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
For the past year, you've seen that perhaps no leverage that the US and the West thought it had — aid, sanctions, the freezing of Afghanistan's reserves — has really had an effect on Taliban behavior. The Taliban has essentially done what they had always done. The Afghan people have been in a humanitarian crisis because the Taliban hasn't budged.
[Mr. Khan...ascended the political ranks with the support of the country’s powerful military so] his anti-establishment stance, in particular, is notable. It represents a departure for Khan, and also for his voter base. The P.T.I [Mr. Khan’s political party], has demonstrated that it has mobilized real support in the wake of the vote of no-confidence against Khan, while the ruling coalition has hemorrhaged support. The ruling coalition will have to fundamentally rethink its strategy and approach and perform well on economic indicators to have a shot at the next general election.
[Who is to blame for Afghanistan's current crises is a] tug of war in some ways. The people who are suffering are ordinary Afghans. [Politically, it’s difficult for the US to release foreign financial assets as long as the Taliban remains in charge.] The US can’t really just say, ‘Okay, you know what, we’re going to unfreeze your central bank funds and essentially insert liquidity in the economy,’ because that really looks like you’re essentially letting the Taliban get away with it.
It would be fair to describe the T.T.P. [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan] as the ideological twin of the Afghan Taliban. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan last year, the T.T.P. hailed the Taliban’s ‘victory’ and renewed its oath of allegiance.
Towards the end of 2020, once President Biden was elected and the withdrawal from Afghanistan was imminent, Pakistan pitched a geo-economics-based relationship with the US... The US-Pakistan relationship for the last 14, 15 months has now been characterised by a cold shoulder by the Biden administration to the Khan government... [Khan] was saying he wanted an independent foreign policy, he wanted good relationships with all counties – that is the foreign policy approach both of the civilian government and the military … [But] in the last few months it ended up looking different because of visits to China and Russia, whereas there hasn’t been a relationship really with the White House. [The military] does want a positive relationship with the US and looking like Pakistan is not properly balancing its relationships with the US and with China, is something the military does not like.
[Shehbaz Sharif] is seen as someone who gets things done. [Whether Sharif will choose to be in power for a year and then hold elections, or call early elections is] a big question. We don’t know yet. [Sharif is known to have a good relationship with military leaders, and he’s not a figure likely to antagonize them but] he’s never held national office before, other than being a leader of the opposition for the last three years, so this is going to be a test for him.
[After Imran Khan veered from military leaders’ foreign policy priorities and clashed with them over major military appointments, they helped orchestrate his fall]. This fits into the larger historical arc of a civilian government losing favor with the establishment, that is Pakistan’s military, and that leads to their ouster from office. Just the mechanisms through which things are happening now are different because of constitutional changes made over the years to guard against the establishment.