File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0109, message 289


Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 00:28:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: An article by Kamran Asdar Ali


MERIP Press Information Note 69

Pakistan's Dilemma

Kamran Asdar Ali

September 19, 2001

(Kamran Asdar Ali teaches anthropology and Middle East
studies at the University of Texas-Austin.)

Pakistani media reports indicate that on the evening
of September 14 the president, General Pervez
Musharraf, met with his cabinet and national security
team in a marathon session lasting until the early
hours of the next morning. The task at hand was to
decide if the Pakistani government should accede to
the demands made by the United States in the aftermath

of the September 11 tragedies, demands related to the
still-emerging US policy toward Afghanistan, accused
of harboring prime suspect Usama bin Laden. 

The US request came in the form of a virtual threat.
Media reports tell us that the Pakistani government
was asked to restrict the movements of goods 
and supplies to Afghanistan, seize the assets of
Afghan/Taliban leaders, provide logistical support to
the US armed forces along with the use of Pakistani
airspace if the need arises and, most importantly,
share up-to-date intelligence on bin Laden and his
followers in Afghanistan.

THE AFGHAN PROBLEM

In the late 1970s, another Pakistani general, Zia ul
Haq, must have convened a meeting similar to
Musharraf's. Then, the military junta was asked to 
play a crucial role in support of the US-financed
resistance to the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan.
That decision was undoubtedly an easier one for 
the dictator Zia ul Haq and his advisors. The general
had been in power for two years, and his religiously
conservative regime was already unpopular at home
and abroad. Supporting the US would grant his
government badly needed legitimacy on the world stage.
Zia ul Haq also anticipated a US aid package
to help the Pakistani state address its perpetual
social and economic problems.

To the skeptical Pakistani population, the military
regime portrayed its intervention in Afghan affairs as
humanitarian and political assistance to
fellow Muslims. But the junta's decision to play ball
with the US was also taken for geostrategic reasons.
Since Pakistan's indeendence in 1947, relations
between Afghanistan and Pakistan had been strained,
due to boundary disputes and the feared spillage of
Pashtun nationalism across the border. Afghan rulers
and elements of Pakistan's Pashtun population in 
the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) bordering
Afghanistan periodically questioned the artificial
line that the British had drawn to divide a culturally
and ethnically continuous area into parts of British
India and Afghanistan in the mid- nineteenth century.
On occasion Afghanistan presented arguments for a
greater Pashtun state to include parts of Pakistan's
northern territory.

Hence, with openly hostile India on their eastern
flank, Pakistani military strategists have also
regarded their not-so-friendly western neighbor 
with anxiety. This state of affairs was aggravated by
the communist-led coup in Afghanistan in 1978, and the
subsequent Soviet invasion of that country in
the winter of 1979. The US-backed resistance to the
Afghan regime guaranteed, at least in the minds of the
Pakistani military leaders, a somewhat concrete
resolution of their Afghan problem.

AFGHAN WAR'S IMPACT

The mass displacement of the Afghan population, the
destruction of their homes and villages and the loss
of 1.5 million Afghan lives during that country's long
civil war has somehow been erased from the
consciousness of the Western media. Nor do many
outside Pakistan remember the Afghan war's
impact on Pakistani civil, cultural and political
life.

The Pakistani military used the infusion of
international aid to strengthen its Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate (ISI), which became the
principal liaison between US intelligence agencies and
the varied factions of the Afghan resistance movement
known as the mujahideen. The ISI assumed a
lead role in suppressing democratic dissent within
Pakistan. With well over 90,000 men under its aegis,
the ISI remains an independent power base 
within Pakistan's government structure. There are no
consitutional checks and balances on its operations.
Its leadership consists of highly motivated and,
in most cases, religiously zealous officers who are
concerned with safeguarding what they consider to be
the spatial and ideological boundaries
of the Pakistani state. Hence, the ISI has been
directly or indirectly involved in all major domestic
and international decisions made by successive
military and civilian governments over the last two
decades.

On the political level, the economic and development
aid helped Zia ul Haq to consolidate his plan for
Islamization of the country. Some of the legacies of
this era are evidentiary laws based on the Islamic
sharia, the creation of sharia courts, laws that
discriminate against minorities and women and the
dreaded blasphemy laws which continue to restrict the 
civil and political rights of Pakistani citizens.
Development funds were also used to establish and
maintain madrassas (religious schools) in different 
parts of the country. Zia ul Haq and his junta
considered the students and graduates of these schools
the foot soldiers who would support the dictator
as he pressed ahead with his agenda to build an
Islamic polity and a theocratic state. Another legacy
of the war was the unprecedented infiltration of
Pakistani society by drugs and arms. Profits from drug

and weapons trafficking helped finance the covert war
in Afghanistan, while funneling enormous wealth to a
section of the Pakistani military brass.

ISI'S DAMPENED EXCITEMENT

But the triumph of the Afghan resistance forces in
1992 did not result in what the Pakistani military had
always desired: a stable Afghanistan following the
dictates of Islamabad. With the Cold War already a
fading memory, the US and other Western countries
virtually abandoned the victorious mujahideen, making
only vague promises of development aid to rebuild
war-ravished Afghanistan. In subsequent years,
infighting among the new Afghan leadership -- and
their growing independence from the ISI -- led
Pakistan to intensify its involvement in the affairs
of this struggling
state. The Taliban, a radical faction of madrassa
students under the guidance of Mullah Mohammed Omar of
Kandahar, were bankrolled by the Pakistani military on
their path to victory in 1995-96.

>From the perspective of the generals in Islamabad, the
Taliban's loyalty to and dependence on them, at least,
would guarantee a safer and less volatile
western border. In addition, the Pakistanis were
interested in secure routes to the landlocked Central
Asian states. A stable Taliban-led Afghanistan
would contribute to a larger geopolitical strategy
wherein Pakistan, the US and international petroleum
companies envisioned multiple pipelines transporting
oil and natural gas from the mineral-rich Central
Asian
countries to Pakistani ports on the Persian Gulf. But
the strongly independent and unpredictable nature of
the Taliban regime, and the continuing war in northern
Afghanistan, have over the last two few years
dampened the initial excitement that these schemes had
generated in Pakistan and elsewhere.

ZIA UL HAQ'S GHOST

More than a decade after his death in an airplane
explosion, Zia ul Haq's ghost lingers on, as Pakistani
cultural life shifts toward embracing orthodox Islamic
values in both public and private spaces. Further, as 
the state has forsaken the task of providing
systematic educational and employment opportunites to
its constituents, the madrassa system has become
an avenue for a large percentage of the rural and
urban poor seeking social and cultural advancement.
The millions trained in the madrassas have emerged
as highly organized and violent power brokers who can
destabilize any regime that manages to take power. The
Pakistani state and military have cynically deployed
these forces against internal opposition, and
recruited them for the state's other covert war in
Kashmir. The price of such manipulation is that, a
decade after Zia's death, Pakistan remains today a
politically unstable place, rife with growing ethnic
and sectarian violence.

The differences between the late 1970s and September
2001 far outweigh the similarities. Musharraf has also
been in power for two years, and he is also unpopular
domestically and internationally. But Musharraf's
military junta may not be able to push its new Afghan
policy as easily as the previous dictator did. The
same madrassa-trained forces that were nurtured by 
Zia ul Haq, and used to bolster the rule of overnments
since he died, could now meet Musharraf with sharp and
violent resistance.

BROKEN PROMISES

Meanwhile, the indices for health and education in
Pakistan are among the lowest in the world. Violence
and lawlessness is endemic, and most people seke out a
living under the official poverty line. Combined with 
religious militancy and the easy availability of
weapons, this puts Pakistan in a socially explosive
situation. By accepting the US demands in exchange 
for fresh promises of international largesse, the
Pakistani military may be saving its own skin from the
wrath of a US-led coalition. But in the process, the
regime once more appears willing to plunge Pakistan
into an uncharted future, with no regard for such
stability as remains in Pakistani social life.

Among most Pakistanis and Afghanis, the promise of US
assistance in exchange for strategic support falls on
deaf ears. These people remember a series of
broken Western promises, most recently when the US and
its allies did not provide much-needed development
assistance in the early 1990s. When the Berlin wall
fell, it seems, so did US and Western interest in
countries which had done the West's bidding to
accelerate the Cold War's demise. 

One hopes against reason that in its current
high-stakes game the Pakistani military does not take
the long-suffering populations of Pakistan and
Afghanistan on yet another disastrous ride.

(When quoting from this PIN, please cite MERIP Press
Information Note 
69,
"Pakistan's Dilemma," by Kamran Asdar Ali, September
19, 2001.)

-----

The fall issue of Middle East Report (MER 220), "Shaky
Foundations: The 
US
in the Middle East," features a set of articles
(written before the
September 11 attacks) providing background on US
Middle East policy and 
its
international consequences.

The winter issue of Middle East Report will focus on
implications of 
the
September 11 attacks for the region.

To order individual copies of Middle East Report or to
subscribe, 
please
call Blackwell Publishers at 1-800-835-6770.



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