Worldwide Web WorldTribune.com

  Commentary . . .


Sol Sanders Archive
Friday, June 29, 2007

Memo to CNN: Pakistan is not a simple problem

The media wolfpack is off [led by CNN, of course] on the thesis that Pakistan now is the heart of the Islamicist conspiracy, and, therefore in a regime crisis. As so often happens, they are wrong, on the first count, and the Pakistani crisis is more multitudinous than religious fanaticism.

If anything, the essence of Islamofascism [correct since it has as much if not more to do with Western politics as with concepts of Islam] lies among the disaffected Moslem diaspora, especially in Europe.

Attempted bombings in the U.K. in late June proved that again, just as did the original successful spectacular of 9/11 effected, for the most part, by young men longtime residents in the West. Physicians not madrasah students plotted these latest outrages. Even Osama Bin Laden, although he never lived for extended periods outside Moslem countries, is a nihilistic reaction to the ill-digested modernization in Saudi Arabia. Osama is a scion of the hybridized Saudi upper class, not unlike that throughout the elites in the umma, the 1.3 billion Islamic adherents across the world.

Also In This Edition

What Pakistan does represent today are tortured new post-colonial, artificial Moslem society constructs so dysfunctional they cannot enter the modern world. Precisely because of its strong ties to Europe – the U.K. particularly – are old and strong, Pakistani connections are convenient for the jihadists.

It goes almost without saying that we are talking about a large number of countries, ethnicities, and levels of development on three continents. But they do share common characteristics that Pakistan epitomizes. Perhaps, too, because once part of British India, with its elite’s great heritage of English despite all the anti-colonial rhetoric, its problems are more ventilated.

Leadership elite. Because these countries remain for the most part tribal, that is clans of families with endogamous marriage, their leadership generally follows a pattern we might call “feudalism”. Obviously, it is not the liege-lord to vassal formula of Medieval Europe where the term was coined. But it is for the most parta similar relationship of an authoritarian ruler, chosen by fiat, with a group of powerful lieutenants to whom he owes an allegiance as they do to him.

Although Pakistan has repeatedly tried to imitate the Westminster System of parliamentary democracy, for more than half of its 60 year existence it has been ruled by military dictatorships. [Gen. Perez Musharraf’s seizure of power in 1999 was the fourth successful military coup.]

In Pakistan’s case – despite British Indian Army traditions including civilian direction – as with most of other Moslem states, military regimes are not that different from their occasionally alternative civilian governments. For they all depend on a pre-industrial vested class, generally landlords as in Pakistan. A covey of latifundia [to use an Hispanic term] mostly in its overwhelmingly most populous province [90 of its 165 million], the Punjab, hold the reins of power. These caste leaders [and Indian and Pakistani Moslems do have caste as their fellow South Asians of other religious persuasion despite their insistence Islam is egalitarian], often, are sophisticated with a veneer of Westernization. [A Baluchistan tribal rebel leader killed recently by government forces was an Oxbridge product.] Their families’ remittance men and women in London, New York and other Western large cities, even more so.

Musharraf, who spent part of his childhood in Turkey where his father was a diplomat, is said to have wanted to model his regime on the sainted Turkish leader, Attaturk, who sought to modernize his country, top down. Yet, unlike Kemal Pasha in another age, Musharraf has rejected state capitalism and sought – in part by choosing Shakaut Aziz, a former chief of Citibank’s Persian Gulf operations as his prime minister – to establish a market economy. That, as much as charges of his extra-constitutionalism has brought on the crisis over removing a supreme court chief justice who ruled against one of his privatizations, an argument contributing to the present chaotic state of the country.

It is one of the many anomalies that “the father of Pakistan” was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, for most of his life a sophisticated Bombay [Mumbai] lawyer and politician, married to a non-Moslem for whom Islam was more politics than religion. Jinnah’s love of a good whiskey and water, forbidden by Islam, was legendary. And Jinnah’s last major public appearance was to counsel the national assembly not to adopt a theocratic state.

Lifestyle of poverty. Early on, Pakistan chose to use target “planning” rather than the Soviet-style diktat which India practiced for some 35 years – delivering stagnation. In those early years, Washington aid officials were enthusiastic about Pakistan’s rapid growth, based on a forlorn hope that perhaps just being smaller and therefore manageable gave it better prospects than India.

But the explosion of an incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy, the demands of a mushrooming population, political volatility – and three and a half wars with its Siamese twin, India – has further bankrupted what was always an impoverished society. The Human Development Index of the UN Development Program – the one helpful activity of that corrupt organization caught dumping money into North Korean Kim Jong Il’s lap -- gives Pakistan the rank of 134th out of 177 countries in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education, access to water, as well as per capita income. In other words, by the standards of America and Europe, life is miserable for most of its people most of the time in Pakistan.

The Un-Nation state. Another characteristic of virtually all these states – Egypt the great exception – is that they are artificial constructs, put together with lines drawn almost arbitrarily on colonial maps. The demarcations, as often as not, cut across ethnic, religious, geographical boundaries sometimes even traditional trade routes.

Pakistan is the apotheosis. That is partly an outgrowth of the fact Moslems [rather than the vastly majoritarian Hindus] originally were British India’s modern “Indian nationalists”. They were attempting to resurrect India’s last native centralized Moghul Empire, Moslem, the only unified state India has ever had except for the short reign of the Buddhist Asoka [c.299 BCE – 237].

It is now largely forgotten that Mohandas Gandhi, the father of Indian nationalism, was also an outspoken leader [although a Hindu] of “the Caliphate movement”. This was an effort among Indian Moslems to persuade Britain in the aftermath of World War I to maintain the semi-political central leadership of Islam in the faltering Ottoman Empire. It contributed to the growth of political Islam inside India. In any event, the first rudimentary attempts at representative government under British rule before World War II quickly demonstrated the deep ethnic, racial, religious and economic divisions.

This finally led to one group of Moslems formulating “the two nation” theory of two distinct peoples living side by side in the Subcontinent. Yet, the fact is that similarities between various South Asian Moslem or Hindu groups is often far greater than the differences among Moslems and Hindus in their own religious grouping. In other words, there may be less difference between a Pakistani Punjabi and an Indian Pubjabi – one of the states and linguistic groups split by The Partition – with other citizens of their own countries.

Still, in an effort “to divide and quit”, London acceded to the creation of a new map whereon majority Moslem areas were placed in a new “pure” Pakistan. The surgery was excruciating. Millions were slaughtered or sought to migrate. Two separated “wings” of Pakistan were created, one in the predominantly Moslem northwest, now Pakistan, and the other in Moslem-majority Bengal in the east. From the beginning there were differences – first based on arguments over national language – which finally ended in the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971 with Indian assistance.

Frustration and paranoia. Groveling in utter poverty, most Pakistanis are struggling for existence. But the pampered elite is habitually – when intellectually aroused by politics or religion – furiously embittered by their membership in a backward and often relatively powerless state to pursue radical slogans, and, eventually, nihilistic actions. It is no wonder that at the height of its power, the Soviet Union was a beacon to many of those in Pakistan, the Middle East and North Africa, who saw it as a shortcut to modernity – and state power.

The call for a return to “democracy” rings hollow when voiced by former politicians, including Benazir Bhutto, or Musharraf’s predecessor, Nawaz Shariff, who were notoriously corrupt and incompetent in meeting the demands of a backward society. But that does not quench the hunger for change in the street demonstrations.

The failures of anti-colonialism, independence, modernization, mass education, to solve basic problems have all led to a deep paranoia. It is expressed in the effort to transfer blame for their failings to outsiders and to concoct fantastic scenarios on the nature of current events. [Such plots include the Jews plotted 9/11 if the CIA did not.] If Pakistan does not progress, it must be the fault of others.

It takes very little, especially for otherwise secularized Pakistanis, to accept tales of a golden Moslem past if only they “accept” the more radical interpretations of Islam [“submission” in Arabic], pursuing old goals of world conquest.

That explains those television clips of rioting, tear gas, wounding and killing from the streets of Islamabad, the Pakistan capital. Remedies are not in order soon. And, meanwhile, it will indirectly feed those who want to exploit it for their terror campaign against “the Jews and Crusaders” in the West.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), 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 and East-Asia-Intel.com.


">
About Us     l    Contact Us     l    Geostrategy-Direct.com     l    East-Asia-Intel.com
Copyright © 2007    East West Services, Inc.    All rights reserved.
World Tribune.com is a publication of East West Services, Inc.