Chronicling Pakistan's conflicted past
An old joke told by Pakistanis holds that three A's count in their country: Allah, army, and America. In his insightful history of his homeland, Husain Haqqani shows it is no joke and basically has been that way since Pakistan's violent birth in 1947 as a haven for Muslims from the dominant Hindus of India. Further, he shows the primacy of the three A's has made it harder for the developing country to grow its economy and rule itself democratically.
Pakistan: Between
Mosque and Military
By Husain Haqqani
Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace,
380 pp., $35.95
Haqqani, a Boston University professor of international relations who has served his country as an ambassador and an adviser to three prime ministers, starts with a challenge to a central piece of conventional wisdom. It was not, he maintains, military dictator Muhammad Zia ul-Haq who first led Pakistan to embrace radical Islam, in the late 1970s.
''Since the country's inception, Pakistan's leaders have played upon religious sentiment as an instrument of strengthening Pakistan's identity. Under ostensibly pro-Western rulers, Islam has been the rallying cry against perceived Indian threats," he writes. ''Such rulers have attempted to 'manage' militant Islamism, trying to calibrate it so that it serves a nation-building function without destabilizing internal politics or relations with Western countries."
The problem is Pakistan's rulers have had difficulty managing the Islamists they inspired. In late 1947, a few months after independence, army officers appealed to tribesmen to wage holy war and invade Kashmir in the first of several unsuccessful attempts to wrest the disputed Himalayan territory from India. Four decades later, Haqqani reveals Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate drafted a similar plan for jihad in Kashmir -- five years before an insurrection actually began in 1989. But until recently the ISI could not get the fighters to stand down, despite India's threats of war and US diplomatic pressure.
To many Americans, these seem like distant matters. Another example of the military-mosque nexus shows why they are not. Haqqani describes how Zia ul-Haq, a general who ruled from 1977 until his death in a plane crash in 1988, politicized believers in an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, the Deobandis. He also decreed that higher diplomas from Islamic seminaries be treated as the equivalent of a university degree in government hiring. Deobandi seminaries thrived. In the 1990s, they produced the Taliban militia that took over neighboring Afghanistan and refused to turn over Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leading to war with the United States.
As for the second A, Haqqani makes a fairly standard case that Pakistan's outsized and intrusive army has done the nation great harm. It has soaked up revenues that could be better used to address poverty and other social ills and has deviously meddled in domestic politics.
Haqqani casts the last A, America, as a willful contributor to the military's preeminence. The United States drew close to Pakistan in the 1950s as a buffer against Soviet expansionism, in the 1980s as a conduit for aid to Afghan holy warriors fighting the Soviets, and since 2001 as a helpmate in tracking down terrorists. Military dictators dominated each era.
He cites US Agency for International Development figures showing that US aid to Pakistan amounted to $12.6 billion between 1954 and 2002. Of that, $9.19 billion came during military rule, and the remaining $3.4 billion during civilian rule. That's not exactly the best way to export democracy. 