The Pakistan Conundrum

By Alan Caruba

The answer to whether Pakistan is our friend is “It depends.”

That’s an apt description of U.S.-Pakistani relations over the years, but one thing is sure, Pakistan believes it is surrounded by enemies in general and fears India in particular. With a mindset like that, friendship is not a priority, but survival—even if it just means muddling through another day—most surely is.

I have read several books about Pakistan in order to understand this odd nation that was peeled off from India in 1947 when the British left. Divided between eastern and western sections, even Bangladesh, formerly East Bengal, separated from its western cousin, declaring its independence in 1971. In the ensuing civil war, a million died and ten million fled to India.

In “The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad” by John R. Schmidt, a former State Department diplomat for three decades, reflects on his years in Islamabad in the years leading up to 9/11. He is a sharp observer of Pakistan and provides a lively history while unraveling the complexities of its various tribal groups, who the Taliban were and are, and how Al Qaeda established itself there.

To understand Pakistan is to understand how very different it is from America. It is a feudal society from top to bottom and it came about because its founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer, envisioned a nation separate from India because he feared that Muslims would become a political underclass in a unified India dominated by Hindus.

Fully one-third of India’s Muslim population numbering 35 million people remained behind in India. In Pakistan, it took until 1956 to come up with a constitution, a decade after independence.

A feudal society relies on patronage to function. Thus, whoever holds power at any level in Pakistan is focused on looking out for his own patronage network and not for the general welfare of the nation.

As Schmidt explains, “It requires little imagination to see where such policies lead. They lead to the poorhouse. Nations whose economics are uncompetitive in the global marketplace yet dependent on imported fuel and other vital commodities, and whose governments pay out more than they take in, are bound to be chronically broke.” As a result, a third of the Pakistani federal budget is consumed by servicing its international debt.

Typical of the Muslim outlook, if you are not a Muslim you are simply the enemy. It doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith. The problem is exacerbated because of the divisions within Islam, primarily Sunni and Shiite, have little love for one another.

Based on its fear and loathing for India, Pakistan’s various leaders concluded they needed to be a nuclear power as a deterrent. That makes Pakistan a major concern for everyone around them, the world in general, and the U.S. in particular. “If jihadists succeed in seizing power in Islamabad,” notes Schmidt, “they will inherit an arsenal that today numbers approximately one hundred nuclear warheads.”

Pinioned between India on the south and Afghanistan to the north, Pakistan’s leaders, as often as not its army generals who seized control, have only their grievances and themselves to blame for troubles with India and the rise of the Taliban who threaten the government. This explains in part why its military has always been the most stable factor throughout its relatively brief history. Based on merit, it is also represents the best leaders the nation can produce.

Even so, the decision to use proxy jihadist fighters to influence who controlled Afghanistan turned out to be a very bad one. Schmidt believes that “Pakistan seems ill-equipped to deal with this rapidly metastasizing radical Islamic threat.” Can there be a more ironic fate for a nation founded to provide a home to Muslims? The threat the Islamic radicals represent is particularly painful in a nation, the majority of whose population, are more tolerant and moderate followers of Sufi Islam.

The U.S. was none too happy to discover that Pakistan had become a nuclear power. When 9/11 occurred, its leaders were told that their cooperation was required to facilitate the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was told to break off relations with the Taliban and close its borders to Al Qaeda.

This explains why Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in the capture of top Al Qaeda leaders such Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but professed to be ignorant of the fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbotabad, a short drive from Islamabad. Indeed, for the Pakistanis, the news came as a shock and his assassination a cause for much chagrin.

In a similar fashion, the attack on Mumbai, India, by a radical Islamic group ended promising peace talks with India over Kashmir and left Pakistan’s international reputation in tatters.

As is the case in one Muslim nation after another, the central problem to their governance and international relations is radical Islam. Some nations like Indonesia have cracked down on it. Others like Yemen have been over-run by it.

Radical Islam, unless addressed by Muslims will remain a threat. It explains why U.S. troops will likely migrate in and out of Middle Eastern nations for years to come, shooting as many jihadists as possible, taking casualties, angering the local population, and confounding the public at home trying to understand why we’re there.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Pakistani Pit of Deception

By Alan Caruba

Even Pakistanis do not believe that their political and military leaders did not know bin Laden was living, as one columnist put it, “wrapped in the bosom of the Pakistani security establishment.”

Cyril Almeida, writing in the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, a few days after the killing of bin Laden noted that, when the question is asked privately, “No one will say anything but, yes, they knew he was there.”

For 34 of its 64 years, Pakistan has been run by generals whose military intelligence presumably works in league with its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), though both have their own agendas. It is unlikely that much civilian control over either exists.

Almeida wrote, “If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state. But does anyone believe they didn’t know?”

If it were an individual, Pakistan would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, subject to raging fears that India intends to invade on a moment’s notice and antagonistic to Afghanistan as it harbors those who attack it.

In his recently published book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country”, Anatol Lieven provides insight to a nation that, until lately, was home to the most wanted man on the face of the Earth, Osama bin Laden. He was dispatched in a compound that was within a short distance of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or England’s Sandhurst. If we are to believe Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, neither had any idea he was there.

“Trying to understand Pakistan’s internal structures and dynamics is complicated,” writes Lieven. “If there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan…it is ‘Janus-faced’: in other words, many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic, and political development.”

“Pakistan,” writes Lieven, “is divided, disorganized, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism.”

Pakistan came into being in 1947 when leaders of India’s Muslim population like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, its founder, made it clear they did not want to be part of the newly independent India after Great Britain relinquished its colonial rule. Later, when East Pakistan broke loose to establish its independence in 1971, it became Bangladesh.

The thing Westerners find difficult to understand is the tribal nature of nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is not difficult to understand “Muslim nationalism and the bitter hostility to the U.S. role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular.” However, in order to pursue the present combat role against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its European allies rely on neighboring Pakistan in order to provision supplies to their troops.

Since the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan’s ISI and because Pakistan has long been where al Qaeda has found refuge, those in charge have played a Janus or two-faced role for a very long time; at times providing intelligence of great value and at others aiding or at the very least, protecting the terrorist organizations. In return, the Taliban have proven an internal problem for the military and the government, occasionally requiring that they be driven out of areas they have seized.

In many ways, Pakistan is barely a nation. In its tribal northwest regions, such as the now fabled Waziristan, the state has little influence or control. As to its tribes, the two dominant ones are Punjab and Pathan. Both pursue their own interests.

As Lieven describes it, “A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and (the) society in its various forms is immensely strong.” It is a nation of many separate fiefdoms who “plunder the state for patronage and favors” and this is graphically demonstrated by the fact that “barely one percent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at all.”

Thus, the billions that the U.S. has pumped into its economy take on a very critical role, particularly for the military. This is a very different world from that of the West. The majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic, led by a few powerful families. The entire society operates on kinship loyalty.

Pakistan is a perfect example of why the U.S. and the West are stymied by the illogic, the irrationality, and the duplicity of nations in which Islam is the predominant factor in their politics and society.

When you add in the geography of Pakistan, lodged between India and Afghanistan, bordered by China and Iran, you have a nation that can neither be ignored nor abandoned because of its strategic location.

Finally, there is the fact that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or anyone else crazed enough to use it for the greater glory of Allah.

Pakistan is a pit of deception and it is notable that our current relations with it consist of the special operations raid that killed bin Laden and the drones that continue to kill al Qaeda and Taliban who make themselves available targets.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Short Attention Spans

By Alan Caruba

The American Revolution, from the day in 1773 when tea got dumped in Boston Bay to the day in 1781 when the British were defeated at Yorktown took eight years. If it had been on television, the ratings would have fallen off in about two weeks.

My point is that, by the end of the second week of the turmoil in Egypt, it mattered less and less to those in the West that a million Egyptians were showing up in Cairo and Alexandria to demand Mubarak’s resignation or that demands for real freedom, real liberty in the Middle East are a very big deal!

Mubarak says he intends to stay in office until the election in September. He appointed a vice president, gave a pay raise to government workers, and has patiently waited for the crowds to grow tired of singing, chanting, listening to speeches, and to get on with their lives.

These events are cultural in nature.

Despite common ties with England, the colonists had been quite distinctly “American” for a very long time and didn’t like being treated poorly by the British crown and parliament. “No taxation without representation” became their rallying call.

Egyptians have been around a lot longer than Americans; several millennia in fact.

They have been Muslims since the religion was “introduced” by its early zealots in the seventh century A.D. Designed to appeal to Arabs in particular, but proclaimed as a universal faith to which everyone would have to submit, Islam put its stamp on Egyptians, just as it would on Persians and others throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and into India..

It wasn’t that long ago that Egyptians were ruled by a monarch, King Farouk, crowned at age 16 and ruling until 1952 when a coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser forced him into exile in Monaco. The defeat Egypt had suffered in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war would lead to the end of the king’s reign. Until then, from around the 1800s, the British had been deeply involved in Egypt, eventually wresting control of the Suez Canal from the French while the monarchy increasingly became a figurehead.

The British literally modernized Egypt, but by the end of World War Two, depleted in wealth to maintain their empire, they watched it drift away into new, independent nations. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and continued to engage in wars with Israel. When Nasser died his successor, Anwar Sadat, made a cold peace with Israel and, shortly after, was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Seated beside him that day was Hosni Mubarak, an air force general and, when he came to power shortly thereafter, he clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to turn Egypt into the same kind of hellish regime that was later imposed on Iran in 1979. As in Turkey earlier, Egypt installed a secular government whose military ensured that it stayed that way.

Most of this is unknown history to Americans who have already tired of seeing Egyptians in Cairo’s main square and, if they have paid any attention to the White House, know that President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton have managed to say conflicting things about the uprising, looking and sounding clueless and foolish in the process.

Freedom, however, is not a joke and, thanks to the Internet, a lot of Egyptians, a lot of Iranians, a lot of Tunisians, a lot of Yemenis, and, in general, people through northern Africa, the Maghreb, and elsewhere in the Middle East would like to vote in legitimate elections where there are real choices among candidates and parties. They would like to live without secret police and other forms of oppression.

We tend to forget that George W. Bush’s aim when invading Iraq was to depose a dictator, to bring about democracy there, and to spread the message throughout the Middle East.

Mostly, the Egyptians would like to be rid of the endemic corruption that authoritarian regimes establish among a small, ruling elite that, in turn, discourages everything from owning a deed to one’s own home to being able to start a business without paying off several levels of bureaucracy and waiting a very long time.

The Egyptians want real opportunity, an energetic economy, and some form of actual democracy. Concessions are being made, but progress is likely to take a while.

The Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all the other Islamists are in a race to gain control over the nations of the Middle East before freedom breaks out everywhere.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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