Prof. Adil Najam Speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations

Prof. Adil Najam, the Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, spoke to the South Asia Roundtable at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York on the topic of “Pakistan’s Future in the Fight against Militancy.”

Prof. Najam argued that issues related to militancy and the war on terror could neither be understood nor solved without paying attention to larger societal questions of maldevelopment, poverty, a chronically weak and often corrupt state, and political fragility. He suggested that democracy and good governance cannot only be a useful instrument in fighting militancy, it may well be the only instrument that is likely to work.

Journalist Imtiaz Ali was the other speaker at the Roundtable, which was moderated by CFR Senior Research Fellow Daniel Markey.