Pakistan is teetering on the edge of its most serious political crisis since the country's creation in the late 1940s. The ruling generals have their hearts sinking in their boots. President-General Pervez Musharraf's imposition of a state of emergency was a last desperate move made in order to renew secret deals with Islamic extremists and to overturn the demands for democracy and civilian rule.
At present Pakistan is very similar to Yugoslavia in the 1980s, when the decadent communist ideology wasn't enough to bind the country together. The ideology of Islamic extremism and the structure of mullah-general rule is now no longer working in Pakistan.
General Musharraf's argument that his decision was made to better combat the surging Islamic extremism in his country, seems to fly in the face of truth and common sense. On the contrary, the de facto martial law has been good news for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who have always preferred dealing with generals rather than civilian rulers like Benazir Bhutto.
A day after the state of emergency was imposed, a new deal was struck between the Pakistani government and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Taliban in Waziristan, which allowed the release of about 200 Pakistani troops in exchange for 25 convicted Taliban activists.
The 200 troops in fact surrendered to the Taliban a few months ago—humiliating for the Pakistani nuclear-armed forces. Pakistani media reported that the troops had been kidnapped by Islamic militants. The secret deal included the pulling out of Pakistani troops from the tribal areas controlled by the Taliban. Moreover, in the wake of the emergency the military regime incarcerated thousands of pro-democracy activists, journalists, and lawyers, just as thousands of Buddhist monks were imprisoned by Burmese generals.
The blame for the current dangerous situation in Pakistan has been General Musharraf's eight year repressive military rule that allowed al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup and take control of the vast northwestern tribal areas of the country. It would have been avoidable six years ago, provided Pakistan had a truly honest and transparent policy in the war on terrorism.
Six years after the war on terrorism was declared, Pakistani military intelligence (ISI)—the real power in the country, is still obsessed with a utopian ideology according to which Pakistan's survival as a country is possible only through the use of Islamic extremism as a magic tool for Pakistan's foreign and domestic policies. This ideology is the linchpin of the political culture in Pakistan.
Pakistan's history may well be a guide to the present realities in this country. This is something always overlooked by the West. Pakistan was created in 1947, not by a bearded mullah or even a moderate one. Instead, it was formed by an Anglicised and secular elite with support from the British Raj as it was departing from the Indian subcontinent. Guardian Weekly disclosed recently that the territory of Pakistan was first designed on a map by a British military officer who had never been to India. The Islamic extremism in this country is an altogether later phenomenon.
The founding father of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jenah, was certainly a secular and even agnostic Indian expatriate in London who had a penchant, as Newsweek wrote on Oct. 29, for whisky, and according to Tariq Ali, for pork (Islam considers both alcohol and pork as un-Islamic). Tariq Ali also claims that Jenah didn't speak any Indian language, except English.
Secularism in Pakistan became a taboo in 1971, after the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan. It was a warning to the Pakistani ruling elite that the survival of Pakistan was only possible through Islamic extremism. Islamic extremism was thought to have the potential to wipe out the nationalism of the ethnic groups that had been coercively integrated into the new state of Pakistan.
The Pashtuns and Baluchis have been categorically disparate culturally, historically, and linguistically from the majority Punjabis. Pashtuns had been the traditional rulers of Delhi before the British and Moggul empires in India. There is an overwhelming desire among the Pashtuns to break away from the Punjabi rule in Islamabad.
The Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are a black hole where inhabitants are isolated from the rest of the world and the only means of livelihood is drug and weapon smuggling. FATA are now the safe abode for Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
At present, a substantial chunk of Pakistani tribal areas are currently under the control of the Taliban who reportedly replaced Pakistani flags with their own white and black flags. The ISI has thus so far successfully replaced Pashtun nationalism with al-Qaeda-induced religious perversity: the imposition of the law of Allah on the entire world and the killing of all infidels on earth. The ISI, nonetheless, has failed to transplant such an ideology to Baluchistan where the Pakistani military is at war with a low-key separatist Baluchi movement. The ISI is using the Taliban to suppress Baluchi nationalism in the province.
The International Crisis Group recently issued a warning about this dangerous secret strategy inside Pakistan. The Pakistani military are following a policy of "repression, killings, imprisonment, disappearances, and torture to bend the Baluchis to its will."
The very idea of Pashtun nationalism is an unspeakable nightmare for Pakistan's paranoiac military rulers in Islamabad. For such nationalism will certainly be a hundred times more lethal than Bangladeshi nationalism. This is the reason that General Musharraf chose a policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He does everything under the sun to please the U.S., while keeping a lifeline tied to the Taliban.
The irony is that the ISI and Al-qaeda both have the same strategic aims vis-à-vis the Taliban, which were developed during years of perfect amity in the past. The Taliban has often been a legion of fanatic religious automatons, a bone of contention between al-Qaeda and the ISI.
They both have a hard-headed calculation: for Pakistan, losing the Taliban is tantamount to losing Pakistan once and for all. For al-Qaeda, the loss of religious militancy as the motivating force for the Taliban amounts to the loss of control over the movement.
Relying on a divide-and-rule policy, the Pakistani military supports Pashtun extremist parties like Jamiati Ulema-i-Islami (JUI), led by Maulana Fazlur-Rahman, a key patron of the Afghan Taliban, in a bid to counter secular Baluchi and moderate Pashtun parties.
Pakistan's military is using the flow of American money and weapons for fighting Baluchi and Pashtun nationalism, while promoting militancy among the Taliban. JUI has a vast network of madrassas in both Baluchistan and the North-Western Frontier Province, which are used as universities for the perverted ideology and terrorism.
Since 2004, General Musharraf has begun a dangerous trend of clinching peace deals with al-Qaeda and Taliban-affiliated religious groups and Pakistani Taliban who have shifted their nerve center and operation network to the Pakistani Pashtun tribal belt after the Taliban were squeezed, by the U.S. and NATO forces, out of Afghanistan.
This policy has emboldened the Taliban in Afghanistan to the extent that they are now capable of engaging in pitched battles with NATO forces. They have reportedly captured three districts in the Western provinces of Afghanistan this month alone.
Such pitched battles and the capture of territory inflicted defeat on the occupying Russian forces in Afghanistan in 1980s. In the upcoming year it will be very difficult for the U.S. and NATO troops to keep the military status quo without pouring in extra troops.
Against all odds, Pakistan is a greater problem in the war on terrorism than Afghanistan. For the Pakistani ruling elite is trying by every means to cash in on the war on terrorism. The one war has two different perceptions in the West and in Pakistan. The Pakistani military sees the war on terrorism as an opportunity to pocket billions of Western dollars and use the Western support for extending central rule in its restive tribal areas.
Instead of this desperate strategy, Pakistan needs an overhaul of its power structure—a hybrid of generals and extremist mullahs. The ISI, as Benazir Bhutto also said recently, has to be entirely reconstructed.
Only democracy and real civilian rule can save Pakistan and help the world win the war on terrorism. The West and NATO will stumble into a grand failure in Afghanistan if they fail to end military rule and its complex web of wrongdoings in Pakistan.
Dr. Ehsan Azari is an Afghan writer based in Sydney, Australia. Copyright © Dr. Ehsan Azari
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