social and political instability in Pakistan.
—Mohammed Hanif, Foreign Affairs
Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State.. is a remarkably clear, concise, and accessible attempt to dismantle assumptions common among Westerners about public opinion in Pakistan. . . Afzal not only gives the lie to Western stereotypes about the prevalence of extremist beliefs in Muslim countries; she also looks closely and critically at the ways in which the Pakistani government has encouraged the country’s militarization and what she refers to as its "Islamization."
—Ahmed Rashid, The New York Review of Books
[The Pakistan civilian government and the military] seem to be working very well together, essentially as one unit, in this government.
[The Taliban] are young. They're uneducated. And all they've learned how to do is fight. And now that the fight has suddenly ended, perhaps unexpectedly early, what happens next, right? So they don't quite know how to transition into the next phase.
Given the Afghan Taliban’s links with the Pakistani Taliban [TTP] — both operational and ideological — Pakistan really has to worry about the risks a resurgent TTP poses to Pakistan. It has already seen some of those risks materialize with the release of TTP prisoners from jails in Afghanistan in recent weeks as well as an uptick in attacks against Pakistani security forces. [Pakistan’s] relationship with the Taliban in particular could strain Pakistan’s already troubled relationship with the U.S.
Looking ahead, the Taliban will certainly want to use technology for its own PR and propaganda purposes. But now that it has taken over Afghanistan, it will in all probability want to restrict social media access to the Afghan population in its bid to reduce their access to information. Platforms like Twitter and WhatsApp will have to figure out how to deal with the Taliban's propaganda, while still trying to ensure that Afghans retain their access to these platforms if the Taliban attempts to restrict access.
ISIS-K is a sworn enemy of the Taliban. Even before today’s complex attack in Kabul, there had been real questions about how effective an eventual Taliban government would be in warding off ISIS-K threats.
I think the question of [the administration's] competence [with regards to Afghanistan] comes down to two things: Why wasn't a quick Taliban takeover anticipated, and planned for accordingly, and it also comes down to successful completion of the evacuation effort.
The Taliban was not abiding by the part of the Doha deal that asked them to cut ties with al Qaeda — intelligence reports have shown that the Taliban continues to maintain those ties.