Pakistan: Where the world's problems collide — and grow worse

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

President General Musharraf was correct when he tossed responsibility – at least in part – back to London when the 7/7 bombers were found to be of Pakistan origin. For like most Islamic terrorists in Europe, they have been “home grown” – ghetto products who had not assimilated to British society.

Yet Pakistan remains a center of the terrorists’ maelstrom. Osama Bin Laden, whether still leading a functioning network or only an icon for autonomous cabals, is apparently somewhere in the Pakistan-Afghanistan hinterland. The bloody schism between Islamic sects – a major hurdle to a stable Iraq – continues to ravage Pakistan’s cities. Because of its size [160 million plus], Pakistan continues to be critical to the worldwide struggle against Islamic fascism with its historic ties of blood and strategy to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, and of course, its linkage to India ‘s Moslem minority larger than Pakistan’s population. The Subcontinent’s Moslems have always been a wellspring of Islamic culture, theology and ideology. [Iran’s clerical revolutionary Khomeini had Calcutta family links]. Some have even looked to them for solutions to integrating Islam with the modern world.

One of history’s contradictions was Pakistan’s sainted founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a paragon of worldly, “secularized” Islam. Yet he successfully demanded Partition of British India with the thesis the Moslem minority could never prosper in an India dominated by Hindus. The theory of “two nations”, one based on Moslem identification, from the beginning incorporated the possibility of irresolvable contradictions. Jinnah expressed this publicly when he warned against creating a theocracy. Jinnah, a product of Bombay’s sophisticated pre-independence cosmopolitan society, wanted a modern state based on religious, ethnic, and racial equality.

That intellectual current has fought for survival during Pakistan’s troubled half century. It was bolstered by Pakistan’s military, who with their British Indian army traditions, largely saw themselves as “secularists” even though on occasion elements of the military flirted with Islamic radicalism. That came from courting the financial support of oil-rich Arab cousins, particularly the Saudis, or the wild strategic dream of creating “strategic depth” against India by backing reactionaries in neighboring Afghanistan.

Musharraf and his supporters had to make the hard decision after 9/11 of abandoning their Afghan Taliban allies in the face of Washington’s determination to destroy Bin Laden’s sanctuary, and, finally, to take on the fanatic Islamicists’ apparati around the world. But religious fanaticism prospered during the flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism. What had been earlier an insignificant political force, acquired new strength as it has throughout the Islamic world where terrorists proved its capacity to create chaos and erode Western prestige.

In Pakistan, a potpourri of opposition includes everything from mad mullahs spouting the creed of death to non-Moslems in whatever venue and without moral scruples to Pakistan’s feudal landowners and primitive tribal leaders threatened by modernization. And there are unscrupulous politicians willing to aggravate its multi-ethnic loyalties. Unfortunately in such an environment earnest if naïve opponents of military dictatorship — both domestically and in the West – become tools of further instability.

Musharraf is playing a complicated balancing game. His dream of being the Ataturk of Pakistan is everywhere being challenged.

The effort to lay the always explosive feud with India has to be uppermost in his efforts. But Kashmir, the trigger, is part and parcel of 1947 origins of the regime – contiguous Moslem majority areas were to go to Pakistan but pro-Indian sentiments at that time dominated Kashmir. That a majority of 750,000 U.K. residents of Pakistani origin are Kashmiri is just one more aggravating element. Earlier on, Musharraf rejected approaching a settlement with India through “confidence building measures” [everything from opening trade to intercourse between the two Kashmirs under Indian and Pakistan control]. But he has settled for that strategy, at least temporarily, hoping economic progress under his technocrat Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, a longtime Citibank official, will provide enough improvement of the country’s desperate poverty to quiet the waters.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s alliance with the Chinese against India – as well as American mediation through its new strengthened ties with New Delhi – is his answer to nationalist forces who see such a strategy simply playing into the hands of clever Indian negotiators, a bred-in-the-bone suspicion of all Subcontient Moslems. Ahead are grave questions: whether the Indian-.U.S. alliance, if it matures, will permit massive military and economic aid to Pakistan. Or whether growing U.S.-Chinese antagonism can be bridged if Pakistan’s new Chinese-built port at Gwadar at the entrance to the Persian Gulf becomes a base for Chinese submarines. Kashmir, plagued with almost daily violence – in part because of Pakistani-based infiltration — could explode.

Terrorism in Britain has only aggravated all Musharraf’s problems. As he has pointed out, clandestine organizations blamed by Islamabad for three attempts on his life, had been given freedom to organize in the U.K. under its tolerance of firebrand Moslems. But now London’s crackdown is used by Musharraf’s opponents to fire up Pakistan nationalism and Moslem xenbophobia. The road ahead is going to be even more difficult.