08-23-2006, 08:25 AM
Pakistan versus the Last Superpower - Underestimated Pakistanis May Be a Degree Too Self-Confident.
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst;jsessionid=G...=o&d=5002386554
by Khalid Duran
Khalid Duran, the publisher of Trans Islam Magazine in Washington, D.C., has written frequently for The World & I on Islam and the Arab world.
When the British granted independence to their colonial empire in India in 1947, the Muslim-majority areas united as a new state separate from India, calling it Pakistan, which means "Country of the Pure." At that time it consisted of East and West Pakistan, separated by six thousand miles of Indian territory.
Since its creation Pakistan has rarely been given the importance due to a nation of its size, and Pakistanis are eminently conscious of being underrated. Although the illiteracy rate is still more than 70 percent, the country has an admirable elite, especially in the natural sciences. At one time Pakistan topped the list of the manpower-exporting countries, and in the United States the number of immigrant medical doctors born in Pakistan is second only to those from rival India. A European diplomat posted in Ankara after four years in Islamabad was wonderstruck to note that Turkey, which is counted as European, was in some respects still less developed than Pakistan. And yet, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, each having less than half of Pakistan's 150 million population, are paid double the attention that it is normally given.
Pakistan's military believes in a "next round," or fourth war, with India. The fight is over the Himalayan state of Kashmir, the major portion of which is held by India but claimed by Pakistan, because Kashmir's population is at least 80 percent Muslim. There is some resemblance here to North Korea's policy over half a century, which was geared toward "liberating" South Korea. Pakistan's irredentism with regard to Kashmir is even a little older.
For Pakistanis, it is hard to accept their role as India's smaller neighbor. In 1971 they lost East Pakistan, which became the independent state of Bangladesh, with the help of India. Ever since, many in the military establishment are all the more determined to get hold of Kashmir. "What was taken from us in the east [Bangladesh] we must take from India in the west [Kashmir]," they argue.
The conflict with India has added to the profound nationalism of many Pakistanis. They envision a state consisting of Pakistan plus Kashmir and Afghanistan. This large Muslim power would seek close affiliation with its neighbors to the north, the former Soviet republics Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan-- considered to be a vast market for Pakistani products.
In the 1950s Pakistanis took pride in being considered America's closest friend in the region. This policy was conceived at a time when India was allied with the Soviet Union. For some time Washington was closer to the Beijing-Islamabad axis than it was to the counter Delhi- Moscow axis. In 1965 India and Pakistan fought a war that ended in a draw. The Pakistanis were deeply disappointed by U.S. neutrality in the conflict. Since the Korean War their country had been a close ally of the United States, to the extent that American spy planes monitoring the Soviet Union used to take off from a base in Pakistan. At one time Moscow threatened Islamabad with nuclear retaliation if it did not stop lending itself to Washington's anti-Soviet designs. Because Washington did not support Islamabad's claim on Kashmir and remained a neutral spectator in the 1965 war, Islamabad moved closer to Beijing.
In the nineties India and the United States improved their relations, leaving Pakistan in the uncomfortable position of having to rely even more on China. Attempts by former Pakistani governments to develop closer ties to Arabia did not yield much. Traditionally, Pakistan has been keen on brotherly ties with Iran and Turkey. Relations with Iran, however, have turned sour, because Tehran feels that Afghanistan should be a vassal of Iran rather than of Pakistan. Pakistan, always somewhat isolated, has rarely been as alone as it is at present. Today many Pakistanis relish being among the foremost opponents of U.S. policies.
The ruling circle, especially the directors of the powerful military intelligence service (ISI), believe that their country can go it alone. They bank on growing hostility between America and China.
Military cooperation between Islamabad and Beijing has now become one of the most lasting alliances in the world. Initially, the China/Pakistan axis was meant to oppose the close alliance between India and the Soviet Union. Now it counterbalances the growing ties between India and the United States as well as the continuing Russia/India axis.
FROM AFGHANISTAN TO KASHMIR
From the start of the Afghan conflict, Islamabad intended to gain control of its neighbor. The Pakistani military had been in need of "strategic depth," which means a larger territory to keep its air force out of reach of an Indian surprise attack. In former days the shah of Iran had permitted the Pakistanis to station their warplanes on his territory. Now Afghanistan provides the strategic depth.
Recent developments in Afghanistan signal a victory of the dynamic ISI. The fundamentalist movement of the Taliban is basically Islamabad's creation. The core of the Taliban are Afghan war orphans brought up in Pakistani refugee camps. Directed by Pakistani officers and reinforced by no less than twenty thousand volunteers from Pakistan, the Taliban has gained control of 95 percent of Afghan territory. This was a remarkable feat in view of the massive support that its opponents received from Iran, India, and Russia (via Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), including huge supplies of weapons by means of airlifts. Iran almost went to war with the Taliban, which might have escalated into a war with Pakistan, but then Tehran backed off.
Pakistan's occupation of mountain ranges in Indian-held Kashmir in 1999 was a military masterpiece. Had not the government of then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif given in to U.S. pressure and ordered a retreat, some of those Himalayan mountaintops might still be held by infiltrators from Pakistan. Most Pakistanis were furious that the United States took India's side, but they were also proud of having shown what their military can do.
After the retreat, Sharif was deposed in a military coup. The new strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has little independence vis-a-vis his colleagues from the ISI. Although not publicly admitted, the Musharraf government is an indirect continuation of the Islamist military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq (r. 1977--1988). Musharraf and the leading ISI officers made their careers during that period.
IDEOLOGY: FROM ISLAMISM TO JIHADISM
A decisive factor in North Korea's perseverance in isolation is its adherence to what might be termed "national communism," centered on what it calls the principle of juche (self-reliance), administered by an all-pervasive dictatorship.
The Islamists, who have dominated Pakistan, directly or indirectly, since 1977, talk as much about self-reliance as the North Koreans do, but they call their miracle principle jihad. Whenever Westerners translate jihad as "holy war" all hell breaks loose, as if this were the most malicious distortion with the purpose of defaming Islam. And yet, the way they themselves define jihad in some of their writings and speeches makes it appear the very essence of militant supremacism. But the privilege of understanding jihad that way is reserved for themselves; others should not dare define it other than as a noble effort to change the world for the better.
Pakistan experimented alternately with democracy and military rule, and the ideological situation remains confusing and appears contradictory. The country has only gradually veered toward the new ideology of Islamism (which is not to be confused with the old religion of Islam). First some militants began to call themselves Islamists rather than Muslims, and now a new brand of even more radical militants has taken another step--from Islamism to Jihadism. They talk about jihad as if this were their new religion, mentioning it the way other Muslims mention Islam or God. The Pakistani press has come to speak of them as "Jihadists," signaling an escalation of extremism.
In fair and free elections the Islamists/Jihadists have invariably been trounced, barely obtaining 5 percent of the vote. Their influence on Pakistani politics, however, has always been disproportionately high, because practically all their activists and sympathizers belong to the educated urban middle class. The rural population still constitutes almost 70 percent.
Jama'at-e Islami, the major Jihadist organization, is one of the smallest parties in the country, but it is by far the richest, thanks to generous support from oil-rich Gulf countries. It is a tradition of the subcontinent to pay political demonstrators a daily allowance. Since the streets of most Pakistani cities are thronged with the jobless, it is easy for a richly endowed party to mobilize people and organize mass demonstrations. The Jama'at-e Islami, moreover, has the largest number of professional agitators and provides them with full- time employment. All along the Jama'at has concentrated its efforts on getting a foothold in the military and intelligence services. In the course of almost half a century, it has gained influence and ultimately come to dominate the ISI and, thereby, the country.
One of its sympathizers, General Zia, ruled Pakistan with an iron fist. During that period Jihadists were placed in key positions in such a way as to make any government not of their choice collapse. In the words of Professor Sayyid Fatimi, the country's foremost historian and theologian, "Pakistan is a minefield just as much as Afghanistan. In Afghanistan it is the mines dropped by the Russians, in Pakistan it is the mines planted by the ISI." The reference is to the Jihadists placed in positions of power during Zia's rule, many of whom are not known to be Jihadists.
For most of the time since independence, Pakistan has been under military governments. The generals have made it abundantly clear that even civilian governments will be subjected to some kind of control by the military, in a manner analogous to Turkey. The Turkish example has been the subject of open discussions for at least three decades.
The situations in the countries are quite dissimilar, however. In Turkey, elections tend to yield results favorable to the Islamists, whose designs are then thwarted by secularist generals. In Pakistan, elections tend to result in landslide victories for secularist parties, which Islamist generals then seek to crush.
In the period prior to the Jihadist supremacy, several former governments arrested leaders of the Jama'at-e Islami and prepared to ban it as a terrorist group. In 1973, when this happened last, an oil- rich Arab state prevailed upon Islamabad not to touch the party. The Jama'at may not be on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, but it is the godfather of several groups listed as terrorist by the U.S. government. In October 2000, the Jama'at held an international convention in a suburb of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
The convention was attended by Rached Ghannouchi, the fugitive head of Tunisia's terrorist organization Ennahda. Because of the group's involvement in terrorism, Ghannouchi has been barred from entering the United States.
The convention also was addressed by Syed Salahuddin, "supreme commander" of Hizbu-l-Mujahidin, which is but another name for one of the groups listed as terrorist by the State Department. Hizbu-l- Mujahidin's specialty is killing Hindu villagers in isolated regions of Kashmir, a policy deeply resented by the victims' Muslim neighbors. Qazi Husain Ahmad, the Jama'at's head, made Salahuddin the hero of the Islamabad convention. Qazi (his family name) has argued repeatedly for retaliation against Americans if the United States takes any action against Usama Bin Laden. An Arabic book written and published by Bin Laden's partisans mentions that as early as 1980 he used to frequent Qazi's headquarters in Lahore, Pakistan, to make donations to the Jama'at.
As far as Islamist terrorism is concerned, past governments of Pakistan have substantiated it abundantly. The present government in Islamabad may find it difficult to prove that all previous investigations were wrong and that the jihad proclaimed by the Jama'at and its various regional offshoots is nothing but moral rearmament. The Jama'at takes pride in its terrorist activities and is always keen on providing hard evidence to bolster its image as a party of hard-liners. In Canada and the United States its branches are called ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America) and hold annual conventions attended by Qazi Husain Ahmad and Ghulam Azam, the party's chief in Bangladesh. In 1999 and 2000 the convention took place in Baltimore.
Addressing another group meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Qazi spoke of an "imperialist plot" to turn Kashmir into a military base from which to control all of Asia (because Kashmir is known as the "roof of the world"). Former army chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, writing in Impact International, the group's monthly magazine, elaborated on this alleged U.S. plan to take hold of Kashmir. The Message, ICNA's quarterly magazine, published from New York, even ran a campaign to mobilize support for the Khartoum regime, caring little for the fact that Sudan figures on the list of terrorist states. For the Jama'at and its supporters in the United States, Sudan is a model state.
The fact that the party is strongly represented among Pakistani Americans is due to a well-organized immigration strategy. To have strong communities in Canada and the United States is seen as economically and politically beneficial. During the Zia dictatorship, the Jama'at's student body used to terrorize the universities. Opponents would be removed from the university, incarcerated, or sometimes killed. Party members would get their degrees easily, and with a doctorate they would have few difficulties getting a visa for Canada or the United States. Once in America they would be looked after by the party's efficient network, which would help them on to quick green cards.
In addition to ICNA they founded ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) as a front organization, with a majority of its Muslim members not knowing what game was being played. While originally funded from abroad, these Islamist organizations in America are now an important source of income for the party back home. Presenting themselves to the authorities as representatives of the Muslim community at large, these Jama'at fronts aspire to become influential Islamist lobbies in Washington.
Mahmud Ahmad Ghazi, director of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, is an adviser to Pakistan's chief executive, General Musharraf. Ghazi personifies Islamist restrictions on the general's freedom of movement. Fluent not only in Urdu and English but in Arabic and French, Ghazi has been working for the ISI since student days, when he used to write reports on his teachers. Interviewed in a BBC film on the honor killing of women, in which Pakistan has established a sad record, Ghazi coldly defended those feudal practices as Islamic, an opinion Islamic scholars all over the world mostly dispute. Ghazi has been a guest speaker at meetings of extremist organizations in the United States.
PARALLELS TO NORTH KOREA
While North Korea is taking first steps to shed its image as a rogue state and reintegrate itself into the world community, Pakistan seems to be moving in the opposite direction. There are a number of parallels between these two states, which have, moreover, cooperated in weapons production. Both border on China and move in the Chinese orbit, North Korea by force of geography and history, Pakistan by choice (though geography plays an important role too).
China, along with North Korea, has lent a helping hand to Pakistan's production of missiles and other arms, successfully offsetting Russian- aided Indian arms production. Pakistan's Ghauri missile is reported to be superior to India's Pritvit. According to British specialists, even the first test explosion of Pakistan's nuclear bomb in 1998 was more successful than the preceding Indian one.
Though largely isolated for decades, North Korea was able to obtain U.S. weapons technology via Yugoslavia. Washington did not allow American arms producers to export their technology to "rogue" states such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. Several companies, however, found a way to circumvent this prohibition by having weapons produced in Yugoslavia, where plenty of cheap skilled labor was available. Selling such Yugoslav weapons (built with American licenses) to the rogue states was easy and profitable, because of Yugoslavia's prestige as a leader of the so-called nonaligned movement. A key person in this circumvention business was Slobodan Milosevic, then a banker in the United States. This was the beginning of his career, which led him to become president of Yugoslavia.
In a similar pattern, Pakistanis have the ability to reproduce Chinese and Korean weapons and occasionally to improve on them. They have an abundance of engineers and a tradition of reproducing weapons. At the same time they have Arab customers waiting in line. Yugoslavia's prestige as a leader of nonalignment is matched by Pakistan's prestige as a power in the Muslim world. For decades Islamabad sought in vain to achieve this position. The breakthrough came with the successful nuclear test, which most Arab states hailed as a triumph of all Muslims.
The rulers in Islamabad would probably scoff at a comparison with North Korea, for three main reasons:
* First, Pakistan has a population of nearly 150 million, compared to North Korea's 23 million.
* Second, the North Korean system is based on an ideology that has failed and is everywhere on its way out. By contrast, Jihadism is fresh and on the rise in several parts of the world.
* Third and most important, Pakistanis believe themselves to have won a war against a superpower. The reference is to the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. In the Muslim world, it is a widespread belief that the defeat in Afghanistan brought about the fall of the Soviet empire. The ISI knows better than anybody else that this was not just an Afghan but a Pakistani feat. The CIA supplied the weapons to the ISI, which then distributed them to Afghans who were trained in Pakistan and often led into combat by Pakistani officers.
Islamists all over are in the habit of saying that they have finished off one superpower, so why not bring the other (and only remaining) one down, too? Afghanistan-based Saudi terrorist Usama Bin Laden and his friends have sometimes said that the fight against the United States is easier than the one against the USSR. The Russians, they say, were poor fighters, and the Americans are of an even-lesser caliber. The Islamists claim to base this evaluation on their experience with U.S. troops in Somalia.
ISI officers smile contemptuously at such boastful declarations by Arab Islamists. Pakistanis live with the self-assurance that they were the ones who made Soviet might crumble. They may not be planning to strike at the United States, but neither are they impressed by threats from Washington. During the 1991 Gulf War, some Pakistani troops were sent to shore up Saudi Arabia, a longtime friend. (In the 1980s two divisions of Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for several years, while the strength of other Pakistani military personnel in the kingdom was almost that of another division.) Aslam Beg, Pakistan's then commander in chief, said, however, that he did so only in compliance with his government's orders. If it were up to him, he would have sent the troops to Iraq to support Saddam Hussein. Later he led the protest against U.S. missile strikes at Bin Laden's hideouts in Afghanistan, claiming that two of the missiles fell on Pakistani territory and killed several citizens. Together with former ISI chief Hamid Gul, General Beg headed a demonstration in support of Bin Laden, warning the United States against taking any action against the Saudi fugitive.
It would be a mistake to equate such Pakistani defiance with Arab rhetoric or Iranian drama. Pakistanis not only differ in mentality from their Middle Eastern neighbors but are also ahead in terms of industrial development.
PROSPECTS: PAKISTAN ON THE FRONTLINE
A strong section of Pakistan's educated class is in favor of reorientating the country's foreign policy. Pakistani academicians abroad even founded an association opposing nuclear armament, though for the common man the "Islamic bomb" is a sacred cow.
Reorientation means primarily a mending of fences with India. In other words, Islamabad should abandon its irredentism in Kashmir and adventurism in Afghanistan, accept the role as a junior partner in relations with India, and seek to make the best of the situation. Such a limited role would allow the country to spend less on the military and use the money on education and economy.
This kind of reasoning could be heard in the early seventies. Pakistanis were then extremely critical of military rule, which they regarded as the root cause of their misfortunes. A generation later many ask, what is wrong with this country, which only goes from bad to worse? There is a strong sense of despondency among Pakistan's elite, and that despondency, too, is now in its thirties.
From Pakistan's military ruler, General Musharraf, come conflicting signals. The Jihadists watch him closely and tell him every day what they expect him to do and what not: intensify fighting in Kashmir, and do not force the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden!
Musharraf rose in the Islamist machinery without being a party man, so everybody worries that he may be won over by the other side. The big question is whether he himself realizes what a definite choice between two options he has to make. If he continues the confrontation with India, using an international legion of "Jihadists" in Kashmir, there will be no improvement of relations with the United States and Europe. And the chances of success are less than dim, even if some Pakistani rockets do function better than the Indian ones, which is not sure. The same applies to the continuation of the infamous blasphemy law, used to terrorize the Christian minority, and the public justification of "honor killings" of women as "Islamic." With such barbarity, which is appalling to most Muslims on religious grounds, Pakistan cannot gain acceptance.
Musharraf's Jihadist controllers rebuked him for having praised Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Ataturk consolidated his rump state by forswearing Turkish expansionism and irredentism, and seeking to ameliorate relations with all neighbors. To this end he outlawed the militant Islamic Movement. Given the choice, more Pakistanis would advise Musharraf to follow the course of Ataturk rather than that of Bin Laden and his cohorts in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Once Pakistanis concentrate on education and the economy instead of developing weapons and exporting insurgencies, the potentially rich country cannot fail to gain the international recognition that is its due.
The clue to the complexity of Pakistan's situation is provided by the Indian press, which is the best informed and also most perceptive as far as its problematic neighbor is concerned. Indian government propaganda and some of the media have presented images of Pakistan that are diametrically opposed to one another. The Indians have done so according to occasion, and in either case they have been right. In general, they present Pakistan as a hotbed of Jihadism. Addressing the United States and Russia, they warn of Pakistan as a terrorist menace, which is difficult to dispute. Addressing Iran, however, they have sometimes portrayed Pakistan as an outpost of Western anti-Islamism, and that portrayal is not wrong either. The Bhuttos, father (r. 1971-- 77) and daughter, did not really adopt such an anti-Islamist line; still, there was a potential for that, inasmuch as strong currents within their party, the PPP, were firmly secularist and wanted the country to adopt Kemalist policies. This tendency used to be strong in the military and continues to have more public backing than Jihadism.
Shortly before his downfall, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made a pathetic attempt to get out of the Jihadist spiderweb and change his country's foreign policy drastically. The foolhardy attempt was bound to fail because he lacked both military credentials and enough backing among the higher echelons of the armed forces. Besides, it is doubtful that the full portent of his last-minute attempt was understood in Washington. Khawaja Ziauddin Butt, just appointed by the prime minister as the new head of the ISI, was dispatched to Washington with the request for help in the reorientation. Instead of being a country that ought to be on the State Department's list of terrorist states, Pakistan offered itself for the opposite role, as a frontline state in the fight against Jihadism. There was something suicidal about this desperate attempt, and Sharif and his partisans almost lost their lives because of it. Whatever was held against them--corruption, the retreat from Kashmir and so forth--was eyewash. The real sin was to have attempted a radical reorientation of Pakistan's policies and to have joined the anti-Jihadist camp.
Because of these extremely divergent tendencies, which are mutually exclusive and allow no compromise, Pakistan has never found the consensus required for healthy nation-building. For various reasons, this dispute has not escalated into open civil war, but it has kept the country engulfed in chaos and constant violence. Recently this turmoil has reached such proportions that some Pakistanis have begun to wish for an all-out civil war to resolve the issue. The situation could not be more volatile.n
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst;jsessionid=G...=o&d=5002386554
by Khalid Duran
Khalid Duran, the publisher of Trans Islam Magazine in Washington, D.C., has written frequently for The World & I on Islam and the Arab world.
When the British granted independence to their colonial empire in India in 1947, the Muslim-majority areas united as a new state separate from India, calling it Pakistan, which means "Country of the Pure." At that time it consisted of East and West Pakistan, separated by six thousand miles of Indian territory.
Since its creation Pakistan has rarely been given the importance due to a nation of its size, and Pakistanis are eminently conscious of being underrated. Although the illiteracy rate is still more than 70 percent, the country has an admirable elite, especially in the natural sciences. At one time Pakistan topped the list of the manpower-exporting countries, and in the United States the number of immigrant medical doctors born in Pakistan is second only to those from rival India. A European diplomat posted in Ankara after four years in Islamabad was wonderstruck to note that Turkey, which is counted as European, was in some respects still less developed than Pakistan. And yet, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, each having less than half of Pakistan's 150 million population, are paid double the attention that it is normally given.
Pakistan's military believes in a "next round," or fourth war, with India. The fight is over the Himalayan state of Kashmir, the major portion of which is held by India but claimed by Pakistan, because Kashmir's population is at least 80 percent Muslim. There is some resemblance here to North Korea's policy over half a century, which was geared toward "liberating" South Korea. Pakistan's irredentism with regard to Kashmir is even a little older.
For Pakistanis, it is hard to accept their role as India's smaller neighbor. In 1971 they lost East Pakistan, which became the independent state of Bangladesh, with the help of India. Ever since, many in the military establishment are all the more determined to get hold of Kashmir. "What was taken from us in the east [Bangladesh] we must take from India in the west [Kashmir]," they argue.
The conflict with India has added to the profound nationalism of many Pakistanis. They envision a state consisting of Pakistan plus Kashmir and Afghanistan. This large Muslim power would seek close affiliation with its neighbors to the north, the former Soviet republics Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan-- considered to be a vast market for Pakistani products.
In the 1950s Pakistanis took pride in being considered America's closest friend in the region. This policy was conceived at a time when India was allied with the Soviet Union. For some time Washington was closer to the Beijing-Islamabad axis than it was to the counter Delhi- Moscow axis. In 1965 India and Pakistan fought a war that ended in a draw. The Pakistanis were deeply disappointed by U.S. neutrality in the conflict. Since the Korean War their country had been a close ally of the United States, to the extent that American spy planes monitoring the Soviet Union used to take off from a base in Pakistan. At one time Moscow threatened Islamabad with nuclear retaliation if it did not stop lending itself to Washington's anti-Soviet designs. Because Washington did not support Islamabad's claim on Kashmir and remained a neutral spectator in the 1965 war, Islamabad moved closer to Beijing.
In the nineties India and the United States improved their relations, leaving Pakistan in the uncomfortable position of having to rely even more on China. Attempts by former Pakistani governments to develop closer ties to Arabia did not yield much. Traditionally, Pakistan has been keen on brotherly ties with Iran and Turkey. Relations with Iran, however, have turned sour, because Tehran feels that Afghanistan should be a vassal of Iran rather than of Pakistan. Pakistan, always somewhat isolated, has rarely been as alone as it is at present. Today many Pakistanis relish being among the foremost opponents of U.S. policies.
The ruling circle, especially the directors of the powerful military intelligence service (ISI), believe that their country can go it alone. They bank on growing hostility between America and China.
Military cooperation between Islamabad and Beijing has now become one of the most lasting alliances in the world. Initially, the China/Pakistan axis was meant to oppose the close alliance between India and the Soviet Union. Now it counterbalances the growing ties between India and the United States as well as the continuing Russia/India axis.
FROM AFGHANISTAN TO KASHMIR
From the start of the Afghan conflict, Islamabad intended to gain control of its neighbor. The Pakistani military had been in need of "strategic depth," which means a larger territory to keep its air force out of reach of an Indian surprise attack. In former days the shah of Iran had permitted the Pakistanis to station their warplanes on his territory. Now Afghanistan provides the strategic depth.
Recent developments in Afghanistan signal a victory of the dynamic ISI. The fundamentalist movement of the Taliban is basically Islamabad's creation. The core of the Taliban are Afghan war orphans brought up in Pakistani refugee camps. Directed by Pakistani officers and reinforced by no less than twenty thousand volunteers from Pakistan, the Taliban has gained control of 95 percent of Afghan territory. This was a remarkable feat in view of the massive support that its opponents received from Iran, India, and Russia (via Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), including huge supplies of weapons by means of airlifts. Iran almost went to war with the Taliban, which might have escalated into a war with Pakistan, but then Tehran backed off.
Pakistan's occupation of mountain ranges in Indian-held Kashmir in 1999 was a military masterpiece. Had not the government of then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif given in to U.S. pressure and ordered a retreat, some of those Himalayan mountaintops might still be held by infiltrators from Pakistan. Most Pakistanis were furious that the United States took India's side, but they were also proud of having shown what their military can do.
After the retreat, Sharif was deposed in a military coup. The new strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has little independence vis-a-vis his colleagues from the ISI. Although not publicly admitted, the Musharraf government is an indirect continuation of the Islamist military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq (r. 1977--1988). Musharraf and the leading ISI officers made their careers during that period.
IDEOLOGY: FROM ISLAMISM TO JIHADISM
A decisive factor in North Korea's perseverance in isolation is its adherence to what might be termed "national communism," centered on what it calls the principle of juche (self-reliance), administered by an all-pervasive dictatorship.
The Islamists, who have dominated Pakistan, directly or indirectly, since 1977, talk as much about self-reliance as the North Koreans do, but they call their miracle principle jihad. Whenever Westerners translate jihad as "holy war" all hell breaks loose, as if this were the most malicious distortion with the purpose of defaming Islam. And yet, the way they themselves define jihad in some of their writings and speeches makes it appear the very essence of militant supremacism. But the privilege of understanding jihad that way is reserved for themselves; others should not dare define it other than as a noble effort to change the world for the better.
Pakistan experimented alternately with democracy and military rule, and the ideological situation remains confusing and appears contradictory. The country has only gradually veered toward the new ideology of Islamism (which is not to be confused with the old religion of Islam). First some militants began to call themselves Islamists rather than Muslims, and now a new brand of even more radical militants has taken another step--from Islamism to Jihadism. They talk about jihad as if this were their new religion, mentioning it the way other Muslims mention Islam or God. The Pakistani press has come to speak of them as "Jihadists," signaling an escalation of extremism.
In fair and free elections the Islamists/Jihadists have invariably been trounced, barely obtaining 5 percent of the vote. Their influence on Pakistani politics, however, has always been disproportionately high, because practically all their activists and sympathizers belong to the educated urban middle class. The rural population still constitutes almost 70 percent.
Jama'at-e Islami, the major Jihadist organization, is one of the smallest parties in the country, but it is by far the richest, thanks to generous support from oil-rich Gulf countries. It is a tradition of the subcontinent to pay political demonstrators a daily allowance. Since the streets of most Pakistani cities are thronged with the jobless, it is easy for a richly endowed party to mobilize people and organize mass demonstrations. The Jama'at-e Islami, moreover, has the largest number of professional agitators and provides them with full- time employment. All along the Jama'at has concentrated its efforts on getting a foothold in the military and intelligence services. In the course of almost half a century, it has gained influence and ultimately come to dominate the ISI and, thereby, the country.
One of its sympathizers, General Zia, ruled Pakistan with an iron fist. During that period Jihadists were placed in key positions in such a way as to make any government not of their choice collapse. In the words of Professor Sayyid Fatimi, the country's foremost historian and theologian, "Pakistan is a minefield just as much as Afghanistan. In Afghanistan it is the mines dropped by the Russians, in Pakistan it is the mines planted by the ISI." The reference is to the Jihadists placed in positions of power during Zia's rule, many of whom are not known to be Jihadists.
For most of the time since independence, Pakistan has been under military governments. The generals have made it abundantly clear that even civilian governments will be subjected to some kind of control by the military, in a manner analogous to Turkey. The Turkish example has been the subject of open discussions for at least three decades.
The situations in the countries are quite dissimilar, however. In Turkey, elections tend to yield results favorable to the Islamists, whose designs are then thwarted by secularist generals. In Pakistan, elections tend to result in landslide victories for secularist parties, which Islamist generals then seek to crush.
In the period prior to the Jihadist supremacy, several former governments arrested leaders of the Jama'at-e Islami and prepared to ban it as a terrorist group. In 1973, when this happened last, an oil- rich Arab state prevailed upon Islamabad not to touch the party. The Jama'at may not be on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, but it is the godfather of several groups listed as terrorist by the U.S. government. In October 2000, the Jama'at held an international convention in a suburb of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
The convention was attended by Rached Ghannouchi, the fugitive head of Tunisia's terrorist organization Ennahda. Because of the group's involvement in terrorism, Ghannouchi has been barred from entering the United States.
The convention also was addressed by Syed Salahuddin, "supreme commander" of Hizbu-l-Mujahidin, which is but another name for one of the groups listed as terrorist by the State Department. Hizbu-l- Mujahidin's specialty is killing Hindu villagers in isolated regions of Kashmir, a policy deeply resented by the victims' Muslim neighbors. Qazi Husain Ahmad, the Jama'at's head, made Salahuddin the hero of the Islamabad convention. Qazi (his family name) has argued repeatedly for retaliation against Americans if the United States takes any action against Usama Bin Laden. An Arabic book written and published by Bin Laden's partisans mentions that as early as 1980 he used to frequent Qazi's headquarters in Lahore, Pakistan, to make donations to the Jama'at.
As far as Islamist terrorism is concerned, past governments of Pakistan have substantiated it abundantly. The present government in Islamabad may find it difficult to prove that all previous investigations were wrong and that the jihad proclaimed by the Jama'at and its various regional offshoots is nothing but moral rearmament. The Jama'at takes pride in its terrorist activities and is always keen on providing hard evidence to bolster its image as a party of hard-liners. In Canada and the United States its branches are called ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America) and hold annual conventions attended by Qazi Husain Ahmad and Ghulam Azam, the party's chief in Bangladesh. In 1999 and 2000 the convention took place in Baltimore.
Addressing another group meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Qazi spoke of an "imperialist plot" to turn Kashmir into a military base from which to control all of Asia (because Kashmir is known as the "roof of the world"). Former army chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, writing in Impact International, the group's monthly magazine, elaborated on this alleged U.S. plan to take hold of Kashmir. The Message, ICNA's quarterly magazine, published from New York, even ran a campaign to mobilize support for the Khartoum regime, caring little for the fact that Sudan figures on the list of terrorist states. For the Jama'at and its supporters in the United States, Sudan is a model state.
The fact that the party is strongly represented among Pakistani Americans is due to a well-organized immigration strategy. To have strong communities in Canada and the United States is seen as economically and politically beneficial. During the Zia dictatorship, the Jama'at's student body used to terrorize the universities. Opponents would be removed from the university, incarcerated, or sometimes killed. Party members would get their degrees easily, and with a doctorate they would have few difficulties getting a visa for Canada or the United States. Once in America they would be looked after by the party's efficient network, which would help them on to quick green cards.
In addition to ICNA they founded ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) as a front organization, with a majority of its Muslim members not knowing what game was being played. While originally funded from abroad, these Islamist organizations in America are now an important source of income for the party back home. Presenting themselves to the authorities as representatives of the Muslim community at large, these Jama'at fronts aspire to become influential Islamist lobbies in Washington.
Mahmud Ahmad Ghazi, director of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, is an adviser to Pakistan's chief executive, General Musharraf. Ghazi personifies Islamist restrictions on the general's freedom of movement. Fluent not only in Urdu and English but in Arabic and French, Ghazi has been working for the ISI since student days, when he used to write reports on his teachers. Interviewed in a BBC film on the honor killing of women, in which Pakistan has established a sad record, Ghazi coldly defended those feudal practices as Islamic, an opinion Islamic scholars all over the world mostly dispute. Ghazi has been a guest speaker at meetings of extremist organizations in the United States.
PARALLELS TO NORTH KOREA
While North Korea is taking first steps to shed its image as a rogue state and reintegrate itself into the world community, Pakistan seems to be moving in the opposite direction. There are a number of parallels between these two states, which have, moreover, cooperated in weapons production. Both border on China and move in the Chinese orbit, North Korea by force of geography and history, Pakistan by choice (though geography plays an important role too).
China, along with North Korea, has lent a helping hand to Pakistan's production of missiles and other arms, successfully offsetting Russian- aided Indian arms production. Pakistan's Ghauri missile is reported to be superior to India's Pritvit. According to British specialists, even the first test explosion of Pakistan's nuclear bomb in 1998 was more successful than the preceding Indian one.
Though largely isolated for decades, North Korea was able to obtain U.S. weapons technology via Yugoslavia. Washington did not allow American arms producers to export their technology to "rogue" states such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. Several companies, however, found a way to circumvent this prohibition by having weapons produced in Yugoslavia, where plenty of cheap skilled labor was available. Selling such Yugoslav weapons (built with American licenses) to the rogue states was easy and profitable, because of Yugoslavia's prestige as a leader of the so-called nonaligned movement. A key person in this circumvention business was Slobodan Milosevic, then a banker in the United States. This was the beginning of his career, which led him to become president of Yugoslavia.
In a similar pattern, Pakistanis have the ability to reproduce Chinese and Korean weapons and occasionally to improve on them. They have an abundance of engineers and a tradition of reproducing weapons. At the same time they have Arab customers waiting in line. Yugoslavia's prestige as a leader of nonalignment is matched by Pakistan's prestige as a power in the Muslim world. For decades Islamabad sought in vain to achieve this position. The breakthrough came with the successful nuclear test, which most Arab states hailed as a triumph of all Muslims.
The rulers in Islamabad would probably scoff at a comparison with North Korea, for three main reasons:
* First, Pakistan has a population of nearly 150 million, compared to North Korea's 23 million.
* Second, the North Korean system is based on an ideology that has failed and is everywhere on its way out. By contrast, Jihadism is fresh and on the rise in several parts of the world.
* Third and most important, Pakistanis believe themselves to have won a war against a superpower. The reference is to the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. In the Muslim world, it is a widespread belief that the defeat in Afghanistan brought about the fall of the Soviet empire. The ISI knows better than anybody else that this was not just an Afghan but a Pakistani feat. The CIA supplied the weapons to the ISI, which then distributed them to Afghans who were trained in Pakistan and often led into combat by Pakistani officers.
Islamists all over are in the habit of saying that they have finished off one superpower, so why not bring the other (and only remaining) one down, too? Afghanistan-based Saudi terrorist Usama Bin Laden and his friends have sometimes said that the fight against the United States is easier than the one against the USSR. The Russians, they say, were poor fighters, and the Americans are of an even-lesser caliber. The Islamists claim to base this evaluation on their experience with U.S. troops in Somalia.
ISI officers smile contemptuously at such boastful declarations by Arab Islamists. Pakistanis live with the self-assurance that they were the ones who made Soviet might crumble. They may not be planning to strike at the United States, but neither are they impressed by threats from Washington. During the 1991 Gulf War, some Pakistani troops were sent to shore up Saudi Arabia, a longtime friend. (In the 1980s two divisions of Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for several years, while the strength of other Pakistani military personnel in the kingdom was almost that of another division.) Aslam Beg, Pakistan's then commander in chief, said, however, that he did so only in compliance with his government's orders. If it were up to him, he would have sent the troops to Iraq to support Saddam Hussein. Later he led the protest against U.S. missile strikes at Bin Laden's hideouts in Afghanistan, claiming that two of the missiles fell on Pakistani territory and killed several citizens. Together with former ISI chief Hamid Gul, General Beg headed a demonstration in support of Bin Laden, warning the United States against taking any action against the Saudi fugitive.
It would be a mistake to equate such Pakistani defiance with Arab rhetoric or Iranian drama. Pakistanis not only differ in mentality from their Middle Eastern neighbors but are also ahead in terms of industrial development.
PROSPECTS: PAKISTAN ON THE FRONTLINE
A strong section of Pakistan's educated class is in favor of reorientating the country's foreign policy. Pakistani academicians abroad even founded an association opposing nuclear armament, though for the common man the "Islamic bomb" is a sacred cow.
Reorientation means primarily a mending of fences with India. In other words, Islamabad should abandon its irredentism in Kashmir and adventurism in Afghanistan, accept the role as a junior partner in relations with India, and seek to make the best of the situation. Such a limited role would allow the country to spend less on the military and use the money on education and economy.
This kind of reasoning could be heard in the early seventies. Pakistanis were then extremely critical of military rule, which they regarded as the root cause of their misfortunes. A generation later many ask, what is wrong with this country, which only goes from bad to worse? There is a strong sense of despondency among Pakistan's elite, and that despondency, too, is now in its thirties.
From Pakistan's military ruler, General Musharraf, come conflicting signals. The Jihadists watch him closely and tell him every day what they expect him to do and what not: intensify fighting in Kashmir, and do not force the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden!
Musharraf rose in the Islamist machinery without being a party man, so everybody worries that he may be won over by the other side. The big question is whether he himself realizes what a definite choice between two options he has to make. If he continues the confrontation with India, using an international legion of "Jihadists" in Kashmir, there will be no improvement of relations with the United States and Europe. And the chances of success are less than dim, even if some Pakistani rockets do function better than the Indian ones, which is not sure. The same applies to the continuation of the infamous blasphemy law, used to terrorize the Christian minority, and the public justification of "honor killings" of women as "Islamic." With such barbarity, which is appalling to most Muslims on religious grounds, Pakistan cannot gain acceptance.
Musharraf's Jihadist controllers rebuked him for having praised Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Ataturk consolidated his rump state by forswearing Turkish expansionism and irredentism, and seeking to ameliorate relations with all neighbors. To this end he outlawed the militant Islamic Movement. Given the choice, more Pakistanis would advise Musharraf to follow the course of Ataturk rather than that of Bin Laden and his cohorts in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Once Pakistanis concentrate on education and the economy instead of developing weapons and exporting insurgencies, the potentially rich country cannot fail to gain the international recognition that is its due.
The clue to the complexity of Pakistan's situation is provided by the Indian press, which is the best informed and also most perceptive as far as its problematic neighbor is concerned. Indian government propaganda and some of the media have presented images of Pakistan that are diametrically opposed to one another. The Indians have done so according to occasion, and in either case they have been right. In general, they present Pakistan as a hotbed of Jihadism. Addressing the United States and Russia, they warn of Pakistan as a terrorist menace, which is difficult to dispute. Addressing Iran, however, they have sometimes portrayed Pakistan as an outpost of Western anti-Islamism, and that portrayal is not wrong either. The Bhuttos, father (r. 1971-- 77) and daughter, did not really adopt such an anti-Islamist line; still, there was a potential for that, inasmuch as strong currents within their party, the PPP, were firmly secularist and wanted the country to adopt Kemalist policies. This tendency used to be strong in the military and continues to have more public backing than Jihadism.
Shortly before his downfall, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made a pathetic attempt to get out of the Jihadist spiderweb and change his country's foreign policy drastically. The foolhardy attempt was bound to fail because he lacked both military credentials and enough backing among the higher echelons of the armed forces. Besides, it is doubtful that the full portent of his last-minute attempt was understood in Washington. Khawaja Ziauddin Butt, just appointed by the prime minister as the new head of the ISI, was dispatched to Washington with the request for help in the reorientation. Instead of being a country that ought to be on the State Department's list of terrorist states, Pakistan offered itself for the opposite role, as a frontline state in the fight against Jihadism. There was something suicidal about this desperate attempt, and Sharif and his partisans almost lost their lives because of it. Whatever was held against them--corruption, the retreat from Kashmir and so forth--was eyewash. The real sin was to have attempted a radical reorientation of Pakistan's policies and to have joined the anti-Jihadist camp.
Because of these extremely divergent tendencies, which are mutually exclusive and allow no compromise, Pakistan has never found the consensus required for healthy nation-building. For various reasons, this dispute has not escalated into open civil war, but it has kept the country engulfed in chaos and constant violence. Recently this turmoil has reached such proportions that some Pakistanis have begun to wish for an all-out civil war to resolve the issue. The situation could not be more volatile.n