Pakistan: Failed State by 2015

I was reading through the Hindustan Times (two days ago), an Indian newspaper, when I found an article entitled Pakistan Will Be a Failed State by 2015:

What makes this particularly ominous is that although the report was compiled by American intelligence agencies, it has not appeared in any western media other than a blurb in the Washington Times. Certainly the collapse of a nuclear power and key American ally should garner more media attention.
The question remains, is it true? Is Pakistan heading for a "Yugoslavia-like" fate?
First, a few statistics: Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world (approx 150 million people) and is the second most populous Muslim nation in the world (after Indonesia). It is also one of the poorest countries in the world.
Pakistan certainly has one of the strangest histories amongst modern nations (for a good map of Pakistan click here). To understand it, we need to rewind back to the 1800's.
By the mid 19th century, Britain had subjugated most of what is modern day Pakistan and India under its control, either directly or indirectly. Before this time, these areas were divided into smaller kingdoms along ethnic and religious lines. Despite what many people think, there is no such thing as an ethnic "Pakistani", which is important to remember.
To the west, Britain had less colonial "success" in subjugating Afghanistan, fighting a disastrous war there in 1842. In 1892, the British signed a treaty with the Afghan ruler Abdur Rehman Khan on the border between Afghanistan and what was later to become Pakistan. This border became known as the Durand Line and was designed specifically to weaken the power of the ethnic Pashtuns, who lived in roughly equal numbers on either side of that line. The Pashtuns, both now and then, were striving for their own homeland which they refer to as Pashtunistan.
By the 1920's, British hold over what is now India and Pakistan was weakening. Muslims, a sizeable majority in these territories, were beginning to push for a separate state. The name "Pakistan" itself was coined in 1933, being the first letters of all the territories the Muslim separatists desired to be included in their state: Punjab, Afghania (now the NWFP), Kashmir, Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan, Afghanistan and Balochistan. The word "Pak" also means "pure" in Persian languages. The official language spoken in Pakistan today, Urdu, is related to the Farsi spoken in Iran and the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan.
Britain offered several different models for future relations with their colony, including granting India "domain status" in the British Commonwealth, but these were all rejected. By 1942, Gandhi's independence movement was gaining steam. On June 14, 1947, the British parliament passed the "India Independence Act" which created two independent "dominions" that the various states could join - one being what is now India and the other what is now Pakistan.
Incidentally, it is because the ruler of Kashmir could not decide whether to join India or Pakistan that this area is still hotly contested. India and Pakistan have fought two wars over this territory, the first in 1949.
On August 14, 1947, Pakistan and India became formally independent. What happened next was that panic struck in both of these territories, which each minority fearing prosecution in the other's territory. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs left the Muslim Pakistan and hundreds of thousands of Muslims left India. Making matters even more complicated, "Pakistan" was two non-contiguous bodies of land, with the part known as East Pakistan breaking away and becoming the sovreign nation of Bangladesh in 1971 (Bengali is an ethnicity and the majority of the people in Bangladesh are Bengalis as are the peoples in the Indian state of Bengal).
Pakistan today is comprised of various groups and it's important to know who these are:
Tribal peoples who have always lived in the region, many of whom continue to live in autonomous areas with little central government control. These include the Dir, Chitral, Amb and Hunza peoples;
Ethnic Pashtuns, who are culturally and linguistically connected to their kin who live in neighboring Afghanistan;
Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan after independence. Over half the population in urban areas came from these migrants (called muhajirs or refugees from India);
The Sindh peoples, whose city of Karachi became the first capital; and
The Punjabi peoples, who have played a dominant role in the national governments
The Baloch peoples (see below)
Ethnic Bengalis, whose traditional homeland is Bangladesh and the Indian state of Bengal
The Durand Line originally caused extremely sour relations with Afghanistan, which was the only nation to vote against Pakistan's admission into the United Nations. It's worth noting here that the treaty establishing the Durand Line had a duration of 100 years which means that technically Pakistan should have acceded this territory in 1993. Many Afghans today believe that Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province is rightly Afghan territory.
Furthermore, the boundaries between Pakistan and India were established by the British and this caused not only the dispute over Kashmir but also gave Pakistan only one major port, in Karachi, which is in the state of Balochistan. Balochistan originally wanted to be an independent nation from either Pakistan or India but the Pakistani military invaded in 1948 and forced it to join the country. Balochistan tried to succede again in 1956 but was crushed once again by the Pakistani military.
Complicating matters even further, the leadership of Pakistan came almost entirely from the British Officer Corps, disenfranchising some of the more "native" population from the outset.
And furthermore, the majority of Pakistani Muslims are Sunni but Pakistan is also home to a sizeable Shi'ite population, approximately 20% of the population.
Therefore right from the beginning Pakistan had the difficulty of juggling a wide variety of religious and ethnic difficulties, highly contested and bitterly disputed borders, a large immigrant population and the nation of India squarely between its western and eastern portions.
The history of independent Pakistan is a long and tortuous one, including many military juntas, imposition of martial law, military repression and the dissolution of democratic rule. Bangladesh seceded from what is now Pakistan in 1971 after fighting a very bitter war with the central government. Estimates range between 200,000 and 3 million Bengalis died during this struggle. The independence of Bangladesh became the Third India-Pakistan War because India intervened on behalf of Bangladesh.
By the 1980's, Pakistan had become a key ally of the United States after the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan. During this time, the military dictator Mohammed Zia ul-Haq was the president of Pakistan and expanded martial law. He also pushed Pakistan to be a more Islamic state. In 1978, Zia announced that all Pakistani law would have to conform with Islamic law. Differences between Sunni and Shi'ite interpretations of Islamic law upset many Shi'ites.
Zia also established "shariat" or courts to try cases under Islamic law. Strict rules began to be enforced against alcohol and other un-Islamic activities, as well as diluting women's legal rights such as their ability to testify in court. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent enormous sums in Pakistan, establishing madrassas or religious schools, often the only educational choice available to people in impoverished areas. It was in many of these madrassas that the future leaders of Afghanistan, the Taliban, got their start.
It is estimated that 2 billion dollars in aid, including advanced weaponry such as Stinger missiles, was funneled from the United States to the anti-Soviet Afghan forces known as the mujahadeen, with the majority of it delivered by proxy via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), their version of the CIA. In an interview in 1998, the National Security Advisor to President Carter at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admitted that the funding of the mujahadeen predated the actual Soviet invasion. The Soviet invasion, which prompted the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics, was justified by Moscow because the American government was "interfering" with the pro-Soviet Afghanistan government.
Brzezinski clearly wanted the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in an effort to weaken that nation. There are other credible reports that the CIA wanted the mujahadeen to expand the war into the Soviet Union itself. The CIA also worked to inflame the Muslim peoples of Uzbekistan and other areas of the Soviet Union with anti-Soviet propaganda and delivering thousands of Qur'ans (the "Bible" for Muslims).
The CIA (via the ISI) did not just provide cash and weapons but also extremely detailed training on military guerilla tactics such as sabotage, how to move weaponry without being detected, how to identify and destroy key economic targets, and how to communicate covertly. Saudi Arabia also provided funding and coordinated with Pakistan's ISI to assist the mujahadeen.
Many Muslims from around the world, including wealthy children from Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, came to Afghanistan to fight in the "jihad" or holy war against the Soviet Union. The most famous scion of a wealthy family to fight in in Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden. This battlefield experience, which fostered pan-Muslim militancy, has contributed to conflicts in Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq.
In 1988, General Zia ul-Haq died in a plane crash and Pakistan returned to a democratic government when Benazir Bhutto (a woman) was elected. From 1988 to 1998, Butto and Nawaz Sharif were each elected president of Pakistan twice and removed twice on corruption charges.
The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Various factions within the mujahadeen began fighting each other for control over the country, many of them with battlefield experience and weaponry from the era of Soviet occupation.
Because of Pakistani and Saudi influence over the mujahadeen, the more fanatical adherents to militant Islam gained leadership positions amongst the Afghan warlords. The "Islamization" also had repercussions in Pakistan itself, fostering more support for militias and guerillas to attack Indian forces in the portion of Kashmir it controls. Many Pakistani militias were trained in the same camps using the same techniques that had earlier trained Afghan mujahadeen.
The Taliban eventually gained control over most of Afghanistan in 1996, enforcing its now infamous strict brand of Islam. While most of the world shunned the Taliban government, it was officially recognized by three countries: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Pakistan's ISI continued to have strong ties to the Taliban leadership. There are reports that many Pakistani ISI leaders funded the Taliban and Al-Qaeda right until September 11, 2001.
It's worth noting here that Mullah Omar, who later became the Taliban's "spiritual leader" and a key associate of Osama bin Laden (and who remains a free man today) had to flee Afghanistan in 1994. He went to the Pakistani province of Balochistan and returned with a militia of 1,500 followers to aid the Taliban's rise to power.
In 1999 in Pakistan, the military rose to power in a bloodless coup and General Pervez Musharraf became the president. Musharraf maintained a semblance of a democratic parliament, although he got his supporters to retroactively legitimize his coup. It's important to note here that the United States imposed sanctions against Pakistan because of the installation of General Musharraf as President.
The attacks on September 11, 2001 greatly affected Pakistan. Most people are unaware that one of the first pieces of legislation passed in the United States after 9/11 was to "waive" restrictions on aid to Pakistan (Public Law 107-57). The most important section of this waiver was that it was now legal for the United States to send military aid to Pakistan as part of the "War on Terrorism".
Pakistan quickly became the recipient of billions of dollars in aid as well as billions in debt relief and restructuring, making it third behind Israel and Egypt in terms of American assistance.
I cannot find a total for all the military and economic aid that Pakistan has received, but I can tell you the recently unveiled Bush administration budget for next year is 691 million dollars of which 300 is specifically military aid. The United States is also considering selling F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. Furthermore, Pakistan will receive 1.2 billion dollars in military aid this year alone, including P-3 Orion aircraft, Phalanx weapon systems and thousands of missiles.
All of this military aid is justified on the theory that Pakistan is a friend of the United States and because its help is "essential" to the campaign against the Taliban. It is however propping up the illegitimate dictatorship of Musharraf who has steadfastly refused to step down as head of the military despite having previously pledged to do so, saying it would dangerously "destabilize" the country.
Musharraf faces significant political opposition domestically as there have been repeated calls for him to step down and resign. Musharraf has also removed politicians and judges who threatened his power and gets his supporters to change the laws to suit him, including passing a law allowing him to be the president indefinitely. You can read more about the political situation here.
Pakistan is also facing an armed insurgency in Balochistan. A gas pipeline was blown up Sunday night in Muridke, three power stations were blown up the day before, a powerful bombing in Quetta occurred at the end of 2004, various rocket attacks and the Army is now setting up "cantonments" in the province, referring to a semi-permanent military presence there. The attacks are being conducted by the Balochistan Liberation Army which, as evidenced by its name, wants Balochistan to revert to the independent tribal kingdom it was before the colonial period. A good explanation of the situation in Balochistan can be found here.
Musharraf himself has nearly been assassinated twice and bizarrely enough the principal suspect escaped from jail earlier this year.
Elsewhere, Pakistan has been wracked by sectarian violence with Shi'ite and Sunni mosques being targeted by bombs in 2002 and 2004. A bomb went off in Karachi near the U.S. consultate, killing 11 and injuring more than 50 people. Plus a host of other suicide attacks, rocket fire, bicycle bombings, bus bombings, massacres of Christians, the gunning down of Protestant ministers and other assorted violence and attacks against minorities.
If that weren't enough, the Pakistani military has been conducting attacks in the tribal areas of the NWFP along the border with Afghanistan, causing bitter resentment amongst the people who live there who had previously maintained near independence. The ongoing fighting, especially in Waziristan, is part of the "War on Terrorism" to root out Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have taken refuge there. Despite all the military aid and advanced weaponry, the Pakistani military has not done well against the tribes in the region. Indeed, Pakistan has had to resort to paying off tribal leaders to get them to quit sheltering Al-Qaeda members.
The fighting in Waziristan has further aggravated the relationship of many in Pakistan with the central government, which is increasingly becoming seen as a "puppet" of western interests as it conducts military operations against its own peoples.
It must also be remembered that Pakistan has functioning nuclear weapons. Should the Musharraf government collapse, it is possible that renegade groups could acquire control over these weapons. During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, Senator Kerry made several allusions to this being a distinct possibility, basing this on briefings he received during his presidential campaign:
"If you were to have a successful coup in Pakistan, you could have, conceivably, nuclear weapons in the hand of a radical Islamic state automatically, overnight," said Senator Kerry.
"And to the best of my knowledge, in all of the inquiries that I've made in the course of the last years, there is now no failsafe procedure in place to guarantee against that weaponry falling into the wrong hands," he said.
Is Pakistan close to a Yugoslavia-like defragmentation? It's too difficult to say but the current situation is a recipe for disaster: ethnic and sectarian violence, poverty, an authoritatian leader who refuses to compromise and a large influx of military weaponry and aid from a country widely seen to be anti-Muslim.
I hope the CIA report becomes more widely reported in the western press so that awareness can be raised on these vital issues.
Peace
Update: Indian and Pak papers have been all over this story with the addition that India would be directly in the crosshairs if Pakistan fails or feels threatened by Indian forces:
Islamabad also faces a high risk of its nukes being stolen by the terrorists within the next 15 years, according to a CIA report.
Given the possibility that terrorists could acquire nuclear weapons, the use of such weapons by extremists before 2020 cannot be ruled out,'' said the report titled ''Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project''.