All about Pakistan

So, for all those of you who want to know:
This is my take on the country and region I have been living in for the past year+. Much like my own country, Pakistan is not a real nation, it is a political state, in this case based on a common religion, encompassing the Islamic parts of old British India, more on that horrendous breakup later. Even the name is not organic, derived as an anagram of the initials of the major ethnic groups in the country (Pushtun/Punjab+Afghan+Kashmir+Islam+Sindh+balochiSTAN). It used to include non-contiguous East Pakistan as well, not connected through anything but religion, but those folks, imagine this, felt neglected and abused at the hands of their Muslim brethren in West Pakistan. East Pakistan eventually became Bangladesh. I got to thinking the other day and if it were still in existence, British India would be the largest country on earth, encompassing, as it did, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and of course, Pakistan.

Anyway, Pakistan is bedeviled by all the ills afflicting most states freed from colonial rule in the mid-20th century: corruption, incompetence, weak institutions, interference from abroad, an overly powerful military, ethnic strife and on and on. Combined with the innate deference and subservience to authority of a colonized people, these problems have served to enable and then corrupt a series of authoritarian governments. And then, of course, there’s India, the gargantuan neighbor, from whose original territory Pakistan was carved, that is always seen, rightly or wrongly, as a threat, with territorial designs on the land and the people. The fact that many Muslims remain in India, even after the bloody partition of the 1940’s, and that those Indian Muslims are perceived to be an oppressed minority, also helps the authoritarians keep opposition in check and line their own pockets in the name of Muslim solidarity.

Even though Pakistan is formally an Islamic republic, the founder of the state and revered father of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an unbearded secularist. Of course, he was around in the first half of the 20th century, when it looked liked Communism had all the answers and secularism was the order of the day. Religion had its place, yes, but it was fast fading away, or so they thought, since the Pakistani version of the fundamentalist revival was building well out of view of elites like Jinnah. His vaguely sinister motto “Unity, Faith, Discipline”, appears all over, most notably in big “HOLLYWOOD” style letters on a hill alongside the road from the airport below a giant neon silhouette of the man himself.

Anyway, as the worldwide, pan-religious fundamentalist movement began to assert itself in Pakistan, smart Pakistani politicians did what smart American politicians did: they allied themselves with it. Now, since Pakistan rarely had regular elections like in the US, (not saying US elections are free and fair, of course, just regular) this alliance took the form not of electoral pandering a la Reagan, Bush and every Republican, but of legal and financial support to various fundamentalist Islamic leaders and institutions. But the strategy was the same and the results, if taken to their logical, and what appears too often to be inevitable, conclusion are the same as well.

Therein lies the story of the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, a situation which blew up so spectacularly a few weeks ago; the father of the two brothers who ran the mosque was given government land and sanction 40 years ago to operate in the heart of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Literally the “City of Islam”, Islamabad is actually a moderate, quiet almost sleepy town, a purpose built capital (like DC or Canberra) with T-square straight roads dividing mile square sectors with names like G-6 and F-7, where diplomatic plates for outnumber headscarves and government functionaries and bureaucrats and foreign missions file directives on how to file. (Billboards around town remind the locals “We want a disciplined City”. The ascetic, stern Jinnah was big on discipline.) Over the years, with the funding and favor of the government, and supporting the nominally secular government in turn, the Lal Masjid folks and their ilk continued to grow their empire, and taking in the young children of Pakistan’s poorest, (see earlier post) along with those of many of the middle class bureaucrats of the capital.

It was a pretty good bargain, and would obtain for many years. But factors both within and outside of Pakistan slowly changed the dynamic in favor of the fundamentalists. First, it’s just their time. The pendulum has been swinging towards the nationalists and fundamentalists for a while and shows no signs of slowing down. But what really brought them to the fore in Pakistan, and from here to other places, was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the West’s reaction to it.

The invasion was expected to be pretty much a walk over on all sides. The Soviets were the real deal, an army that could fight toe to toe with the US in Europe and possibly win. They had a long history of invasions and putting down insurrections in Hungary, Prague, Poland, and dissuading many more with their very existence. And here, finally, the Soviets were going to fulfill the ancient Russian dream of a warm water port for the navy and tropical vacations for the czars. Yet a funny thing happened on the Soviet march to the sea; 1980 became 1981, became ’82, became ‘83, became ’84, became ’85 and still no outright Soviet victory. Even Reagan was ready to give the Russians a pass, criticizing Carter for withdrawing from the Moscow Olympics because, essentially, it was all over but the shouting, so dominant were the Russians. Nobody got it, everyone believed Soviet propaganda that victory was just around the corner, that a few more troops and a few more months and the Soviets would vanquish their enemies. It wasn’t until the mid ‘80’s that people finally realized there was potential to do some serious damage to the Soviets.

And why didn’t the Commies win? Because they picked a fight with the wrong people: the Pushtuns. Afghanistan today is poor in a way that is nearly impossible for us to comprehend. And I’ve been living in Pakistan. And back then, it was worse. Unlike the Hungarians and the Poles and the Czechs, the people of Afghanistan had, and have, NOTHING to lose. They got some sheep, a few goats and rocks. That’s it. Oh, and one other thing, something they will die before they give up: their honor. So they fought. And won. Well, at least they didn’t lose, which is all in insurgency has to do. They got our help, of course, but in the long run, and these people are nothing if not long term thinkers, with or without our help, they were not going to lose, because they had no incentive to do anything but fight to the death. Don’t ever forget: you can’t win in Afghanistan, you can only encourage the people to do what you want them to do. They are, without question, the most honorable people on the planet, if you define honor as living and willingly dying by a code that all respect and all agree to. Remember when Bush said "Surrender Osama or be destroyed" and the Taliban told him to piss up a rope? There was never a chance they would give him up in that situation. You cannot threaten these people. You cannot scare them. They are not afraid. If he had offered to negotiate for Osama's release...Well, It is too tiring to go into, but suffice it to say that this is ANOTHER HUGE Bush screw up. It didn't have to be this way...

Afghanistan is not really a country, either, it is just the twilight zone created when the British stopped conquering northwards and the Russian Empire stopped conquering southwards. It is a collection of tribes who may or may not get along, depending on the issue and the time. They generally like to be left alone and not told what to do, by anyone, and that includes the mullahs. Pushtuns are NOT extremists, unless they are pushed to extremes to protect their honor. Alexander was the last one to have any success in war there, and he only did it by inviting the locals to join what was by then a huge multi-national traveling and raiding army and he didn’t stay very long, so he didn’t have the problems of occupation. About the British invasion: after they conquered all of the sub-continent, they set their sights on the soft underbelly of the Russian Empire. So they sent an army over the Khyber Pass to do battle. One guy got out, and only because he was a doctor and treated the son of one of the warlords. As the old saying says, “Afghanistan swallows armies whole.”

So, the Brits stopped, licked their wounds, drew a line in the mountains, and consolidated their hold on the sub-continent. The line they drew came to be called the Durand line. Over 100 years old, it is still doing what it was designed to do, divide the battle hardened, fiercely independent yet ethnically unified peoples on each side of that artificial border and keep them fighting with each other so they don’t attack the soft, prosperous people of the flatlands. The basic problem of Afghan-Pakistan relations, and from there the fatal flaw in Bush’s “Global War On Terror” (GWOT) can be understood from this map. Well, not THE fatal flaw, the GWOT is full of flaws, it is, in fact, nothing but flaws, but this is one of them. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/tribal/map.html In the upper right corner, toggle the white box to see that the borders, as stated earlier, are not “real” meaning cleanly separating a single ethnic group, thereby creating a nation (ethnic) state. What you have is an arbitrary line through the mountains. The war on terror expects every country to extend their writ of control right up to every nook and cranny on every border. In this area, as in so many other in the world, it is just not in the cards.

OK, I’m getting ahead of myself. Or behind. Whatever. Now you may ask, what interest does Pakistan have in Afghanistan? Since India is the traditional enemy of the Pakistan state, so Afghanistan is seen as the place to which a Pakistan government under siege can retreat, much as Pakistan was the place to which the Afghans retreated under the onslaught of the Soviets. Once there, among folks who share their religion and language, they could regroup and attack. The Afghans retreated to Pakistan, the very definition of a Cold War client state, with established military and intelligence links to both the US and the UK.

Although they took their own sweet time about it, leaving thousands of Afghans to die before they helped, the CIA and others eventually funneled millions of dollars and tons of weapons through Pakistan, especially through the heavy duty dudes at the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI. Oh yeah. The ISI. Kinda forgot about them. That’s a mistake no Pakistani ever makes, however. The ISI is like, like…well, like no other organization anywhere. A shadowy and secret operational intelligence agency, they coordinate and organize all intelligence within Pakistan and are feared and respected. Suffice to say that people I know think they are the one group that can really rip the place apart without even trying.

With millions of US dollars funneled to the Afghan resistance through Pakistan and the ISI, and the calls for Jihad going out around the world, LOTS of people showed up to help, including a bored rich kid from Saudi Arabia who was not sure what to do with his life and his millions, but knew he hated the infidel imperialists, no matter where they came from. That was Osama Bin Laden of course. His origins and the origin of his money also has a Pakistan connection. His father started out as a laborer on construction sites, but he showed a talent for organization and began bidding on work, eventually locking up the biggest single civil construction contract in history, if I'm not mistaken, the contract, still open in fact, to rebuild Mecca, from the airport to the roads, hotels, sewers, etc. etc. etc. all the way to the Great Mosque, so that the millions of pilgrims who make the Hajj every year can do so in relative comfort and ease. And who did most of the building? Pakistanis, of course.

So Osama Bin Laden, among thousands of others, came to join the Mujaheddin, the holy warriors to take on the Soviets. These guys were trained and armed with Pakistani expertise and weapons at US expense. The ISI and the rest of the Pakistan political and military establishment were happy to use their connections with the fundamentalists to recruit jihadis, and of course the US was happy to see all this happen as well. Funny how we didn't mind helping the Jihadis when they were atacking our enemies then, did we? And now they are going to force us out, too. This is nothing about "Fighting them over there so we don't fight them here." That is about the most ridiculous notion I have ever heard. These folks are homebodies, they aren't leaving. They just want us to leave. We can visit them of course. Tourism is no problem, but we have to do it on their terms, not ours and certainly not with guns. This place is unlike anyplace else on the planet and...OK, getting off track again.

Anyway, after years of consigning the folks in Afghanistan to their fate, a fate everyone believed to be inevitable, folks woke up to the fact that the Soviets, with their overstretched supply lines and an increasingly threadbare army, had still not won. The CIA came in to arm the only people who would fight the Soviets: the Pushtuns and Uzbek and Tajik tribesmen, the folks who were getting hammered in Afghanistan. The CIA’s base of operations? Pakistan, specifically Peshawar, the capital of the NWFP, or North West Frontier Province. Money and weapons and supplies and people flowed in and up the Khyber pass and into Afghanistan, reinvigorating trade and smuggling routes still in use today. All this movement of men and materials came at a cost, of course. The US continued our long and unhappy history of propping up military dictators, this time Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Zia was not a nice guy, to say the least, but we gave him planes and missiles and big booming guns and other toys. And of course, lots of the money was siphoned off by the military dictators, too.

One thing about those trade and smuggling routes: the bazaar at Peshawar is filled with all kinds of US made military weapons and supplies, much stolen by Afghans working on US bases in Afghanistan, just like it was full of Russian supplies in the 1980’s. I have no idea what the value of the stuff is, but I would imagine that in that box of flash drives I saw, there was at least a little valuable information. A lot of this stuff is smuggled on regular trucks and the like, but things are so institutionalized these days that for the most incriminating things, they use donkey trains over the mountains, and the donkeys have been going back and forth for so long that they know where to go, they don’t even need people to accompany them anymore.

All of this is just par for the course from the US perspective, but it had the effect of solidifying the military hold on the country and entrenching their place in society, something we were happy to see to keep the Soviets in check and keep a toe hold, if required, to address problems in Central Asia. These Pakistan military guys are not stupid. They didn’t ONLY take their money for shopping trips at 5 star hotels in Paris. They invested in their own economy, so much so that the army or army allied people, retired brigadiers and generals and the like, own or control a major company, often the ONLY company, in just about every sector of the Pakistan economy, from cement to food (yes, in Pakistan you can tell them apart, unlike other places I’ve been) and everything in between. While the army has always had a lot of control of the country, the graft from the US support of the Russian-Afghan war was the seed money that took the Pakistan army to the next level of corruption. Now they can rip down forests and pollute rivers and set the price of basic commodities with impunity.

And we haven’t even talked about the refugees yet. Did you know that within a year of the Soviet invasion, over 8 MILLION refuges appeared on Pakistan’s collective doorstep? Neither did I. And you know why? Because the Pakistanis took them in. To the last starving waif, the Pakistanis made room for them and took them in. Remember the code I talked about earlier? This is their code in practice. They did it because Islam tells them they must. Even the poorest people in Pakistan, people with barely a room to live in would hang a blanket to divide the room and invite strangers in to live with them for years. Nothing short of amazing. Even now, many of those refugees remain in Pakistan. Think of it: if 16 million Mexicans, who are Christians after all, came to the US in a year, would our reaction be anything like the Pakistanis’ reaction to the influx of Afghans? Especially after nearly 30 years? Think of that the next time you hear an US politician accuse the Pakistanis of “not doing enough”. Good gravy, what more should they do? These are people who voluntarily impoverished themselves, set their development back 20 years to take care of neighbors in need. And the US can’t make the “sacrifice” to build energy efficient cars? Words fail me.

The US has now committed a measly $750 million over 5 years to address the development problems on the Afghan-Pak border. Considering that is less than 3 days spending in Iraq, and this area, known as FATA or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is the source of the kind of poverty and alienation that could easily destabilize Pakistan and India. Nuclear states, both. And Afghanistan, where US soldiers risk their lives everyday. The whole thing could blow. And we put a band aid on it. Get used to the names North and South Waziristan and Kurram and Orakzai and the Khyber agency. They could take their place along side names like Fallujah and Anbar and Helmand and Herat and…well you get the idea.

So I hope, after all that, you can see the problem: an entrenched military in cahoots with the fundamentalists, all aided and abetted by some serious heavies at the intelligence agency, in a desperately poor country in one of the most volatile regions of the world. Anyone who tells you they know what is going to happen is, as the saying goes, either a liar or a fool.

Where does that leave us? The Durand line (Afghan-Pak border) will continue to be a HUGE problem, long after all of us are cold and in the ground. The rest of Pakistan is in a period of tremendous instability as the various forces: the army, the intel services, the Jihadis and fundamentalists, even the lawyers are getting into the act, battle it out for influence and control, although the innate good sense of the Pakistani people should prevail, you can never be sure that things won’t spin completely out of control. When I lived there, I never went out without taking a few minutes to check the TV to make sure Musharraf was still alive. The only reason he hasn’t been replaced is that no one else wants the job. But eventually he will be replaced, whether by elections or a coup or assassination or a “retirement to spend more time with the family”. It is sure that the army will remain in control and will take control, even from an elected civilian government if they feel their own interests or those of the largere state are threatened. But beyond that, no one, least of all me, knows what will happen next. Watch that space!!

If you made it this far, congratulations!! There is so much more but this should give you an idea of what we are dealing with.

Cross-posted at www.dailykos.com