by Ahmed Rashid
The Americans distrusted the ISI, which was known to be riddled with Islamic extremists who supported the Taliban and had shown a tolerance toward al Qaeda. The CIA was apprehensive about placing so much of the intelligence-gathering burden for the upcoming war on such an unreliable agency. But there was little choice, as Pakistan had the longest border with Afghanistan and was the only country that could provide intelligence about the Taliban’s military preparedness and targets for U.S. bombing. The ISI hoped that by initially complying with U.S. demands, it could create sufficient room to maneuver in order to circumvent those very demands. The ISI had no intention of dumping the Kashmiri militants and their struggle against India.
Many skeptical Pakistanis opposed to military rule were experiencing déjà vu. In 1977, when Gen. Muhammed Zia ul-Haq seized power, Pakistan became a pariah state. Yet in 1979, after the Soviets entered Afghanistan, Zia became a major U.S. ally by agreeing to confront Soviet expansionism. His military regime was to survive for eleven long years. Once again, it appeared that Afghanistan had come to the rescue of another beleaguered military regime. Yet most Pakistanis still hoped that 9/11 would provide the opportunity for the military to cut its ties with Islamic fundamentalism and set the country on the path toward democracy.
For the first twenty-four years of Pakistan’s existence, its military, bureaucratic, and political elite carried out ruinous policies at home, alienating both the ethnic and religious minorities and the ethnic majority, sparking the 1971 uprising in East Pakistan, defeat at the hands of India, and the secession of half the country. The creation of Bangladesh was the most traumatic event in the country’s history. For the next thirty-five years, that same elite, now dominated by the military and often in alliance with the United States, nurtured Islamic extremists, which helped prepare the ground for 9/11. At the height of the cold war, the United States poured billions of dollars into arming anyone who would oppose the Soviets, including Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia.
Since its birth in August 1947, when India was partitioned and Muslim-majority provinces were joined by a hastily retreating British empire to create a new country, Pakistan has grappled with an acute sense of insecurity in the midst of a continuing identity crisis. As a result, it has developed into a national security state in which the army has monopolized power and defined the national interest as keeping archenemy India at bay, developing nuclear weapons, and trying to create a friendly government in Afghanistan. The development of political institutions, a constitution, democracy, and a prospering economy—the true indicators of national security—have been considered secondary. Two relationships have dominated the politics of the country: that between military power and civil society and the one between Islam and the state.
Pakistan’s insecurity is partly a legacy of two centuries of British rule in India. The region that makes up Pakistan today was conquered by the British in the mid-nineteenth century, at least one hundred years after the British conquests of Bengal and central India. Sindh was conquered in 1843 and Punjab six years later. The British conquest of northwest India was aimed solely at providing security from marauding Afghan, Baloch, and Pashtun tribes and later by the fear of tsarist Russia expanding into Central Asia and interfering in India through Afghanistan. After two wars in Afghanistan (1839-1842 and 1878-1881), the British needed secure lines of communications and so turned northwest India into a garrison colony ruled from Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. More than half the British army garrison in India was to be based along the Balochistan- North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) border with Afghanistan.17
In Punjab, the British used both patronage and repression, allying themselves with a landowning feudal class, for whom it built a lavish canal irrigation system, and recruiting large numbers of the Punjabi peasantry for the army. Pakistan inherited this security state, which has been variously described by scholars as “the viceregal tradition” or “a permanent state of martial law.”18
Pakistan’s identity crisis is rooted in the fears, insecurity, and contradictions inherent in Muslims living during the Raj, Muslims who had once ruled India and now lived in a Westernized colonial state after they had been heavily defeated—most recently in the 1857 uprising. Modern Muslim reformists and elitist landlords saw a majority Hindu population favored by the British and so began to consider themselves as a separate “nation” from Hindu India. This “two-nation theory,” which was to form the basis for the Pakistan movement, disregarded ethnic and linguistic differences and considered a separate religious identity sufficient to create a nation. Yet adherents had no support from the ulema, or religious leaders, who saw Indian Muslims as inextricably linked to the ummah, or the global community of Muslim believers, whose leadership still lay with the defunct Ottoman Empire. The ulema did not consider a new nation-state for Muslims as being valid, although they were to change their minds after Partition. This identity crisis became even more complicated when the Muslim League, founded in 1906 and led by Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, drew its main support from Muslims in central and eastern India rather than the western regions that were to become the future Pakistan.
The League made its demand for an independent Muslim state in Lahore on March 23, 1940, at its annual general meeting, when it passed the Pakistan Resolution. Seven years later Britain handed over a truncated Pakistan, with Sindh, Balochistan, Punjab, and the North-West Frontier Province forming West Pakistan, while the eastern province of Bengal was divided between India and Pakistan to create the geographically distinct East Pakistan. Kashmir’s status was left undecided by the British, leading to immediate conflict between India and Pakistan. The speed and nature of Partition satisfied nobody. Millions of Hindus and Sikhs living in Pakistan crossed over into India, while Indian Muslims migrated to East and West Pakistan. A staggering twelve million people moved home and between five hundred thousand and one million were killed in the ensuing sectarian violence. Pakistan emerged from a bloodbath of religious and ethnic hatred even as millions of Muslims chose to remain in a secular India. It was a tragic beginning for a new nation-state.19
Immediately the question of Pakistan’s identity arose: Was it to be a pluralistic, democratic country for Muslims and other religious minorities or a theocratic Islamic state? Founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah was perfectly clear that Pakistan had to be a secular, democratic state. In his most famous speech, in 1947, Jinnah was emphatic: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State,” he said.20
Jinnah died early, in 1948, and since then many Pakistanis, but particularly the military, have ignored his wishes and the democratic founding creed of the country. Today no state-funded school’s textbooks teach children Jinnah’s words because they would infuriate the mullahs.21 Today the military and the mullahs stress the Islamic nature of the state and pervert Jinnah and history by claiming that Pakistan was created as a result of a religious movement. “It is an established fact that Mr. Jinnah did not struggle for a secular Pakistan as it is against the basic creed and faith of a Muslim to sacrifice his life for such a secular cause. The driving force behind their tireless efforts was . . . setting up a country where people could practice Islam as their state ideology,” said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami, the most influential Islamic party in the country.22 The army trains its men to defend Islam rather than the nation and protect Pakistan’s territorial and “ideological” (Islamic) frontiers. The army’s deeply rooted Islamic orientation would profoundly affect Musharraf’s inability to deliver on his promises to the United States after 9/11.
For half of the sixty years of the country’s existence, Pakistanis have lived under four military regimes. Each one has reinvented the wheel by debating whether democracy is possible in an Islamic state and whether a parliamentary or presidential system best suits the country’s “Islamic identity. ” The 1973 constitution, which established a parliamentary system of democratic
government and is still in force today, has been amended so many times by politicians and generals alike that it is barely recognizable. Attempts by secular politicians to live by the rule of law and the constitution have failed. The first free and fair elections took place only in 1970—twenty-three years after Partition.
Pakistan’s inability to forge a national identity has led to an intensification of ethnic, linguistic, and regional nationalism, which has splintered and fragmented the country. The largest province, with 65 percent of the population and providing the bulk of the army and bureaucracy, Punjab never accepted Pakistan as a multi-ethnic state necessitating equal political rights, greater autonomy for the smaller provinces, and a more equitable distribution of funds. A rebellion of these smaller provinces against so-called Punjabi domination led to the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan, war, and, in 1971, the creation of Bangladesh.23
Ethnic nationalism has continued to tear Pakistan apart. Four insurgencies by Baloch nationalists seeking greater autonomy (1948, 1958-1959, 1962-1963, 1973-1977) have been put down with brute force by the army. A fifth insurgency has been under way in Balochistan since 2002. In the NWFP, a secular Pashtun nationalist movement was suppressed in the 1970s. In Sindh province since the 1980s, there have been severe tensions and rivalry between local Sindhis and Muhajirs, Urdu-speaking migrants from India settled in major cities such as Karachi.
The failure of a political culture to take root encouraged the army to seize power as early as 1958. Desperately weak and with few resources, the army sought U.S. support, agreeing to become an anti-Soviet prop in the cold war in exchange for military aid. In 1954, Washington agreed to provide a military and economic aid program to Pakistan worth $105 million a year, but also decided to covertly equip four infantry divisions for the army, six fighter squadrons for the air force, and twelve navy ships. By 1957 the covert U.S. military commitment to Pakistan had grown to an astonishing $500 million a year. Pakistan became a frontline bastion for the United States in the cold war, joining several U.S.-led regional pacts, allowing a large CIA office to be established in Karachi, and letting American high-altitude U2 spy planes fly over the Soviet Union from an air base near Peshawar.
Pakistani leaders assiduously courted Washington in the hope of gaining security guarantees against India.24 Their main aim in accumulating U.S. weaponry was to confront India, against whom Pakistan went to war in 1965 and again in 1971, when it lost East Pakistan. After this debacle, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto became president. A charismatic, brilliant, flamboyant but deeply flawed politician from rural Sindh, Bhutto initiated the first sustained period of democratic rule by a civilian politician. He had founded the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and started out as a populist with policies rooted in the deep public thirst for social and economic justice and democracy, and its dislike for military rule. He was to end his rule in 1978 as an intensely disliked autocratic ruler whose ruthlessness and hunger for absolute power led to his downfall after he rigged national elections.
One of Bhutto’s major successes, in August 1973, was achieving a political consensus for the constitution, which has become the bedrock of the state’s legality, even though it has been amended many times. He also removed Pakistan from the milieu of South Asia to play a larger role in the Arab world, as he sought money from the newly rich oil states to revive Pakistan’s economy. In 1972 he initiated Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, which was stepped up after India tested a nuclear device in May 1974.
Ironically for an aristocrat, Bhutto’s other major legacy was introducing the Pakistani public to populist politics. The PPP inspired millions of people as it espoused secularism and democracy and mobilized supporters who were anti-mullah and anti-military. By contrast, the Pakistan Muslim League, once the party of Jinnah, was to become the party of the military. With no clear ideology or political roots and an opportunistic membership, the Pakistan Muslim League was dubbed the “King’s Party,” catering as it did to a succession of military rulers. Generals Ayub, Yahya, Zia, and Musharraf all were to refashion it to suit their own political needs, to perpetuate their rule, or to provide themselves with a civilian façade when it suited them.
General Zia’s eleven-year rule was to have the most long-lasting and damaging effect on Pakistani society, one still prevalent today. Zia, who seized power from Bhutto in a coup in 1977, dealt with Pakistan’s identity crisis by imposing an ideological Islamic state upon the population. Many of today’s problems—the militancy of the religious parties, the mushrooming of madrassas and extremist groups, the spread of drug and Kalashnikov culture, and the increase in sectarian violence took place during the Zia era.
Although self-effacing and pious, Zia was also ruthless and vindictive, with a sharp sense of political timing, which he used to undermine his opponents. He frequently invoked a “divine mission”: “I have a mission, given by God, to bring Islamic order to Pakistan,” he said in 1978.25 Zia banned politics and censored the media, while his new Islamic laws victimized non-Muslim minorities and women. In Islamizing the legal system, he ordered public floggings and the use of torture. His supporters were drawn from the religious right and the army, where he inculcated the conviction that only soldiers were capable of ruling Pakistan. The epithet that “all countries have armies, but in Pakistan the army has a country” came true under Zia.26
Zia’s longevity as a ruler was made possible by the unstinting support he received from President Ronald Reagan and the U.S. administration after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Zia offered the ISI to act as a conduit for the arms and funds the CIA wanted to supply to the Afghan Mujahedin. In the next few years the Americans built up the ISI into a formidable intelligence agency that managed to run the Afghan war and the political process inside Pakistan. Widespread corruption within the ISI through its involvement in the Afghan heroin trade and the CIA arms pipeline enriched many ISI generals and also provided covert funds for Pakistan’s nuclear program and the promotion of new ISI-BACKED Islamic insurgencies in Kashmir and Central Asia. Musharraf was to have the same strategy after 9/11, using U.S. funds provided for combating al Qaeda to strengthen the army against India, modernize the ISI, and undermine his political opponents.27
Zia bargained hard for maximum U.S. support. In January 1980 he dismissed President Jimmy Carter’s offer of a $400 million aid package as “peanuts.” A year later, he accepted an alliance with Reagan, agreeing to a five-year (1981-1986) military and economic aid package worth $3.2 billion, which included the sale of forty F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan. This was followed by a six-year (1987-1993) $4.02 billion aid package that was never completed. Between 1982 and 1990 the CIA, working with the ISI and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, funded the training, arrival, and arming of some thirty-five thousand Islamic militants from forty-three Muslim countries in Pakistani madrassas to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan was to sow the seeds of al Qaeda and turn Pakistan into the world center of jihadism for the next two decades.28
Zia’s quid pro quo with the Americans was that they were not to question his domestic politics or his grip on power—exactly what Musharraf negotiated with Washington after 9/11. As long as Zia backed the Afghan Mujahedin, Reagan turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s lack of democracy, the floggings and torture, the drug trafficking by the army, and even the country’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. Similarly, two decades later, as long as Musharraf pursued al Qaeda, President George W. Bush declined to question his domestic policies or insist upon democracy.
Reagan was to severely compromise the U.S. stance on nuclear proliferation by declining to question Islamabad’s development of nuclear weapons—as long as Zia did not embarrass Washington by testing them.29 It is widely believed that with the help of China, Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon by the late 1980s. The U.S. Congress did monitor Zia’s nuclear program and imposed the Pressler Amendment, in which the U.S. president had to verify every year that Pakistan
did not possess a nuclear device. The inability of President George H. W. Bush to make such a verification in 1990 led to U.S. sanctions on Islamabad. Pakistani generals became bitter, accusing the Americans of a grand betrayal, as the sanctions came just a few months after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when Pakistan was of far less value to the Americans.
The aims of Pakistan and the United States in relation to Afghanistan now diverged considerably. Zia wanted to secure a pro-Pakistan fundamentalist government in Kabul, led by Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, whom the ISI favored.30 Washington wanted a more moderate Mujahedin government, but at the same time was rapidly losing interest in the region. Neither aim was to be met as Afghanistan slipped into a brutal civil war.
When Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988, public anger against the army forced the new army chief, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, to hold elections. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had returned to Pakistan from exile in 1986 to a rapturous reception by the public but had been sidelined by Zia. Now under the watchful eye of a nervous military, Bhutto mobilized public support for a PPP victory at the polls. To prevent a PPP landslide, the ISI cobbled together a right-wing alliance of nine Islamic parties and the Muslim League, called the Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA).31 No party secured a clear majority in the election, although the PPP won the largest number of seats in the National Assembly.32
The army refused to let Bhutto govern as prime minister until Washington brokered a deal in which she had to agree to allow the army to run foreign policy and the nuclear program, and not to reduce the military’s budget. General Beg was to encroach even more upon Bhutto’s decision-making prerogatives. Bhutto was not allowed to ask about the military’s budget for the nuclear program, backing the Kashmir insurgency, or the Afghan Mujahedin. She was further hobbled in the provinces as her main political rival and the army’s protégé, Nawaz Sharif, became chief minister of Punjab, which led to a state of open confrontation between the two leaders. Sharif, a businessman from Lahore whose family had prospered enormously under the Zia regime, was a dour, unintelligent politician who had been promoted and patronized by the military.
