Pakistan: A Hard Country (2 page)

intel igence and internal security in the armed forces.

Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, al iance of Islamist political MMA

parties.

MNA

Member of the National Assembly.

MPA

Member of a Provincial Assembly.

Muttahida Qaumi Movement or United People’s Move MQM

ment (formerly Mohajir Qaumi Movement), the party of the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs of Sindh.

The North West Frontier Province, since 2010 renamed NWFP

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

PML

Pakistan Muslim League.

Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the party led by the PML(N)

Sharif dynasty.

Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), a political al i ance mainly made up of defectors from the PML(N) of PML(Q)

the Sharifs, and put together in 2002 to support the administration of President Musharraf.

Pakistan People’s Party, led by the Bhutto – Zardari PPP

dynasty.

Research and Analysis Wing (Indian intel igence RAW

agency).

Station House Officer, the commander of a local police SHO

station.

SSP

Sipah-e-Sahaba, Pakistan, anti-Shia militant group.

Tehriq-e-Insaf, party founded and led by Imran Khan TeI

Niazi.

Tehriq-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi, Islamist mili tant TNSM

movement in Swat, since 2008 al ied with the Pakistani Taleban.

TTP

Tehriq-e-Taleban Pakistan.

Land, People and History

1

Introduction: Understanding Pakistan Eppur si muove

(And yet it moves)

(Galileo Galilei)

There have been times during the writing of this book when it seemed that it would have to be titled ‘Requiem for a Country’. At the time of writing, the pressures on Pakistan from without and within are unprecedented even in its troubled history. Yet such despair would be premature. Tariq Ali wrote Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State in 1983, a generation ago. That’s quite a long deathbed scene by any standards.1

It is possible that the terrible floods of the summer of 2010 have fundamental y changed and weakened the Pakistani system described in this book. This, however, wil not be clear for a long while – and in the meantime it is worth remembering the extraordinary resilience that South Asian rural societies have often shown in the face of natural disaster, from which they have repeatedly emerged with structures of local authority and political culture essential y unchanged.

What is certainly true is that if floods and other ecological disasters on this scale become regular events as a result of climate change, then Pakistan wil be destroyed as a state and an organised society – but so too wil many other countries around the world. Indeed, such a development would reduce present concerns about Pakistan to relative insignificance. In the meantime, however, the floods have obviously damaged Pakistan’s national infrastructure, and retarded stil further the country’s already faltering economic progress.

This book is intended to describe and analyse both Pakistan’s internal problems and the sources of Pakistan’s internal resilience. In consequence, it of course deals extensively with the threat from the Pakistani Taleban and their al ies, the roots of their support, and the relationship of this support to the war in Afghanistan. It also examines the policies of the Pakistani security establishment towards Afghanistan and India, since these have had very important effects on domestic developments in Pakistan. It is not meant, however, to be a study of Pakistan’s international position, though the conclusions contain some recommendations for Western policy.

Trying to understand Pakistan’s internal structures and dynamics is complicated; for if there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan and is the central theme of this book, it is ‘Janus-faced’: in other words, many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic and political development.

Pakistan is divided, disorganized, economical y backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism – ‘and yet it moves’, and is in many ways surprisingly tough and resilient as a state and a society. It is also not quite as unequal as it looks from outside.

Pakistan contains islands of successful modernity, and of excel ent administration – not that many, but enough to help keep the country trundling along: a few impressive modern industries; some fine motorways; a university in Lahore, parts of which are the best of their kind in South Asia; a powerful, wel -trained and wel -disciplined army; and in every generation, a number of efficient, honest and devoted public servants. The military and police commanders of the fight against the Taleban in the Pathan areas whom I met in Peshawar and Rawalpindi in 2008 – 9 struck me as highly able and patriotic men by any standards in the world.

The National Finance Commission Award of 2010, which rebalanced state revenues in favour of the poorer provinces, was a reasonable if belated agreement. It demonstrated that Pakistani democracy, the Pakistani political process and Pakistani federalism retain a measure of vitality, flexibility and the ability to compromise.

None of these things is characteristic of truly failed or failing states like Somalia, Afghanistan or the Congo.

That doesn’t mean that Pakistan always smel s nice (though sometimes it does); and indeed, some of the toughest creepers holding the rotten tree of the Pakistani system together are at one and the same time parasites on that tree, and sometimes smel bad even by their own standards. Nonetheless, tough they are; and unless the USA, India, or both together invade Pakistan and thereby precipitate its disintegration, the likelihood is that the country wil hold together, and that if it eventual y col apses, it wil be not Islamist extremism but climate change – an especial y grim threat in the whole of South Asia – that finishes it off.

Support for extremist and terrorist groups is scattered throughout Pakistani society, but as of 2010 mass support for Islamist rebel ion against the Pakistani state is so far present only in the Pathan areas, and in only some of them – in other words, less than 5 per cent of the population. That is not remotely enough to revolutionize Pakistan as a whole. During their rule over the region, the British faced repeated revolts in the Pathan areas, without seriously fearing that this would lead to rebel ion elsewhere in their Indian empire.

Any Pakistani national revolution would have to gain not just mass but majority support in Pakistan’s two great urban centres, Lahore and Karachi; and as the chapters on Punjab and Sindh wil make clear, this is unlikely for the foreseeable future – though not necessarily for ever, especial y if ecological crisis floods the cities with masses of starving peasants.

When terrorist groups attack India, or Western forces in Afghanistan, their actions enjoy a degree of instinctive, gut sympathy from a majority of Pakistanis – not because of Islamist extremism, but because of Muslim nationalism and bitter hostility to the US role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular. Support for a civil war and revolution in Pakistan itself that would turn Pakistan into a revolutionary Islamic state is, however, a very different matter from sympathizing with attacks on the US and India. That would mean Pakistanis kil ing Pakistanis on a massive scale, and by and large they don’t want to. They may wel want to kil some set of immediate rivals, but that’s another matter.

It is important not to be misled by the spread of terrorism in Pakistan in 2009 – 10. In many ways, terrorism by the Pakistani Taleban is a sign not of strength but of weakness. If you want to overthrow and capture a state, you need either a mass movement on city streets that seizes institutions, or a guerril a movement in the countryside that seizes territory, or a revolt of the junior ranks of the military, or some combination of al three. No movement relying chiefly on terrorism has ever overthrown a state. The Pakistani Taleban looked truly menacing when it took over most of the Federal y Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), fol owed by the districts of Swat and Buner. When it blows up ordinary people in bazaars and mosques, it merely looks foul.

Pakistan is thus probably stil far from the situation of Iran in the late 1970s or Russia in 1917. Apart from anything else, the army is a united and disciplined institution, and as long as that remains the case, it wil be strong enough to defeat open revolt – as it proved by defeating the Taleban in Swat and south Waziristan in 2009. Unlike in Africa and elsewhere, military coups in Pakistan have always been carried out by the army as a whole, on the orders of its chief of staff and commanding generals – never by junior officers. As my chapter on the military wil describe, there are very deep reasons for this in terms of material advantage as wel as military culture.

The only thing that can destroy this discipline and unity is if enough Pakistani soldiers are faced with moral and emotional pressures powerful enough to crack their discipline, and that would mean very powerful pressures indeed. In fact, they would have to be put in a position where their duty to defend Pakistan and their conscience and honour as Muslims clashed directly with their obedience to their commanders.

As far as I can see, the only thing that could bring that about as far as the army as a whole is concerned (rather than just some of its Pathan elements) is if the US were to invade part of Pakistan, and the army command failed to give orders to resist this. Already, the perceived subservience of the Pakistani state to Washington’s demands has caused severe problems of morale in the armed forces.

I have been told by soldiers of al ranks that faced with open incursions on the ground by US troops, parts of the Pakistani army would mutiny in order to fight the invaders. With the army splintered and radicalized, Islamist upheaval and the col apse of the state would indeed be al too likely – but even then, the result would be rebel ions leading to civil war, not, as in Iran, to a national revolution that would be successful in taking over the whole country.

I hope through this book to strengthen the argument that however great the provocation, the US must not contribute to the destruction of Pakistan – even though, as this book wil make clear, neither the Pakistani army, nor the Pakistani state, nor the great majority of Pakistanis wil ever give more than very qualified help to the US

campaign against the Afghan Taleban, since Pakistanis of every rank and class see these in a quite different light from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taleban.

PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN AND THE TALEBAN

Pakistan is quite simply far more important to the region, the West and the world than is Afghanistan: a statement which is a matter not of sentiment but of mathematics. With more than 180 mil ion people, Pakistan has nearly six times the population of Afghanistan (or Iraq), twice the population of Iran, and almost two-thirds the population of the entire Arab world put together. Pakistan has a large diaspora in Britain (and therefore in the EU), some of whom have joined the Islamist extremists and carried out terrorist attacks against Britain.

The help of the Pakistani intel igence services to Britain has been absolutely vital to identifying the links of these potential terrorists to groups in Pakistan, and to preventing more attacks on Britain, the USA and Europe. Pakistan therefore has been only a partial al y in the ‘war on terror’ – but stil a vital and irreplaceable one. For we need to remember that in the end it is only legitimate Muslim governments and security services that can control terrorist plots on their soil. Western pressure may be necessary to push them in the right direction, but we need to be careful that this pressure does not become so overwhelming that it undermines or even destroys those governments, by humiliating them in the eyes of their own people.

Final y, Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons and one of the most powerful armies in Asia. This means that the option of the US

attacking Pakistan with ground forces in order to force it to put pressure on the Afghan Taleban simply does not exist – as both the Pentagon and the Pakistani military have long understood. Deeply unsatisfying though this has been for the West, the only means of influencing Pakistan has been through economic incentives and the threat of their withdrawal. Economic sanctions are not real y a credible threat, because the economic col apse of Pakistan would play straight into the hands of the Taleban and Al Qaeda.

Pakistan’s relationship with India has been central to Pakistan’s behaviour since 9/11 – as of course it has been ever since partition and independence in 1947. Fear of India has both encouraged and limited Pakistani help to the US in Afghanistan. This fear is exaggerated, but not irrational, and neither are most of the policies which result from it. On the one hand, fear of a US – Indian al iance against Pakistan seems to have been a genuine factor in Musharraf’s decision to help the US after 9/11, and was certainly used by him to convince the military and – initial y – many ordinary Pakistanis of the necessity of this help. On the other hand, fear of India has been both a reason and an excuse for Pakistan not to redeploy more troops from the eastern border with India to fight against the Taleban in the west.