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In the coming weeks, Pakistan’s 150-million people will be at the epicenter of any American effort to wage a war against terrorism. The importance of Pakistan cannot be exaggerated because:
Pakistan has intimate economic, political and blood ties with the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan harboring Osmana Bin Ladin, the Yemini-Saudi leader of a worldwide network of terrorist cells.
Pakistan is battling its own internal terrorism, based not only on attacks by radical Islamicists, but between radical Shi’a and Sunni wings of Islam in its most populous province of Punjab, and between ethnic groups which have undermined law and order in its largest port city of Karachi.
Pakistan’s role as a secular, Western-oriented Moslem state, is at issue. Its descent into chaos or radical Islamicism would roil the whole Islamic world, not least the oil-rich Persian Gulf states — probably with greater effect than the fall of the Shah’s Iran to Moslem extremists.
Events in Pakistan will dictate the stability in India next door — whose Moslem population, some 15% of its more than a billion people is larger than Pakistan’s. A chaotic or fracturing Pakistan would spill over into India’s fragile polity, stoke its insurgencies and fan its separatisms.
Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities are now in the hands of an army dominated by moderate officers with [however eroded] a heritage of the professional British Indian Army. Violent domestic disorder might bring radical military elements to power with nukes.
Because Bin Ladin has become the symbol of “the enemy”, Washington must make his neutralization its highest priority in dealing with Pakistan. Whether he can be tied directly to the Sept. 11th horrors is irrelevant. He has declared war on the U.S., proclaimed the aim of killing Americans, civilian and military. He has been tied to the bombing of the East African embassies and the attempt to sink the Cole in Aden. In the process, he has won the plaudits and is titular leader of the lunatic fringe in the Islamic world.
But while Pakistan’s cooperation is sine qua non of any attempt to lay hands on him, the U.S. —and Pakistan if it really means to cooperate — must move carefully and cleverly. Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, romanticized in those old films about British India, is tribal territory with blood ties across the Afghan border. There has long been a movement to create in the border region a Pushtoonistan, based on the majority of the Pathan tribesmen who speak Pushtoo, the base of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The origins of the Taliban are, in part, in the madrassa, the religious schools of the NWFP.
Pakistan’s Gen. Masharraf, himself, represents Pakistan’s strange dichotomy. That is, while it was created out of a movement which argued that British Indian Moslems represented a second and separate nation from the majority Hindus, its leadership has always been secularist. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, considered the father of the country, during his first speech to a Pakistan legislative assembly, warned against a theocratic state. And, until recently at least, Pakistan army officers were openly dismissive of the mullahs, Islamic religious leaders, as they took their whiskeys and soda in the gymnkhana clubs.
But in its effort to match the weight of its Indian rivals, the Pakistanis have bent to their relationship with the rest of the Islamic world, particularly the oil-rich Gulf states. One of the requirements of Saudi Arabian aid has been to emphasize its puritannical Islam, harass so-called heretical Islamic sects, once disproportionately powerful in Islamabad’s government, and move toward shariah [Koranic law], replacing inherited British Indian traditional legal forms. All this has been compounded by the foreign incitement of deadly rivalries [through funds and propaganda] between Pakistan’s majority Sunni community and Shi’a in the Punjab, from neighboring Shi’a Iran. [The leader of the Iran religious radicals, Khomeini, was from a Calcutta, Indian Moslem family with Persian antecedents, an example of the convoluted ties.]
Islamic radicals have no doubt penetrated the military. But Pakistan elections have always shown a small religious vote. Pakistan society, at least at the level of the middle and upper classes, has never reflected Mideast orthodoxy. Women, for example, are not veiled and have played a prominent role in public life. The former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, daughter of a former president hanged by an earlier military regime, still is one of the most powerful political voices.
Washington has little choice but to try to enhance Masharraf’s position at the same time it rides herd on the Pakistanis to cooperate. Unfortunately, he is neither Punjabi, Pathan, nor Sindhi, the majority ethnic groups, but scion of a family that fled India during the bloody Partition in 1948. Only a few months in power, his mettle as a statesmen is to be tested. A mistep by either side could mean chaos in Pakistan and infinitely greater problems for American strategists.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.