A rchive Date
[ 06-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Pakistan ]
|
[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur.html
Political failures lead slide toward 'inferno'
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the London Free Press
May 29, 2002
The current nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan is the most appalling the world has witnessed since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.
The Cuban missile crisis was also one in which a democracy, the U.S., was threatened and provoked to respond by the former Soviet Union, a country that former president Ronald Reagan appropriately defined as an "evil empire."
Similarly, a democratic India finds itself threatened and provoked by Pakistan under a military dictator and a grim record of bloody-minded authoritarian regimes for most of its history since creation in 1947.
But unlike the United States and the former Soviet Union, India and Pakistan have fought three major wars and one minor war in 1999 that could have escalated to a nuclear threshold. This history looms large in the current crisis, whose origin is bound with the events of Sept. 11 and after.
The American-led war in Afghanistan against terrorism placed the military rulers of Pakistan in a quandary.
The Taliban regime of Mullah Omar, which aided and abetted Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network of demented warriors, was the handiwork of the Pakistani military. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the Pakistani military had to make a choice between supporting America's war against terrorism, or somehow providing protection to terrorists.
The choice of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, self-declared president of Pakistan, to support America and abandon the Taliban, while well received by most of his countrymen, continues to be opposed by a significant segment of officers and men in the military and among fundamentalist Muslims. For Musharraf's opponents, the decision to support America amounted to a betrayal of the ideology and politics of religious fundamentalism represented by the Taliban.
This dimension of Pakistani politics, and its precipitate slide to the current nuclear standoff with India, is not widely understood in the West.
The insane politics of the Taliban was a byproduct of the Islamization of Pakistani society begun in 1979 by the late General Zia ul-Haq, another brutal dictator who hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a popularly elected leader of the country.
When the Afghan war ended with the defeat of the former Soviet Union in 1989, Pakistan itself had become a prototype of a quasi-fascist state run by the military and its intelligence service, with an occasional facade of elected civilian politicians.
By all indices of economy and society, Pakistan is an example of a failed state.
Sept. 11 ironically offered Musharraf an opportunity to refloat the country's bankrupt economy and politics by reconstituting an old alliance with America that went sour when the Afghani war against Moscow ended. Success of this strategy requires Pakistan to turn its back on failed policies of the previous years.
Pakistan's homegrown Taliban and network of Muslim fascists, however, are bent on restoring what Musharraf has, at least rhetorically, repudiated. The attempt to bomb India's parliament in New Delhi by agents of the Pakistani intelligence service last December was the first major attempt at derailment of Musharraf's policy by his domestic opponents. Subsequently, the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in February, followed in March by a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, that killed five people including an American diplomat and her daughter, and on May 8, the bombing of a bus killing 11 French nationals in Karachi, are all part of the same effort to derail the military regime headed by Musharraf.
In this context, the escalation of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir by Pakistani Taliban and their cohorts, is a wider attempt at derailment of Musharraf's American-supported regime by instigating war between two nuclear armed yet poverty-stricken countries of Asia.
Such insanity, not unknown in human history, cannot be rationally explained.
If these demented warriors succeed, Sept. 11 will appear as a tragic hiccup compared to the hell they may raise as ultimate suicide bombers in cities incinerated.
The trap set, heedless of consequences and driven by irrational national pride, India and Pakistan are sliding into an inferno in the making.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|