The Islamic Shift

Pakistan remained a relatively liberal and moderate Muslim state until the 1970s.

The loss of the eastern wing in 1971 transformed the Pakistani psyche. Apart from subverting the ’two-nation’ theory, a humiliating military defeat by India took a hefty toll on national pride. Unaccustonied to learning from history and more comfortable with myths of an imagined past, Pakistanis were susceptible to the Islamist charge that the ruling elite’s lack of religiosity had caused the country’s disintegration.

Secular in his political convictions, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto instead tried reviving national morale by acquiring nuclear capability and rebuilding a shattered economy. He redoubled efforts to strengthen ties with Muslim oil-producing countries, especially Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.

In February 1974 Pakistan hosted the second summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Lahore. The pomp and ceremony of the occasion provided the pretext for Pakistan formally recognising Bangladesh. Lines of credit were sought from friendly Arab states, softening the blows of the global oil shock for cash-starved Pakistan. The global reassertion of Islam on the back of Arab petro-dollars won the admiration of Pakistan’s rising middle classes, who sought to emulate the Saudi variant of Wahabi Islam.

This was grist to the mill of Islamist parties like Jamaat-e-Islami, who used the Saudi call to excommunicate the heterodox Ahmadi community from 23the Islamic fold to revive their own long-standing demand. Bhutto’s cynical decision in 1974 to concede the exclusionary demand of the religious ideologues to declare Ahmadis a minority undermined the principle of equal citizenship rights in a modern nation-state. While the consequences of the decision have been far-reaching, the critical change in the role of religion in Pakistan came in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. General Zia-ulHaq (1977-1988) synchronised his so-called Islamisation policies with American-backed support for the Afghan resistance movement in the 1980s.

Signalling a departure from earlier regimes that had restricted themselves to periodically appeasing the religious lobby with symbolic displays of Islamic rectitude, Zia upon becoming the Chief of Army Staff changed the Army’s motto to ‘Faith, Piety and Jihad’ in lieu of ‘Unity, Faith and Discipline’ coined by Jinnah.

Handlers of the ‘jihad’ in the ISI developed a stake in the enterprise once billions of dollars flowed in from the US and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Afghan rebels and local militants fighting the Soviets were regarded as assets that could help the Pakistan Army extend its influence in Afghanistan to achieve strategic depth against India. A sprawling state-sponsored ‘jihad’ industry was cultivated by funding madrasahs in the northwest that shared a common Pakhtun culture with over three million Afghan refugees who had poured into Pakistan.

The blending of Saudi Wahabism with the neo Deobandi ideology propagated by these seminaries made for a witch’s brew of religious bigotry and sectarian hatred. State sponsorship of the Deobandis for strategic purposes upset the sectarian balance in predominantly Barelvi Pakistan. Long before the Taliban reared their heads in the tribal northwest of Pakistan, local rivalries dressed up as disagreements over Islam erupted in pitched battles between militant bands of Sunnis and Shi’as as well as Deobandis, Barelvis and the Ahl- i-Hadith.

The surge in sectarian conflict occurred against the backdrop of administrative paralysis, mounting regional grievances and systemic corruption aggravated by a parallel arms and drugs economy. Despite elected PPP governments led by Benazir Bhutto, Zia’s devoted legatees in the political fraternity stuck to the task of ideologically remapping Pakistan as the outpost of ‘original’ Islam in Saudi Arabia. An already compromised educational system with only a perfunctory commitment to research and critical analysis was gradually dismantled. A premium was placed on displays of piety without stemming the growing rot in social morality.

The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan followed by the collapse of communism fanned illusions of Islamic grandeur that was harnessed by the ISI to project its preferred view of Pakistan’s present and future security concerns. Relations with the US plummeted. In October 1990 Washington suspended military and economic aid to Pakistan for pursuing its nuclear ambitions. This felt like a betrayal after services rendered between 1979 and 1989. Suspicious of India and with Kashmir up in arms after 1989, the Pakistan Army’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan gave a fillip to religious militancy at home. India’s nuclear tests in 1998 were duly matched by Pakistan, encouraging the Army’s high command to check New Delhi’s resolve by occupying the Kargil heights, making the Kashmir dispute more intractable than ever.

Post-9/11 Challenge

This is where matters stood when Pakistan was catapulted onto centre stage with the events of September 11, 2001. While agreeing to support the US campaign against al Qaeda operatives, General Pervez Musharraf refused to abandon the time-honoured security paradigm of defense against India at all costs. The doctrine of strategic depth was predicated on denying India a foothold in Afghanistan, a prospect whose likelihood increased with the dismantling of the Taliban regime. Like most liberal Pakistanis, Musharraf understood that the world had zero tolerance for a country promoting extremism as an instrument of foreign policy. Yet elements in Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the ISI, rejected the need for a paradigm shift in their strategic doctrine. They pointed to India’s eager embrace of Hamid Karzai’s government, warning that America would quit Afghanistan sooner rather than later. While delivering Arab members of al Qaeda to the Americans, the ISI continued supporting the Afghan Taliban through a clandestine network of retired officers from the Army and the Frontier Constabulary. In addition to helping resettle them in FATA, these ‘rogue’ ISI operatives built a command and control structure for the Taliban in Baluchistan from where they launched attacks on American and NATO forces in southern Afghanistan.

FATA’s emergence as terrorism-central injected a new strain into the equation, threatening American and NATO forces in Afghanistan as well as Pakistan. After the crackdown on the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in the summer of 2007, a fulcrum of ISI-supported militants since the 80s, a spate of suicide bombings orchestrated by the Pakistani Tehrik­i-Talban targeted the Army and police personnel as well as politicians. As fighters 25from Central Asia, Western China, Turkey and various Arab countries combined with radicalised Pakhtun tribesmen to train a new generation of Pakistani and European Muslim militants, al Qaeda resurfaced in the tribal redoubts of northwestern Pakistan with a vengeance. The ongoing military operations in FATA have given cause for cautious optimism, but the Pakistani Army’s reluctance to give up on the Afghan Taliban signifies its clash of interest with America in Afghanistan.

Is a Turnabout Possible?

Pakistan cannot change course without neutralising the security concerns of its all-powerful Army.

The USA, EU, NATO and the UN, have to urgently tackle the problems of Pakistan and Afghanistan in a holistic fashion. This entails assisting Pakistan’s civilian government to sort out its political and economic difficulties and weaning the Army away from its deadly gamble with religious extremism.

Peace will remain a forlorn hope so long as Pakistan and India continue to see their interests in Afghanistan as a zero sum game. The two nuclear states have to appreciate the threat a war-torn Afghanistan and unstable north western tribal areas in Pakistan pose to the future of the subcontinent as a whole. Washington too has to realise that the policy of de- hyphenating relations with India and Pakistan has its limitations and what is considered an opportunity in one may be the cause of the problem in the other.

The idea of the two archrivals sharing an interconnected future will raise the hackles of those used to viewing the past and the present through the refracting prism of ideology rather than history. Cooperating not subverting neighbours can be a more effective way for nation-states to re-establish control over rebellious regional satraps. An understanding between Rajeev Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto in the late 80s took the sting out of the Sikh uprising in the Indian Punjab that had been aided and abetted by the ISI. In marked contrast is the unresolved issue of Kashmir, which New Delhi imputes to Pakistan’s backing for the popular insurgency in the valley and support for ‘crossborder terrorism’.

In the moral one-upmanship characteristic of their relations, Islamabad regularly accuses 26India of sponsoring acts of sabotage in Pakistani cities and, more recently, of fomenting dissent in Baluchistan. The air of mutual distrust suffocating creative thinking in the Indian and Pakistani capitals has kept Kashmir on the boil.

This has been detrimental not only for the Kashmiris but also for India-Pakistan trade relations that are widely believed to hold benefits for both countries at a time of crisis in the global economy.

The Kashmir conflict has given Pakistan’s military establishment an excuse for not abandoning its Afghan policy. Once America attacked Iraq and lowered its threat perception from Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence hawks convinced Musharraf and his top generals that their self-interest demanded keeping lines open with the Taliban and reviving contacts with some of the ISI’s former wards among the Afghan warlords. Accused by Americans of duplicity and not doing enough, the Army leadership has pointed to India’s heightened presence in Afghanistan, which rejects the Durand line as its official border with Pakistan and claims the North West Frontier Province and parts of Balochistan.

From a military perspective, letting India use its influence over Kabul to squeeze Pakistan from both the eastern and the western fronts is suicidal and the reason why the Army top brass has resisted US dictation in Afghanistan. The contours of Pakistan’s India centred strategic doctrine were etched soon after independence by a civilian leadership, which instead of addressing domestic political problems made the acquisition of Kashmir a national cause celebre.

With the Army’s rise to dominance in the state, the legacy of inconclusive India-Pakistan wars over Kashmir and the psychologically bruising defeat of 1971, no elected civilian government has been permitted to alter the time-honoured security paradigm. Despite an ostensibly free press, out of the box discussions of strategic security are deemed anti-national. For the few who have questioned Pakistan’s defence doctrine, many more take the path of least resistance by accepting the Army’s claim that Indians, not the Taliban, are the main enemy.

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on 27 December 2007 removed the one politician publicly committed to fighting militancy as Pakistan’s own war. After the 2008 elections, the PPP-led government took political ownership of military operations against insurgent hubs in FATA and settled areas in the northwest. Jamaat-e-Islami and other opposition parties accuse the government of waging war on its own people to satisfy its 27American paymasters. Mounting civilian casualties and the displacement of several hundreds of thousands of people has stirred popular anger, especially as the war is showing no signs of coming to an end anytime soon.

The growing American presence in Afghanistan is a matter of great concern, as it is generally believed to be a prelude to a thrust into Pakistan and depriving it of its nuclear arsenal. The irony of needing to safeguard nuclear weapons instead of being protected by them is lost on Pakistanis. Pious hymns about national sovereignty run counter to the political and military leadership’s eagerness for American financial and military assistance. In the absence of a well-developed critical tradition and an atmosphere for open dialogue and discourse, a testament to years of military dictatorship and the staggering infirmities of the educational system, the reality deficit in Pakistan is unlikely to take a self-corrective course in the foreseeable future.

The situation in FATA is grave enough to cause concern in all the neighbouring countries. India in particular needs to calculate the risks of Pakistan being overrun by unruly tribesmen or collapsing under the increasing weight of its own internal contradictions. In wanting to extract maximum advantages from their new partnership with India, the Americans too need to calibrate the dangers of treating Pakistan’s strategic concerns with nonchalance and pretending they can win the Afghanistan War on their own terms.

Ultimately Pakistanis have to take control of their own destiny by revising the premises of a national security paradigm that has eroded the basis of their state and derailed attempts at establishing a viable democratic system. Of the manifold challenges facing Pakistan, by far the most formidable is the need to educate the citizenry so that it can engage in an informed debate on how the country’s foreign and defence policies can be squared with the requirements of internal political stability.

Far from providing the proverbial glue, instrumentalist uses of Islam have created extreme divisiveness and widespread social corrosion. If the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is targeting Islamabad, radicalised elements in non-Punjabi provinces are talking secession or invoking the Muslim League’s 1940 resolution with its confederal overtones to demand sovereignty.

Conclusion

Pakistanis should be taught how to delve into the depths of their own history with the kind of open mindedness and spirit of freethinking enquiry that is the basis of mature understanding.

It is only then that this troubled and troubling country of more than 170 million can begin shedding its curious penchant for myths, delusions and conspiracies, day in and day out of season.

Critical awareness of Pakistan’s present problems in the light of history can overcome the reality deficit and help create the political will that can allow Pakistan to navigate its way out of a daunting present and chart a future consistent with the aspirations of its rudderless and long-suffering people.