Pakistan: A catastrophe in waiting

[Jagat]

<h3>Pakistan: a catastrophe in waiting</h3>

 

By EMRAN QURESHI

Saturday, December 21, 2002 – Globe and Mail

 

Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan by Mary Anne Weaver. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pages, $38.95

 

Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones, Yale University Press, 352 pages, $46.50

 

Fifty-five years ago, Pakistan was a secular, industrializing Third-World nation showing promise for the future. It has since stumbled very badly, and is today a hotbed of Islamic militancy and now, much to its shame, the new home of al-Qaeda. Political scientists and foreign-policy analysts increasingly describe Pakistan as a failed state with nuclear weapons.

 

Pakistan, after Sept. 11, is the front-line state in the fight against terrorism. Not coincidentally, it is also the very source of the terrorists that it fights. Mary Anne Weaver, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has travelled regularly to Pakistan for nearly two decades, and in Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan she provides depressing vignettes of a traumatized Pakistani society.

 

Weaver attributes the manifold miseries that afflict that tormented land to the U.S.-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad that took place in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Pakistan was the staging area, the base for the struggle against the Soviets, and after the Soviets were vanquished, tens of thousands of Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis were available for other violent struggles. Today, these violent struggles are playing out on the embattled landscape of Pakistan. Weaver interviews retired U.S. General Anthony Zinni, at one time the head of U.S. central command and a close friend of Pakistan's ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Zinni sketches three possible worst-case scenarios for Pakistan: military hard-liners come to power, religious hard-liners come to power, or the state disintegrates.

 

Owen Bennett Jones, a former Islamabad-based BBC correspondent, explores in Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm how rapacious ruling elites and a powerful army have brought the country to the precipice of disaster. By coincidence, both authors narrate the riveting tale of how Musharraf seized power. In 1999, Musharraf, then chief of staff for the Pakistani armed forces, was returning to Karachi from Sri Lanka on a civilian airliner. The Airbus was crowded with schoolchildren returning from a trip abroad. The Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, fired Musharraf, and would not let the flight land at the Karachi airport. Further, the airport runways were darkened and fire trucks placed on them. The plane circled above, desperately short of fuel, landing only when Musharraf's fellow officers seized the airport.

 

Democracy has had an attenuated life in Pakistan. In 1981, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power and had the democratically elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto hanged on trumped-up charges. In 1988, Zia died in a mysterious plane crash. Bhutto's daughter, the charismatic Radcliffe- and Oxford-educated Benazir, won the elections that soon followed. It was a bittersweet moment for Benazir Bhutto, the first female head of a Muslim nation.

 

Sadly, she quickly squandered it all. Weaver describes how, in power, Benazir acted like a vindictive feudal lord and was indulgent of her grossly corrupt husband (John F. Burns of The New York Times alleged that he siphoned off nearly $1-billion from the public treasury). Wealthy industrialist Nawaz Sharif, her successor, was not much better. Democracy in Pakistan today lies mortally wounded as a result of venal, autocratic "democrats" sparring with an equally corrupt but more powerful Praetorian Guard.

 

One calamitous result of Zia ul-Haq's dictatorship was the rise and funding of right-wing religious seminaries (madrasas) across Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad. The madrasas provided the cannon fodder for that war and "educated" their successors, the Taliban. Bennett Jones recounts how General Zia also sought to provide the fig leaf of religious legitimacy for his regime by entering into an alliance with a marginal Islamist party, the Jamiat Islami (JI),and its founder, Maulana Mawdudi. (Mawdudi was an influential cleric whose writings, circulated throughout the Muslim world, have contributed to retarding its intellectual development.)

 

Further, Zia ul-Haq placed thousands of JI activists into the judiciary, civil service and army. He was bitterly resisted by the intelligentsia of Pakistan, and the prisons were overflowing with thousands of dissidents. However, Zia did not go entirely unnoticed in the West: His regime received billions of dollars in U.S. aid, and then Secretary of State George Shultz eulogized him as a "great fighter for freedom." The legacy of these policies still haunts Pakistan.

 

Weaver estimates that roughly 40,000 madrasas now dot the Pakistani landscape, preaching an intolerant Saudi Wahabi and local Deobandi interpretation of Islam. Madrasa graduates are unfit for gainful employment; worse, they have imbibed Saudi Wahabi doctrinal intolerance toward Pakistan's other Muslim sects, especially Shiites. In recent years, Shiites have been attacked in ever-increasing numbers during the holy month of Ramadan and at mosques. More ominously, these madrasas provide the cadres for a dozen or so private Islamist armies, some with close ties to Osama bin Laden, and which are capable of overthrowing the state.

 

To further deprive the reader of sleep, Weaver retells the chilling tale of bin Laden's repeated attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. He met on several occasions with one of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists, Bashiruddin Mahmoud. Mahmoud, a radical Islamist, had repeatedly travelled back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan on what he described as "charitable" work. U.S. officials were sufficiently alarmed at the possibility that bin Laden might acquire technology for a "dirty bomb" that CIA Director George Tennet was dispatched to Islamabad, where he met with Musharraf to discuss this threat.

 

Far too often, naive Western commentators assume that religious radicals have widespread popular support. They do not. In one well-known incident, Pakistani Taliban students who attempted to interrupt a soccer match at the Peshawar stadium (the players were apparently provocatively dressed in shorts) were literally beaten back by outraged spectators. Their support is far thinner than presumed, and based primarily upon coercion, fear and violent intimidation. Weaver makes the point that the Taliban-like policies pursued by radical mullahs have very little support within the broad populace, who would rather continue watching television and listening to catchy Bollywood tunes.

 

The future for Pakistan can best be described as bleak. The Economist called the recent Pakistani election farcical, a rigged result that provoked indignation and hostility across wide swaths of Pakistani civil society. Militant Islamists with ties to the Taliban, who have never before received popular representation, did dangerously well, especially in the North-West Frontier province and Baluchistan. On top of that, al-Qaeda seems to have relocated successfully in Pakistan. Weaver asserts that the recent outburst of murderous assaults -- a church in Islamabad, car bombings in Karachi and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl -- bear the telltale imprint of al-Qaeda. Moreover, Pakistani militant organizations that were previously preoccupied with murdering Shiites have formed a loose alliance with al-Qaeda.

 

It is against these unyielding odds that Musharraf attempts to bring order out of chaos, and rebuild the shattered Pakistani economy. Approximately 55 per cent of the Pakistani populace is illiterate. But the lion's share of the state coffers goes to the armed forces -- one-third to one-half of the budget. Bennett Jones points out that for Pakistan to develop and prosper, the budget and power of the armed forces must be shrunken over time and devolved to its citizenry. That is, simply put, democracy must flourish. Alas, that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

 

Mary Anne Weaver's superb reportage helps us to understand the grievous wounds that afflict Pakistan. Her account deserves the highest praise. Owen Bennett Jones masterfully explores the historical, institutional, ideological and class forces that have created the fine mess that is today's Pakistan.

 

One might reasonably ask what could possibly be worse than this present situation? Imagine these very mullahs with their fingers on the launch buttons of nuclear devices while watched across the border by a belligerent militant Hindu nationalist government of nuclear-armed India. If ever there was a scenario for nuclear armageddon, this is it. Pity the nation and fear for the future.

 

Emran Qureshi is the co-editor of the forthcoming The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy.

[theist]

 

One might reasonably ask what could possibly be worse than this present situation? Imagine these very mullahs with their fingers on the launch buttons of nuclear devices while watched across the border by a belligerent militant Hindu nationalist government of nuclear-armed India. If ever there was a scenario for nuclear armageddon, this is it. Pity the nation and fear for the future.

 

 

 

Prabhupada pinpointed this area as a flash point for WW3.

 

Anybody remember well enough to quote him?

[madhav]

Washington Post

December 30, 2002

Pg. 14

 

Pakistan Releases Militant Leader

 

 

MULTAN, Pakistan -- Pakistani police complied with a court order to free the leader of a banned Islamic militant group from house arrest.

 

"Following the removal of the police guard, Maulana Masood Azhar left for an unknown place after midnight," police official Sikandar Hayat said .

 

Azhar, head of Jaish-i-Muhammad, and other leaders of Pakistan's often violent Islamic groups were ordered jailed after a Dec. 13, 2001, attack by Islamic militants on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in which 14 people died.

 

India and the United States then pressured Pakistan to rein in the militants, who are fighting Indian control of the disputed Kashmir region. Pakistan banned many of the groups but most quickly reemerged under other names.

 

In recent weeks, courts in Pakistan have ordered the release of several jailed militant leaders.

 

--Associated Press

 

[madhav]

London Times

December 20, 2002

 

Pakistani Scientist 'Offered Saddam Nuclear Designs'

 

By James Bone

 

A Pakistani scientist approached Iraq soon after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait to offer nuclear weapon designs and help in procuring bomb components, according to a document found by United Nations weapons inspectors.

 

The revelation, which provoked an inconclusive inquiry by inspectors, has raised new concerns about Pakistan’s role in the proliferation of nuclear technology. It follows allegations that Pakistan helped North Korea to develop a nuclear bomb and that Pakistani nuclear scientists met Osama bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Afghanistan.

 

The offer by the Pakistani scientist, found in Iraqi archives, was made in October 1990 as a US-led coalition prepared to repel the August invasion of Kuwait. Iraq had already embarked on a crash programme to develop a nuclear bomb, but told the UN it had not pursued the scientist’s offer — a claim UN investigators are inclined to believe. The document revealing the contact between the scientist and Iraq is referred to twice in the Iraqi declaration of its nuclear capability, which The Times has obtained.

 

The file first came to the attention of UN weapons inspectors after the 1995 defection of President Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’s secret weapons programmes. After he defected to Jordan, Iraqi officials led UN inspectors to a cache of 1.5 million pages of documents hidden in packing crates at General Kamel’s chicken farm in Iraq, the Haider House Farm, in an apparent effort to get rid of incriminating evidence that they assumed he would provide to Western intelligence.

 

Among them was a file of correspondence between Iraq’s Mukhabarat secret service and Department 3000 of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), a secret Iraqi nuclear programme that was codenamed Petro-Chemical 3.

 

"Included was a few pages relating to an approach made by a foreign national who offered assistance, for financial reward, in nuclear weapon design and in the procurement of material that may be required," Iraq’s declaration says. "The Iraqi team pointed out to the International Atomic Energy Agency Action Team (IAEA AT) that no external assistance was received by the former Iraqi nuclear programme, other than that already declared to the (team) and is documented."

 

A source familiar with the case said that the document identified the scientist as a Pakistani. The handwritten paper seems to be a record of a meeting between him and an Iraqi contact. "He made the unsolicited offer to a contact of the Mukhabarat procurement network and there was a communication between the Mukhabarat and Department 3000, where IAEC procurement was handled," the source said.

 

The document triggered an investigation by UN nuclear inspectors, who approached Pakistan. Islamabad told them it could not identify the scientist, but some UN Security Council diplomats suspect that Pakistan does know who it is. Inspectors thought that the matter was important enough to brief the five permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — on their 1997 inquiry. Evidence of contact between a Pakistani scientist and Iraq will only fuel fears that Pakistan is willing to share its technology with so-called "rogue nations". The US suspects Pakistan of having supplied North Korea with gas centrifuge technology to make weapons-grade uranium for its nuclear bomb in 1997/98.

 

[atma]

Theist, I think you got Folio. Look in the morning Walks of Prabhupada. Year 74 0r 75 in Mayapur. I'm very sure he talked there about WW3 and India and Pakistan starting everything and the part that is always in my mind is when he said that India will suffer the most.

[madhav]

>>.. when he said that India will suffer the most. <<

- atma

 

Gandhi divided India and avoided a civil war threatned by the muslims minority.

since then India has been sufering from the islamists within and without. now there does not seem any solution other than war, sooner or later.

 

The suffering that it will cause now will be more than the suffering the civil war could have caused in 1947.

(so gandhi's effort was a failure.

he failed to understand islam nature.)

 

But after the war, if it happens, there will not be pakistan. it did exist just before 1947. no big deal.

 

there will not be islam and xianity in india either. most of these groups will happily give up their faiths and accept hinduism, incontrast to the hindu ancestors of the current muslims who accepted islam when their neck was under the sword of muslim barbarians.

 

Jai Sri Krishna!