Pakistan: The Most Dangerous Place

Today, it is well proven and acknowledged worldwide that the roots of Pakistan’s jihadism lie in its obsession with India, born out of the two-nation theory. Crafted by the fear that its powerful neighbour, India wants to dismember Pakistan and undo the Partition, supports the overall design of policies in Pakistan. The break-up of Pakistan in 1971 and emergence of Bangladesh from erstwhile East Pakistan as an independent nation has reinforced national paranoia. Contrary to convincing the country’s Punjabi elite of the need to come to terms with Pakistan’s size and power and finding security within the parameters of reality, the establishment in turn has fanned “India scare” to divert focus from internal challenges.

Struck by the unexpected reality post 9/11 destruction of the twin-towers in New York, the world awakened to a new-fangled threat. A shockingly spectacular execution of attacks by Al-Qaeda took the world by surprise. The Americans might have responded and hunted the Taliban out of Kabul and forced Al Qaeda to find a new home in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan yet, as veteran Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul writes, “One by one, the militants crossed the border into Pakistan and settled in its tribal areas, building alliances with locals and terrorising or bribing their way to power. This place – Pakistan’s lawless frontier – is now the epicentre of global terrorism. It is where young American and British jihadists go to be trained, where the kidnapped are stowed away and where plots are hatched for deadly attacks all over the world. It has become, in President Obama’s words, “…the most dangerous place” – a hornet’s nest of violent extremists, many of whom now target their own state in vicious suicide-bombing campaigns.”

Obama’s observation on one of the world’s most opaque tribal areas of Pakistan’s North West region bordering Afghanistan got vindicated, even more unequivocally this time on December 16, 2014, when terrorists of Teherik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) butchered 132 innocent children of the Army Public School in Peshawar, all in the age group of eight to eighteen years.

The Genesis

Pakistani society has drifted towards religious militancy over the last 20 to 25 years. Anti-American and anti-Indian sentiments are very strong. This is because the mindsets of the younger generation over decades have been built on that discourse. Rizvi, a Pakistani political analyst predicts that Pakistan will have a rough decade ahead as the generation born in the 1980s comes to power. This generation has been raised on extremist ideology taught in schools and repeated on television and in the mosques. The future of Pakistan is all set to be doomed if course correction is not recalibrated in time.

The old saying that the wise learn from others’ mistakes may not be so true when it comes to those in Pakistan’s establishment. History bears testimony to the ills of religion interfering with the matters of the state. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 AD, the West decided to separate religion from the business of the state. With this decision, the West, which was living in the Dark Ages, suddenly embarked on the path of inventions and discoveries heretofore blocked through religious decrees and brought the world to the wonders of the 21st century. This was only possible after the clergy was denied its divine right to interfere in every matter possible. What will it take for Pakistan to embark on the route to reforms culling the mullahs out of state functioning? Will it ever be able to do achieve that? Or is it that its leadership has taken the country well beyond the culmination point. These are rather more pertinent questions that need to be addressed at this hour.

Into nationhood for 67 years now, Pakistan has developed only one element of national power and that is the military which is so central to the idea of Pakistan today that all other elements of national power have been relegated to a state of irrelevance. The country’s institutions, ranging from schools and universities to the judiciary, are in a state of general decline. The economy’s stuttering growth is dependent largely on the flow of international economic aid. Pakistan’s GDP stands at $245 billion in absolute terms and $845 billion in Purchasing Price Parity thus making it the smallest economy of any country maintaining nuclear arsenals. Twenty-two per cent of the population lives below the poverty line and another 21 per cent lives just above it, resulting in almost half the people of Pakistan living at extreme levels of poverty.

It is ironic to see a country deviating from the path of prosperity and progress towards hate and assured self-destruction. The vision of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which he presented to the framers of Pakistan’s constitution when he addressed the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, had the basis of equality and secularism. Sadly, secularism has become a dangerous, deadly label in Pakistan. Religious extremists slowly gained in strength and tightened their stranglehold on the country putting its stability at risk.

As the rabid clergy, mostly consisting of madrasa-indoctrinated bigots with medieval mindsets, are completely illiterate as far as contemporary disciplines are concerned. Unfortunately their ideology has started resonating in vast stretches of Pakistani society. For this reason, being liberal and secular has become synonymous with infidelity in the new intolerant society. In 1947, at the time of independence, Jinnah would have never dreamt of a Pakistan in its present state.

Sixty-five years after the death of its founding father, the people of Pakistan are still searching for Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s vision for the country. During much of its existence, Pakistanis have been encouraged to believe that Jinnah created Pakistan in the name of Islam as a theocratic state. Others have disagreed, arguing the Jinnah wanted a Muslim-majority but secular and progressive country. The debate over the two competing and contradictory visions has intensified in recent years as the country reels from growing Islamic extremism and Taliban militancy. At the heart of this debate are some public addresses of Jinnah around the time of the Partition of India in 1947. In his address to the Constituent Assembly in the port city of Karachi on August 11, 1947, three days before the creation of Pakistan. Jinnah had said, “You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan.” Jinnah had declared, “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”

It is a known fact that Jinnah’s words did not go down well with the powerful and ambitious religious ideologues around him at the time, who then made sure the speech was virtually blacked out in the next day’s newspapers. Successive military governments in Pakistan were accused of attempting to downplay, even remove, the speech from official records. Why did that speech unsettle some Pakistani leaders so much? Many believe it was seen at odds with the kind of anti-India, anti-Hindu, Islamic state they were trying to create thus preserving their own power bases. And this is the genesis of the whole problem.

Self-Destructive Course

Today, it is well proven and acknowledged worldwide that the roots of Pakistan’s jihadism lie in its obsession with India, born out of the two-nation theory. Crafted by the fear that its powerful neighbour, India wants to dismember Pakistan and undo the Partition supports the overall design of policies in Pakistan. The break-up of Pakistan in 1971, and emergence of Bangladesh from erstwhile East Pakistan as an independent nation, has reinforced national paranoia. Contrary to convincing the country’s Punjabi elite of the need to come to terms with Pakistan’s size and power and finding security within the parameters of reality, the establishment in turn has fanned “India scare” to divert focus from internal challenges.

Pakistan’s emphasis on religion and ideology at the expense of ethnic, linguistic and sectarian diversity in a complex society is making it bear a heavy price to the extent of risking its very existence. The relationship between Pakistan and jihadism emanating from state-sponsored ideology cannot be understood without understanding the country’s psychological dimension and make-up. Hussain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to the US sums up the past sixty years of Pakistan’s existence by stating, “…for the first 30 years of Pakistan’s existence, the clamour was for religiosity within and Pan-Islamism in foreign policy. For the next 30 years global jihadism has been the overarching security and foreign policy idea that has advanced the Pakistani ideology.”

Analysing the evolution of Pakistan since 1947 is important before arriving at any realistic conclusion. In January 1951, Ayub Khan succeeded General Sir Douglas Gracey as Commander in Chief of the Pakistan Army, becoming the first Pakistani in that position. Within a short time of his promotion, however, Ayub Khan became the most powerful political figure. Perhaps more than any other Pakistani has ever emerged till date.

By 1958, Ayub Khan and his fellow officers decided to turn out the “inefficient and untrustworthy” politicians – a task which was easily accomplished without bloodshed by imposing martial law. Ayub Khan justified his assumption of power by citing the nation’s need for stability and the necessity for the army to play a central role – an argument that has been played by all the Generals toppling the civilian government down the line.

He concentrated on consolidating power and intimidating the opposition. To do so, he promoted the Jamat-e-Islami and other religious groups more than the political parties. He also aimed to establish the groundwork for future stability through altering the economic, legal, and constitutional institutions. This whiskey-loving Muslim General did not hesitate invoking the clichéd fears of “Islam in danger” to suppress his political opponents.

Ayub Khan added the word Islamic to the Preamble of the 1962 constitution. This constitution stipulated that its President would be a Muslim, and the Advisory Council of Islamic Ideology and the Islamic Research Institute were established to assist the government in reconciling all legislation with the tenets of the Quran and the Sunna. Hence began the journey into making of a fundamentalist society that exists today. A chemical process started in the late fifties has made the acid concentration ever stronger and deadlier in the cocktail by each passing decade.

When internal stability broke down in the 1960s, he remained contemptuous of lawyer-politicians and handed over power to his fellow army officer General Yaya Khan. After a humiliating defeat in 1971 war and the creation of Bangladesh, a civilian government led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had won the 1971 elections on a heavily leftist map for governance; entrenched as it was in socialist ideals and thereby enjoying massive support. However, it did not take long for the tide to turn. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto brought in the elements of Islamic ideology in Pakistan’s substantive foreign policy. Islam came to the forefront of all policy and law-making decisions and ultimately, emerged as the guiding principle in all policy-related issues. He was responsible for getting all policies whether pertaining to finance, defence, foreign, education or interior ministry, increasingly dressed in Islamic colours. Religion soon after became the official legitimising strategy for all political manoeuvres.

Islam had thus emerged as the most predominant political factor to facilitate in both external and internal scenarios, by the end of Bhutto’s regime and as a result thereof. Although his insistence upon the role of Islam in Pakistani politics during his final days in power could not save his fading popularity however it did serve to reinforce the centrality of Islam for the military regime that followed. The dangerous alliance between military might and religious pressure thus found its seeds in Bhutto’s policy shifts, only to find renewed force under the approaching military rule.

The military regime under Zia-ul-Haq entered the political arena in 1977 as a “caretaker ninety-day government staging a military coup.” His rule spanned over the course of eleven years, permanently scaring the Pakistani society by introducing Muslim fundamentalism at entirely different levels. In less than a year after Zia’s takeover, his main concern was to put the country on the Islamic system.

The process of Islamisation started almost immediately, and soon emerged strongly in the shape of legal amendments. As AK Brohi, General Zia’s Law and Religious Affairs Advisor rightly states, “Whatever Islamisation Zia had been enforcing was more to consolidate his own personal power than to establish a genuine Islamic order.” And in that process he brought the Wahabi ideology to the forefront of Pakistan’s religious landscape displacing the tolerant Sufism seated in the region for almost a thousand years.

CIA secret funds and Saudi money poured in volumes to raise and fund Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the Cold War. In the eighties, hundreds of madrasas soon dotted the tribal belt and other regions of Pakistan, churning out Jihadis in thousands to fight in Afghanistan and later in Kashmir. The strategic idea though was always India-centric and Soviet intervention was merely a God-sent opportunity. Carving out strategic space for itself in Afghanistan against India after Soviet withdrawal and wresting Kashmir by unleashing Jihadi power to fight the Indian Army was Zia’s grand strategy.

After Zia-Ul-Haq’s sudden death in an air crash, the leaders of the civilian governments that followed could not muster the strength to reverse the order set in motion by Ayub and cemented by Zia because of military’s ascendency over the complete government and societal apparatus in Pakistan.