Inherently Unstable?

Inherently Unstable?
Pakistan has always been a
somewhat unstable state; one might even argue it was
built upon not just a myth but a falsehood. Even before
they created Pakistan, the Muslims of the subcontinent
have been divided and confused about many basic
questions defining the nation and the state.1 The
original conception, as Stephen Cohen of the Brookings
Institution has explained, was for a Pakistan as an
“extraordinary” state, “a homeland for Indian Muslims
and an ideological and political leader of the Islamic
world.”2 At the same time, the ideology of the Pakistan
movement was opaque and contradictory, with the
contradictions seemingly captured in the figure of
its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Karachi-born but
trained as a lawyer in England and retaining a lifelong
affinity for fine English tailoring. Though a partner of
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Gandhi and Nehru in the Indian Congress, Jinnah was
suspicious of their all-India approach, and as British
imperial power on the subcontinent began to wane in
the early 20th century, the compact between Indian
Hindu and Muslim likewise weakened. Moreover,
Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in
1922 threw the Muslim world into turmoil, with the
particular effect of politics becoming ever more local;
the pan-Islamic caliphate movement collapsed entirely.
There was rising political uncertainty not only in the
subcontinent but across the broad Islamic world.
Thus, at the 1928 session of the Indian Congress,
Jinnah proposed not only guaranteed seats for Indian
Muslims in national and provincial legislatures,
but the creation of three “designated Islamic
states”─Sind, Baluchistan, and the Northwest Frontier
Province─within a future independent Indian
federation. In other words, while the subcontinent
was still struggling to separate itself from British rule,
Jinnah was proposing an ethnic state-within-a-state
that held within it the promise of further separation.
To be sure, to Jinnah and others, the allegedly inclusive
All-India Congress appeared more like a vehicle for
Hindu political dominance. And the definition of who
was a “Muslim” was mostly defined in distinction to
Hinduism and elided traditional differences between
regions and tribes. The deeply secular Jinnah declared
in 1940 that the two communities “are not religious in
the strict sense of the word, but are in fact different and
distinct social orders. And it is a dream that the Hindus
and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality.”3
Jinnah’s dream also held an expansionist tendency.
When Gandhi embarked upon his “Quit India”
campaign at the nadir of Britain’s fortunes in World
War II, Jinnah seized the opportunity to double his
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territorial demands, adding Kashmir, the Punjab, and
Bengal to his list of Muslim provinces. Though this
would prove to be an inherently unstable strategic
fantasy, Britain, in its haste to leave India after the
war, allowed the growing fissures between Hindu
and Muslim to fester. In the final solution to the Raj,
the Punjab and Bengal were split, inciting massive
ethnic cleansing and resulting in the deaths of nearly
1 million people and, of course, leaving Kashmir a
contested province. The fundamental instability of
the new Pakistan was apparent from the start, and
was confirmed─though hardly entirely resolved─by
the 1971 secession of East Pakistan. That the nascent
“Bangladesh” would rely on Hindu India to secure
the separation, showed the weakness of Jinnah’s and
Pakistan’s ideas of Muslim brotherhood. The bond of
Islam was not strong enough to convince Bengalis that
they should remain confederate with, and subordinate
to, Punjabis.
“Pakistan is a paranoid state,” writes Stephen
Cohen, “that has enemies.” Pakistani strategists
and political elites fear they may become a “West
Bangladesh─a state denuded of its military power,
and politically as well as economically subordinated
to a hegemonic India.”4 Yet, somewhat perversely,
the result is a strategic “adventurism,” by which
Cohen means Pakistan’s ambitions in Kashmir and
Afghanistan, but which should be applied equally to
Pakistan’s nuclear program, its relations with China,
and its ambiguous stance vis-à-vis the Taliban, al-
Qaeda, various “associated movements” internationally,
and its homegrown radicals. Indeed, it is hard to escape
the conclusion that Pakistan began as and remains
a profoundly unsettled and unsettling political
phenomenon, both internally and internationally.
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Curiously for a self-conceived Islamic state, Pakistan
has found it difficult to deal with a narrower but more
immediately powerful vision of Islam─that advanced
by al-Qaeda and the radicals. Islamist madrassas have
provided education and other state services when
and where the Pakistani government has not. The
Pakistani army, by far the strongest institution of the
state, has long had cozy relations with Islamist groups,
particularly in the eternally troublesome North-West
Frontier Province. The traditional wisdom is that the
army holds the upper hand. Cohen expresses this
perfectly. “The political dominance and institutional
integrity of the Pakistani [army] remain the chief
reasons for the marginality of radical Islamic groups,”
he concluded even in 2003. “Although the army has a
long history of using radical and violent Islamists for
political purposes, it has little interest in supporting
their larger agenda of turning Pakistan into a more
comprehensively Islamic state.”5
But who is using whom is difficult to tell from a
distance. At a minimum, there seems to be a strong
correlation of interests between Islamic radicalism
and Pakistan’s otherwise “national” interests, or the
interests of Pakistan’s Pashtuns. Indeed, the history of
Pakistan is─to oversimplify for the sake of clarity─a
history of the pact between Punjabis and Pashtuns,
a partnership reflected particularly through the
Paksitani army and officer corps. While this has itself
been an unstable relationship, it has helped keep a lid
on the even more fissiparous tendencies of Sindhis
and Baluchis. It has also made the Punjabis partners
in the nationalistic yearnings of Pashtuns to reclaim
“Pashtunistan”─a homeland cut in half by the 1893
Durand Line, the border that allegedly advanced
British colonial interests but, like a good number of
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the borders throughout the Islamic world, left constant
conflict in its wake.
This has made for unending border wars, both in
Kashmir─it was Pashtun tribesmen, supported by the
Pakistani army, who sparked the fighting that began
in October 1947, shortly after the British withdrawal,
and continues to this day─and in Afghanistan. The
persistence of terror and guerilla attacks in Kashmir,
such as the recent series of bombings in Srinagar, is
in part a product of “tolerance” in Islamabad, as is
the continuing tension with Afghanistan. Speaking
at a counterterrorism conference in Turkey in March,
Afghan President Hamid Karzai─a Pashtun himself,
it should be remembered─complained that extremist
tendencies and terrorism in Afghanistan were not just
an internal problem, but the result of “political agendas
and the pursuit of narrow interests by governments.”
By this euphemism, Karzai meant Pakistan, as he
made clear when talking about the Taliban, whose
rise in the 1990s he described as a “hidden invasion
propped up by outside interference and intended to
tarnish the national identity and historical heritage” of
Afghanistan.6
Yet it would be a mistake to blame all of Pakistan’s
internal and border problems on the Pashtuns; Punjabis
have often been at odds with their Baluchi and Sindhi
countrymen. Recent deployments of the Pakistani
army to Karachi, ostensibly to dampen unrest in the
wake of a suicide attack that killed three Sunni Muslim
clerics but seen to be a move against the large Baluchi
population there, have fueled Baluchi separatist
feelings. Islamabad “has treated Baluchistan like a
colony,” complained Imran Khan, a member of the
Pakistani parliament. Baluchi nationalist Humayun
Baluch charges that Punajbis are being introduced as
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settlers, traders, and miners. “[Our] provincial resources
are being exploited and looted,” he says. “People’s
rights are being compromised and everything is being
done for the benefit of the Punjabis. Army troops, army
weaponry, helicopters, jets, and F-16s are being used
in Baluchistan. The population is being forced out and
primarily living in Sindh [in Karachi]. Houses have
been burned and looted.”7
Also irritating to Baluchi national pride is the
construction of the Gwadar port and the influx of
Chinese engineers who oversee the project. On May 3,
2004, the “Baluchistan Liberation Army” killed three
Chinese engineers working on the port project, an
effort that employs several hundred Chinese nationals.
Baluchi nationalists believe that Beijing is in league
with Islamabad to develop and export the province’s
natural gas resources. Pakistan’s leading natural gas
company, Sui, is located in Baluchistan but provides
products for the entire country.
Pakistan was born in instability and retains a
political culture marked by deep insecurity and
uncertainties that underlie the idea of the Pakistani
nation and the formation and history of the state of
Pakistan. These distortions are exacerbated by the
army’s dominance of the state; civil society has been
unable to soothe either Pakistan’s real fears or the fears
that are the unsurprising result of “adventurism.” Even
those accustomed to Pakistan’s “normal” instability,
like Stephen Cohen, cannot be sure that the army will
continue to balance these many competing demands
in the face of rising Islamic populism or Baluchi
separatism; he is not confident much beyond the
immediate future. The more Pakistan acts as though
it were cornered, the more cornered it becomes. The
more tightly the army grips the reins of power, the
more likely the bridle may break.
m.sarjov
Type: Book
Pakistan's Nuclear Future: Worries Beyond War. Edited by Mr. Henry D. Sokolski.