When Pakistan arose from the ashes of a divided India in 1947 – a Muslim state artificially created is a bloody transition from British rule – the national army pretty much resembled the same local force organized during the Raj (British occupation). Professional soldiers recruited to fulfill a military need without strong ties to any fundamentalist Islamist faction. But that was before four-star general and Army Chief of Staff Muhammad Zia-Ul-Haq (an early picture of him is presented above) staged a bloodless coup, deposing Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977. Some charge that the British Secret Service and the CIA were instrumental in this coup, fearing Bhutto’s pro-Soviet stance and preference for socialism. With the military firmly in place atop this struggling nation, the Pakistani military moved significantly closer to the more extreme elements of Islamic fundamentalism. To the United States and its Western allies in 1977, Islamist extremists and global terrorism were simply not issues of concern. They just didn’t care.
As the Soviets mounted their war in neighboring Afghanistan in 1980, Zia’s ties to the Afghan resistance (the Mujahideen, fairly strongly controlled by Islamist extremists) and his antipathy to the Soviet Union proved useful to the U.S. and the West as they funneled arms to the Afghan rebels to undermine the Soviet presence there. The economic strain of the Afghan War on the USSR war is thought by many to have been the straw that literally broke the communist regime’s back, ending the Soviet Union as a nation. Zia leveraged his position with the West and generated billions of dollars in military aid, further strengthening the military as the dominant political force in Pakistan.
Then came “blow back” as these well-armed, superbly field-trained Islamists turned their attention on the West... culminating in the infamous 9/11 attack on the United States. Zia is also blamed for accelerating Pakistan’s nuclear program and encouraging Dr. A.Q. Khan (the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program) to spread that technology to Iran and North Korea. “Zia argued that Pakistan's atomic bomb is a property of Islamic Ummah [pan-Muslim Diaspora] , a theory that Bhutto had earlier avoided to keep the Pakistan sentiment strong and alive in scientists while developing the program.” Wikipedia. But the strongest change implemented by the Zia administration was the move to make Pakistan a fully-Islamic-centric society, a move which also included the active recruitment of Muslim extremists into the military, the road for poor Pakistani’s to move up into the highest reaches of Pakistani power and status.
“On December 2, 1978, on the occasion of the first day of the Hijra to enforce the Islamic system in Pakistan in a nationwide address, Zia accused politicians of exploiting the name of Islam: ‘Many a ruler did what they pleased in the name of Islam.’ After assuming power, the government began a program of public commitment to enforce Nizam-e-Mustafa (Islamic System), a significant turn from Pakistan's predominantly Anglo-Saxon law, inherited from the British. As a preliminary measure to establish an Islamic society in Pakistan, Zia announced the establishment of Sharia Benches [the application of Islamic law vs. a more modern penal code]. To many secular and communist forces, Zia cynically manipulated Islam for the survival of his own regime. In 1983, Nusrat Bhutto reasoned General Zia's policies as she puts it:
The (scream) and the horrors of 1971 war..... are (still) alive and vivid in the hearts and the minds of people of [Pakistan]...Therefore, General Zia insanely.... used the ‘Islam [Card]’.... to ensure the survival of his own regime.... —Nusrat Bhutto, former First Lady of Pakistan..” Wikipedia.
Clerics and Islamist zealots were given de facto rights to maintain strong (even bullying) presences on Pakistani university campuses. The army drifted steadily into the Islamist camp, and today, many of the young recruits in Zia’s day have risen to become the most senior officers in the Pakistani military... and the most profoundly anti-U.S. and anti-western voices in the country. Zia died in 1988 in a plane crash under the most mysterious of circumstances, but his legacy has defined Pakistan.
And so we move into the present day in which the consequences of decisions made decades ago, even with U.S. support, have created a modern Pakistan that has become the hotbed of Muslim extremists, where the military which receives massive US aid makes deals with the very terrorists we are trying to subdue, and where we are pretty much blackmailed into continuing military aid to Pakistan under a disguised threat that if we don’t, somehow that nuclear know-how, if not the weapons themselves, will be transferred to America’s greatest enemies. Relations between our two nations have never been more strained. Pakistanis have harbored our enemies (e.g., Bin Laden), probably with all the knowledge in the world and continue to aid Islamist/ Taliban forces as they attack American troops in Afghanistan.
And when the Pakistani ambassador to the United States grew concerned over the new escalation in negativity enforced by Pakistan’s highest military leaders, his bosses believe that he crossed the line. The allegations are most stunning, if they prove true. “Husain Haqqani, the embattled Pakistani ambassador to the United States, resigned [November 22nd] in the wake of accusations that he had sought American help to rein in the powerful Pakistani military. Although he had hoped to stay on, Mr. Haqqani offered to resign [b]ut on [November 22nd], the prime minister said he should resign so that an investigation into the accusations could be ‘carried out properly.’
“The accusations center on a memo that Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman of Pakistani origin, said Mr. Haqqani asked him to have delivered to Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Mr. Ijaz, the memo asked for American help in heading off a possible military-led coup and promised concessions in return… The accusations, which Mr. Haqqani denies, created a political storm in Pakistan, where anti-American feelings run high and Mr. Haqqani is considered by some to be an apologist for the United States.” New York Times, November 22nd.
In a faint glimmer of appeasement towards American interests, Pakistan has appointed a U.S.-educated (Smith College) woman, Sherry Rehman, as Haqqani’s replacement: “Ms. Rehman … carries proven credentials as a social progressive; she’s advocated for women’s and minority rights. She was forced last year to live under police guard after receiving death threats from Islamist extremists over her opposition to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, which are often used to settle personal scores, especially against minority Christians and Hindus.” New York Times, November 23rd. Despite her liberal credentials, Ms. Rehman’s mission is to represent the incumbents in Pakistan, so it remains to be seen whether this appointment marks anything more than a cosmetic gesture.
Where this story and the tangled relations between the U.S. and Pakistan will lead are anything but clear, but the fracturing of regional relations between various powers in Central Asia seems to play directly into the hands of the very fundamentalists we sought to contain and destroy in our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. We misplayed our hand, have sapped our economy to pay for these failed efforts, and have probably impaired our national security by swatting a wasps’ nest with our massive military baseball bat. With accusations that 24 Pakistani soldiers died in the Afghan border region from a NATO airstrike gone wrong just days ago, US-Pakistani relations have plummet to a new low.
I’m Peter Dekom, and in a world of unintended consequences, I am beginning to believe that United States will win first prize.
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