The 9/11 Wars (58 page)

These often alarmist analyses seemed difficult to reconcile with the country’s evident resilience. Created in 1947 in the blood and chaos of Britain’s precipitate departure from the subcontinent, Pakistan had survived its traumatic birth, defeat in a series of wars, repeated internal insurrection, the loss of its eastern half, a series of military governments, brutal nationalization programmes in the 1970s, the consequences of the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s, the turmoil of the end of the Cold War, sanctions and the chaotic and corrupt ‘democracy’ of the 1990s. The years immediately before 9/11 and through the first half decade of the wars had dealt the country blows that would have caused many others to fail: a coup (albeit bloodless) in 1999 which overturned an elected if deeply unpopular government, a lengthy military dictatorship, a series of rigged or semi-rigged elections, broad civil unrest, a scandal over the selling of its nuclear weapons secrets and a devastating earthquake. Somehow Pakistan managed not just to survive all this but, in some areas, to thrive. Pakistan was not so much a ‘failed state’ as a state which should by rights have failed long ago but had somehow successfully held on in the face of extreme adversity.

The greatest tests were yet to come. Though the country had played a very significant role in setting the scene for the conflict, the 9/11 Wars had largely avoided Pakistani soil in the years following the September 11 attacks. The waves of violence that had surged across Afghanistan, the Middle East, even parts of the Far East and Europe from 2001 on through the middle of the decade had barely touched the country. That began to change in the summer of 2007. In July, there was a pitched battle between Pakistani troops and Islamic militants who had fortified a mosque and
medressa
compound in the centre of Islamabad, the capital city. The late summer saw fierce fighting in the west of the country between Pakistani paramilitary forces and fighters from a whole set of new emerging radical factions who dubbed themselves the Pakistani Taliban. Then, after an unprecedented wave of blasts and shootings across much of the north and west of the country, Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister and self-dubbed ‘Daughter of the East’, returned to Pakistan from nine years of exile in Dubai. Landing in Karachi, Pakistan’s southern port city, she was greeted by a huge bomb that killed 139 and injured several hundred. There is some suggestion that the bomb had been hidden in the crib of a small child.

BHUTTO AND A CHANGING PAKISTAN

The idea of a separate nation for the Muslims of the subcontinent had sprung from a perception that to remain within a Hindu-dominated independent India after the British had left would mean risking discrimination, marginalization and the eventual extinction of any distinct south Asian Muslim culture and identity. Such fears were voiced by the unofficial posthumous poet laureate of the new nation, Mohammed Iqbal, the Indian philosopher and politician whose revivalist writings provided an eloquent literary and ideological underpinning to the idea of the Pakistani state and echoed sentiments present since the mid nineteenth century in much of the colonized Muslim world. Even if, as some historians hold, the concept of Pakistan was only ever a bargaining position on the part of the Indian Muslim League, the partition that was apparently so desired led to a bloodbath with somewhere between 500,000 and a million being killed as communities fled west or east to their new homes. The vast bulk of the capital, material wealth and infrastructure of the British Indian possessions remained in what became India. So too did almost all the major monuments and sites of the very south Asian Islamic culture the creation of the new state was meant to preserve. Pakistan was thus born with several major disadvantages: a bloody and frightening delivery, almost no resources, a clearly untenable geography with its eastern wing a thousand miles from the western part of the country and, perhaps most problematic of all, no clear idea of what the country was supposed to be.

Many analysts have noted the incoherence at the heart of the concept of the Pakistani state and the role of religion.
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Though Pakistan was created as an Islamic homeland, indeed a refuge, its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the seventy-year-old Westernized lawyer who ran the Muslim League, had made clear that he saw the new nation’s future as tolerant and pluralist with religion playing a major but not defining role in the country’s political and legal structures and identity. Pakistan was not to be a theocracy. On August 11, 1947, in Karachi, Jinnah told the new nation’s constituent assembly: ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship … We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.’ Jinnah died of lung cancer and tuberculosis only thirteen months after Pakistan’s creation but, even if he had survived a little longer, it is unlikely that he would have been able to resolve the fundamental questions of identity the new country faced.

Born only six years after Pakistan’s foundation, Benazir Bhutto’s life had been intertwined with the troubled history of her country. By the time she was old enough to vote, she had already seen two military coups. The latter had brought General Ayub Khan to power in 1958. Like many other leaders in the Islamic and broader developing world at the time, Ayub Khan was a committed secular reformer who, influenced by Ataturk, promoted women’s education and rights and made a genuine attempt at controlling population growth. He did not believe in democracy, or more precisely in politicians, and was forced from power in 1969, having failed to achieve most of his modernizing ambitions.
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After a short interim, he was succeeded by Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a brilliant, charismatic and utterly unscrupulous minor hereditary landowner from the southern Sindh province. Z. A. Bhutto had cynically and skilfully exploited the aftermath of Pakistan’s loss of its eastern, more populous wing following an uprising and a disastrous conflict with India in 1971 to force a situation where he had a chance of winning power. His strategy worked, and his newly formed Pakistan People’s Party swept elections by campaigning on a platform of radical nationalist, socialist policies with the slogan ‘Food, clothes and shelter’. His voters were to see precious little of any of the three, however, though Bhutto did implement a divisive and economically disastrous nationalization programme, expand the role of the intelligence services in domestic politics and ban alcohol in a bid to head off increasing discontent among the country’s powerful and well-organized religious conservatives. His rule, first as president and then as prime minister, lasted six years until he was deposed in a military coup which occurred when the religious right wing, despite the concessions Bhutto had made to their demands, made Pakistan ungovernable. In the chaos, General Zia u’Haq, the chief of army staff, took power. He hanged Bhutto two years later, in April 1979. Benazir was one of the last to see her father alive. She spent much of the next decade under house arrest or overseas.

Zia had ruled, at least initially, with the support of Pakistan’s numerous and well-organized Islamists, appointing many to political office, carefully directing funds to religious organizations, empowering the clergy and increasing the powers of the religious courts that had run alongside the previously largely secular legal system.
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The biggest beneficiaries of this shift were naturally the members and supporters of Jamaat Islami, the vast and highly disciplined organization founded by the Indian autodidact cleric Abu Ala Maududi in 1941, who, despite the concept of the nation theoretically being an unislamic innovation, had, like Islamists elsewhere, nonetheless accepted the idea of the Islamic or Islamicized nation state, albeit preferring one that was run by religious leaders, to a Western-style democracy.
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Maududi, who admitted that his vision owed much to revolutionary Communism and Fascism, was one of the most original thinkers of modern Islamic revivalism and a key influence on such major Middle Eastern figures such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and the Ayatollah Khomeini, who translated his works into Farsi. It was Maududi, for example, who first began using the term
jahiliya
, which can roughly be translated as pagan ignorance, to describe almost all innovations since the time of the
salaf
, the early generations of Muslims, and who popularized the idea of the jihad as transcendental struggle, albeit a spiritual one.
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Zia was the son of a government clerk, and his animosity towards the Bhutto dynasty was, at least in part, based on class. Though his continued hold on power owed much to American support – the invasion of Afghanistan arrived at a particularly opportune moment – the courteous, pious and teetotal general also successfully played on the tensions between the old landed elite and the less privileged bureaucracy, the recently educated urban lower middle class and the conservative commercial classes to divide any opposition to him. Relations between the dictator and the Islamists steadily soured, but there was enough consonance between Zia’s values and theirs for their agenda to be steadily advanced nonetheless. Though his death in a mysterious plane crash led to elections in 1988 which were, against all expectations, narrowly won by Bhutto and the PPP, the Islamists, though distanced from any formal power, retained a significant degree of informal influence, not least in the bureaucracy and the military.
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Their organization also remained strong, particularly in the urban lower middle classes, the bedrock of political Islamism across the Muslim world.

This rough balance of forces led to alternate governments of Bhutto’s PPP and the conservative Pakistan Muslim League (PML), now led by the unprepossessing Nawaz Sharif, through the 1990s. While Bhutto retained her power base in rural areas and in the south, Sharif, the son of an industrialist with solid Islamist connections, consolidated his own constituency in the relatively prosperous Punjab and among the urban population and reached out to Jamaat Islami.
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Weakened by her second deposition in 1996 and the reputation of her husband, a former playboy from a third-rank landed family called Asif Ali Zardari, for corruption, Bhutto was unable to mobilize sufficient popular support to resist efforts to bring her to trial at the end of the decade. To avoid looming incarceration, she fled the country.

Sharif’s triumph was short-lived, however. A combination of incompetence, graft and increasing authoritarianism rapidly alienated most of his erstwhile supporters, and when the army under General Musharraf moved in to depose him in 1999 the coup was largely welcomed as a result. Both Sharif and Bhutto had inherited vast problems from Zia but succeeded only in exacerbating them. Both had entered into a series of deals with religious parties to bolster their grip on power, allowing Islamists and the conservative Deobandi clergy to develop a power base within the democratic political system. Both had allowed or encouraged the country’s security services to aid the Taliban in Afghanistan and militant groups in Kashmir. Both, though ostensibly democratically elected and ‘moderate’, presided over a significant deterioration of relations with the USA. In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Pakistan for pursuing its nuclear programme. In 1998, a new set of more sweeping restrictions was triggered by Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of that year.
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Between them, Bhutto and Sharif left Pakistan’s economy on life support from international agencies increasingly unwilling to lend, its political system riddled with graft, its society undermined by unprecedented levels of crime and its stability threatened by rising extremist violence.
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Once Bhutto had left the country and Musharraf had taken power, few in the West paid much attention to Pakistan. This was a mistake. Over the previous decades almost every one of the various factors that had contributed to the rise of radical violent Islamism elsewhere had been emerging. Like their Egyptian or Algerian counterparts in the late 1990s, for example, young Pakistanis in, say, 2002 could look back on the successive failures of secular modernizing dictatorships, populist nationalist Socialism, state Islamism and a debased form of democracy to solve the problems of their country. There was the vast ‘youth bulge’ seen elsewhere too. Between 2002 and 2007, when violence began to surge in a very serious way, the other key elements which had helped create the conditions for violence elsewhere also became evident. There was the growth of the middle class to a size where a new arrangement of power relations and a redistribution of economic wealth in the country became unavoidable if any semblance of stability was to be retained. There was the social change associated with rapid urbanization and economic growth, which boosted expectations without resolving the structural problems which made them almost impossible to fulfil. There was the exposure to new ideas of pan-Islamic solidarity and the supposed Western ‘crusade’ against Muslims. There were tensions between generations and a general breakdown in established social hierarchies. There was, particularly due to the growing influence of the Middle East, a new reaffirmation of a more defined and confident Islamic identity, one which promised a resolution to the fundamental historic incoherence at the heart of the nation. This was Pakistan, of course, not the countries of the Maghreb or the core Middle East, and therefore these factors played out in new and different ways. But some of the consequences – particularly in terms of violence – were the same.