RSS Feed MenuThis is the fourth installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series on Pakistan. Click here for the rest of the series.
In 1948, there was a state called Pakistan: all it lacked was Pakistanis. Within less than a year of Pakistan’s bloody creation, mass riots broke out in East Pakistan over the question of language: why was Urdu being forced upon Bengalis? Sindhis, Pathans and Baluchis openly expressed their resentment at being lorded over by Urdu-speaking bureaucrats and Punjabi army officers. An insurgency was taking grip in Baluchistan.
Two things could unite this nation divided against itself: adherence to Islam and opposition to India. The country would be a continuation of the movement that created it – its survival predicated on the presence of a permanent enemy. Jinnah had freed Muslims from “Hindu Raj”; his successors would defend Islam from “Hindu India”. Created as a home for the faithful, Pakistan would survive by becoming the guardian of the faith. But the Objectives Resolution, introduced in 1949 to invent a religious nationalism for Pakistan, disenfranchised non-Muslims, empowered the mullahs and opened up the sluice-gates to Islamists. Decades before the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, Pakistan became a mecca for global Islamists: senior figures from the Muslim Brotherhood started paying visits, and Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the one-time Grand Mufti of Jerusalem notorious for his association with the Nazis, was a regular.
Yet for all its evocations of Islamic glory, Pakistan was a mess, a country teetering toward extinction. It had no significant industry. It produced jute and cotton, but the processing mills lay in India. Partition had resulted in a massive flight of capital, with non-Muslim entrepreneurs fleeing the new dispensation for India. What saved Pakistan from imminent extinction was its location. Proximity to the Soviet Union offered rich possibilities. Wholly fabricated reports of Soviet plans to invade Pakistan were prepared and distributed in London and Washington. Pakistan’s finance minister, Ghulam Mohammed, was keen to sell the idea of an “Islamic barrier” to contain Moscow.
The offer to Washington was plain: Pakistan was prepared to offer its territory for anti-Soviet operations — so long as the U.S. provided economic and military aid, and guaranteed the Islamic state’s security against India. President Eisenhower was willing to offer aid, but he was not prepared to commit the U.S. to a security pact against India, nor was he willing to make Washington party to the Kashmir dispute. At this stage, Pakistan had few choices. It accepted Washington’s terms. Aid began flowing. The U.S. equipped Pakistan’s army, air force and a dozen navy ships. By 1957, U.S. assistance to Pakistan reached a staggering $500 million. But even as Washington armed Pakistan to fight Communism, it released a policy paper identifying Pakistan’s “religious leaders” as an equally potent threat. Washington’s only mistake was to believe that by funding Pakistan, it was propping up “Western-minded” leaders who would thoroughly oppose fanatical religious forces. It did not occur to President Eisenhower – and nor have his successors sufficiently appreciated the fact – that the cultivated appearance of Pakistani leaders merely cloaked the deep-seated resentment they felt for the west.
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voiceover // Dec 10, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Great artilce series by K Kapil. Even 10 yrs back there would not have been any audience in the western world for this analysis. Pakistan ‘the land of pure’ ( hatred) is finally reaping the results of what it has been sowing for the last 50 years. Pakistan with intentional Saudi backing in billions of dollars was meant to spread Wahabi Islam . Hence the thousands of madrasas that are still churning out Jihaadi suicide bombers and terrorists. US conveniently turned its head the other way until 9/11 as the various Jihadi factions did not threaten them directly. So it continued to pour BILLIONS into a corrupt and failed regime, leaving India to bear the brunt of asymmetrical terror war perpertrated by Pakistan. Alas this realization is coming a bit too late. Pakistan and Saudis have been indoctrinating Jihadi venom and brainwashing for over 5 decades. There are by now may be million muslim fanatics around the world who have bought into the Jihadi Islamic doctrine ‘we are victims of a grand scheme by infidels to destroy us hence we must destroy them before they destroy us.
MrPerkins // Mar 16, 2010 at 10:20 am
shame on you Kapil Commiereadies and commentor voiceover for propogating such nonsense.
You claim the Soviet threat to Pakistan wasnt real? Er where were you when The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and occupied it for 9 years??? To me as a neutral observer that would suggest the Pakistanis fears were very legitimate.
Let me educate you voiceover. It was not the Saudis but the US themselves who trained and propogated jihadis and maddrassas in pakistan in order for the products of such places to fight the Soviets which they did succesfully. To this day Jihadis in Afghanistan read military training manuals produced in Omaha, Nebraska and given to them by the CIA! of course the Taliban being the Taliban they had to rip out all the illustrations of humans which their religion of islam forbids but they adhere to the textbooks from the US nontheless!
Pakistan may have corrupt morally bankrupt dynastic politicians but it has a strong independant judiciary and a capable military and one fact ignored by Indians is that during the Musharraf years it had the 5th fastest growing GDP per capita income in the world behind China, India and Turkey amongst others!
As someone who has actually visited Islamabad recently in my capacity as an engineer i can tell you very much the city and its people are far more prosperous than the scenes I saw on my Delhi and Amritsar postings.
India only prospered economically when dynastic politics were destroyed and it has been the same throughout Asia. Indonesia has prospered when 50 years of dynastic politics and the era of Sukharno came to an end.
Similarly Pakistan will prosper to heights India cannot reach due to its crippling population levels, once the Meglamaniacal Bhutto and Sharif dynasties collapse and true democracy untainted by corruption and India and the USA’s nefarious intelligence influences is established.
Those hindu fundamentalists who bleat of Pakistan as a “failed state” ought to consider their own nation of 900 million slumdog dwellers living in abject poverty amidst huge social problems of illiteracy and forced prostitution and ethnic tensions. Yet of course they prefer to talk of the call centre culture and 80 million middle class so beloved of consumerism! Not realising it is exactly such talk which is sowing the seeds of Indias inevitable implosion into smaller states as the economic divide increases