Category: Morgue

Cow, Crescent and Star in Postcolonial States

Middle East Policy
2015

In November 2014, President Obama accepted India’s invitation to be the chief guest at its Republic Day celebrations. He will be the first American president to do so.

I was in Kolkata (Calcutta), India’s “cultural capital” when this was announced. Most of my interlocutors there were euphoric about the news, especially the supporters of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP). Narendra Modi, the BJP leader and prime minister, had invited the American president to the January 26, 2015, events. On that date 67 years ago, newly independent India adopted its democratic constitution.

Most Hindu nationalists in India viewed Obama’s gesture as America’s acceptance of Hindu nationalism.  I saw it as the president’s doing business with a democratically elected government that happens to be Hindu nationalist. Two years ago, the Obama administration embraced the Islamist government of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who had come to power through a free and fair election. The Morsi government has since been overthrown in a military coup, and Morsi languishes in jail.

Nevertheless, secularists and liberals in the West who throw a fit on hearing the word “religious fundamentalist” or “militant” might consider following Obama’s lead on the issue. Not that we should approve of religious militants’ violence or other destructive conduct, if they engage in it. However, we need to understand the sources of their militancy and encourage their evolution into more peaceable social or political categories, and participation in the democratic process is one of the best roads to that goal. So far, though, bombing Muslim militants has been America’s and NATO’s preferred method of dealing with them, it has served only to multiply them and bolster their capabilities.

Today religious values and ethos permeate most postcolonial societies, whether Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or others. Unfortunately, the religious upsurge also has ratcheted up interfaith hostility in many countries. The BJP is a glaring example. The party and allied Hindu nationalist organizations plan to change India’s traditionally multi-cultural society into one based on Hindu religious and cultural values. They have come a long way toward that goal, but their march has been accompanied by widespread discrimination and violence against Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, numbering around 160 million people.

Modi has long been in the vanguard of the movement to Hinduize Indian society. He was banned from visiting the United States for nearly a decade for his alleged connivance in the horrific anti-Muslim riots of 2002. Nearly 2,000 Muslim men, women and children were hacked, beaten and burned to death by Hindu mobs. The all-important question haunting many Indian minds, including mine, is whether these faith-based communal conflicts will abate. And if they do, how?

I disagree with those who fear that the new wave of religious resurgence, especially among Muslims, might lead to the kind of sectarian or interfaith bloodbaths that ravaged Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some historical records show that 35 percent of the population perished in those waves of intra-Christian militancy. But these are different times. Thanks to the spread of the Enlightenment values of freedom, tolerance and humanism, people around the world are increasingly getting used to divergent ideologies, religions and cultures. Everyday people in most countries are more tolerant of the religious or ethnic Other than they were 50 years ago.

The growing acceptance of the Other has been facilitated by globalization and the 24/7 electronic and digital interaction across countries and continents. Of course, most diehard liberals (Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls them “liberal fundamentalists”) and religious militants have yet to feel the winds of pluralism and contestation with discrepant ideologies, faiths and communities. I also do not rule out further aggravation of Muslim hostility by the military aggression and political and diplomatic tutelage America and its allies are using around the Muslim world. But I see this approach running its course before too long, as its futility and backlash begin to dawn on its practitioners.

Meanwhile, there has been a growing search among intellectuals, the media and others for the sources of the what is commonly known as religious militancy and violence. A host of sociologists and social scientists has concluded that the religious pull being felt by people in postcolonial societies stems, in large measure, from their quest for dignity and authenticity. This is also fostered by their pervasive exposure to Western ideas of freedom and selfhood. Modernity’s corrosive effects on societies are another source of religious upsurge. “Modern societies,” says Daniele Hervieu-Leger, a leading French sociologist, “may corrode their traditional religious base; at one and the same time, however, these societies open up new spaces and sectors that only religion can fill.”

Postcolonial societies aren’t generally receptive to the liberal tools of mediation, elections and so on, to settle what they see as existential issues: foreign domination, preservation of religious and cultural values, and basic communal interests. Many Western societies have no qualms about waging war over lesser questions.

Liberalism, is a uniquely Western ideology; it cannot be planted holistically in most non-Western societies.  The liberal concepts of church-state separation, individualism and freedom without responsibility emerged largely as reactions to anomalies in European traditions. Those include the long and bloody religious conflicts, the church-state power struggle and the sanctity of individual property rights in the Germanic tribal cultures. Societies that were unaffected by these historical trends and experiences have mostly been inhospitable to most of the liberal values that are germane to Eurocentric civilization.

Hence most of Europe’s former colonies are modernizing, while cherishing the basic aspects of their religious and other traditions.  Peoples outside the West can, of course, profitably cultivate many of the useful institutions that have evolved from Western ideas, experience and endeavors. Indeed they have been enriching their lives and societies by embracing many of those ideas and institutions — democracy, the rule of law, scientific inquiry and so forth. But they’re doing so to the extent these pursuits can be adapted to their core religious and cultural norms.

The view that liberalism is a specifically Western ideology and that aspects of it will not work in many non-Western societies, is shared, to different degrees, by a growing number of sociologists, philosophers and historians. Among them are Peter Berger, David Martin, Grace Davie, Karen Armstrong, Amy Goodman, Steve Bruce, Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor. They also include many non-Western intellectuals who are committed to liberal and leftist causes and worldview.

Susnata Das is professor of history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. The leftist Hindu intellectual complained that Hindu-Muslim tensions had increased in India since the BJP had come to power in New Delhi seven months earlier. Asked about his take on the Gujarat “riots,” the professor took exception to my use of the word. We were talking in our native Bengali language. Getting excited about his viewpoint, he switched to English: “It was NOT a riot. It was pogrom.” With portraits of Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and India’s socialist icons watching us from his office walls, Das described some of the horrifying details of the Gujarat carnage. He blasted Modi and his BJP for their anti-Muslim “bigotry, pure bigotry, and hate,” which he said had unleashed recurrent Hindu violence against Muslims.

Then, scratching the back of his head, indicating a sense of resignation, my interviewee lamented that India’s once-powerful leftist and secularist movements had been “losing ground” to Hindu nationalism. That was because, he added, many Indians are “turning back to their religious and cultural traditions.” The same can be said of people in many other non-Western countries. They are forswearing many features of liberalism with which they began their journeys as citizens of independent states and substituting them for their own religious institutions and idiom.

The “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan was founded by a thoroughly secular and Anglicized Muslim statesman. He did not practice the Islamic faith, and he drank gin in the afternoon and whiskey in the evening, though drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden by Islam. In August 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly (parliament) that his new nation would guarantee complete freedom to practice any religion, but that religion would have no role in the affairs of the Pakistani state.

The father of the nation assured Pakistanis,

You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.

Yet the Islamization of Pakistani society and laws began less than a decade after Jinnah’s death in 1948. It reached a peak under the government of another staunchly secular Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. That left-leaning populist came to power as president when grassroots Islamization campaigns had spread to large swaths of Pakistan and threatened his government. In September 1972, he said to me in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, “You can’t be a democrat and secular [in Pakistan] at the same time.” I had asked him about the pressure from the Islamist political parties Jamiatul Ulama-i-Islam and Jamaat-i-Islami to enshrine the Sharia, Islamic canon law, in a constitution that was being drafted in parliament.  “The National Assembly has been elected by the people,” he reminded me. “Most of our people are devout Muslims.” 

I was prompted to ask for the interview with the non-practicing Muslim politician after he had made a clarion call to Pakistanis “to make this beautiful country an Islamic state, the bravest Islamic state and the most solid Islamic state.” The U.S.-educated “socialist” Zulfikar Bhutto’s new constitution declared Pakistan an “Islamic state.” It proclaimed that “all existing laws shall be brought in to conformity with the injunctions of Islam,” and that no new laws would be enacted that would be “repugnant to the injunctions of Islam.” Later, as prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto endorsed other measures, excluding the Ahmadiya sect from the traditional Islamic mainstream; changing the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, the Islamic Sabbath; and taking other measures, all of which turned Jinnah’s secular Pakistan into an Islamic state.

Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia and most other postcolonial Muslim states also founded their political structures on liberal — sometimes socialist — models. Today most of them have reworked those models to accommodate Islamic tenets and code of conduct. Some Muslim states continue to maintain formally secular political systems, mostly for Western consumption. But Islam pulsates in the life of their Muslim citizens. This category of Muslim states includes Indonesia, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mali, Senegal, Djibouti and Gambia.

Hindu or Muslim societies aren’t the only ones facing a religious upsurge in their once-secular public space. The world’s only Jewish state was founded as a fiercely secular polity.  In its declaration of independence in 1948, Israel announced that it “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights” and “guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture to all citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” These principles formed the bedrock of Israel’s Basic Law.

Beginning in the late 1970s, however, the ultra-orthodox and orthodox branches of Judaism began to Judaize Israeli politics and culture, gradually reducing Palestinians and other non-Jews to second-class citizens. The racial and religious apartheid that became pronounced under Prime Minister Menachem Begin has culminated in the policies of the  Benjamin Netanyahu government. 

Despite the state-sponsored discrimination and suppression of Israeli Palestinians, however, the state’s Basic Law still recognizes the equality of all Israeli citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity. In a widely cited ruling, former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak articulated the state’s doctrine of equality. “It is true,” he wrote, “members of the Jewish nation were granted a special key to enter, but once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.”

That could soon change. The “Jewish nation-state” bill, which the Netanyahu government has approved and will be pushing through the Knesset (parliament), would confer national and group rights only to Israel’s Jewish citizens. It would override the “individual rights” to be conceded to Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens. If passed, it would institutionalize anti-Palestinian apartheid, undermine democracy and turn Israel into a Jewish Pakistan. Netanyahu has fired two of his Cabinet members who opposed the bill (and disagreed with him on some other issues), paving the way for new elections.  Public-opinion polls show that religious and right-wing Jewish parties are more popular in Israel than ever; the bill could sail through the new parliament.

These “religious” tides aren’t specific to religions. Secular ideological and nationalist ferment has also fueled intergroup militancy. And it has often been as malevolent and bloody as movements carried out under religious banner. Karen Armstrong points out that the liberal French revolutionaries enacted some of history’s most savage massacres among the opponents and victims of the Revolution:

Early in 1794, four revolutionary armies were dispatched from Paris to quell an uprising in the Vendée against the anti-Catholic policies of the regime. Their instructions were to spare no one. At the end of the campaign, General François-Joseph Westermann reportedly wrote to his superiors, ‘The Vendée no longer exists. I have crushed children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred the women.… The roads are littered with corpses.

Ironically, no sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion than they invented another. Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they worshiped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis David. The same year that the goddess of reason was enthroned on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral, the reign of terror plunged the new nation into an irrational bloodbath, in which some 17,000 men, women and children were executed by the state.

Europe’s bloodiest religious and ideological cataclysms occurred during its transitions from one ideational paradigm to another: from Roman to Germanic to Christian, from Christian to liberal, from liberal to socialist and communist, and from nationalist to imperialist and colonialist.

The religious and ideological movements in today’s postcolonial societies indicate similar processes of transition. They mark the transition from colonial-era liberal political paradigms to postcolonial indigenous ones. For many Muslim societies, it also represents the struggle to transform Western hegemonic political and security structures foisted on them into native Islam-oriented ones. Foreign tutelage in these Muslim states is sustaining repressive despotism, while native Islamic movements reflect the priorities and aspirations of the public.

The challenge before most of the former European colonies is two-pronged. One is to douse the extremist and violent impulses of the activists struggling for social renewal. They would abate in the course of time, as have previous episodes of Muslim extremism and violence. The other, which is more complex and long-term, is to build bridges between clashing religious, sectarian and ethnic communities: Hindus and Muslims in India; Sunnis and Shiites in Pakistan; and Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and Assyrian Christians in Iraq.

These communal tensions and conflicts have been touched off partly by the unraveling of the political institutions introduced during colonial rule. European powers and Westernized native elites carved out these states overnight, splitting sectarian and ethnic communities among different states without consideration of their inhabitants’ cultural affiliations or economic interests. Yet the citizens of these artificial entities were expected to identify primarily with state institutions and laws. Those citizens have mostly proved unable to foot that bill. They feel strong communal bonds with their religious and ethnic communities that often span more than one of these states.

There are not many true Lebanese in Lebanon. Lebanese citizens are primarily Maronites, Shiites, Sunnis and Druze. There are almost no real Iraqis in Iraq, only Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and members of other religious, ethnic and tribal communities.

When people identify strongly with their nations or states, they view citizens of other states as the rival Other and compete and sometimes fight with them. When religion or ethnicity claims their deeper allegiance, they are prone to rivalry and hostility toward other ethnic or religious communities.

As the older nations and states matured, they learned, often the hard way, the perils of interstate hostility. Europe, once the most violent continent, has all but jettisoned conflicts between states.  Similarly, as religious and ethnic communities in postcolonial states would begin to mature, they would also learn the grief and misfortune caused by communal hostility. They would then be more disposed to living peaceably with one another.

Bangladesh’s quest for identity

Providence Journal
March 17, 2013

I’m saddened by the bloody mayhem rocking Bangladesh, where I lived and worked through two turbulent decades. Street fights between the country’s secularist government forces and Islamist activists have claimed dozens of lives. The clashes were triggered by a death sentence handed down by a Bangladeshi court to a leader of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami. Maulana Delwar Hussein Saeedi, the death-row inmate, and other top Jamaat leaders have been charged with having roles in killing Bangladeshi liberation activists 42 years ago.

The Islamist leaders have been put on trial by the Awami League party government, supported by a secularist youth movement. The Awami League is the party of the country’s secularist founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, which had been in power nearly a dozen times since Bangladesh achieved independence. But it ignored the Islamists’ alleged crime until now. I recently called a friend in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, and asked why.

“Because public support [for the trials] was not there,” he replied. “Now huge crowds are calling for their execution.”

This is a new twist to Bangladeshis’ long odyssey to find their niche in a national framework, a process most other post-colonial societies have experienced. Nearly two centuries of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, which ended in 1947, had obliterated the political structures that had been evolving there over the millennia.

Bangladeshis, like other communities in the subcontinent, now faced the baffling task of choosing the space, ideology and cultural pattern for a nation-state they were called upon to build.

Nearly 90 percent Muslim, Bangladesh comprises the eastern half of the old Bengal, which became Pakistan’s eastern province in 1947. Those days Bengali Muslims pulsated with Islamic fervor. They plunged headlong into the movement to split British India to create the Muslim state of Pakistan.

A stalwart of the Pakistan movement was young Mujibur Rahman. Years later Mujib would tell me about his work for the Pakistan movement at his home in Dhaka. He said proudly that undivided Muslim-majority Bengal was “the only province in all [British] India that elected a pro-Pakistan government” in a 1946 election, which legitimized the Muslim demand for Pakistan. I interviewed Mujib now and then for my column in what used to be The Pakistan Observer newspaper, published in Dhaka.

Once East Bengal became East Pakistan, however, the Islamic wave there began to give way to a growing secularist one. As elsewhere in the world, ideological movements in Bangladesh began to lose steam after their immediate goals were realized.

Additionally, the use of Islamic slogans by West Pakistani elites in their economic exploitation and political suppression of East Pakistanis discredited Islamic political parties. Mujib now rode the crest of the secularist tide, bringing about East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan and emergence as independent Bangladesh. The East Pakistanis who opposed that secession included the Islamists who now face trial.

Bangladeshis paid a heavy price for their independence. During spring through mid-winter of 1971, West Pakistani troops slaughtered thousands of innocent men, women and children and raped many Bangladeshi girls and women while trying to suppress the movement. Post-independence, the Mujib government got “secularism” enshrined in Bangladesh’s first constitution as among its foundational principles.

But then, just as the Islamic wave in East Pakistan had begun to recede after the creation of Pakistan, the secularist wave in Bangladesh tapered off almost immediately after its independence from Pakistan. Now the Islamic surge that had accompanied the Pakistan movement nearly three decades before began to revive with a vengeance.

Barely four years after Mujib created his “secular” and “socialist” Bangladesh, he and most of his family and cabinet members were assassinated in coup d’etat by army officers. They resented his close ties to Hindu-majority India, which was seen as exerting hegemony over Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshis shared this perception of him. Nobody mourned the “Father of the Nation” in public, let alone stage a protest against his assassination.

Politicians who followed the new Islamic surge to power shelved the Mujib government’s secularist constitution, and at one point adopted a new one rebranding Bangladesh an “Islamic Republic.”

During trips to Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I saw throngs of head-covered women milling about college campuses, where headscarves were a rarity during the country’s Pakistan phase. Mosques were proliferating all over Bangladesh and prayer congregations in many of them extended to the yards. Stores, automobiles, streets and schools for secular education flaunted Islamic names and signs as never before.

Hamidul Huq Chowdhury, an elder statesman who published my old newspaper, told me in 1982 that the new Islamic upsurge was “partly a reaction to an overdose of ‘Indiaphilia’” which disturbed many Islamic-minded Bangladeshis. “But watch how long this [Islamic wind] lasts,” advised my old boss, a British-educated barrister.

Today’s secularist upsurge and the hounding of Islamists by secularists remind me of Chowdhury’s caveat. The point, though, is that while Bangladesh’s embattled Islamists and secularists have been going through ups and downs, neither side has been quite vanquished.

Neither needs to be. The histories of Western nations, many of them bloodier and more tumultuous, show that bitter ideological and political struggles often produce societal and national integration. Unlike many other nations, most Bangladeshis belong to a single religious community – Sunni Islamic – and a single ethnic community, Bengali.

I can see them integrating into a relatively cohesive national society sooner than seems possible now. Meanwhile, as Bangladeshis go on modernizing, they will continue to secularize. But they’re unlikely to be unhinged from their Islamic cultural and social roots, anymore than any other modernizing Muslim society.

Benghazi murders: Revisit free speech

SF Gate – Muslim World
September 14, 2012

It was a reprehensible crime. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic staff members were nurturing excellent U.S.-Libyan relations until they were murdered by a Muslim mob in Benghazi. Many Libyans will fondly remember Stevens’ hard work to implement the U.S. policy to facilitate their liberation from Moammar Khadafy’s repressive dictatorship.

Unfortunately, these four innocent Americans have been the latest casualties of the West’s conscious or subconscious policy to foist its liberal ideology on unwilling Muslim societies. The amateurish movie “Innocence of Muslims,” produced in California by an Egyptian Copt and American evangelical Christians, portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a child molester and womanizer. It has triggered Muslim outrage in Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, Iran, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and probably elsewhere. But it conforms to the Western principles of freedom of speech and separation of church and state. So did the Muhammad cartoons published by a Danish newspaper, the anti-Quran movie produced by Holland’s Greet Wilder, Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” published in the United Kingdom, and other anti-Islamic works put out in the West.

All these incidents sparked indignation throughout the Muslim world. Yet Western statesmen and media generally defended the artists’ and authors’ right to produce these materials, citing the free-speech principle, even though some questioned the wisdom behind the projects.

Westerners are mostly comfortable with unbridled freedom of expression and the privatization of religion because these doctrines have evolved from the West’s unique historical experience. These values stemmed from a reaction to the Catholic Church’s suppression of freedoms, the Inquisition and fierce power struggles with secular governments. Historical memories of those traumatic episodes have engendered antipathy for religion and religious values among many Westerners.

Muslim history has had no such conflicts between the laity and religious hierarchy.

In fact, the Sunni branch of Islam, to which nearly 90 percent of Muslims belong, has no religious hierarchy at all. And most Muslims – religious, agnostic or even non-believers – cherish their religious heritage. So do Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and many other non-Western religious communities. Western governments and most Western citizens don’t seem to recognize this diversity of value systems, so they insist on universal applicability of their liberal ideology and its doctrine of freedom of expression.

They have waived the free-speech principle, however, in cases of Holocaust denials, racial slurs, advocacy of terrorism and other expressions that could endanger Western social order or national security. But they have persistently refused to prevent the vilification of Islam.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has staunchly justified this stance in the case of the video “Innocence of Muslims,” citing America’s “long tradition of free expression.” She added that “we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be.”

This Western insensitivity to the Islamic faith and civilization has been a major source of the smoldering anti-Americanism in many Muslim countries. The key to defusing this ominous trend lies in overcoming the delusions about universality of the West’s liberal ideology.

Islam embraces some key Western political structures and values, such as nationalism and democracy, but it rejects others, such as the ban on religious ethical standards in political discourse, the denigration of Islam in the name of speech freedom.

Islamic values and the cultural patterns built around them engender Muslims’ missions and aspirations and lend meaning to their lives. As a step toward reconciliation with anti-American Muslim masses around the world, the West should adopt measures to stop the misuse of the free-speech doctrine to attack Islam.

New-Age Muslims: They Embrace Modern Life But Seek Meaning in Islam

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
June 13, 2012

A casualty of a trip to Bangladesh (and many other Muslim countries) could be the belief, or illusion, that Islam and modernity are conflicting value systems. A college classmate’s visit to my ancestral home here in Polashpur village reminded me of this illusion, which is widely shared in America.

I wouldn’t have recognized Rafiqul Islam if he had not told me who he was, especially because of his sprawling gray beard, Islamic cap and long Islamic shirt. It was more than three decades since I had seen him, then a clean-shaven businessman in slacks and a short-sleeve shirt.

Relishing jackfruit from a tree planted by my deceased father, Rafiq said his children had settled down, and he now had “the freedom” to devote to social service. That included campaigning for “Islamic-minded” candidates at elections and fundraising for a “modern madrassa,” or Islamic school.

The madrassa would offer the usual Islamic courses, but also English, math, science and social studies. Secular courses were rarely taught in non-government madrassas four decades ago when I lived in Bangladesh. While madrassas providing secular education are proliferating throughout the country, secular schools are teaching more Islamic subjects than ever.

About 90 percent of the Bangladeshi population of 160 million is Muslim. Rafiq is among the many educated elites who began their professional or business careers as run-of-the-mill secularists but eventually were swayed by the Islamizing wind.

“You look like a mujahid [one who struggles for Islam],” I said in jest.

“I wasted my life,” he replied, “doing things that don’t mean anything. … It’s already late for me to do what you would like to remember in your deathbed.”

Islamic activism such as Rafiq’s used to be a red flag to Bangladesh’s staunchly secularist founding leaders, especially the “father of the nation” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Referring to Islamic activists, Sheikh Mujib had scowled “these beards!” during an interview with me in September 1970. “It will take 30 years of education and progress to weed them out.”

Bangladesh was born the following year as a terribly poor and backward country. After two decades of economic and political turmoil, it began to modernize at an impressive pace. Surveys by U.N. agencies show that the country’s per capita GDP has tripled during the past 20 years — from $217 in 1991 to $640 today. During this period, the national literacy rate has risen from 26 percent to 56 percent. More remarkable is Bangladesh’s progress in female education. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, the female literacy rate is 77 percent, higher than the male rate of 74 percent.

Bangladeshi women are highly visible in politics, business and other professions. For two decades, the country has not known a male head of government. Two women, heading the two largest political parties, have been rotating as prime minister.

Most of these professional and activist women, however, don’t step out of the house without their Islamic head covering. Indeed, the country’s cultural landscape flaunts Islamic symbols and idiom more lavishly than at any other time in the country’s short history.

In Sylhet, the town nearest to my Polashpur home, many of the business, social and educational institutions boast Islamic names: Shah Jalal (local Muslim saint) University, Ibn Sina (eminent Arab Muslim philosopher) Hospital, Al-Hambra (Muslim architectural masterpiece in Spain) Shopping Center, Islamic Insurance Company, Al-Makkah (Mecca) Pharmacy, Bismillah (in the name of Allah) traders, and so on. During my visits in the early years of the country’s independence, I don’t remember seeing any of these Islamic symbols, except that of the saint Shah Jalal.

As in many other Muslim societies, the educated elites in Bangladesh who grew up under Western colonial rule or in its immediate aftermath believed in Western-style secularism with mosque-state separation. The further they travel from the colonial era, the more they feel the pull of their native Islamic culture.

The Western lifestyle doesn’t “mean” anything to them, as Rafiq put it. They still embrace modernity, but to make it meaningful, they are adapting it to Islamic values and ways of life.

Pakistan: A Hard Country

Middle East Policy
2011

The question once again: Is Pakistan a “failed state?” Anatol Lieven, a professor at King’s College in London, is among the latest authors to try an answer. His book Pakistan: A Hard Country is a broad and detailed survey of the security, economic, social, political and ecological challenges facing Pakistan. But he argues that a greater threat to Pakistan’s security is posed by the United States and India.

India has been Pakistan’s archenemy, with which it has fought three wars, two of them over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir (Kashmir, for short). Muslim Pakistan, including what is now Bangladesh, was carved out of British India in 1947 on the principle — agreed to by its Hindu and Muslim leaders and the departing British — that the subcontinent’s Muslim-majority territories should become an independent state. The rest of British India would be an independent Hindu-majority state. Pakistanis believe that India, which occupies two-thirds of Muslim-majority Kashmir, is violating the foundational principles of the partition of the subcontinent.

Lieven analyzes, extensively, Pakistan’s serious economic crises, never-ending ethnic and sectarian strife, and growing water shortages. He considers the last to be potentially the gravest threat to Pakistan’s survival. His best insights involve the question of Pakistan’s stability, especially whether terrorism is going to undo the problem-ridden state.

The author examines four kinds of terrorism roiling Pakistan. First, the Pakistani Taliban and allied groups are crossing over into Afghanistan and fighting the U.S. and NATO forces there. Second, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa wage campaigns of violence in India to vent their rage at the occupation of Kashmir, and most Pakistanis approve of their action. Third, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba, which belong to the majority Sunni Muslim sect, are striking Shia Muslim targets in Pakistan. Finally, the Taliban, Jaish-e-Muhammad and other militant groups are also attacking Pakistan’s military forces and civilian institutions; they have branded the Pakistani military and civilian government America’s “slaves” for joining the U.S. “war on terror” against militant Muslim groups in Pakistan.

Embarrassed by this kind of criticism — which is widespread among the Pakistani public — the Pakistani government and army brass, as well as the United States, are arguing that Pakistani military forces are actually defending Pakistan against these militants. They cite militant attacks on Pakistani installations. Americans add that these assaults, together with economic and other problems, threaten to make Pakistan a “failed state.”

The author agrees that militant violence has been a major part of the bloody mayhem Pakistan is going through in the anti-terror campaign. “By February 2010,” he points out, “according to official figures, 7,598 civilians had died in Pakistan as a result of terrorist attacks, Taliban executions, military action or drone attacks. It is worth noting that this figure is two and a half times the number of Americans killed on 9/11” (p. 474).

But Pakistanis view America as the source of the whole phenomenon of terrorism and social turmoil in their country. The Taliban didn’t begin to organize and al-Qaeda didn’t exist in Pakistan before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. “Before 9/11,” Lieven quotes a Pakistani activist as saying, “there was no terrorism in Pakistan. Once America has left Afghanistan, our society will sort itself out” (p. 155).

In reality, despite their violence, the anti-American and anti-Indian militant groups enjoy wide support among military ranks and the public. And the Pakistan army, the author says, “has been forced into alliance with the US, which a majority of Pakistani society — including soldiers’ own families — detest” (p. 175).

Most Pakistanis have been anti-American because of U.S. support for Israel, perceived hostility to Islam and the invasions of Iraq and, especially, neighboring Afghanistan. As Afghanistan provides Pakistan its “strategic depth” against India, Pakistanis are always leery about foreign hegemony over Afghanistan. Also, Pakistan is the home of twice as many Pashtun as live in Afghanistan, from which they are fighting to expel NATO forces.

Many Pakistanis recall the massive American aid and arms supplies to Afghan mujahedeen in their struggle to roll back the Soviet occupation, and they “see Afghan Taliban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against [the U.S. and NATO] occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s” (p. 8).

The Taliban’s violence against Pakistani military and other institutions is, however, resented by many Pakistanis. Educated Pakistanis become outraged when they see the Taliban forcing their puritanical Islamic religious and moral code on Pakistanis, meting out brutal punishment to villagers for violations of that code. Yet, most Pakistanis don’t consider them or their violence a threat to the stability of the state.

The author argues that terrorists cannot destabilize the Pakistani state “unless the US indirectly gives them a helping hand” (p. 128). By indirect U.S. action, he apparently means U.S. drone attacks on militant targets and other American anti-terror operations within Pakistan. He quotes a 2009 cable from then-U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson to the State Department, warning that U.S. drone and other attacks on Pakistani targets “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governing crisis in Pakistan” (pp. 478-79).

Significantly, the author also mentions the possibility of Pakistan’s being destabilized by direct U.S. invasion, maybe in collaboration with India. He does not explain how and why America might invade Pakistan, but warns of its dire consequences. No conceivable gains “could compensate for the vastly increased threats to the region and the world that would stem from Pakistan’s collapse, and for the disasters that would result for Pakistan’s own peoples” (p. 478).

On the question of a possible U.S. invasion of Pakistan, Lieven echoes the fears of many Pakistanis, which some of them shared with me during research trips through Pakistan. A retired army colonel, whom I interviewed on condition of anonymity, said that “the hue and cry [in the United States] about terrorists stealing our so-called Islamic bomb” has been a “ruse to take out our nuclear weapons and facilities.” He recalled that, in the mid-1980s, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the government of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to join Israel in an operation to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. He feared that if Mossad now revived its scheme, “it may have a partner” in New Delhi.

Muhammad Sirajul Islam, a Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) activist and resident of Karachi, voiced the same concern, adding that the United States and Israel have never reconciled with “what they call our Islamic bomb.”

The roots of Pakistan’s belligerency and warfare with India lie in the dichotomy of self-image between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. In undivided British India, Hindus were three-fourths of the population, Muslims making up most of the other fourth. Hindus in general resented Muslims’ separate cultural niche and their demand for constitutional safeguards for their political representation and economic interests. Without such safeguards, Muslims argued, “the brute majority” of Hindus in a majoritarian democracy would relegate them to permanent subordination. The Hindu leadership did not agree to Muslim demands, and Muslims forced the partition of the country to create a Muslim state, Pakistan. Most Hindus were furious at the partition, and some continue to nurture their hostility to the Muslim state.

Since partition, India has assumed a hegemonic posture on the subcontinent, to which Pakistanis are not reconciled. This historic Muslim-Hindu animus has been at the root of Pakistani-Indian hostility.

I am more optimistic than the author about Pakistan’s future and its relations with the United States and India. I see Washington beginning to realize that its goal of eliminating Muslim anti-American militancy through military means is a pipe dream. Already, that realization has led to the Obama administration’s decision to begin pulling out American troops from Afghanistan, without being able to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taliban, which President Obama had vowed to do. The administration also has all but given up on getting the Pakistani army to root out Taliban and al-Qaeda groups within its borders. In frustration, Washington has suspended a third of its annual aid package ($800 million) to Pakistan. I believe the United States is likely to better appreciate Pakistan’s strategic importance once it no longer has boots on the ground in Afghanistan and anti-American militancy continues to percolate in South Asia.

The belligerency between Pakistan and India has already begun to abate. For one thing, Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent has made a large-scale Indian invasion of Pakistan almost inconceivable. Second, the unrelenting secession movement in Indian-held Kashmir and India’s cool relations with Muslim Bangladesh, which it helped create, would make New Delhi extremely wary of a cataclysmic military campaign against the hornet’s nest of Muslim Pakistan. In Kashmir, India has tried every trick to suppress the 22-year Muslim uprising and will have to come to terms with the Kashmiris’ aspiration for some kind of self-determination.

Third, my research has revealed that the memories of wars and the partition of the subcontinent, which have bred much of the India-Pakistan hostility, are fading among both Pakistanis and Indians. The generations that were most traumatized by those hostilities have mostly departed from the political scene. The lingering tensions between the two states are now fueled by the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the army and some militant Muslim groups in Pakistan. The new generations of Pakistanis and Indians are more interested in peace and business between the two countries.

Thus, while official bilateral trade between Pakistan and India amounts to only about 1 percent of their respective global trade, Pakistani towns and bazaars, especially near the Pakistan-India border, are flooded with Indian goods. Indians’ interest in Pakistani music and literature, and the popularity of Indian movies and music in Pakistan, among other things, signal an inexorable trend toward normalization of relations.

During five millennia of their recorded history, the peoples of the subcontinent have alternated between periods of hostility and relative harmony. While the boundaries between their states are likely to endure, the dark period of their mutual hostility, spawned by the 1947 partition, appears to be yielding gradually to a new era of relative political and economic harmony.

U.S. should nurture Arab democracy

The Columbus Dispatch
April 30, 2011

Democratization of Arab societies “would be a disaster” for the West, warns Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis. Yet he predicts that Islamic political parties are “very likely to win … genuinely fair and free elections” in the Arab world.

Democratization of Arab societies “would be a disaster” for the West, warns Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis. Yet he predicts that Islamic political parties are “very likely to win … genuinely fair and free elections” in the Arab world.

One of the West’s best-known historians of Islam, Lewis has echoed what many American intellectuals and politicians are saying in private. And sometimes in public. Democracy, they argue, brought Hamas “terrorists” to power in Palestine and has given Hezbollah “terrorists” a lock on the Lebanese government. Democracy has replaced Iraq’s staunchly secular and anti-Iranian – albeit autocratic – regime with a pro-Iranian pseudo-theocracy. And in Turkey, an anti-Israeli government rooted in Islam has replaced an ultra-secularist and pro-Israeli ruling establishment through free and fair elections.

Ironically, Lewis had personally lobbied former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and democratize it and other Arab societies. Many Americans supported that campaign. The new drive to sit out Arab democratic upheavals is also shared by many Americans, especially politicians and pundits. Among them Nicholas Goldberg, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times.

“It would not be beneficial to the United States for the Middle East to be democratic,” Goldberg wrote. Democracy would replace the current pro-Western Arab governments, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, with anti-Western Islamic regimes. That would force the West “to pay a fair price for petroleum, which would shake the foundation of the (Western) economic system.”

Both the Arab democratization campaign of the past decade and today’s opposition to Arab democracy have a common goal: resisting Islamic forces from seizing the reins of government. Both are based on a dire misperception, i.e. that Islam-oriented regimes would necessarily endanger American or Western interests.

It’s a tribute to the West that most of the Muslim and non-Muslim societies that once fought hard to throw off the Western colonial yoke have adopted or are pursuing Western political institutions – political parties, elections, parliaments, press freedom, and so forth. Yet these societies remain deeply rooted in their own traditions and heritage.

Thus, in Muslim countries such as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan, Westernized ruling elites have given or are giving way to political forces rooted in Islam. In others, such as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, India and Indonesia, political parties anchored to native traditions are on the rise and are forcing the adaptation of their Western-oriented state laws to native traditions.

Islam is the bedrock of Muslim social and cultural traditions. Indigenization of a Muslim society’s political process means its adjustment to Islamic values and lifestyle. Decades of Western cultural and military campaigns have failed to stem this trend. Western antipathy or indifference toward Arab pro-democracy movements wouldn’t do it, either.

But the very concern that Islamic political activism would threaten Western interests is also unfounded. Sure, anti-Americanism is agitating many Muslim minds, and it sometimes triggers terrorism. But contemporary Muslim anti-Americanism has been spawned by the American invasion, occupation and domination of a host of Muslim societies, not by Islam.

If mighty imperial armies couldn’t suppress anti-colonial movements in earlier times, today’s feckless and tottering Arab autocracies can’t ride out the greatest Arab populist upheaval in a millennium. (The Arab nationalist movement of the early twentieth century was confined mostly to military and political elites.)

The Arab spring has given America and the West an opportunity to protect their interests in that region by cultivating the revolutionary forces that are going to shape the policies and agenda of tomorrow’s Arab states.

The Obama administration needs to drop its policy of supporting some Arab pro-democracy movements and ignoring others. It should adopt a bold and principled policy of defending and aiding all populist Arab struggles. Democratic or populist governments in the Persian Gulf may ask the West to “pay a fair price for petroleum.” A fair price would be cheaper than the high price that could be demanded by governments alienated by American apathy or indifference toward the struggles that would have brought them to power.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West

By Mustafa Malik

Middle East Policy, 2010.

In the spring 2004 issue of Middle East Policy (Vol. XI, No. 1), I argued that, while earlier groups of immigrants assimilated into European societies, “Muslims are unlikely to do so.” A majority of those who commented on it thought I didn’t get it. They basically said that modernity would eventually assimilate Muslims into European societies, as it had other waves of immigrants. Remy Leveau, a French sociologist whom I have known for years, wondered if I had “spoken too soon.”

A recent book also makes the argument I did. In his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell predicts that Muslims will not assimilate into native European societies and will “retain the habits and cultures” they acquired from Islam. He notes that Muslim immigrants and their European-born offspring “feel at home in Europe.” But, while the offspring of Christians who had migrated from one European country to another assimilated into host societies by second and third generations, a trend toward Muslim assimilation “went into reverse” by the second generation.

Caldwell says European Muslims, now about 20 million and increasing rapidly, will change the continent’s cultural ethos. They are “anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines,” while the dwindling white native population languishes in “an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture.” The author, an American conservative, quotes German jurist Udo di Fabio as lamenting:

During my research trips through Europe I have found native liberal intellectuals the most resentful of the continent’s growing Islamic space. Among the not-so-liberal Christian believers, the growth of Muslim communities has triggered a twofold reaction. One group, mentioned by Caldwell, is led by Pope Benedict XVI. These Christians view Islam as a threat to global — and especially European — Christianity. They would wish to rally European Christians, religious and secular, to resist the spread of Islamic culture in Europe. The pope has also lined up some liberal intellectuals for this mission. Jurgen Habermas, the atheist German philosopher, declared after a meeting with Benedict: “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization.”

Why in God’s name should a member of a vital [Islamic] world culture want to integrate into Western culture, when Western culture … no longer has any transcendental idea, is approaching its historical end? Why should he get caught up in a culture marked as much by self-doubt as by arrogance, which has squandered its religious and moral inheritance on a forced march to modernity, and which offers no higher ideal of the good life beyond travel, longevity and consumerism?

Other Christian believers consider liberalism, rather than Islam, the main threat to Christianity. They are collaborating with Muslims in what they view as a common struggle of all faiths against Godless liberalism. Among them is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. In February 2008, the head of the Anglican Church said Britain could implement parts of Islamic law, the sharia, in marital and other issues in Muslim communities.

In the early 2000s, the French Catholic clergy (and some Jewish rabbis) were supporting Muslim protests against public hostility and government strictures. Father Jean-Marie Gaudel, adviser to the French Catholic Bishops Conference, told me in Paris that Muslims, Christians and Jews “drink from the same moral well” of the Abrahamic tradition. They should “join hands” in strengthening societies’ moral values. In Marseilles, I saw white fathers defending the right of Muslim girls to wear headscarves to public schools, taking a stance that was opposed by the liberal establishment. I haven’t checked their positions since the ascendancy of Pope Benedict.

Caldwell is an editor at the American neoconservative publication The Weekly Standard, and he makes no secret of where he stands. “Islam,” he says, “is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But it is in no sense Europe’s religion and in no sense Europe’s culture.” However, the author doesn’t make a convincing argument as to why “Europe’s culture” can’t accommodate Islam. Hasn’t Europe been hospitable to liberal, Christian, Greco-Roman, Slavic, Germanic and Celtic cultures? Some of these cultures clashed violently with one another. Caldwell doesn’t delve into the underlying variables that have pitted Europe’s white social mainstream against its Islamic sub-society.

A growing number of philosophers, anthropologists and social scientists have been exploring these variables, however. Peter Berger, one of my favorite social anthropologists, argues that liberalism has relativized Western societies, and by so doing, has diminished the certainty and plausibility of Western values and cultural norms. “Relativism liberates,” he says, “but the resulting liberty can be painful” as it challenges people’s long-nurtured assumptions and norms, driving them into the quest for “liberation from relativism” (A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity, 1992). They become attracted to new systems of beliefs and worldviews. I agree and see Islam’s robust institutions thriving in this drift of mainstream European culture.

Some Western thinkers posit that liberalism has failed to achieve its main goal: bringing happiness into human life through secular and material means. They note that consumerism, hedonism, anomie and so forth, which are fruits of the liberal-materialist Weltanschauung, have robbed man of real happiness and fulfillment. Alastair MacIntyre attributes this predicament to liberalism’s “inability to provide any post-Christian means of understanding [man’s] situation in the world” (Secularization and Moral Change, 1967).

Caldwell says the parts of Europe that are taking on an “increasingly Muslim character” are expanding inexorably, and he calls it a “revolution.” His failure to explore the roots of this historic phenomenon stems from his unwillingness or inability to look into it from outside the traditional Western vantage points. Happily, others are making outside-the-box inquiries into “post-Christian [and post-liberal] means of understanding” the evolving Western civilization and culture. I call them the John the Baptists of a new epistemic paradigm and hope that the messiah of that paradigm is waiting in the wings.

Pakistan: Can U.S. Policy Save the Day?

Middle East Policy
Summer 2009

Ever since 9/11, America’s preoccupation in Pakistan has been with “terrorism.” Anti-American Pakistani militants call it part of their jihad against the U.S.-NATO “occupation” of Afghanistan. Today political stability has become the overriding U.S. concern in Pakistan. President Obama says his administration is “working to secure stability in Pakistan” because he is “gravely concerned” that an unstable Pakistan could become a haven for militants.¹ Pakistan’s stability hinges mainly on its interethnic equations, mode of governance, relations with India and the American policy toward Pakistan. Obama aides acknowledge that U.S. policy since the 1950s has continually abetted the disruption of the nation’s democratic governance, fueling its disintegrative trends.

The administration is also worried that political chaos could lend Taliban or al-Qaeda militants access to Pakistani nuclear weapons. Yet Washington has pushed Pakistan into an ominous war with the Taliban, which is spawning the chaos that troubles it. To promote Pakistan’s stability, the administration is recasting U.S. policy objectives in that country. It is unclear, though, to what extent the U.S. policy shuffle would help the fraying society pull together.

In this article I explore the threats to Pakistan’s political stability, foremost among them the ethnocentrism that is inherent in the multiethnic postcolonial state. Punjabi ethnocentrism, in particular, has played a pivotal role in exacerbating Pakistan’s separatist movements and impeding the democratic process. Furthermore, Washington has supported Pakistan’s dictatorial regimes and used the country’s military forces to promote U.S. foreign-policy goals. I also discuss the impact on Pakistan’s stability of the continuing “war on terror” (a term the Obama administration has stopped using). Finally, I look into the steps the United States might take to help shore up Pakistan’s troubled political and economic institutions.

Pakistan was born in 1947 as an unstable “nation-state.” Like many other postcolonial states, it was created overnight out of disparate ethnic communities that had never lived together as a “nation.” The previous year, the departing British colonial rulers of undivided India had held an election, partly to determine which Indian provinces wanted to join the “Muslim homeland.” Pakistan would be chopped off from the country’s Hindu-majority provinces, which together would become modern India.

The All-India Muslim League spearheaded the Pakistan movement and called the election a “referendum” on its Pakistan project. Ironically, in none of the four provinces that make up today’s Pakistan (Baluchistan was carved out as a separate province after the creation of Pakistan) did the Muslim League win the election. The legislature of Sindh province had, however, adopted a resolution three years earlier signaling its support for Pakistan. The ethnic groups in each of these provinces, which would be known collectively as West Pakistan, were preoccupied with their ethnic interests. Only the province of Bengal, a thousand miles to the east, elected a Muslim League government. Besides, Muslims in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh played a key role in the creation of Pakistan.

Years later, the would-be founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, said to me, “Without the victory of the Bengal Muslim League [in the 1946 elections] and the Calcutta riots, Pakistan would have remained a dream.”² Sheikh Mujib had joined the Pakistan movement as a Muslim League activist and defended Muslims during the Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta that broke out over the Pakistan question in August 1946. Part of Bengal, home of the Bengali ethnic community, would join Pakistan and be called East Pakistan. And yet, irony of ironies, East Pakistan would break away from Pakistan 24 years later to become independent Bangladesh, complaining bitterly of the Punjabi political and economic stranglehold on the country.

British Indian Muslims shared a common religious bond, but their religious values metamorphosed into their ethnic lifestyles, and their political behavior was guided essentially by their ethnicity. In undivided Bengal, Muslims were 52 percent of the population, most of them exploited and suppressed by upper-caste Hindu landowners and money lenders. In 1946, they voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim state, primarily so as to rid themselves of caste Hindu exploitation. Muslims in what would become the four West Pakistani provinces — Punjab, Sindh, Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan — had not suffered similar Hindu suppression. In Punjab (which, like Bengal, would be split between Pakistan and India), Muslims were a third of the population but had a strong middle class, while in the three other West Pakistani provinces they made up large majorities.

Most West Pakistani Muslims warmed to the Muslim state after learning that their provinces would become part of it in any case. The inception of Pakistan sparked vicious riots between Muslims and Hindus in Punjab, Bengal and other parts of the subcontinent. These were followed by three full-blown wars and several minor conflicts between Pakistan and India. The Hindu-Muslim riots, the India-Pakistan wars and the Islamic bond fostered Pakistanis’ national solidarity.³ Yet ethnic values and affinity remain strong among Pakistanis and have been exacerbated by the Punjabi military and political elites’ domination of other provinces.

Approximately 75 percent of contemporary Pakistan’s armed forces, and roughly an equal percentage of its central government bureaucracy, come from Punjab. The Punjabis rebuff complaints about their domination, claiming that since they are Pakistan’s majority ethnic community (about 60 percent of the country’s population), their leading role in national affairs is natural. In the old Pakistan, though, the Punjabis were a minority, but they stubbornly resisted the leadership of the East Pakistani Bengalis, the majority community. The main complaint against them concerns the constant use of their preponderance in the army and bureaucracy to impose dictatorships and promote Punjabi interests in other provinces.

REGIME CHANGE

The United States has supported all of Pakistan’s half-dozen dictatorial regimes and been accused of abetting the unconstitutional overthrow of some of its democratic ones. The first such allegation followed a 1953 coup. Those who related the story to me included the late Pakistani Prime Minister Nurul Amin. The Eisenhower administration had invited Pakistan through its pro-American army chief, General Mohammad Ayub Khan, to join the proposed Baghdad Pact. This anti-Soviet treaty, sponsored by America and Britain, would later be renamed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).

Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin, a native of East Pakistan, wanted the draft treaty reworked to enable Pakistan to count on alliance support if attacked by a foreign power. The Americans rejected his request, and the prime minister was having difficulty making up his mind about the alliance, despite the prodding of the Punjabi governor general. On the afternoon of April 17, 1953, Governor General Ghulam Mohammad told an incredulous Nazimuddin that he was being fi red as prime minister. The governor general had no constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister who had the support of a parliamentary majority. Three days later, the deposed prime minister told visiting Nurul Amin, then chief minister of East Pakistan, that he had been warned by army sources that any challenge to his dismissal would “compel the army to step in.”

Nurul Amin told me in 1970 that “Ghulam Mohammad and his coterie were uncomfortable” about having a Bengali prime minister, and that Nazimuddin believed that they made common cause with the Americans to get rid of him.⁴ On February 24, 1955, Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact without the alliance’s commitment to its defense. The Nazimuddin episode instilled anti-American feeling in many of the first generation of East Pakistani leaders. This was reflected in Nurul Amin’s last letters to me before his death in 1974.

Four months after Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA openly orchestrated a military coup against the democratically elected prime minister of neighboring Iran, Mohammed Mosaddeq, and replaced him with American protégé Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Like Nazimuddin, Mosaddeq had resisted the U.S. demand to join the Baghdad pact; the autocrat Reza Pahlavi had no such compunctions. Nazimuddin, one of Pakistan’s architects, swallowed his humiliation to avoid a military adventurism that could harm the five-year-old state. Nurul Amin had told him that he would resign as East Pakistan’s chief minister and launch a movement challenging the “illegal, ultra vires [extra legal] and undemocratic” act of the Punjabi governor general, “provided you come with us.” The ousted prime minister rejected the idea. He had evidence that Ghulam Muhammad had “acted in this matter in consultation with General Ayub Khan,” who was present in the governor general’s official residence when the prime minister was fired. “The army was kept ready to take over.” Political turmoil in Pakistan, Nazimuddin feared, could give “enemies of the country,” meaning India, an excuse for intervention. ⁵

Another East Pakistani leader, Sheikh Mujib, refused to accept an obstruction of the democratic process by a Punjabi military dictator, and Pakistan paid dearly for it. Sheikh Mujib’s political party, the Awami League, had won a majority of parliamentary seats in the 1970 elections, but the military ruler General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan would not allow the party to participate in creating Pakistan’s future constitutional framework, prompting it to launch the Bangladeshi independence movement. And as though to vindicate Nazimuddin, India invaded East Pakistan, dismembered the old Muslim state and helped create Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi political elite never forgave the Nixon administration for staunchly supporting the Punjabi dictator through this vicissitude.

A third Pakistani leader — a democratically elected prime minister from Sindh — was toppled and executed by the Punjabi General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq after the prime minister had a falling out with the United States over Pakistan’s nuclear program. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told family and friends that his resistance to pressure from Henry Kissinger (then U.S. national security adviser) to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program cost him his prime ministership and “perhaps my life.” Later Benazir Bhutto, his daughter and successor as prime minister, related his encounter with Kissinger in her autobiography. Zulfikar Bhutto, she wrote, returned from his meeting with President Richard Nixon’s emissary “flushed with anger.” Kissinger had spoken to him “crudely and arrogantly,” warning him that if he didn’t give up Pakistan’s nuclear program, he could be “made into ‘a horrible example.’”⁶

Significantly, the day before his July 5, 1977, coup, Zia had met with the U.S. ambassador to Islamabad alone, telling others that he wished to greet the envoy on America’s Independence Day. Zia had not visited the embassy on July 4 before, and Zulfikar Bhutto did not know about the visit until a week after he had been overthrown. Kausar Niazi, a fellow journalist who had become a member of the Zulfikar Bhutto Cabinet, told me during a 1989 trip to Islamabad, “Mr. Bhutto took Kissinger’s threat seriously,” but never thought “Zia, of all people, would betray him.” Zia had been Zulfikar Bhutto’s favorite general. The prime minister had suspected, Niazi added, that “the Americans could try to get him some other way.”⁷

Few of America’s policy initiatives have had a more destabilizing effect on Pakistan than its use of the Pakistani armed forces to fight the “war on terror.” Pakistan’s Punjabi army chief of staff, General Pervez Musharraf, had staged his military coup against a democratically elected prime minister — who happened to be a Punjabi for a change — and had become a pariah in Pakistan and abroad until the United States tapped him to run its anti-terror campaign.

The campaign against Pakistani militants continues under the Obama administration. During the Cold War, the United States cultivated Pakistani generals in order to use the Pakistani army as a bulwark against the Soviet Union’s southward expansion. Most Pakistanis did not like the one-sided relationship because America had no commitment to Pakistan’s defense. They resented it especially when successive U.S. administrations supported or condoned the generals’ coups d’état against democratic governments. In the post-9/11 phase, Pakistanis see the United States using their army against, not an external power, but their own children. Many Pakistanis who would normally have supported the army campaign to rein in the Taliban oppose it instead for two reasons. One, they know that their army has waged the anti-Taliban war at the American behest because part of the guerrilla force is fighting U.S.-NATO troops in Afghanistan. They are anguished by the sight of Pakistanis in uniform killing young Pakistani civilians. Secondly, most Pakistanis, including those who denounce the Taliban’s religious extremism, support their struggle against foreign forces in Afghanistan. And they are alarmed by the progressive alienation of the army from the public during the anti-Taliban campaign. The U.S. assignment for General Musharraf was to keep Pakistan’s mostly Pashtun guerrillas from crossing over into Afghanistan, besides allowing the passage of war matériel through Pakistan. Under the Obama administration, the focus of the “anti-terror” campaign in Pakistan has shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The administration not only continues the air raids on Pakistani Taliban targets begun by the Bush administration, but has also sponsored and funded the Pakistani army’s war on the militant organization. The whole campaign is based on the apparent assumption that anti-American militancy in Pakistan and Afghanistan stems essentially from the militants’ religious and social values. The Americans routinely attribute the Taliban and al-Qaeda jihad to Islamic scripture and seminaries, poverty, illiteracy and so forth. Seldom do they ponder whether American policy has had anything to do with it.

A 6,000-YEAR-OLD PASHTUN

During two trips through Pakistan in the last three years, I was told by politicians, scholars and activists over and over that anti-American militancy there had been fueled mostly by the “reckless military campaign” against militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and America’s support for repressive Pakistani dictators. My interviewees said that prior to the Afghanistan invasion, suicide bombing had been practically unknown to Pakistanis. Al-Qaeda did not exist there; neither did the Taliban have much of an organization. By now, the militancy has spread from the tribal areas and the NWFP to Punjabi and Sindhi cities. The guerrillas are moving to the Pakistani heartland because, noted a British reporter, “U.S. air strikes have made life uncomfortable in their traditional homelands in the northwest frontier regions.”⁸

The movement of the mostly Pashtun Taliban is inspired by the Islamic values that underpin their ethnic community more than any other in Pakistan. Islam propelled British Indian Muslims into a two-pronged liberation struggle. They fought to end British colonial subjugation as well as economic and social suppression of the Hindu caste system. Six decades later, the Taliban, xenophobic and obscurantist as they mostly are, have launched a similar struggle. They are fighting to end the U.S.-NATO occupation of Pashtun territory in Afghanistan and the political suppression of the Pakistani lower classes. Despite their Islamic agenda and activism in non-Pashtun areas, the Taliban retain their ethnic orientation and are focused mostly on the Pashtun-inhabited NWFP.

The Taliban’s February 2009 peace agreement with the government set off alarm bells in Washington. American officials and media viewed it as the Pakistani federal government’s capitulation to Islamism, which, they contend, could engulf the whole nation. Actually, the deal was an intra-Pashtun rapprochement, negotiated by the Pashtun government of the NWFP in support of its Pashtun feudal constituency. The Taliban had expelled dozens of landlords-cum-politicians from Swat and distributed their estates among the poor, creating excitement among the local public and part of the Pakistani intelligentsia. Columnist Manzur Ejaz of Pakistan’s Daily Times wrote, “The foreign powers obsessed with extremism and jihadi violence in Pakistan have little insight into Pakistan’s real issues.”

The foreign powers obsessed with extremism and jihadi violence in Pakistan have little insight into Pakistan’s real issues, Pakistani society has long reached the boiling point because of continuing oppressive feudalism at the political and economic levels. To that has been added the new rich class of Pakistan, brazenly exhibitionist, which, too, has no regard for the poor. The country has thus become a conglomerate of urban and rural fiefdoms where the powerful make their own laws and state institutions extract from the poor whatever they can. No one has yet put a stop to such degradation. Perhaps the Taliban will.⁹

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Pashtun landlords in the Malakand and Hashtnagar areas of the NWFP were threatened by peasant movements, usually supported by Maoists. Some of those movements were defused by the pro-Soviet leftist provincial government of Abdul Wali Khan, the father of the current leader of the NWFP-based Awami National Party, Asfandyar Wali Khan. Pakistan’s pro-Soviet left was led by landlords. The Taliban, on the other hand, come mostly from the lower classes, and they have revived the anti-feudal movement once led by Maoists. Their socioeconomic agenda resembles that of Catholic liberation theology in Central and South America.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s stability is threatened, not so much by Islamism, but by ethnocentrism, especially the hostility between the Punjabis and minority ethnic groups. Democracy could have helped bridge the ethnic fissures by giving citizens from minority provinces greater stakes in the national economy, politics and culture. Continual military coups — establishing Punjabi military, bureaucratic and economic domination of minority provinces and ethnic groups — obstructed that process and sustained most of the ethnic fault lines inherited by Pakistan.

The Pashtun “nationalist” upsurge was once symbolized by the pro-Soviet left in the NWFP. It seemed to be tapering off during the past three decades, mainly from the fading of the left and the gradual Pashtun incorporation into the army and economy. The war on the Taliban, who are deeply rooted in Pashtun society and culture, threatens to reverse that trend. If this war on the Islamist movement goes on, Pashtun nationalism could revive under Islamic garb.

The Pashtun ethnonational movement is as old as Pakistan. The historical Pashtun homeland was split in 1893 by the British colonial power between Afghanistan and what would later become Pakistan. The Afghan government has not recognized the partition to this day, but, curiously has been complaining about Pashtun militants from Pakistan crossing into Afghanistan. Few Pashtun, on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have ever reconciled with it.

In 1974, the Zulfikar Bhutto government arrested the Pashtun leader Abdul Wali Khan on the apparently baseless charge that he had accepted a bribe from then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to carry on secessionist activity in the NWFP. In court the defendant said he was a Pashtun and also a Muslim, but that neither his ethnic nor his religious identity conflicted with his loyalty to Pakistan. Which was his primary identity — Pashtun, Muslim or Pakistani? — the prosecutor demanded to know. “I am a 6,000-year-old Pashtun,” roared the Pashtun warhorse, “a thousand-year-old Muslim and a 27-yearold Pakistani!” Islam had spread among Pashtun tribes during the eighth century, and in 1974 Pakistan was 27 years old.

Like the Pashtun, the Baluch have a unique ethnolingual tribal culture. Depressingly poor and uneducated as most of them are, they are fi ercely independent and resent the domination of their community and exploitation of their minerals by the Punjabi-dominated central government. Since the creation of Pakistan, the Baluch secessionist campaign has ignited a half-dozen extremely bloody wars and miniwars between their guerrillas and the Pakistani army.

The Baluch are, says author Stephen Philip Cohen, “an unlikely candidate for a successful separatist movement.”¹⁰ Though their province spans 42 percent of Pakistan’s territory, they make up only 5 percent of the Pakistani population. And a massive influx of Pashtun and Punjabis has turned the Baluch into a minority in Baluchistan. Still, their independence movement rages on. Two years ago, I saw graffiti on store walls in Quetta, the provincial capital, and hillside rock faces in the countryside: “Islam is our religion, Baluch is our nation, independence is our goal.” “Pakistanis out!” “Stop looting Baluchistan,” and so forth. The secessionist movement has been waged by the Baluchistan Liberation Army, the Baluchistan Liberation Front, Jundallah, the Bugti militia and other militant groups.

Many of the Baluch separatists are left-leaning and critical of the United States. They also resent U.S. support for the predominantly Punjabi army, which has waged bloody wars against them. Interestingly, some intellectuals and government officials in Punjab and the NWFP accuse the Americans of supporting the Baluch rebels. Among them is Azmat Hayat Khan, head of the Area Study Center at Peshawar University in the NWFP capital of Peshawar. He told me that the CIA and Indian intelligence had been funding and arming Baluch rebels out of different motives. Pointing to a map on his wall, the professor said the United States wanted a “corridor through Baluchistan” for passage of its military forces, oil and other resources from Central Asia and Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. India was trying to “destabilize Pakistan,” he added, to counter Pakistani support for the Kashmiri insurgency.¹¹ America may or may not have anything to do with Baluch separatism, but the complaint echoed a near consensus among the Pakistani intelligentsia that American “interference” is destabilizing Pakistan.

FEW EXPERTS

The Sindhis, also resentful of Punjabi dominance, waged their separatist movement in 1972. Leaders of the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz, the umbrella organization of several Sindhi separatist groups, complained that the Punjabis, along with immigrants from India called Mohajirs, were scooping up jobs and land in Sindh. And they denounced the diversion of river water to the upper riparian Punjab, hurting Sindhi agriculture. The movement’s leader, the late Ghulam Murtaza Sayed — better known as G.M. Sayed — was inspired by the independence of Bangladesh and wanted his province to become an independent “Sindhu Desh,” the country of Sindh. The Jeay Sindh movement had abated by the mid-1970s but revives continually.

The late Akhter Hameed Khan, one of Pakistan’s best-known intellectuals and social activists, blamed Pakistan’s separatist ferment partly on “Punjabi greed and militarism.” During a series of interviews in 1989, Khan likened the new Punjabi neighborhoods in Sindh and Baluchistan to “the British [colonial] settlements in Kenya or Zimbabwe” and said Punjabi land grabs and “brutal military crackdowns” in trouble spots had aggravated ethnic conflicts and “threaten[ed] the stability” of Pakistan.¹²

Today, the war against the Taliban, unless ended soon, could pose a greater threat to Pakistan’s stability. It threatens to deepen the Pashtun Punjabi ethnic divide, while fomenting the class dissension between the feudal aristocracy and the landless poor in the NWFP. President Obama believes, an administration source told me in February, that al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan could be “defeated by a combination of military, economic and diplomatic tools” which, in the president’s opinion, would be more palatable to Pakistanis. This view was reflected in the “comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan” that the administration has announced. Under it, the United States has undertaken to dispatch an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan and pour billions of additional dollars in economic and military aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The expectation that military action and economic assistance would “defeat” the anti-American militants in Afghanistan or Pakistan betrays a serious lack of understanding of what the militants are fighting and dying for.

Taliban activists and guerrillas are amused by the American political and media speculation that they have been inspired by Islamic scripture, enjoining them to fight Christians and Jews. Several of them told me that they did not see their anti-American jihad today as any different from the anti-Soviet one that their elders had fought in Afghanistan two decades before. They recalled that the CIA had helped arm and train those Pakistani guerrillas, and that the Americans “called them mujahedeen,” freedom fighters.¹³

Mighty foreign hegemons have occupied Afghanistan and other South Asian countries before, and some spent money and energy to spread education and build infrastructure in those countries. But their good deeds, which the benefi ciaries appreciated, did not buy them the natives’ tolerance of their hegemony. “The West doesn’t seem to understand,” says British author and activist Tariq Ali, “that people do not like to be occupied. The British tried and failed, the Russians tried and failed, and now the U.S. and NATO are trying, too.”¹⁴ Cohen says U.S. policy toward Pakistan has often been clueless because “the United States has only a few true Pakistan experts and knows remarkably little about this country.”¹⁵ Obama appears instinctively to realize the need for a fundamental change in U.S. policy toward Pakistan (and Afghanistan). It requires fresh ideas based on facts on the ground. The president’s reliance on the advice of retirees from past administrations with little useful knowledge of the region seems to have become his administration’s Achilles heel in its dealings with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

U.S. OBJECTIVES

At his 2003 Camp David meeting with Musharraf, President George W. Bush outlined three issues that were of paramount American interest in Pakistan: terrorism, nuclear proliferation and democratization. The three issues also underlie the Obama administration’s Pakistan policy. In addition, the administration is pursuing two other objectives: improving Pakistan’s relations with India and shoring up its rickety economy. Some of these objectives are contradictory.

The Obama administration is wasting its time trying to get Pakistan to defeat the Taliban militarily. The Pakistani Taliban organized itself to fight U.S. and NATO forces in the Pashtun land of Afghanistan and, along the way, launched its campaigns to introduce Islamic law and take on the feudal aristocracy in areas under their sway. Military force will not defuse the movement, especially while foreign troops roam Afghanistan. On the contrary, Pakistani military and paramilitary crackdowns and, especially, the U.S. drone attacks, are found to have swollen the ranks of the Taliban: A Pakistani writer narrates the impact of the drone strikes on his state and society. “The message given [by the drones] to the people,” says Khalid M. Ashraf, “is that it is not the government of Pakistan that controls these areas, it is we who control these areas. Your lives are at our mercy. We will attack anywhere, anytime.” While Pakistani government forces flee at the sight of the drones, “the Taliban are closing in … on Islamabad. Pakistan will crumble if these attacks continue.”¹⁶

The U.S. position on Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons facilities also needs to be reassessed. Pakistani government offi cials and generals, dependent on American military and economic aid, would not pick an argument with the Americans on the issue. In private, they resent the traditional “American hostility” to their arsenal of nuclear devices. They consider the nukes their only deterrent against India’s overwhelmingly superior nuclear and conventional military forces. Some fume over American official and media “paranoia” about the safety of their nuclear facilities. They insist that the security system at their nuclear plants is “ironclad.” Some Pakistani offi cials are worried that the Americans, by throwing a fit about their nuclear arsenal and the country’s instability, may be building a case to take over their nuclear facilities.

It is hard to understand, too, whether Washington is serious about its professed commitment to democracy and human rights in Pakistan. The United States has had close ties to all of Pakistan’s autocratic governments. America does not talk about the democratization of the Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Moroccan and other repressive Muslim regimes. After 9/11, it introduced the surveillance of hundreds of law-abiding American Muslim citizens and incarcerated and tortured hundreds of other Muslims at Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Bagram and the “black sites.” These actions have flouted international law and, in some cases, amounted to war crimes. They have undercut America’s credibility as a promoter of democracy and human rights. Furthermore, if the Pakistani army decides to grab power again, Washington would still need to work with it on terrorism, proliferation and other issues.

A well-considered initiative to improve Pakistan’s relations with India would indeed serve the cause of peace and stability as much as American interests in the subcontinent. The Pakistan-India conflicts have, as mentioned, strengthened Pakistanis’ national solidarity. But they also have unduly elevated the army’s clout, which is among the country’s major destabilizing agents. If the United States is serious about promoting Pakistan’s stability, it should begin by discontinuing its long-standing direct liaison with Pakistani generals.

Bruce Riedel, the administration’s resident expert on South Asia, wants the United States to begin its quest for peace between Pakistan and India with the Kashmir issue. The Hindu ruler of that Muslim-majority principality had refused to join Pakistan or India. Subsequently, each country occupied part of the state, demarcated by a “line of control.” Riedel suggests “making the line of control a permanent and normal international border.”¹⁷ I doubt that this would pacify the Kashmiri militants, who have been struggling for their “national independence.” A better way to begin the search for a resolution of this thorny issue could be to try to persuade India and Pakistan to make the line of control permeable and grant the Kashmiris greater autonomy over their territory.

The administration plans to dramatically increase the volume of aid to Pakistan and focus on the country’s economic development. In the eight years following 9/11, Pakistan received $12 billion in U.S. aid, nearly 90 percent of which went to the military and was intended mainly to be used in “war on terror” operations. Yet today the Talibans’ robust network spans most of Pakistan’s northeast and challenges the Pakistani army, while part of it continues to engage U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Obama advisers blame the dramatic rise of the Pakistani Taliban on the Bush administration’s obsession with military crackdowns on the group. They are trying to win the hearts and minds of Pakistanis in an attempt to erode the Taliban’s public support, simultaneously arming and pushing the military to fight the militants. The administration has introduced measures in Congress to triple the amount of Pakistan aid to $1.5 billion a year for a five-year period, allocating a substantial portion of it to education, infrastructure and other programs for public good.

This substantial aid package would help alleviate some of the hardships afflicting everyday Pakistanis, provided the United States makes sure a good portion of it is used to benefit the lower classes. For this, the aid program should include such efforts as job creation, promotion of small business, and technical and vocational education. Equally important, an effective monitoring mechanism should be put in place to insure the use of the aid for the intended purposes. Studies have shown that in South Asia only about a third of foreign economic assistance reaches the target groups. The rest is siphoned off by bureaucrats and used for unintended projects.

Pursuit of these objectives could assuage some of the grievances the Pakistanis have been nurturing against the United States. It would not do much, however, to defeat the Pakistani Taliban movement. Many Pakistanis criticize the Taliban’s obscurantism and cruelty to those who do not conform to their brand of Islam, but most support their struggle to expel foreign forces from Afghanistan. American aid would not diminish Pakistani public support for the “Afghan jihad.” Neither can military power vanquish Taliban guerrillas while U.S.-NATO troops remain entrenched in Afghanistan. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a steadfast U.S. ally participating in NATO’s Afghan mission, understands this reality. “We are not going to ever defeat this insurgency,” he told CNN and The Wall Street Journal.¹⁸ The administration should begin exploring a strategy to wind down the Western military presence in Afghanistan. This would take care of anti-American militancy in Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan.¹ Jon Meacham, “A Conversation with Barack Obama: What He’s Like Now,” Newsweek, May 25, 2009; Helene Cooper and Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Voices Concern on Pakistan and Defends Interrogation Memo Release,” The New York Times, April 30, 2009.

² Author’s interview with Sheikh Mujibar Rahman, Dhaka, East Pakistan, March 14, 1970.

³ Mustafa Malik, “Pakistan: Terror War Bolsters Islamism, Nationhood,” Middle East Policy, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 111-124.

⁴ Author’s conversation with Nurul Amin, Dhaka, East Pakistan, February 28, 1970.

⁵ Nurul Amin’s forthcoming autobiography, narrated to the author.

⁶ Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of Destiny (Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 95.

⁷ Author’s conversation with Kausar Niazi, Islamabad, Pakistan, August 26, 1989.

⁸ Michael Burleigh, “Will World War III Start Here?” Daily Mail (London), March 4, 2008, p. 14.

⁹ Manzur Ejaz, “Taliban to the Rescue,” Daily Times, Lahore, April 22, 2009.

¹⁰ Stephen Philip Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Brookings Institution, 2004), p. 1.

¹¹ Author’s interview with Azmat Hayat Khan, Peshawar, Pakistan, October 3, 2007.

¹² Author’s interview with Akhter Hameed Khan, Karachi, November 2, 1989.

¹³ Author’s interviews with tribal youths and a tribal elder at the Mohmand Agency town of Yaka Ghund, October 4, 2007.

¹⁴ Lisette B. Poole, “Author Tariq Ali Warns against U.S. Actions in Pakistan,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2008, pp. 70-71.

¹⁵ Cohen, p. 221.

¹⁶ Khalid Ashraf, “Drone Attacks Will Crumble Pakistan,” Writers Forum, Islamabad, April 9, 2009.

¹⁷ Bruce Riedel, “Pakistan: The Critical Battlefield,” Current History, November 2008, p. 361.

¹⁸ Robert Marquand, “Clinton Pushes NATO Allies for United Strategy on Afghanistan,” Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 2009, p. 7.

News of Pakistan’s demise is premature

The Daily Star

Beirut, Lebanon
May 22, 2009

A friend called from Lahore, Pakistan, and asked if I could put up his family in my home in the Washington suburbs. “Most welcome!” I said. “When are you all coming?”

“As soon as Pakistan begins to collapse!” replied Abdul Wahid Qureshi, a retired college professor.

Qureshi was responding facetiously to David Kilcullen’s forecast that Pakistan would “collapse” within “one to six months” from a financial crisis and an “extremist takeover” of its institutions. Kilcullen served as the top adviser to General David Petraeus, chief of the US Central Command.

You can’t blame Pakistanis, beset with myriad problems, for having a little diversion over the Americans’ curious words and deeds about their country. I bet many of them were amused by the outcry in Washington for a military “defeat “of the Taliban, which has driven Islamabad into a de facto war against the movement that has cost 700 lives so far.

The army had tried but couldn’t defeat the Taliban. And the Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, is now promising to “flush [them] out” of the Swat area, not end their widely supported movement. Most Pakistanis know their army just can’t do it. Yet most also know why their government waged the campaign, which opposition politicians are denouncing as “America’s war.” The offensive was launched on the eve of President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to the United States, made when the Obama administration and Congress were considering a substantial aid package to Pakistan. It will likely continue until the money is in the pipeline.

With Zardari at his side, Obama announced that he and his guest had agreed to “meet the threat of extremism with a positive program of growth and opportunity.” The House Appropriations Committee approved $1 billion in emergency aid to Pakistan, more than half of it economic. A five-year, $7.5 billion Pakistan aid package was subsequently introduced in Congress: a big chunk of it would go into funding education, building infrastructure and promoting other programs for public good.

Since 9/11, Pakistan had received $12 billion in US assistance. More than 90 percent of it had gone to the military to fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Obama aides say the Bush administration aid couldn’t halt the Taliban march because it was focused exclusively on use of the stick. They believe their use of the carrot could do the trick by winning Pakistanis’ hearts and minds and thus alienating them from the marauding guerrillas.

This reminds me of a Pakistani student’s prognosis of Islamism (I had been invited to Karachi University to talk about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict). I had asked the female student why Islamists had never done well in Pakistan’s parliamentary elections, despite their huge public rallies and strong organizations. “Islam inspires Muslims on the big issues,” she said, “religious issues, social suppression, foreign invasion … issues over which people die and kill. Elections are about building schools, lowering prices, and so on, for which people turn to practical politicians. [Such politicians] maybe not be good Muslims and may even be corrupt, but voters think they can get things done. “

I had heard the argument before and share it to an extent. In any case, I don’t think the administration’s goodies for Pakistanis and courtship of the notoriously corrupt Zardari would derail the Taliban movement. Many Pakistanis resent the Taliban drive to introduce Islamic law. Many criticize their confrontation with the army that has displaced tens of thousands of Pakistanis. Yet, as I found out during my two latest trips, most Pakistanis support the Islamists’ struggle to rid Afghanistan of US and NATO forces. It’s a “big issue” for them.

The news of Pakistan’s impending demise seems premature. Pakistan is used to “extremism.” The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis can live on $2 a day and weather the economic crisis. And I’ve learned reliably that Pakistan’s nukes are very secure under the vigil of its 600,000-strong armed forces. If Pakistan should “collapse,” however, that would result from a civil war that its army, under brutal American pressure, would set in motion in the name of fighting extremism.

I hope America isn’t turning Pakistan into another Iraq. To spare the troubled nation further instability – and me the trouble of putting up the Qureshis! – the administration should explore a new Pakistan strategy, beginning perhaps with an exit strategy from Afghanistan.

Defeating the Taliban is a pipe dream

SF Gate
May 17, 2009

A friend called from Lahore, Pakistan, and asked if I could put up his family in my home in the Washington suburbs.

“Most welcome!” I said. “When are you all coming?”

“As soon as Pakistan begins to collapse!” replied Abdul Wahid Qureshi, a retired college professor.

Qureshi was responding, facetiously, to David Kilcullen‘s forecast that Pakistan would “collapse” within “one to six months” from an “extremist takeover” of its institutions. Kilcullen served as the top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, chief of the U.S. Central Command.

You can’t blame Pakistanis, beset with myriad problems, for having a little diversion over Americans’ curious words and deeds about their country. I bet many of them were amused by the outcry in Washington for a military “defeat “of the Taliban, which has driven Islamabad into war against the guerrilla movement. That war has cost more than 700 lives, according to the Pakistani government, and driven 834,000 people out of their homes, according to a U.N. report.

The Pakistani army already had tried but couldn’t defeat the Taliban. And Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani is promising to “flush [them] out” of their Swat area stronghold, not defeat them. Most Pakistanis know why their government, which had helped create the Taliban and has been ambivalent about their recent activities, went to war against them and when it did. The government of President Asif Ali Zardari initiated the anti-Taliban offensive on the eve of his visit to the United States. And his trip was timed to coincide with the consideration of a substantial Pakistan aid package by the Obama administration and Congress.

With Zardari at his side, President Obama announced his plans to “meet the threat of extremism [in Pakistan] with a positive program of growth and opportunity.” The House Appropriations Committee approved $1 billion in emergency aid to Pakistan, more than half of it economic. A five-year, $7.5 billion Pakistan aid package was subsequently introduced in Congress, a big chunk of it would fund programs for public good.

Since 9/11, Pakistan has received $12 billion in U.S. assistance. Most of it has gone to the military, and Obama aides say the Bush administration aid couldn’t halt the Taliban march because it was focused exclusively on the use of the stick. They believe their use of the carrot would do the trick by winning Pakistanis’ hearts and minds and thus alienating them from the marauding guerrillas.

This reminds me of a Pakistani student’s prognosis of Islamism. I had been invited to Karachi University to give a talk. I had asked the student why Islamists had not done well in Pakistan’s parliamentary elections, despite their huge public rallies and strong organizations. “Islam inspires Muslims on the big issues,” she said, “religious issues, social suppression, foreign invasion … issues over which people die and kill. Elections are about building schools, lowering prices, etc., for which people turn to practical politicians.”

I had heard the argument before, and concur with it to an extent. I don’t think the administration’s goodies for Pakistan and courtship of the notoriously corrupt Zardari (with a 19 percent approval rating) would derail the Taliban movement. Many Pakistanis abhor the Taliban’s xenophobia and cruelty in their implementation of Islamic law. Yet, as I found out during my two latest trips to Pakistan, most Pakistanis support the Islamists’ struggle to rid Afghanistan of U.S. and NATO forces. It’s a “big issue” for them.

Islamism has been a feature of Pakistan, which will not “collapse” from a spike in the Taliban Islamist ferment. If anything could destabilize Pakistan now, it would be this internecine war. Yet the feckless Zardari government may want to continue the conflict as long as the U.S. aid money keeps flowing. To spare the troubled nation further instability – and me the trouble of putting up the Qureshis! – the Obama administration should explore a new Pakistan strategy, beginning perhaps with an exit strategy from Afghanistan.