M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India —
Attendees at the numerous parties held in Lahore, Islamabad or Karachi would
find it difficult to accept that Pakistan is heading toward Talibanization.
Alcohol and the attentions of the opposite sex are there in profusion, while
the passports of those present would testify to their global footprint.
Unfortunately,
the gilded individuals whose aftershave has so charmed legions of otherwise
hardnosed U.S. officials – be they spies, military or civilian – have almost no
influence over the base of that country's social pyramid.
At the base, two
generations of indoctrination have created a perception that what is needed to
bring progress, absent all their lives, is the practice of the "pure"
version of their faith. Of course this is only possible once the
"impure" have been driven from office through terror and
intimidation.
This idea was
fostered by General Pervez Musharraf in an agreement with the so-called “Pakistan
Taliban” – a formulation that ignores the unity of command and operation
between those functioning on either side of the Pakistan-Afghan border drawn by
British colonial overlords in 1893 and dividing the Pashtun people.
On Nov. 12,
1993, an agreement between the British and the Emir of Afghanistan lapsed, and
fears were raised within the Pakistan military that Pashtun nationalists might demand
a reexamination of the border. The Pakistan military sought to supplant such
nationalism with the same brew of religious fervor that animated its extremist
legions against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Today, even the
"Afghan" Taliban are, in effect, controlled by their counterparts
within Pakistan. This includes the tens of thousands of so-called "hidden
Taliban," those who clandestinely back the militia, but give no outward
sign of fealty.
Millions within
Pakistan have been indoctrinated – in conventional as well as religious schools
– with suspicion and hatred for "the other,” defined as any human being
who does not practice the Wahhabist version of the faith that began in the
deserts of Arabia three centuries ago.
Products of this
extremist logic were given precedence in army recruitments in Pakistan by
General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1970s. Since then they have spread within the
Pakistan military and now account for nearly 80 percent of the junior ranks and
close to 37 percent of the higher ranks.
In Chief of Army
Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani they have found a kindred soul, as the new chief
comes from the same humble social background as Zia-ul-Haq. This social stratum
has been almost completely indoctrinated with a sense of "religious
supremacy" – the perception that their faith is superior to that of
others, who belong to an inferior universe and deserve to be dominated by the
"superior" group.
Despite Kiyani’s
background and his demonstrated closeness to the social vision of General Zia,
almost every Western analyst has seen him as a "moderate," an
individual who could be expected to empathize with victims of Taliban terror
bands and join in efforts to destroy them.
In reality, it
was Kiyani who was instrumental in getting the more modern Musharraf to agree
to a 2006 ceasefire with the "Pakistan Taliban," a step that
emboldened the militia into establishing a monopoly of control over large areas
in the Swat Valley and tribal areas in Pakistan, the way they already had
within southern Afghanistan.
Musharraf's
ceasefire was the equivalent of the Franco-British refusal to take
countermeasures against Hitler's 1936 occupation of the Rhineland, while the
2009 Kiyani ceasefire can be compared to the 1938 occupation of the Sudetenland
by Hitler – whose cruelty and pathology were similar to that found in the
present-day Taliban.
Former U.S. Vice
President Dick Cheney, who reportedly takes pride in being compared to Darth
Vader, and his successive defense secretaries have behaved more like benign
versions of Mickey Mouse in dealing with the Pakistan army, which has been
nourishing the Taliban since 9/11. U.S. policy has been characterized by a
myopia similar to that shown in its dealings with Reza Shah of Iran.
The U.S. failure
to grasp the reach of the “hidden Taliban” within Pakistan could impact the
security of the United States and the entire civilized world, dwarfing the
malefic effects of the 1979 takeover of Iran by the Khomeinists.
Relying on a
force honeycombed with sympathizers of the Taliban – from the chief of army
staff down to the common soldier – to do battle with the deadly force that now
covers so much of Pakistan and Afghanistan is to concede defeat in advance.
Pakistan's civil
society has been loud in its wails that the pinprick attacks on Taliban targets
indulged in by George W. Bush and now by Barack Obama are "alienating the
people of Pakistan" from the coalition. In reality, such alienation
already exists, and can be reversed only by the defeat of the Taliban in the
field. This would involve taking at least the air war into Taliban hideouts
within Pakistan, and the destruction of the opium crop in Afghanistan.
The peoples of
that region respect the strong and have contempt for the weak. They need to
know through defeats in battle that the fanatics that have captured their
imagination and their fealty belong to the latter camp.
Unfortunately
this was shown to them for only a painfully short length of time in 2001,
before the end of November that year, when George W. Bush followed the examples
of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in outsourcing the War on Terror in South
Asia to the Pakistan army.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced
Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and professor of geopolitics at Manipal
University. He can be reached at mdnalapat1@gmail.com. ©Copyright M.D.
Nalapat.)
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