Until her August 5, 2024 ouster, Sheikh Hasina, a two-time prime minister who had run Bangladesh for 20 of its 54-year history, was the closest to royalty as anyone in Bangladeshi politics. Not only was she the South Asian country’s longest-serving ruler, but she was also the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father.
Students and opposition politicians grew more critical of her autocratic tendencies over time. The spark for the protests was a long-simmering dispute over civil service employment quotas that Hasina first expanded and then as discord grew, abolished, only to have courts reinstate them.
While quota reform initially motivated protests, a reaction to Hasina’s heavy-handed response backfired. Violent protests and vigilantism snowballed after security forces killed five protestors in mid-July. Within a couple weeks, security forces and pro-Hasina vigilantes reportedly killed slightly over 1,000 protestors. Amidst the outrage, protestors marched on Dhaka. As they reached the capital, Hasina fled. Whether she officially resigned, however, remains a subject of debate.
To fill the vacuum, protestors announced the appointment of Muhammad Yunus, an 84-year-old economist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate popular in the West. Yunus should have said no because, while he assuages the West, changes are afoot in Bangladesh that could alter the country irrevocably.
History matters. When Pakistan formed from the 1947 partition of India it was not a single contiguous territory but rather divided into West and East Pakistan separated by more than 1,000 miles of India. While the two halves of Pakistan were technically equal, West Pakistan dominated politically, culturally, and militarily.
After the East Pakistan-based Awami League won the 1970 Pakistani General Elections, West Pakistani elites responded by cancelling the election. East Pakistan declared its independence as Bangladesh, and the Pakistani military responded by attempting genocide against the Bangladeshis. Bangladesh won the war, but the Awami League had a long memory. Because many Islamist parties like Jamaat-e-Islami sided with West Pakistan during the civil war, Bangladeshi elites long kept them at bay, castigating their leaders as war criminals which, frankly, many were.
Hasina’s departure has opened the floodgates to Islamism, and Yunus is too weak or aloof to recognize the danger. In the days after Hasina’s departure, for example, Islamic extremists in Chandpur lynched popular actor Shanto Khan and his father and prominent Bengali film producer Selim Khan. Islamist mobs rampaged across the country, raping Hindu and Christian women, killing men, and destroying houses and businesses owned by minorities.
Enter Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency which seeks to drive a wedge between India and Bangladesh and recoup Islamist losses from a half century ago. Yunus and his interim government, meanwhile, give Islamist groups almost anything they want. On August 27, 2024, for example, he released chief of the Ansarullah Bangla Team, a local Al Qaeda affiliate. Three months later, India’s National Investigation Agency uncovered a ring of financiers among India’s Muslim community channeling funds to Bangladesh’s growing Al Qaeda affiliates. Nor are they alone. The broader Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent is establishing cells, while Islamists from across the Indian Ocean basin now pump money to terrorist and jihadi groups in Bangladesh, taking advantage of the country’s porous coast.
When Islamists seize control of a country—think not only Pakistan and Afghanistan, but now also Syria—it can become a generational project to reverse the damage, especially after the capture of state media and education.
In hindsight, Sheikh Hasina was a finger in the dyke. Yunus may have been a good microlending champion, but he is over his head in Dhaka. Islamists are hollowing out Bangladesh and its institutions. They are reportedly establishing training camps. Yunus’ attempts to paint Hasina as guilty of crimes against humanity via a politicized UN investigation appear cynical and ego-driven; he fiddles, while Bangladesh burns. His decision to ban broadcast of Hasina’s speeches suggest Yunus himself is afraid of robust debate. Hasina might be correct to call herself the victim of “terrorist aggression.”
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio may calculate Islamists seizing power across the globe is not an American problem. That is the same logic that governed President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s decision to ignore Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan, at least until the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings.
Letting Bangladesh fester and ignoring its radicalization will have ramifications that will consume American policymakers for decades to come.
About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin
Dr. Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. He is also a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor. The views expressed in this opinion pieces are the author’s own.
