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3 Pakistan's nut that won't
crack By Mark LeVine
for the Taliban and jihadi
movements after the Afghan war. The growth of the
heroin and arms trades, and other cross-border
smuggling (especially of Chinese-made goods, much
of them pirated), also increased the power of the
new religious forces and the growing number of
tribal leaders who were aligned with them.
As the US Institute of Peace concluded in
a 2002 conference on the NWFP, "These new leaders
have effectively captured the
various forms of simmering
discontent within the tribes and have emerged as
more legitimate defenders of tribal interests. The
foundations of Pashtun identity have changed with
perhaps a permanent turn toward Islamism and
movement away from traditional secular, tribal
leadership."
Complicating matters even
more was that the central government's main
intelligence network, the Inter-Services
Intelligence, simultaneously encouraged,
infiltrated and sometimes fought against the
Pakistani Taliban and various jihadi groups.
A landscape filled with
contradictions The founders of Pakistan,
Muhammad Jinna and Allama Iqbal, imagined their
country as a "land of the spiritually pure and
clean" people. Their vision never approached
reality, as from the start Pakistan was plagued by
rampant poverty, lack of development, government
repression and systemic corruption. Indeed, the
new state quickly reinforced the most corrupt and
exploitative dynamics of British rule, a reality
that helped drive the leadership of East Pakistan
to declare independence as Bangladesh in 1971.
The Pashtun peoples of the NWFP and FATA have
never had a cohesive enough nationalist identity
to break away from the rest of the country. In
fact, their relative independence depended on the
region's continued function as a buffer between
Pakistan and its Western neighbors, as well as on
the very absence of state authority that has been
an important cause of the region's many economic
and political woes.
The ambivalence
towards the state by local forces reflects the
larger contradictions of life in the NWFP and
FATA, which literally jump out at you when you
travel through them. Signs welcoming you to the
"land of hospitality" alternate with those that
warn foreigners to keep out. Smugglers' markets
sell the latest high-tech electronics, as well as
advanced weapons, drugs and pornography.
Innumerable English language and computer schools,
and one of Pakistan's most venerable universities,
Islamia College, sit next to squalid refugee
camps, in a region plagued by rampant illiteracy.
The two regions are awash in money, but
most is derived from the local gray and black
economies. The state pledges increased funds for
local development, yet 60 years after independence
it hasn't managed to build a modern road into the
provincial capital of Peshawar. The government
decries the prevalence of tribal customs, yet it
continues to administer the regions based on
customary practices such as the collective
punishment of tribes.
Dictatorship is
defended by appeals to fighting the terror it
helped breed, while agreements designed to rein in
the Taliban (such as the much-criticized 2006
Miramshah Agreement between the government and
tribal and Taliban leaders in North Waziristan)
wind up helping the Taliban and al-Qaeda to
regroup and grow.
And now, the political
situation has become so contradictory as to border
on the absurd.
Former premier Bhutto is
being called on to save the country from the
Salafis, when it was her government that did the
most to build up the Taliban. She is supposed to
bring a breath of political fresh air (which would
be much appreciated, given the pollution levels
across the country), but she was twice removed
from power because of corruption (Interpol even
issued arrest warrants for Bhutto and her husband,
Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as "Mr Ten
Percent" for the kickbacks he demanded from
businesses during her time as prime minister).
It is hard to imagine what Bhutto will do
that President General Pervez Musharraf hasn't
already done, or how she will succeed where he
has, at least in Washington's eyes, failed.
Indeed, it should surprise no one when Bhutto
proves as incapable - or, as likely, unwilling -
to crush the Taliban and al-Qaeda as previous
governments have been, including her own.
That's because ultimately, the tragic
reality of Pakistan is that the forces tearing the
country apart are the same ones that are holding
it together.
The central government is too
weak and corrupt to implant or impose a strong,
national identity or program of development in the
manner that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey or
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin did in the Soviet
Union. The very process of doing so would likely
trigger widespread social unrest, disintegration
and even civil war.
The suicide bombings
against Bhutto's homecoming procession are only a
taste of the chaos and large-scale violence that
would erupt if a politician or party actually
challenged the finely honed corruption and
horse-trading that has defined Pakistani politics
for generations. But not challenging the system is
equally no answer, as it is clearly approaching
the point of entropy.
Although its causes
would owe as much to economic and political
inequalities as to religious or tribal ideologies,
Pakistan's slide into chaos, or worse, would
inevitably be interpreted as yet another example
of "ancient tribal hatreds" dooming a developing
country to perpetual war and poverty.
Only
this country is a nuclear weapons state that is
home to the world's most dangerous terrorists. And
unlike Bosnia or Rwanda, the United States would
be forced to intervene, fulfilling Osama bin
Laden's wildest dreams when he turned commuter
planes into cruise missiles on that warm September
morning over the island of Manhattan.
Mark LeVine is professor of
modern Middle Eastern history, culture and Islamic
studies, University of California-Irvine, and
author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the
Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld, 2005).
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