The Charitable Terrorist: State Capacity and the Support for the Pakistani Taliban

• Author: Federico Masera,Hasin Yousaf
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221079398
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(7-8) 1174–1207

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221079398

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The Charitable Terrorist:

State Capacity and the

Support for the Pakistani

Taliban

Federico Masera

1

and Hasin Yousaf

1



Abstract

Violent organizations are often providers of many social services in competition with

the state. We provide evidence that these organizations use the provision of social

services to gain support. This strategy is only effective when it f‌ills the void left by a

weak state. We show this by studying the provision of natural disaster relief by the

Pakistani state and the Taliban. We f‌irst analyze the f‌loods of 2010 that received an

inadequate response from the government and show that support for the Taliban

increased in the areas affected by the f‌lood. These effects were concentrated in places

where the Taliban likely provided help and where the state under-delivered. We then

study the 2005 earthquake that instead received a swift government response and

show that the Taliban lost support in the affected areas. Results cannot be explained by

alternate mechanisms as anger against incumbents, political competition, electoral

participation, and religiosity.

Keywords

state capacity, foreign aid, political economy, rebellion, terrorism, natural disasters

1

School of Economics, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Hasin Yousaf, School of Economics, University of New South Wales, Business School building, Sydney, NSW

2052, Australia.

Email: h.yousaf@unsw.edu.au

Introduction

The survival of violent, criminal, and terrorist organizations often relies on the support

of the population where they operate. Additionally, the viability of the use of violence

and terrorist attacks by these organizations is highly dependent on their local support

(Berman, Shapiro, and Felter (2011);Kalyvas 2006;Staniland 2012;Wood 2010).

Scholars have hypothesized that to gain and maintain this vital support, violent or-

ganizations engage in providing goods and services. For example, in Latin America,

criminal organizations maintain support by providing social services, building roads,

maintaining water distribution systems, and handling trash disposal (Solis and Rojas

2009). The Maf‌ia in Southern Italy gained support by providing security and dispute

resolution mechanisms (Gambetta 1996). In several Muslim majority countries, violent

religious groups engage in a similar strategy. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood in

Egypt (Phillips 2011), Hezbollah in Lebanon (Flanigan and Abdel-Samad 2009;

Grynkewich 2008), Al-Shabaab in Somalia (Menkhaus and Shapiro 2010), and the

Islamic State in Syria (Caris and Reynolds 2014) all provide many social services to the

local population to maintain and gain support. Felbab-Brown, Trinkunas, and Hamid

(2018) highlights some recurrent features of this strategy. First, goods and services

supplied by these organizations are similar to what a well-functioning state would

provide. Second, this strategy is often used in places with a weak state. Third, these

violent organizations often f‌ill the needs left unanswered by a weak state.

In this paper, we provide causal evidence consistent with these observations. Our

results suggest that violent organizations can gain support by providing goods and

services in competition with the state. This strategy is only effective when and where

there is a weak state. If violent organizations compete with an effective state, they lose

support.

To demonstrate this, we examine the competition between the Pakistani Taliban and

the Pakistani state to provide natural disaster relief. Both the state and the Taliban

provide food, water, and medicine as immediate relief after natural disasters. In the long

run, they are both involved in reconstruction efforts and provide a legal system to

resolve disputes, often land-related, that arise after natural disasters. These two or-

ganizations compete in providing many other services such as education, medical care,

and a legal system (Telesetsky (1998);Mohammad and Conway (2003);Rashid (2010);

Giustozzi (2012)). In Taliban as Competitors to the Modern Pakistani State, we present

detailed evidence that the Taliban provided relief to the affected areas after the

2010 f‌loods.

Pakistan is an ideal location for studying if violent organizations gain support when

competing with a weak state because of two features. First, we can measure the support

for the violent organization competing with the state in a small geographic unit and

across time. This is due to the close relationship between the extreme Islamist political

alliance called Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and the Taliban (Norell 2007).

1

In this

study, we interpret a vote for the MMA as a vote in favor of the Taliban’s method of

organizing society, which directly contrasts with the modern Pakistani state. In Islamic

Masera and Yousaf 1175

Parties and Connections with Taliban, we describe in detail the connection between the

MMA and the Taliban.

Second, because of changes in Pakistan’s international relationships, we can study

two comparable situations (natural disasters of similar magnitude) in which the Taliban

provided services but were met with different state capacities. First, we study the

2010 f‌loods that occurred when relationship between U.S. and Pakistan had deteri-

orated. With unusually low levels of aid, the government was unable to respond to this

natural disaster adequately. Wethen examine an earthquake in 2005 that struck Pakistan

in a period when it was a vital ally to the U.S., which led to the arrival of substantial

international aid swiftly.

To guide our empirical analysis, we outline a theoretical framework that provides

our preferred explanation of the results. Citizens have incomplete informat ion about

the state’s and the violent organization’s relative capacity in providing social

services. Citizens update their beliefs about relative capacity by observing the

quality of the services delivered by these two organizations. In our context, natural

disasters provide an opportunity for the Pakistani state and the Taliban to change

citizens’beliefs about their relative capacity. Weexpect citizens directly exposed to

a natural disaster to learn the most from this event. After a natural disaster occurs,

the perception of the state’s ability increases (decreases) if a natural disaster is well

(poorly) managed by the state. When these perceptions are expressed at the polls,

we expect to observe an increase in voting for the MMA, the only political force that

is openly linked to the Taliban.

To test the hypothesis of the theoretical framework empirically, we f‌irst study the

2010 f‌loods by combining electoral data with information on the extent of the f‌lood

damage in a difference-in-difference (DiD) strategy. We compare changes in the

MMA’s political results between areas affected and unaffected by the f‌lood. We f‌ind

that the MMA vote share increased by 5.1 percentage points (p.p.) more in f‌lood-

affected areas relative to the unaffected ones. This effect represents a sizable change, as

the average MMA vote share was 9.8% in 2008. On the other hand, following the

2005 earthquake, a natural disaster of comparable size that received a swift response

from the government (Wilder 2008), we show that the MMA vote share decreased by

19.4 p.p. more in the areas affected by the earthquake relative to the unaffected areas.

These results support the f‌irst hypothesis that votes for the political party associated

with the Taliban would decrease (increase) after a natural disaster with swift (poor)

rehabilitation by the state.

In addition, the theoretical framework has three further hypotheses that the effects

are stronger in districts where more people were affected by the f‌lood, where the state

particularly under-delivered, and where the Taliban provided relief. We provide a series

of empirical results in line with these theoretical predictions. We f‌ind that the MMA’s

electoral gains are stronger in districts more intensely affected by the f‌lood, had a lower

amount of aid delivered, and were closer to the Afghanistan border (or had a known

terrorist rehabilitation camp), where the Taliban are more likely to provide natural

disaster relief effectively.

1176 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 66(7-8)