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Sol Sanders Archive
Tuesday, May 4, 2009     INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING

Urgently needed: Yet another Pakistan miracle

The Battle of Pakistan is underway.

While slower minds concentrate on the Israel-Arab conflict, the largest Muslim nation — 150 million — is near a death rattle.

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For ironically, like Israel, Pakistan is a miracle with multitudinous contradictions. It was, after all, a poetic notion that the British Indian Empire was two “nations”, one overwhelmingly majority Hindu, one minority Muslim. Muslim leadership turned after dominating “Indian” nationalism for almost a century before Mohandas Gandhi arrived, arguing the two communities could not live together. In fact, Pakistan’s founders maintained a “modern” state could only be created in the Subcontinent on the basis of a Muslim reformation.

Of many ironies is that once ultra-secular Pakistan is now number one target for international terrorists. If the Islamicist International could topple Pakistan, they might well repeat the Assassins’ 400-year history of mayhem before the Mongols literally wiped them out.

That’s why Pakistan needs another miracle.

If there were not enough, a modern Mata Hari, a minor Hindu propagandist in India’s Islamabad Embassy, has apparently been caught kohl-handed spying. That could well torpedo sprouts of an Indo-Pakistan understanding. A Pakistan implosion means India’s own larger Muslim population and its neighbors additional 200 millions would be up for grabs. There is no way New Delhi could secure the Indian Subcontinent’s western flank, the historic invasion route, without a functioning Pakistan.

Pakistan is in the throes of reinventing itself — as it has done so many times in an eventful half century since British India was cleft by Louis Lord Mountbatten, the Empire’s last and perhaps worst viceroy. Without so much as a constitutional convention, President Asif Ali Zardari, known as Mr. 10 Percent [probably a big loser in the Dubai debacle] has turned the country back to a raucous parliament. Yet it was chief of army staff Gen. Pervez Kyani who worked out details of Washington’s multibillion 10-year aid program. And given history, it will not be the last time that the country’s only valid national institution is called in to save — you will pardon the expression — the bacon.

There is also under American pressure an effort to reactivate a moribund federalism — including rebadging the colonial North West Frontier as a Pushtoon-speaking entity. This calculated risk, acceding to a movement long backed by the Soviets with Indian aid — to carve another Subcontinental entry such as Bangladesh [né East Pakistan] in 1971 — from both Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the far western largest Pakistan province, Islamabad is buying off [renting?] “nationalist” Baluch and other tribals. [One might ask Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Gitmo, the author of 9/11, what, with or without waterboarding, he thinks of this offer to his “countrymen”.]

That the country is now the No. 1 target of Islamicists is self-evident: almost daily suicide attacks on “soft” targets, military and police, as often as not by “foreign” Muslims, is proof. As so often in the last 75 years of asymmetrical warfare, this is used to soften up civilian government with methodology developed by the Tamil Tigers [“black widow” bombers] kidnappings and hijackings [Palestine Liberation Organization], truck/car bombings [Hizb’allah], and terror mortars and unguided missiles [Hamas] — and the Vietcong against the Saigon government.

Whether essentially feudal forces can handle this deluge remains to be seen. It is not encouraging that Chief Justice Iftkhar Muhammad Chaudhri has appointed himself the “John Jay of Pakistan” in an attempt to establish “judicial supremacy”. He leads the most venal lawyers and legal system in the British Common Law world, constipated with bits of sharia, authoritarian World War II Defense of India Emergency Regulations, tribal adat, etc. Their antics would make John Edwards blush.

To add to the confusion, when Washington is not looking under other parts of the Islamicist blanket, an incredible array of overlapping U.S. officials is making public statements they shouldn’t [whether about Indo-Pak relations or our drone attacks] There are the “normal” ambassadors, U.S. field commanders, regional commanders [rumored as presidential candidates], and overlords somewhere in between.

The Congress has gone on record for some $1.5 billion [2011] annually in aid, military, financial and commercial over the next decade, hoping to reach some of the world’s poorest villagers.

But there are complications there, too. Having voided its own strategy to bloc nuclear power technology sales to India, Washington has had to refuse Pakistan because of its notorious proliferation to North Korea, Iran, China and other pariahs. That has permitted Beijing to sell two probably overpriced and perhaps dangerous nuclear plants. About 60 Chinese companies working 122 projects in oil and gas, IT and telecom, power generation, engineering, automobiles, infrastructure and mining sectors are draining foreign exchange. That means American taxpayers will be paying more into China’s balance of payments surplus through Pakistan. And, in a sense, fueling one of the outstanding issues between Islamabad and New Delhi if left unsaid — Pakistan’s “all-weather” Chinese alliance. That is going to deteriorate further as U.S. relations with China erode further.

Not a pretty picture even in a country which has known more than its share of miracles.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), writes the 'Follow the Money' column for The Washington Times on the convergence of international politics, business and economics. He is also a contributing editor for WorldTribune.com and EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com. An Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, Mr. Sanders is a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.


Comments


Mr. Sanders wrongly claims that Pakistan was ultra-secular and it now finds itself as the target of jihadis. That is some poor reading of history and current affairs, shall I dare say. Pakistan, a nation artificially carved out in the name of religion amidst bloodshed and violence, was never secular. Whether it should be is a different debate. Pakistan is a victim of the divisive idea that helped create it. The jihadis and the elements in the Pak army are taking this divisive idea to its logical extreme.

Nick      5:26 p.m. / Tuesday, May 4, 2010


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