October 5-11, 2001
Split down the middle
Khaled Ahmed's A n a l y s i s
As time passes, the Pakistani mind is throwing up fresh barriers of objection to the policy of breaking out of the isolation emanating from supporting the Taliban, and relieving its long drawn out economic crisis. The truth of the matter is that no Pakistani actually supports the American invasion. The mullahs have come out on the road. But those opposed to the mullahs don't think differently from the mullahs. Even those who boast about not reading the 'emotional' Urdu press tend to express views very close to the column-writers of the Urdu newspapers. The mind prefers a deal benefiting Pakistan financially. The heart wants to challenge America and defend Osama bin Laden.
After the government of President General Pervez Musharraf announced that it would give unstinted support to the international initiative against terrorism led by the US, the Pakistani mind is split down the middle. The question is whether Afghanistan should be punished for harbouring Osama bin Laden. Pakistanis don't believe that enough proof has been furnished of Osama bin Laden's complicity in the attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. If he is not proven guilty, then the invasion of Afghanistan would be wrong and immoral. The tortured question is: why has Islamabad supported the expected invasion and offered 'unstinted support'? The heart has 'other' reasons: The wide-spread support for this policy change on Osama bin Laden was pegged adroitly by General Musharraf to India's support to the expected invasion. (You want to get anything accepted by a Pakistani? Peg it to India. But such subterfuge leads to problems of a collective split personality). The Pakistani quickly accepted the fact that standing outside the international consensus, Pakistan could be isolated and destroyed by a flanking move by India. Indian private TV stations had a hawk like Brahma Chellany presenting scenarios of Pakistan's destruction as a terrorist state, and that was enough to raise the hackles in Pakistan and make the government opt for 'unstinted support'. But the truth of the matter is that no Pakistani actually supports the American invasion. The mullahs have come out on the road. But those opposed to the mullahs don't think differently from the mullahs. Not long ago it was settled among the columnists and General Musharraf that the religious trouble-makers in Pakistan were only one percent of the population and that there was a large segment of the population which was cosmopolitan and therefore non-isolationist. Now the new figure relating to those who are agitating against Islamabad's change of policy over the Taliban is 10 percent. It means that 90 percent of the population wants General Musharraf to help the United States invade Afghanistan. But if you examine the mind of this 90 percent, they don't want Musharraf to give any meaningful facilities to the US. As time passes, the Pakistani mind is throwing up fresh barriers of objection to what Pakistan earlier wanted to do to break out of the isolation emanating from supporting the Taliban, and relieve its long drawn out economic crisis. The perfidious United States syndrome: Kamran Khan ( The News 22 September) brought the 'inside' information that while General Musharraf's civilian cabinet was all for offering unstinted support to the United States, the generals in the corps commanders' meeting had voiced their reluctance to relying on the Americans to assist Pakistan in the future to overcome its difficulties. They referred to the past record of the United States with regard to friendship with Pakistan and appeared cautious about implementing the 'unstinted' policy. The Urdu press echoed the split in the Pakistani mind. The English language press focused on a pragmatic approach and some writers in it also referred to the global alliance against the Taliban as an antidote to the almost unsolvable problems of fundamentalism and the two 'tired' policies (Afghan and Kashmir) that were now yielding negative fallouts. But the split mind manifested a curious pattern. Those who relied on the English press to accept the pragmatism of General Musharraf's decision leaned significantly to the opinion expressed in the Urdu press about the satanism of the United States. It seems as if the English language press represents the mind while the Urdu press holds sway over the hearts of Pakistanis. Even those who boast about not reading the 'emotional' Urdu press tended to express views very close to the column-writers of the Urdu newspapers. The mind prefers a deal benefiting Pakistan financially. The heart wants to challenge America and defend Osama bin Laden. The heart of course is persuaded by the grand myth that the United States had betrayed Pakistan in the past. Once that premise has been accepted then the whole story about Zionism and Pakistan's epic struggle against it becomes our real narrative. Blessings of 'emotional' foreign policy: There is a basic contradiction in how Pakistanis and the Americans look at the conduct of foreign policy. American thinking is based on enlightened self-interest, in other words, a tendency to change policy not on the basis of morality or emotion but opportunity to enhance the state's international standing. One can say that America admits that it is not a loyal friend unless such a course is dictated by domestic lobbies and external self-interest. On the other hand, Pakistanis think of international relations as a network of emotional friendships. For them the state is a sentient being which experiences passions of friendship and alienation. Pakistan's first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was so put off by the American credo of foreign policy opportunism that he politely objected to it during his tour of the United States: 'A statesman, well known in history, speaking of his own country, once said that it had no eternal friends and no eternal enemies but that it had eternal national interests. Personally I believe that is too cynical a view to take of the foreign relations of any country, unless the word 'interests' is interpreted very widely. But perhaps for some people it is a good starting point for the study of foreign relations.' The truth is that Pakistan never really understood the nature of American policy. It was offended that the Americans should object to Pakistan using weapons received by it under the anti-Soviet treaties against India. Wasn't India a Soviet ally? And wasn't Pakistan treating the enemies of the United States as its own enemies? Sadly, the American embargo on arms to Pakistan after the 1965 Indo-Pak war was correct on the basis of the agreements under which the arms had been received. In 1979-80, when the Americans needed Pakistan to fight their covert war in Afghanistan, Pakistan acted pragmatically. This pragmatism was manifest in the price which Pakistan named for its participation in the jehad. It told President Carter off for his parsimony and went along with the big-spending President Reagan and his 'package' for Pakistan's economy and a shopping list for General Zia's depleted military arsenal. The named price was paid. There were other bonanzas from the Afghan war pocketed by the rulers of Pakistan about which the less said the better. Pakistan too stabs US in the back: How did Pakistan behave as a friend of the United States? This must also be examined if Pakistan's protestations about America's perfidy are to be credited. An American ambassador representing the Reagan Administration in Islamabad used to cite five contradictions between Pakistan and the United States despite the alliance in the Afghan war. Some of these contradictions were actually complaints about how Pakistan had been stabbing the United States in the back while posing as its 'paid' friend. The first contradiction was of course the development of Pakistan's nuclear programme in violation of the express American policy against nuclear proliferation. Some of the equipment that went into the maturing of the bomb in Pakistan was actually stolen from the United State which had to keep quiet so as not to jeopardise its enterprise of defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The second contradiction was the production of narcotics in Pakistan and the export of heroin to the United States. At one point during the Afghan war, fully 80 percent of the heroin consumed in the United States was supplied from Pakistan. And the suppliers included the president of Pakistan and some of his fellow generals as well as his civilian friends who ran the federal and provincial assemblies. As the war simmered down in Afghanistan a bit, the American embassy took to circulating lists of those members of the assemblies who were busy exporting heroin to the United States. The list contained nearly 60 percent of the members who served General Zia in the provinces. A convicted heroin-smuggling son-in-law of an important functionary of Pakistan, who later became president, had to be freed by the United States in deference to the Afghan war. The habit of smuggling heroin to the United States spread to the armed forces and lingered long after the Afghan war. The wrong bed-fellow protests too much: The third contradiction was the abysmal human rights record of the Zia regime which had just added to the disabilities of the Ahmedi community in Pakistan earlier apostatised by the Bhutto government. The fourth contradiction was of course the lack of democracy in Pakistan - an admission by the US that it was willing, temporarily, to deal with dictators and despots to gain its foreign policy objectives around the globe. The fifth contradiction was Pakistan's resistance to normalisation of relations with India, which was a part of the American foreign policy in South Asia. Pakistanis were always mystified by this insistence on normalisation with India. Bhutto in his Myth of Independence in fact came to the conclusion that the US and the USSR were actually planning Pakistan's subjugation to India through this policy. The thesis in India was that, far from seeking such a normalisation, the Americans were responsible for sowing the seeds of discord between otherwise brotherly Pakistan and India. In South Asia, no one believes that a big power may find normalisation between India and Pakistan to be in its interest. During the Afghan war honeymoon, speakers from the United States often spoke publicly in Pakistan, warning the Pakistanis that once he war was over the American policy was expected to change drastically in view of Pakistan's above-mentioned contradictions - an admission that the US and Pakistan were strange bed-fellows right from the start. If the Pakistanis say that they were taken by surprise that in 1990 President Bush stopped all aid to Pakistan and applied the Pressler Amendment sanctions to it, they are clearly not telling the truth. The record shows that Pakistan was indeed not an honest ally of the US. It had its rogue officers who spread the anti-US virus inside the army and in fact used the war to convert Pakistan into an anti-US state which may not have been in Pakistan's interest. They gave Hekmatyar 60 percent of all aid coming from the US while Hekmatyar enjoyed little support among the mujahideen, as prime minister Nawaz Sharif discovered in 1993 when he tried to implement the Islamabad Accord among the government-in-exile of the Afghan mujahideen. It was a part of Hekmatyar's charisma to routinely insult President Reagan - the president whose largesse was actually responsible for his prosperity and that of his handlers inside the ISI. It was this anti-US orientation of the Afghan jehad under Pakistan that also partly led to the Americans abandoning Afghanistan in great haste after the exit of the Soviet troops from there. The US-Pak relationship was ideologically poisoned from the start. Because it was consorting with all and sundry to advance its cold war aims against he Soviet Union, the United States leaned on the theory of changeability of foreign policy. On the other hand, despite its reliance on the theory of 'eternal friendship', as enunciated by Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan routinely stabbed the US in the back during the Afghan war. At the level of theory, the US is still better off admitting that it is fickle. Pakistan's behaviour remains schizophrenic because it boasts of moral fixity in its foreign policy.