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BOOK
REVIEW
Pakistan:
The world's next failed
state?
Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad
and Afghanistan, by Mary Anne
Weaver
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
 Since
September 11, 2001, no country has captured the
attention of US policymakers and news analyzers as much
as Pakistan. A plethora of current-affairs pundits in
the United States, whose visions rarely crossed the
Middle East, rediscovered forgotten Pakistan as it
turned overnight from a "peripheral" state, in Richard
Haas' foreign-policy priority classification, into a
"vital" state for the conduct of the war on terrorism.
Unlike these opportunist "experts", Mary Anne Weaver has
written on Pakistan and its surrounding region for more
than 20 years. She is rightfully a South Asia
specialist, immensely experienced, possessing access to
the most important movers and shakers of the region.
In the mold of CNN's Anita Pratap, she has
covered Pakistani and Afghan politics for The New Yorker
with a blend of professionalism, courage and compassion,
qualities on display in this new book that asks
troubling questions about Pakistan's stability as a
state and reliability as a bulwark against militant
Islam.
Profusion of drugs, arms, private
militias, fundamentalist ideologies and sectarian
violence has led to an "accumulation of disorder in
Pakistan such that it could well be the next Yugoslavia"
(p 7). Whichever place in Pakistan Weaver visited in
2001, "there was a tangible fear that Pakistan was
drifting, perhaps inexorably, toward chaos ... one of
the most frightening places on Earth". Weaver's gut
feeling expressed in the preface is that Pakistan's
structural weaknesses are so advanced that it "could
well become the world's newest failed state - a failed
state with nuclear weapons" (p 10). The next major day
of terror in the United States could also come from this
combustible and volatile country, whose military rulers
halfheartedly agreed to assist Washington against the
Taliban when cornered with implied threats of diplomatic
and aid embargo.
Weaver's first chapter sketches
President General Pervez Musharraf, the man who sits
uneasily astride a "country that is angry and out of
control". His dispute with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
centered on Pakistan's Kargil intrusion of 1999 into
Jammu and Kashmir, which led to a quasi-war with India.
Army chief Musharraf considered the misadventure a
"major tactical coup" and was sore that Sharif ordered a
withdrawal under US pressure. Musharraf's hawkish
anti-India tendencies were also revealed when his
airplane was disallowed from landing in Karachi on
Sharif's order (October 1999), and the pilot informed
him that the Indian city of Ahmadabad was open for an
emergency stop. The ex-commando's reply was brusque:
"We're not going to India! Over my dead body will we
land there!" (p 15) According to one old Musharraf
colleague, "when India and Kashmir come up, he's
transformed into a hardline table-thumper". Working his
way up the army ladder, Musharraf spent his "entire
adult life battling India" (p 28).
On the
domestic front, his "western cowboy" image
notwithstanding, Musharraf has been unable or unwilling
to rein in the state-nurtured Islamist terrorist
networks fanning jihads around the world. Weaver thinks
it is the result of his power base, an army that is
increasingly anti-American and fundamentalist. In his
three-year reign, Musharraf has acquiesced recurrently
to the pressures of the religious right. The Human
Rights Commission of Pakistan labels him a "silent
spectator in the rise of the orthodox clergy and
militant Islam" (p 36). Before September 11, under
Musharraf, Pakistan's backing of the Taliban had risen
to client-state proportions. In a face-to-face
interview, Musharraf parried Weaver's questions about
the rise of fundamentalist forces, saying "all this talk
about madrassas teaching militancy is just
hearsay". Musharraf's responses on squeezing Islamist
extremism in Pakistan were "unforthcoming, even
misleading at times" (p 39).
Chapter 2 recalls
the fatal swing Pakistan took toward Kalashnikov and
jihad culture under Musharraf's mentor, General
Zia-ul-Haq. Pakistan's role as a frontline state in the
first Afghan jihad, starting in 1980, resulted in a
profligate slippage and diversion of arms, opium and oil
from the US Central Intelligence Agency's pipeline by
the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Fifty percent of
US arms (including 500 Stinger missiles) never reached
the battlefields of Afghanistan. The US "intentionally
or not, launched Pan-Islam's first holy war in eight
centuries" by massively aiding the ISI and its favorite
Islamists. The lethal formula of parlaying popular
unrest into holy wars, tested in Afghanistan, went on to
be applied by the ISI in the Kashmir proxy war against
India.
Zia's militarization and his focus on
jihad deepened anti-Punjabi fissures in Pakistani
society. Weaver recounts a 1983 meeting with the leader
of Sindhi separatism, G M Syed, in house prison.
Question: "Why are the Sindhis so angry?" Answer:
"Because we are dominated by Zia's Punjabis." One
encounter with the powerful Khan of Kalat in Balochistan
reinforced this deep sense of insecurity felt among
minorities in Pakistan. "Pakistani Army raided this very
house. They took away my father. There were many more
army operations - and then you ask us why we are
anti-Pakistan" (p 100).
Chapter 3 sojourns into
the tribal areas of Balochistan, a fiercely independent
and Islamist province of Pakistan. Of the 5,000 or more
Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who had slipped into
Pakistan by March 2002, the majority sneaked in from
Balochistan, adding to the "returnees" from the
anti-Soviet jihad. The mass influx of Osama bin Laden
supporters transformed Balochistan and its adjoining
North West Frontier Province "the world's next
Afghanistan" (p 87). In Quetta's Smugglers Bazaar,
Weaver found dealers selling anti-tank rockets,
launchers, AK-47s, light cannon, landmines and grenades.
"A bullet costs only one rupee; an egg costs two" (p
118).
Anti-Pakistan secession movements are
benefiting from the open availability of deadly arms.
The leader of the rebellious Marri tribe, Humayun Khan,
told Weaver, "We're being exploited and neglected. We're
bitter, we're angry, we're armed" (p 106). Baloch music
in the remote town of Turbat carried chants of "May
Allah curse the Pakistani government and martial law".
So suspicious are Baloch youth and nomads of Pakistani
rulers that road-building personnel of the central
government are pelted with rocks as an alleged part of a
plot by Musharraf and the United States to take over the
Makran coast.
Chapter 4 is an account of the
Wahhabi Saudi Arabian sway over Pakistan, cultivated by
both military and civilian governments in Islamabad.
Through the medium of the houbara bustard bird, which is
hunted rapaciously by Saudi elites in Pakistan, Weaver
goes to the heart of Pakistan's Arabic orientation.
Billionaires from Riyadh, Doha, Manamah, Dubai,
etc entered Pakistan from the 1970s to shoot the
endangered houbara to near-extinction. Agha Abedi, the
Pakistani founder of Bank of Credit and Commerce
International (BCCI), arranged hunting outings for the
sheikhs in return for walloping bank deposits. When the
BCCI collapsed a few years ago, the question cropped up:
"How did Pakistan become so enmeshed with the interests
of one bank?" (p 134) Arab dignitaries who pumped wealth
into the bank and greased the palms of Pakistani
generals were given diplomatic immunity even when less
powerful Pakistanis got arrested and prosecuted for
houbara poaching. Conservationists view the
non-application of environmental regulations on Arab
guests as a case of sheer hypocrisy on the part of the
government.
But there are profounder reasons for
the exalted treatment of Arabs in Pakistan. As they have
been doing in the rest of the Muslim world, Saudis are
the primary financiers of Pakistan's Sunni supremacists
and Islamist terrorists. Besides funding the thousands
of mujahideen and madrassas, they bankrolled the
government of Pakistan with about US$3.5 billion in
annual military and economic aid in Zia's time.
Pakistan's emergence as the leading figure in the world
of militant Islam owes a great deal to the oil wallahs
from the Persian Gulf.
Chapter 5 takes a close
personal look at Benazir Bhutto, the former prime
minister, who now lives in exile in London. Weaver sees
Benazir, the avowed secularist, as the incubator of the
Taliban during her tenure in power. Musharraf, as
Benazir's director general of military operations, had
helped her spawn the Taliban in the mid-'90s. Her
inability to improve Pakistan's appalling human-rights
record on women and her reliance on religious motifs to
survive in a highly conservative Islamic polity doomed
her prime ministership. She had to cede control of
Pakistan's nuclear program, its high-risk policy in
Afghanistan and the anti-Indian war in Kashmir to the
generals. Her influence on the ISI was minimal, as the
latter intervened in fundamentalist movements across the
world.
Weaver remembers Benazir's election
rallies in Rawalpindi where her supporters fired AK-47s
with gay abandon and sang, "Listen, all you holy
warriors." Benazir's failure in politics is summed up in
one sentence: "Pakistan is not an easy country for
anyone, let alone a woman, to rule" (p 179). Her promise
of "breaking the stranglehold of the Islamic clerics"
never materialized.
Chapter 6 discusses the
growing Talibanization of Pakistan, a process Weaver
denotes as Afghanistan moving farther east into South
Asia. Musharraf's public rhetoric on dealing firmly with
homegrown Islamist terrorists has not been accompanied
by concrete actions, leading many in Washington to doubt
how dependable and ally Pakistan can be.
Weaver
reports seeing shops in Miram Shah, a tiny town of the
Waziristan area, where for only $100, Taliban and
al-Qaeda escapees were shaved, issued new sets of
clothes and sent into major Pakistani cities with false
identity papers. A few miles from there, in Parachinar,
"the mullahs announced to everyone assembled that they
should kill Americans on sight" (p 221).
Weaver
personally received e-mails from publicly banned
Pakistani terrorist claques "informing us that they were
going underground to regroup and that we would be
receiving their new e-mail addresses and websites" (p
222). Osama bin Laden underwent dialysis treatment in a
military hospital in Rawalpindi and, according to Afghan
intelligence, was under the protection of Maulana Fazlur
Rehman of Pakistan's Jamiat-ul-Ulema-I-Islam in December
2001. Most frightening, a Pakistani official told Weaver
that the maverick nuclear scientist Bashiruddin Mahmood,
who is a proponent of Islamic science, "failed six or
seven lie-detector tests" when interrogated on his
meetings with al-Qaeda top brass. Peace envoy Anthony
Zinni reckons, "in a few years, Pakistan's nuclear
weapons could fall into the hands of religious
extremists" (p 266).
Musharraf himself has a
queasy past regarding bin Laden. In 1999, before his
coup, Nawaz Sharif was asked by Washington to set up a
special commando unit to capture or eliminate the man
responsible for the Kenya-Tanzania bombings. The project
was "scuttled by the ISI" upon Musharraf's nod. Even
earlier, in 1998, Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia sought
Islamabad's intervention with the Taliban to extradite
bin Laden. Musharraf "opposed the Saudi move" (p 247).
Weaver's final chapter delves into Kashmir. The
same policies of holy war against India that Zia,
Benazir and Sharif followed are today being applied with
renewed vigor by Musharraf. The seemingly unlimited
funds that Pakistan allocates to the jihad in Kashmir
come not only from its own coffers but also Libya, Saudi
Arabia, Europe and North America. By 2000, Pakistan's
military spending alone was greater than all of its
development spending combined. Much of this goes into
helping mujahideen infiltrate across the Line of
Control. Weaver witnessed Pakistani soldiers giving
these irregular troops "rations, weapons and ammunition,
and even air cover, if need arose" (p 258).
US
intelligence estimates that 300 or more al-Qaeda Arabs
are active in Kashmir on both sides of the Line of
Control, besides participating in Sunni-Shi'a battles
and attacks on Westerners inside Pakistan. Against the
overwhelming evidence, Musharraf remonstrated to Weaver
in an interview: "All this talk of private armies is
total nonsense. These men are freedom fighters, not
terrorists!" One prominent Pakistani liberal put
Musharraf's stand on militant Islam thus: "He's got this
agenda in Kashmir. And he is using the Islamists' fervor
for the battle of Kashmir" (p 271). In the process of
exporting battles all over the region, Pakistan itself
has been converted into a battleground. The jihad has
come home.
Weaver's book suffers from a few
factual and descriptive inaccuracies. Musharraf is
wrongly absolved of any role in Zia's Afghan jihad and
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is oddly
termed a "strident Hindu nationalist", a representation
neither his foes nor his friends would agree with. The
narrative of the book is also disconnected, with plenty
of non sequiturs between chapters.
To Weaver's
credit, she has packaged plenty of anecdotal evidence
that many are not familiar with, especially not in the
West. Readers are left pondering whether Pakistan will
indeed fall deeper and deeper into the quagmire of
lawlessness and state failure and whether more Ramzi
Yousefs and Aimal Kansis (both came from Balochistan)
are going to hit the United States hard in vulnerable
spots.
Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad
and Afghanistan, by Mary Anne Weaver, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, November 2002, New York. ISBN:
0-374-22894-9. Price: US$24. 285 Pages.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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