NEW DELHI: Three recent events vividly illustrate the dilemmas of today’s Pakistan, which are in many ways the same challenges faced by the country’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, over six decades ago.
The foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan met in New Delhi recently, after a gap of more than 15 months, the terrorist attacks of November 11, 2008 having frozen bilateral relations between the two countries in suspicion and mutual recrimination. The New Delhi meeting marked a temporary thaw, yet even as Pakistan’s foreign secretary returned home to Islamabad, suspected Taliban bombers had attacked an Indian medical mission in the heart of Kabul, Afghanistan, killing 11 people.
Moreover, in the Pakistani province of Waziristan, three Sikhs, a minority in Pakistan, were abducted. When the ransom could not be raised, one was beheaded.
India and the world watch such events in horror, unable to decide how to respond. As people wonder if the United States-NATO surge in Afghanistan which began last month will succeed, all of South Asia is asking even more troubling questions: Who runs Pakistan? Who is really in charge of its nuclear arsenal?
To understand where Pakistan’s massive problems began, we need to look back to the country’s founding. At a press meeting on November 14, 1946, nine months before British India was partitioned into two countries, India and Pakistan, Jinnah was asked about the future of the communal situation in what would become Pakistan. He foresaw “a really stable and secure government in Pakistan, whose Muslim majority would treat minorities in their midst “in a most generous way. Seeking to dispel skepticism, he declared that “Pakistan and Hindustan by virtue of contiguity and mutual interests will be friends in this subcontinent.
That was Jinnah’s dream, but the reality is that Pakistan has lived in high drama ever since its birth, often troubled by dark and imaginary historical shadows. It has been a victim of its own grandiose dreams about its role in the world and place among Islamic nations, and often of intense emotionalism and an absence of calm, dispassionate logic. Almost inevitably, or so it seems, the idea of Pakistan has been usurped, which is why Pakistan’s friends have so often become its masters, and why Pakistan continues to remain fragile, insecure, and tense.
But there are other, non-psychological factors for Pakistan’s troubles. Founded on the notion of separateness, Pakistan has continuously had to affirm its Islamic identity, as well as its opposition to India. So it adopted the identity of an Islamic Republic – a seemingly direct and logical evolution from “Muslims as a distinct nation before partition to Pakistan as an “Islamic State afterward. In reality, this transition has impeded Pakistan’s evolution into a modern, functioning state underpinned by a coherent national identity.
Indeed, by becoming an Islamic state, Pakistan ultimately – and perhaps inevitably -became something of a “jihadi state. Unsurprisingly, when set on this path, it also became the chosen refuge of Osama bin Laden and of the Taliban leadership that fled Afghanistan after the US-led invasion.
Can Pakistan alter its identity? Peace in the region, and within Pakistan, depends on the answer to this question, which only Pakistani civil society – not the US, NATO, or any “surge – can provide. But Pakistani society is now an orphan, dependant almost totally on both the Pakistani Army and the all-pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has grown into a state within a state, answerable only to itself.
Of course, there are ideas of Pakistan other than that of an “Islamic state. Indeed, Pakistan aspired at one point to becoming something of a modern extension of India’s long-ruling Mughal dynasty. But this aspiration grossly misread both the present and the inherited historical reality, for Pakistan also wanted to be a legatee of British India – a confused desire that made Pakistan more vulnerable to becoming a “rented state than when it was part of either the Mughal or British Empire.
Likewise, dreams of cultural links with Central Asia by themselves do not make Pakistan a boundary between it and the teeming masses of India. Indeed, the only role Pakistan plays in this respect is as an outpost for Central Asian terrorists.
There is cruel irony in the observation that in the country which Jinnah created in the name of Islam, that noble faith itself now constitutes the principal challenge to the very survival of the state. It is no less ironic that Pakistan, once seen as the protector of Western interests in South Asia, has become the central challenge to those interests – what one high Western dignitary has undiplomatically called an “international migraine.
Jaswant Singh,India’s foreign minister (1998-2002), finance minister (1995, 2002-2004), and minister of defense (2001-2002) is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
