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Pakistan: What every American should know
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Pakistan is essentially an artificial nation. When the British ruled India, they permitted elections with communal franchises, which means that Hindus (the large majority) voted only for Hindu candidates, while Muslims (about 28 percent in undivided India) voted only for their fellow Muslims. This fostered extremism in both communities.
In 1947, when India became independent, the country was partitioned and Pakistan was created as a separate nation. India and Pakistan have fought repeated wars since then, over Kashmir, the chunk of swamp along the border known as the Rann of Cutch, and Bangladesh. Intense violence at independence forced all Hindus and Sikhs out of West Pakistan, although many Hindus remained in the East, which later became Bangladesh. Meanwhile, there was also an exodus of Muslims from India into Pakistan. In all, tens of millions were uprooted, and perhaps a million killed, in the 1947 turmoil.
From 1947 to 1970, West Pakistan treated the East -- separated by nearly a thousand miles of Indian territory -- as a colony, directing all development to the West. Political power was monopolized by the army, whose leaders were nearly all from the West. In East Pakistan, where Bengalis formed all but a small minority of the population, the local non-Bengali immigrants were favored by the West Pakistanis because they spoke Urdu, as did the Western elite. The large Hindu minority remaining in the East was discriminated against, and many fled to India.
In 1970, hundreds of thousands of East Pakistanis were killed in a flood, causing Bengali discontent to explode. Elections held shortly thereafter gave a majority to the Awami League, which sought extensive autonomy for the East. West Pakistan refused to accept the results of the election, leading to a civil war in which about three million East Pakistanis, most but not all of them Hindus, were killed. It was the most brutal act of genocide seen in the world since the fall of Nazi Germany.
The violence soon spread to India, forcing New Delhi to intervene, and this led to the creation of the new state of Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan. West Pakistan survived as a united state, but had lost more than half of its population as a result of the East's secession. It also lost its reason for existence. Pakistan had been created on the assumption that all Muslims in the Indian subcontinent formed a single nation, but after 1971, only about a third of them were living in Pakistan, with the rest either in Bangladesh or still in India. Pan-Islamists were strengthened by the military defeat, and soon became a stronger force than before. There were also ethnic quarrels in Pakistan between the dominant Punjabi and Pushtu groups, which ran the army, and the Sindhis, who were thinking of independence along the lines of Bangladesh. In addition, violence broke out between Sunnis and Shiites. Meanwhile, Pakistan developed its own nuclear arsenal, in response to India's emergence as a nuclear power.
Pakistan is now a failed state with nuclear weapons -- failed not only in terms of its inability to maintain law and order in its own territory, but in the sense that its reason for existence is no longer valid.
Today, the ISI, Pakistan's counterpart of the CIA, is covertly sympathetic to the jihadists of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Until recently, the Taliban enjoyed sanctuary in Pakistan, which received billions in U.S. military aid, even as its Taliban clients were killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. And it is widely believed that Mullah Omar, the head of the Afghan Taliban, is living in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
At the same time, Arab terrorists from al-Qaeda are not welcome in Pakistan, and both Ramzi Yussuf and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who plotted 9/11 with bin Laden's backing, were arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the United States.
Our media continue to repeat the story that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are hiding in a cave somewhere in the Frontier province of Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. How strange that our troops could find Tora Bora in Afghanistan within a few days, but haven't been able to find this new hiding place in nearly eight years, despite our spy satellites. And what about the captives we waterboarded in Guantanamo? Did we ever think of asking them, while we had their attention, where bin Laden might have been hiding?
The truth is that we already know. As Dick Cheney has recently stated, our "enhanced interrogation techniques" were successful. In 2005, Porter Goss, then head of the CIA, announced that bin Laden was hiding in a country where the government was protecting him. This clearly rules out Pakistan, where the jihadists tried at least twice to assassinate the then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Since then, the jihadists have slain Pakistan's leading politician Benazir Bhutto, bombed government offices, blown up Shiite mosques, and killed hundreds of civilians. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are clearly trying to destabilize the Pakistani government, and they would not be doing this if they were hiding in the country.
What bin Laden and his friends are trying to do is provoke a coup in Pakistan, toppling the moderate but unpopular current leader, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the slain Benazir Bhutto -- and a man with a particularly sleazy record of corruption. His current popularity is now running at below 20 percent, although most Pakistanis would probably not prefer a return to military rule.
Unless, of course, the killings and sectarian violence grew so intense that people could no longer tolerate it. And then, the army would intervene, as it has four times previously, to reestablish security. Few people, in Pakistan or elsewhere, would prefer violent anarchy to dictatorship. This is the current strategy of bin Laden and the jihadists. They are planning to seize power in Pakistan in order to gain control of its nuclear arsenal. Their targets, as they have boasted, will include Washington, DC, along with countless other cities throughout the world. The Obama administration had better recognize this threat before it is too late. We were warned ahead of time, repeatedly, about jihadists planning to hijack American airplanes, but the Bush-Cheney administration neglected to put sky marshals on our planes. This led to the deaths of 3000 Americans, and massive damage to our economy. The stakes today are even higher.
