Pakistan: present, past and future

A Persian poet once said, when a builder fails to put the foundation stone of a building straight, the whole structure gets erected clumsily. More than 60 years old, Pakistan is “clumsy” from the foundations through decades of misrule. Consequently even positive developments in the governance of the country are deemed with scepticism.

The inauguration of the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhuto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari as the 12th president of Pakistan, following the resignation of General Parvez Musharaf, hardly satisfied the public. Apart from Mr Zardari’s chequered past, which makes the Pakistani public cynical of any improvements likely to happen in their lives, the country has been in continuous internal turmoil since its creation, which seems to be the major element in public’s distrust on governments.

Since 1947, the country has seen only 27 years of democratically elected governments. This has taken its toll on the integrity of the country as well as the contentment of its multiethnic population.

The maltreatment of small provinces within Pakistan and the country’s behaviour towards at least one neighbour, Afghanistan, are other major elements that have played an enormous role in its instability.

Birth

Pakistan was founded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), known as Qaid-e-Azam (the greatest leader). The son of a prosperous Indian merchant he was educated in London and was initially a member of the Indian National Congress party. He joined the Muslim League of India (MLI) in 1913 and became its leader in 1920. In 1940 in a Muslim League conference in Lahore (now in Pakistan) Jinnah made an official demand for a separate state for India’s Muslim population.

On August 14, 1947, his venture bore fruit. India was partitioned and a new state, Pakistan, was born. As a backdrop to the creation of the new state hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lost their lives and more than 14 million people were forced to migrate between India and Pakistan.

The colonial empire as usual played its hypocritical role in adding to the fire. A 1940s British civil servant Christopher Beaumont’s memoir says:

The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished. … The Punjab partition was a disaster … Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment. The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

Jinnah didn’t live long though, and died of tuberculosis a year after the creation of Pakistan. However, in that one year as the first governor-general of the new state he demolished the Congress government in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), forced Baluchistan to enter the confederacy of Pakistan and imposed Urdu as the national language on the more than 95 per cent non-Urdu speakers of the country.

This series of hasty and unlawful actions triggered the dismissal of the first civilian government in 1953 by Governor-General Ghulam Mohammed. Dismissals were to become the fashion in Pakistani politics.

The state was created on the sole basis of Islamic identity (as MLI was granted a separate electorate on this ground by the British rulers in 1937 and 1946 elections) and its fundamental state law was supposed to be based on Islam. But Jinnah failed to implement that policy. Instead, he and his associates created an enterprise that was neither Islamic nor democratic, but a confusing mixture of both, which still constitutes today’s Pakistan.

Provinces

Pakistan was created in two pieces of land - east Bengal which constituted East Pakistan - and a combination of four provinces, - Punjab, Sindh, NWFP and Baluchistan, which constituted West Pakistan. One thousand miles of India separated the two parts.

In an election after the second war with India in 1971, the Awami League of Sheikh Mujeeb Rahman won the majority of votes in the eastern part, while Zulfiqar Ali Bhuto’s Peoples’ Party took most votes in the western. On the whole the Awami League had the edge and was supposed to form government, but Bhuto refused. Instead, Bhuto said to Rahman “this bit is mine and that is yours” and so the Indian subcontinent was bestowed with another child - Bangladesh.

Within the continuing Pakistan, Punjab has been the main powerhouse of the country and regarded as “us” while the other provinces are the “others”. Punjab is the largest producer of food, but the importance of other provinces cannot be denied either. Sindh is known for its industrial and trading significance, Baluchistan supplies gas to the country and the NWFP provides almost 70 per cent of the country’s energy.

In exchange for their contribution, the small provinces’ population, particularly NWFP and Baluchistan, have been treated as second-class citizens, with low standards of urban infrastructure including road, rail and other forms of transportation and communication facilities, power, water and sanitation, and educational institutions including all forms of schools and universities.

Punjab and also Sindh (of which Karachi is the capital and is the largest and most developed city in the country with almost 20 million population) enjoy, in most cases, a good standard of urban facilities, although the rural areas are poorly serviced across the whole country.

For 60 years since the creation of Pakistan, NWFP and Baluchistan lobbied to receive royalties for the gas and electricity they supply to the country, but their voice has always fallen on deaf ears in Islamabad.

This inequality has created antagonism in the provinces and promoted nationalistic and separatist sentiments. Baluchis revolted against the central government two years ago and NWFP and the tribal areas, who share the same ethnicity, experienced clashes between the army and the so-called Pakistani Taliban.

Recently, the newly elected nationalist government in the province has brokered a rather fragile truce with anti-government forces. The local government believes that the revolt is a result of lack of development in the province and tribal areas. But the central government in Islamabad seems more interested in what makes the Americans happy rather than in the views of the disaffected.

The inhabitants of the province are Pashtoons, the ethnic group that comprises more than 65 per cent of the population across the Durand line in Afghanistan. Because of this link Pakistani governments have always questioned Pashtoons’ loyalty despite them proving their loyalty fighting alongside the Pakistani army against the Indians in two wars.

Neighbours

Pakistan borders China, Iran, India and Afghanistan.

The country has friendly relations with China, which has also fought with India over border issues. With Iran, Pakistan has a normal relationship and even plays a connecting role between the disgruntled USA and Iran.

In the case of India, Kashmir has been a major obstacle to normalising relations between the two countries. The Beaumont memoir constantly points to the fact that the partition was hasty and that Viceroy Mountbatten bent the borders in India’s favour.

Kashmir was one of the Muslim-majority territories that was intentionally ceded to India instead of either giving it to Pakistan or being made into a third country. On Kashmir Beaumont says the third option was “far more sensible”.

Pakistan has had quite bleak relations with Afghanistan since its creation. Afghanistan was the only country to vote in the United Nations against the recognition of Pakistan as an independent country. This was because Afghanistan has a claim over the Pashtoon areas of Pakistan, which includes NWFP, tribal areas and about 40 per cent of the Baluchistan province. Afghanistan lost these areas after an agreement between the British foreign secretary Mortimer Durand and the Afghan Amir Abdul Rahman Khan in 1893. In 1949 the Loya Girga (Grand Assembly) of Afghanistan declared the Durand line invalid since British India ceased to exist after the creation of India and Pakistan.

Abdul Samad Ghaus, a long time civil servant in Afghan governments, talks about the conflict in his book The fall of Afghanistan: an insider’s account. He says Afghanistan could have captured the Pashtoon areas of Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 when Pakistan was at war with India. Ghaus says that on both occasions some members of the King Zahirshah’s cabinet asked the government to attack Pakistan, but it was refused on the basis of it being principally wrong to attack a Muslim country when it was at war with a non-Muslim country. He says in 1971, after the war, the then prime minister of Pakistan Zulfiqar Ali Bhuto especially travelled to Kabul to thank Afghanistan for not attacking Pakistan.

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989) Pakistan, seeing its sovereignty threatened, helped the Afghan resistance and opened its borders to Afghan refugees after being instructed to by the USA. During these years Pakistan was showered with Western and Arab money and ammunitions, taking full advantage of the situation to not only supply its army with new weaponry, but to work tirelessly on completing its nuclear bomb project.

Within the Afghan resistance forces the Pakistan army’s notorious spy agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), created as much conflict as it could and created more than seven resistance parties. These political parties initiated a fierce civil war, after the defeat of the Soviet forces, in which thousands of innocent people lost their lives.

Under Whitehouse directions Pakistan created the Taliban movement, a combination of religious students and elements of former resistance forces. At the same time an alliance of minority ethnic groups was created in the north of Afghanistan, with the help of Russia and Central Asian countries, to resist the advance of the Taliban forces.

After the events of September 11, 2001 in the US, Pakistan opened its air and ground corridors to the Americans to invade Afghanistan. Just as in the Soviet invasion, Pakistanis wanted to obtain some monetary benefit from the new venture in Afghanistan.

Musharaf, in his book In the line of fire, admits that Pakistan obtained a large amount of cash in exchange for providing logistic support to the Americans and the handover of thousands of innocent Afghan and non-Afghans to USA as Taliban and al-Qaida suspects.

The alienation of small provinces coupled with its unconditional support of the American “war on terror” have brought Pakistan to a situation worse than that the country experienced in 1971 when Bangladesh was separated.

The disaffected populace of Baluchistan, NWFP and tribal areas and the revolt against the state in the areas is a direct result of the hasty and erroneous domestic and foreign policies of the governments in Islamabad.

The presence of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president at the inauguration ceremony of Asif Ali Zardari as the president of Pakistan is a sign that Pakistan may have learned from its past mistakes.

Afghanistan has always been complaining about intruding militants from the Pakistani side of the Durand line. If the new president in Pakistan were able to curb the problem, then Mr Karzai will have to accept the demands of the forces opposed to his government to end the conflict without disgruntling his “godfathers” in Europe and the USA.

And unlike Musharaf, Zardari seems to be more compatible with Karzai. However, it remains to be seen whether the new president will be able to contain the influence of Pakistan’s powerful generals on the politics of the country or will if maintain the status quo.

The ball is in the court of Mr Zardari and his government in Pakistan. Whether they will choose to change the 60-year-old route of governance in Pakistan and respond logically and sensibly to the deteriorating situation or push it to further divisions or even eventual demise, time will tell.