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COMMENTARY
July 21, 2007
Pakistani inferno
One might almost recommend American occupation to the people of Pakistan, as a way to reduce the casualties from daily suicide and other terrorist bombings to the levels now enjoyed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, as an alternative to Indian occupation. Though I doubt the Americans are currently up to the task.Yesterday, the country’s former chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudry, removed from office by President Musharraf on fairly specious grounds of corruption, and actually because he was genuinely independent, was reinstated by a 10-3 vote of the remaining high court. Musharraf has had to accept this humiliating moment of sweet victory for Pakistan’s surprisingly ebullient lawyers, and the semi-Westernized urban middle-classes they represent. He must accept it because Pakistan is currently facing a larger challenge from loose confederations of Islamists whose urban bombings and tribal insurrections are taxing the authorities’ will to survive. There are two big questions worth pondering gravely: 1. Are we witnessing a repetition of the events in Iran, in 1979, in which all the relatively “liberal” elements in Persian society fell to squabbling among themselves, while the totalitarian Islamists under Ayatollah Khomeini deposed the Shah? 2. Whether or not this could happen, will it come to appear so likely, that India will resolve to prevent it by main force? The Pakistan army has its hands full, and seems unable to do anything about Islamist activities throughout Baluchistan and the North West Frontier. One hesitates to criticize them: the British imperialists had similar problems in those districts. And yet, again and again we read allegations that they, and more fulsomely Pakistan’s secret service -- the notorious I.S.I. -- are playing both sides of the street. There is a long, complex history to this, going back beyond even the joint Pakistani-American-Islamist effort to dislodge the Soviets from Afghanistan, at the end of the Cold War. But to simplify, alliances were made then, both formal and informal, and the latter have proved hard to dissolve in the new, new world order in which Pakistan is the nominal ally of the West against the Islamists, while Pakistan herself is rent by the explosive force of her radical madrasahs. To complete this rough outline, one must mention Kashmir. One never wants to mention Kashmir, except when quoting Persian poets, but it remains a challenge to both the policies and the sanity of statesmen on both sides of the Pakistan-India border. You will no more convince a Muslim Pakistani (97 percent of the population) that majority-Muslim Kashmir does not belong entirely to Pakistan, than you will convince an old-school I.R.A. supporter that Ulster doesn’t belong entirely to Ireland. The fact that most of the people who live there don’t want to belong (to Pakistan, and Ireland, respectively) being of no account to them. Kashmir continues to give Pakistan’s Jihadis their cachet. General Musharraf himself must wink and blink when he is directly questioned by Western diplomats about informal state assistance to the Jihadis in Kashmir, doing their best to create problems for Hindu India. Compound this with the lesser but still substantial cachet of the essentially tribal Islamists in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier, whose open support for Taliban and Al Qaeda interests in Afghanistan can be presented as a Muslim Jihad against the puppets of the Western infidels. Then add the fact that they are ethnically identical with their neighbours further north and west, and you have a problem that has often seemed insoluble. But the events of 9/11/01, in New York and Washington, were triggered by events in Pashtoon Afghanistan, so we can’t walk away. Pakistan herself is larger than her frontiers, and contains the watered, lowland, anciently civilized provinces of Punjab and Sind. From an Indian geostrategic point of view, the idea of devolving this Islamic superstate into its four constituent parts (plus Kashmir), and they in turn into some condition of dependency upon India, has always appealed. Naturally, it remains unspoken. But the kind of Pakistan-India war that was kindled in the Indian desire to detach East from West Pakistan in 1971 (and led to the foundation of Bangladesh), could be kindled again if India’s politicians spy Pakistan in a state of serious disorder. That both states are armed with nuclear weapons is a point always worth noting. This can be viewed as a good or bad thing: for if they weren’t both armed with nuclear weapons, that war might well have happened already. Probably: a good thing in the past, a bad thing in the future. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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