Pakistan: A Hard Country (9 page)

As elsewhere in the Muslim world, the decline of Muslim power from the early eighteenth century on produced a complex set of religious and cultural responses – the great majority of which, however, had the same ultimate goal, namely to strengthen the power of Muslims in the face of their enemies, and to strengthen Muslim unity in the face of the Muslims’ own divisions.4 From the later eighteenth century, Muslim fears were focused above al on the rise of the British (in 1803 the Mughal emperor became a British pensionary).

Since those days, religious forms of Muslim resistance to Western power have been a constant in South Asian history, ebbing and flowing but never disappearing. From the mid-nineteenth century on, they have been joined by a very different response, that of Westernization. It is important to note, however, that the great majority of Westernizers have justified their programmes in public by arguing that they were necessary in order to strengthen their communities, their countries or the Muslim world in general against their non-Muslim enemies. In other words, these figures were no more necessarily pro-Western in geopolitical terms than were the Westernizers of Japan. This is something that the West would do wel to remember, given our congenital il usion that anyone who shares aspects of our culture must necessarily agree with our foreign policy.

The Muslim religious response to Western power has always been a highly complex mixture of conservative and radical elements. Many of these have been reformist – but reformist in the sense of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, not of modern Western ‘reform’.

They have also shared the ‘fundamentalism’ of parts of the Protestant tradition, in the sense of a return to the ‘fundamentals’ of the original religious scriptures. Al have stressed the need for Muslims to wage the ‘greater jihad’ of spiritual struggle and personal and social purification as wel as the ‘lesser jihad’ of war against Islam’s enemies.

Underpinning intel ectual and political responses by Muslim elites has been a diffuse but widespread sense among the Muslim masses of ‘Islam in danger’. This has contributed to episodes both of mass mobilization and of savage local violence against non-Muslims (or other Muslims portrayed as non-Muslims). These combined in the developments leading to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

This sense of an endangered Islam has long been fuel ed not only by local or even regional events but by developments in the wider Muslim world (for example, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fal of the Ottoman empire in the face of attack from Christian powers). The role of the Ummah in the minds of most South Asians therefore might be seen as vaguely analogous to that of ‘Christendom’

in the European Middle Ages: not something that could ever trump local powers and al egiances and lead to a universal state, but nonetheless a potent idea with important cultural, intel ectual, emotional, political and international consequences – not least in the form of the Crusades.

With the disappearance of France and Britain as ruling powers in the Muslim world, the focus of Muslim fears concerning Western threats to the wider Muslim world natural y shifted to the new state of Israel (in occupation of Islam’s third holiest shrine, as Pakistanis are continual y reminded by both their mosques and their media) and Israel’s sponsor, the United States.

In Pakistan, however, hostility to the US was for a long time damped down by the fact that Pakistan was facing far more pressing dangers, against which the US provided at least a measure of security: India and the Soviet Union. Thus, in the 1980s, President Zia’s Islamization programme contained no hint of anti-Americanism, for the obvious reason that the US was both an essential al y in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and an essential financial sponsor of Pakistan and Zia’s administration. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made considerable play with anti-American sentiment and with the idea of Pakistan as a leader of the Muslim world (including his rhetoric of a Pakistani ‘Islamic bomb’), but his own anti-Americanism owed more to the fashionable left-wing thought of the time. The col apse of left-wing nationalism in the Muslim world in the last quarter of the twentieth century has left the Islamists as the last political homeland of anti-American (and anticolonial) sentiment.

After 1989, a series of developments shattered the previous obstacles to anti-Americanism in Pakistan. First, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the subsequent col apse of the Soviet Union itself removed Pakistan’s value to the US as an al y. Instead, free rein was given to groups in Washington that feared Pakistan’s nuclear programme to press for sanctions on the country. The prominent role of the Israel lobby and pro-Israeli politicians such as Congressman Stephen Solarz in these moves helped increase existing anti-Israeli feeling in Pakistan, and focus attention on the US – Israel al iance. The anger this caused in Pakistan was exacerbated by the way in which the US abandoned al responsibility for the consequences of a war in Afghanistan which it had done so much to fuel, leaving Pakistan facing a civil war on its borders and a continuing refugee problem.

Of even greater importance has been Washington’s increasing ‘tilt to India’, replacing the mutual hostility that characterized most of the period from 1947 to 1991. Seen from Pakistan, this was reflected first in Washington’s wil ingness to punish Pakistan as wel as India for the nuclear race in South Asia, despite the fact that in both 1974 and 1998

it was actual y India which first exploded nuclear devices. Moreover, because of its far smal er economy and greater dependence on exports to the West, the US sanctions of the 1990s hit Pakistan much worse than India, and were in fact largely responsible for the economic stagnation of that decade.

Since 9/11, the US has sought a quasi-al iance with India, amid much talk in the US of building up India as a force against both China and Islamist extremism. The US has abandoned any pretence at parity in its approach to the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programmes, and has sought active nuclear partnership (albeit with qualifications concerning security) with India. The US has put immense pressure on Pakistan concerning sponsorship of militant and terrorist groups in India and Indian-control ed Kashmir, but has repeatedly backed away from any attempt to put pressure on India to reach a settlement of the Kashmir conflict – notably when, in early 2009, pressure from India and the Indian lobby in the US led to India being swiftly dropped from the responsibilities of the Obama administration’s regional special envoy, Richard Holbrooke.

Also of great importance in creating anti-American feeling in Pakistan has been the belief that Washington has supported authoritarian governments in Pakistan against their own people. In the past, this belief was stimulated by US aid to Generals Ayub, Zia and Musharraf. Today, it is focused on US help to President Zardari – which just goes to show that US administrations have no preference for military government or indeed any kind of government in Pakistan as long as that government does what the US wants.

Pakistanis also tend greatly to exaggerate the degree of hands-on control that the US can exert over Pakistani governments. In fact, the relationship with the US has always been one of mutual exploitation heavily flavoured with mutual suspicion. Ayub went to war with India and cultivated relations with China against US wishes; Zia diverted US

aid to Pakistan’s particular al ies among the Afghan Mujahidin; successive Pakistani administrations developed a nuclear deterrent in the face of strong pressure from Washington; and since 9/11 Pakistani governments have only very partial y acceded to US wishes in the ‘war on terror’. However, in Pakistan facts are rarely al owed to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, and the widespread belief among Pakistanis is that the US runs their country as a neo-colonial client state.

As a conclusive blow to pro-US sentiment in Pakistan came the US

invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the immediate wake of 9/11, to judge by my researches in Pakistan in 2001 – 2, the US move into Afghanistan was accepted with surprisingly little protest by most Pakistanis, and there was some wil ingness to accept Al Qaeda’s responsibility. The invasion of Iraq, however, and the mendacious arguments used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion, appeared to confirm every Muslim fear about the American threat to the Muslim world.

The disastrous impact of this invasion in Pakistan is reflected in the fact that it retrospectively destroyed the justification for the Afghan war as wel , as far as most Pakistanis are concerned. This shift is reflected in the fact that, to judge by my own interviews and those of other Western col eagues, an absolutely overwhelming majority not just of the Pakistani masses but of the Pakistani elites believe that 9/11 was not in fact carried out by Al Qaeda but was a plot by the Bush administration, Israel, or both, intended to provide a pretext for the US

invasion of Afghanistan as part of the US strategy of dominating the Muslim world.

Whenever a Westerner (or, more rarely, a sensible Pakistani) attempts to argue with this poisonous rubbish, we are immediately countered by the ‘argument’ that ‘Bush lied over Iraq, so why are you saying he couldn’t have lied about 9/11?’5 The US invasion of Iraq, coming on top of US support for Israel and growing ties to India, greatly strengthened the vague and inchoate but pervasive feeling among Pakistanis that ‘Islam is in danger’ at the hands of the US.

The effects of al this on the desire of Pakistanis to make sacrifices in order to help the US in the ‘war on terror’ should hardly need emphasis. Instead, from the widespread hostility to the Afghan Taleban in 2001 – 2, by 2007 – 9 the perception of them on the part of the vast majority of ordinary Pakistanis with whom I spoke at that time had become close to their view of the Afghan Mujahidin during my time in Pakistan in the late 1980s: not nice people, or ones they would wish to see ruling Pakistan – but nonetheless brave men waging a legitimate war of resistance, or defensive jihad, against an alien and infidel occupation of their country.

Natural y, therefore, there has been intense opposition within Pakistan to the Pakistani military helping the US by attacking the Afghan Taleban in Pakistan’s border areas. For a long time, this opposition extended to the Pakistani militants in the region, who were seen as simply attempting to help their Afghan brethren carry on their legitimate struggle. This opposition diminished somewhat as the extent of the militant threat to Pakistan became apparent in 2008 – 10, and the Pakistani media became much more hostile to the Pakistani Taleban. It remains, however, a very powerful strain of public opinion, and opposition to the military campaign against the Pakistani Taleban, and hostility to the US al iance in general, have done terrible damage to the administrations of both President Musharraf and his successor President Zardari.

RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR RESPONSES

The specific religious forms that resistance to the West has taken have of course changed considerably over time, while nonetheless preserving an organic continuity. In the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, a prominent part was played by Sufi orders and local religious leaders belonging to those orders – just as in the resistance of the Muslim Caucasians to Russian conquest under Imam Shamil, and that of the Algerians to French conquest under Abdul Qadir. Today, the Wahabiinfluenced Taleban and their like are attacking the shrines of the very saints who formerly fought against the British, French and Russians – but nonetheless they are their heirs as far as anti-Western action is concerned.

Shah Waliul ah (1703 – 62), the most significant intel ectual Muslim figure of the era, was an Islamist reformist who preached the use of independent reasoning (ijtihad), but directed towards a return to a purer form of Islam based on the Koran, and towards the strengthening of Muslim states and mobilization for armed jihad to restore Muslim power in South Asia; a jihad which he and his fol owers – like their successors today – saw as ‘defensive’. Jihad against the British was declared and implemented by the great Muslim ruler of Mysore in southern India, Tipu Sultan.

Shah Waliul ah’s teaching inspired both the Deobandi tradition which in recent years has inspired political Islamism in Pakistan, and more immediately Syed Ahmed Barelvi (1786 – 1831), who tried to lead a jihad against growing Sikh rule in the Punjab. Interestingly, he and his 600 fol owers became the first of a number of figures – of whom Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are the latest – to move from elsewhere to the Pathan tribal areas, both because the absence of government provided what we would now cal a ‘safe haven’, and because the legendary fighting qualities of the Pathan tribes seemed to make them prime recruits for jihad.

Like many of his successors, however, Syed Ahmed Barelvi discovered that the tribes also have their own traditions and their own agendas. He was abandoned by most of his local Pathan al ies after he tried to replace the traditions of the Pathan ethnic code of pashtunwali with strict adherence to the Koran, and, together with his closest disciples, was kil ed in battle by the Sikhs at Balakot. He is remembered by jihadi Islamists in the region as the greatest progenitor of their tradition, though the precise circumstances of his end tend to be glossed over. Fol owing Shah Waliul ah’s defeat and death, his grandson Muhammad Ishaq quit India in disgust for Arabia.