Pakistan: The biggest "failed state"

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): We have just had our first military coup in a country with nuclear weapons and while you can certainly blame India for forcing Pakistan into testing its "Islamic" bombs by carrying out its own nuclear weapons tests last year, the real problem is Pakistan itself. There's a strong argument for saying that it should never have been a country at all.

This line of argument connects directly with the coup in which Pakistan's army chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Oct. 12, because the quarrel between Musharraf and Sharif was mainly over the Pakistani army's hare- brained incursion into the Indian-controlled sector of Kashmir last summer, the latest round of fighting over a scar that has still not healed after 52 years. But in a broader sense, Pakistan never made an economic, ethnic, or historical sense anyway.

Sharif took part in the decision to infiltrate Pakistani troops, disguised as Kashmiri "freedom-fighters", into the mountaintop bunkers on the far side of the Line of Control in Kashmir which the Indian army abandoned to the elements each winter. When spring came, the Indians discovered that they had lost their own high ground, and for a couple of months a few hundred Pakistani soldiers held off 60,000 Indian troops backed by artillery and aircraft.

It was enormously satisfying for Pakistanis to watch, but it was also utterly futile. The infiltrators could hang on for ages, but there was no way to translate this tactical success into a political gain. As a policy blunder by an inexperienced nuclear power, it ranked right up there with the Anglo-French attack on Egypt in 1956 and Soviet policy during the Cuban crisis.

Sharif at least had the wit to accept American mediation, agreeing to pull his troops out during a visit to Washington in early July. But Musharraf has not forgiven him for that, nor has Pakistani public opinion, and Sharif's ham-fisted efforts to silence the protests have contributed to the joy with which most Pakistanis greeted his removal from office on Tuesday.

Even in the longer view, Sharif was a discredit to the office of prime minister, systematically undermining every rival center of constitutional power in the state. But a military coup? In what other big country (except perhaps Nigeria) would you expect to hear of a military coup in the late 1990s?

Pakistan has now had four military coups since independence in 1947, and Musharraf's three military predecessors (Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, and Zia ul-Haq) have ruled the country for 25 of its 52 years. Even more damning is the fact that its civilian leaders have generally served the country no better than the generals: Pakistan lags far behind the Siamese twin from which it was separated at birth, India, by almost every index of health, development and prosperity.

In Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi, a permanent civil war rages between the locally born Sindhi population and "mohajirs" descended from Muslim refugees from India (for whom Pakistan was allegedly created in the first place): hundreds are murdered each year. The army is dominated by Punjabis, and neither Pathans nor Baluchis have much respect for all these lowlanders who live in the Indus valley. It's hard to think of what does work in Pakistan.

Maybe the real problem is that splitting Britain's Indian empire in two in 1947 into three, actually, because Bangladesh subsequently fought its way free of Pakistan was a bad idea. It reduced people who inhabited a far more complex reality of many languages and traditions and ethnic groups to mere Hindus and Muslims, defined solely by religion, and separated them on that basis. And it set up a dynamic that may yet end in nuclear war.

There are real differences of belief and custom between Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent (not to mention Sikhs and Jains and Christians and Buddhists), but these religious categories are just one set of distinctions among many. Carving the Indian empire up on religious lines just distributed the Muslim minority among three separate countries: there are now over 100 million Muslims each in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Almost all of them, in all three countries, are poor, and most of them are effectively powerless. Whereas over 350 million Muslims in an undivided India would have been a real political force: over 25 percent of the population, with the political clout to demand that their interests be respected. There would have been problems, certainly, but no wars, no huge defense budgets, no nuclear weapons tests, and no military coups.

There would have been no coups because those have been exclusively a phenomenon of the breakaway states that were defined solely by Islam. (Now that Bangladesh has broken away from Pakistan and become a more or less ethnically defined state, it has stopped having coups too). The problem is that a common religion was not enough to bind the very different groups in what is now Pakistan into a single community in their own minds, so democracy had nothing to work with.

This would be just a big local tragedy if it merely condemned 125 million Pakistanis to being ruled forever by ignorant generals like old Ayub Khan and arrogant civilians from rich families like Nawaz Sharif and his hated rival, Benazir Bhutto.

It has become a regional tragedy because India is involved too: Pakistan's endless search for a meaningful identity has gradually driven many army officers into defining Pakistan's purpose as an endless jihad against India.

And with all those nuclear weapons around, it could even become a world tragedy.

Window: The problem is that a common religion was not enough to bind the very different groups in what is now Pakistan into a single community in their own minds, so democracy had nothing to work with.