Pakistan & Terror: Part 1 (1947 – 79)
As I write this, the Pakistani army is on the verge of taking Mingora, the largest city in the Swat Valley located in the North-West Frontier Province – a victory which could deliver a percussive blow to the Taliban in a conflict that has so far produced 1.9 million Pakistani refugees. Meanwhile, a top U.S. general in eastern Afghanistan said he is seeing “some very interesting movement” of insurgents crossing into Pakistan this spring, possibly to join the Taliban militants. Um, yes…possibly. One step forward …and two back.
The Taliban’s rise in Pakistan should shock no one, especially after reviewing the history of this perpetually failing incubator of global terrorism – it is a story with which the U.S. should empathize. Because the United States is all too familiar with Frankensteinian endeavors, especially the case in which, during Afghanistan’s struggle against the Soviets in the 80s, the U.S. funded and supported the Afghanistan mujahedeen which would later became al-Qaeda. Sharing in this sad historical irony is Pakistan, whose Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was the conduit for channeling U.S. funds to Bin Laden and company during this same time period. Thus, Pakistan both directly and indirectly helped spawn al-Qaeda, which in turn helped create the Taliban. As the U.S. did on 9/11, it is Pakistan who is now reaping the whirlwind from a beast they helped actuate.
Pakistan’s problems began at its birth in 1947. As India achieved independence through nonviolent means, Pakistan was partitioned off as a separate state by the former ruling Brits, and India complied to avoid a bloody civil war sure to ensue should the “achieve Pakistan” movement not get its way. Because the first time India tried to block an agreement to form a Pakistani state, the Muslim League incited the Great Calcutta Riot on August 16, 1946 which killed 4,000 Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.
Ironically, the founder of Pakistan and leader of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, wanted to establish a secular democracy. But after Jinnah’s death in 1948, instead of a state for Muslims, Pakistan was eventually transformed into a Muslim state.
In addition to the theocratic element, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid says that Pakistan inherited a “security state” from British rule, described by scholars as “the viceregal tradition” or “a permanent state of martial law”. Christopher Hitchens describes how the country was doomed to be a dysfunctional military theocracy from day one – beginning with the very name of the country itself:
But then, there is a certain hypocrisy inscribed in the very origins and nature of "Pakistan". The name is no more than an acronym, confected in the 1930s at Cambridge University by a NW Muslim propagandist named Chaudhri Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind, plus the suffix "-stan," meaning "land." In the Urdu tongue, the resulting word means "Land of the Pure." The country is a cobbling together of regional, religious, and ethnic nationalisms, and its founding, in 1947, resulted in Pakistan's becoming, along with Israel, one of the two "faith-based" states to emerge from the partitionist policy of a dying British colonialism. Far from being a "Land of the Pure," Pakistan is one of the clearest demonstrations of the futility of defining a nation by religion, and one of the textbook failures of a state and a society.
And from day one the new nation of Pakistan was knee deep in blood, at first due to the crown’s untidy exit. The British brilliance of leaving the question of a Muslim-dominated Kashmir undecided, combined with the Pakistan government’s ever growing militant Islamic fundamentalism led to the 1948 Kashmir War, the first of three with India between 1947 and 1971.
Pakistan periodically attempted civilian rule, only to be usurped by the military throughout its history. In 1956, Pakistan actually became a Republic, but it was short-lived, because General Ayub Khan executed a coup d’état and then made himself president from 1958 to 1965. Yahya Khan then took over, and in 1971 sent troops into East Pakistan, touching off Bangladesh's War of Independence. He also attacked India on 12-6-71, and was defeated on 12-21-71.
Civilian rule resumed under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from 1972 to 1977, a period during which a parliamentary system of government was implemented, although Bhutto was no reformer and was hung for murderig a political opponent. Bhutto was deposed by General Zia-ul-Haq who became the country's third military president. Zia introduced Islamic Sharia legal code, banned politics, censored media, and implemented public floggings and torture. Rashid has called Zia’s 11-year rule the most damaging to Pakistani society.
Hitchens sums up Pakistan’s history nicely: “Pakistan has been a fiefdom of the military for most of its short existence: as was once said of Prussia, it is not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country.” So, taking all of this in, once more, current events in Pakistan should not shock.
What does shock, however, is the role the U.S. has played in assisting Pakistan go from bad to worse. Since 1957 the U.S. had provided Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars per year in military aid to help fight the Soviets. Reagan supported General Zia’s administration because we needed Pakistan’s help to beat the Communists, while turning a blind eye throughout the 80s to the fact that this mad tyrant was ruling over a repressive Islamic theocracy that was going nuclear. As I will discuss in my next article, it was during this time that the United States also began building another marvelous creation that would haunt them years later, that being one of the most formidable intelligence agencies in the world: the ISI.
No comments:
Post a Comment