October 15, 1998
Holes dug deeper
"Although the Taliban seem to be digging their own political grave, the Pakistani leadership follows them along the same path, writes Eqbal Ahmad"
A North African diplomat with years of experience in the Middle East and Africa lamented the behaviour of Arab and Muslim governments the other day: "When one falls into a hole, instinct and reason compels an effort to get out of it. Our leaders do the opposite. They keep digging the hole deeper until they can't get out." He was venting frustration over the state of affairs in Algeria and Palestine.
I thought of Pakistan. Our leaders too keep digging the holes we are in as though they wish to bury alive the country and its people. Oblivious to insistent warnings and clear signals they keep digging deeper, hole after hole until the country finds itself in a depression difficult to overcome.
Soon after its founding, Pakistan fell, from an excess of insecurity and paucity of leadership, into the traps of dependency and militarism, and failed to get out of these even after the state, as originally constituted, broke up. By 1974, it was clear that Pakistan was getting into a third trap, namely debt. Since others -- Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia etc -- were already ensnared, the debt trap was on the forefront as a Third World problem. Its disastrous consequences were known.
So this time around, warnings went out, from civil society no less than the conscientious technocrats, that while the debt hole was still shallow we should stop borrowing. Z A Bhutto ignored them. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq dug Pakistan deeper into the debt trap while taking the country into other -- the Afghanistan and 'Islamisation' -- traps.
Neither ruler made one contribution toward advancing the country's future. Successive governments have built on this legacy. Mr Nawaz Sharif may do worse by bringing this catastrophic process to its logical conclusion, unless, that is, citizens compel him to seek a way out of our multiple entrapments.
If he is inclined to help this beleaguered land, his easiest challenges lie in the Islamisation project, and in Afghanistan where the trap door is still somewhat open. The arguments for both have been made earlier in this space. They bear repeating. Islamism -- that is, the deployment of Islam as a political weapon -- has been a ploy of enfeebled governments. Z A Bhutto used it as his last resort. Jaafar Numeiry of Sudan deployed it to shore up his declining power. Zia-ul-Haq pushed Islamisation to overcome his isolation and cover up his breach of oath and solemn promises to restore constitutional government.
But religion is about the spirit rather than power, it is about morals not politics. Hence the internal structure of Islam resisted these invasions of opportunism, and neither Bhutto, nor Numeiry, nor Zia were helped by their crude hauling of Islam into politics.
Prime Minister Sharif ought to heed these examples, promptly put his 15th amendment in deep freeze, and make laws to suit the needs of society.
All disturbances contain the seeds of creation; their utilisation depends on human intelligence and effort. The turmoil which broke out in Afghanistan with the communist coup d'etat of 1978 held promises no less than perils. As a primary actor in Afghanistan, Islamabad takes credit for the Soviet debacle there. It must also bear responsibility for the great tragedy which has since visited Afghanistan and its people. Predictably, we share some of the perils -- guns, drugs, refugees and a great distortion of religion and society -- which have visited the Afghans. Given our support of the Taliban, more and worse can be forecast. There is still time, I believe, to cut our losses.
That is precisely what Islamabad appears unwilling to do. In New York last week the officials who accompanied Prime Minister Sharif offered platitudes on behalf of the Taliban. "They are a misunderstood lot," said one high level Pakistani official to his skeptical audience, "They are simple and sincere people who have brought peace and stability to a large part of Afghanistan. Of course, they have made mistakes, but they are young and learning." A senior American official is reported to have received an unworthy explanation of the murders the Taliban carried out of ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist: "They had been there supporting the anti-Taliban opposition and were seen as the enemy." As for the ethnic cleansing the Taliban carried out in Mazar Sharif, "the numbers are highly exaggerated." These explanations did not go well with the hostage-bitten and terrorism obsessed Americans who fear, as UN officials do, that Taliban capture of Bamiyan may entail Shi'a-cleansing and Iran's intervention. But the accusation that Iran was attempting to divide Afghanistan in order to expand its influence in South West and Central Asia fell on hospitable American ears. Effective or not, Pakistani officials engaged in propaganda not diplomacy. As propaganda goes, such cant does nothing to advance the national interest and much to harm it.
Iranians heard perhaps exaggerated versions of these mutterings. Predictably, they were furious. For nearly forty-eight of Pakistan's fifty-one years Iran had been a friend. For good reasons: We have no territorial dispute with Iran. Our strategic interests coincide and cultural ties go deep in history. There is no objective basis for a clash of Iran-Pakistan interests. For a country born with a sense of insecurity, Iran's and China's goodwill have been Pakistan's greatest assets. Islamabad is in the process of squandering these assets. It is essential to change this suicidal course before it is too late. Nothing, no amount of real or imagined Pakistani influence in Afghanistan can compensate for the loss of Pakistan's fraternity with Iran. For differing reasons the Chinese too are uneasy over Pakistan's support of a militantly obscurantist movement in Afghanistan.
Even high level Pakistani officials feign ignorance of realities, and emit clichés as they did in 1971 during the East Pakistan crisis. Some months ago in Islamabad I expressed concern to one of them over Taliban's excesses. He responded by saying that a lot of the bad impression about the Taliban has been created by Western journalists who apply Western norms to Afghanistan.
"Afghans", he said, "have their own way of life." A familiar line! Tell that to the Afghan physician who cannot attend to an ailing woman, the teacher who cannot teach, the artist who may not paint, and the singer who is not permitted to sing. "But they are a handful of intellectuals," replies the senior official from the Foreign Office. He is an educated man who had his son study in an American university. Could he be unaware that intellectuals, professionals and artists have been for centuries the cement of societies, including Afghan society, the 'ahl al-hall wal-aqd'' who hold communities together and help sustain the process of continuity and change? We complain of Washington's double standards. Is it not a moral obligation to eschew double standards of our own?
Myths and false presumptions inform our Afghan policy. There is the notion of strategic depth which has become lodged in some perfectly normal minds. A fixation of this sort is not unique to the Pakistani strategic brain. The French got fixed on the Maginot Line and paid for this fixation with a humiliating defeat. I have argued at length in this space that "strategic depth" is not a concept. It is a very dangerous illusion. The sooner it is abandoned the better for the country.
Then there is the pipe dream about the pipelines of which the Taliban are perceived as the knight guards. A bunch of American, Argentinean and Saudi financed oil cartels have fed this dream by investing in it some of their tax-free dollars. At the beginning the United States also connived in it. As with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, for them it is a relatively cost-free investment. If it works so much the better. If it does not work, they take the tax deductions on monetary losses. The real costs will be paid by the locals.
Afghans, Pakistanis, and Iranians are still paying, to varying degrees, the price of the Jihad against the "evil empire". The Americans took their profit and left, unscathed. A few angered men seek revenge, and the giant cries over mosquito bites.
From the start, Pakistan's unproductive and extravagant establishment has regarded the free flow of foreign money as a primary objective of foreign policy. Almost all our major foreign policy developments -- pro-America posture, courting of the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, promotion of labour-export, conversion of Pakistan into a 'front-line state' -- have been compelled by this limited pecuniary quest. An objective so skewed cannot serve the national interest. Our own history is witness to this fact. Yet the diggers are still at work.