Why does Pakistan behave like this ?

What behaviour, one may ask. That may best be explained by some of the ways Pakistan has been described in recent times, 'international migraine'(Madeline Albright), 'epicentre of terrorism' (Man Mohan Singh), 'a mortal threat'(Hillary Clinton), 'a fire inside its own house'(Pierre Lellouche, French Special Envoy for Af-Pak), "the headquarters of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership"(Gen. David Petraeus), 'main terrorist threat'(Lord Malloch-Brown, Foreign Office Minister for Africa and Asia, UK), 'the biggest source of instability'(Annual Review, IISS), 'a rat hole'(Howard L Berman, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman), 'epicentre of extremism'(Senator John F Kerry, Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee), 'epicenter of global terror'(Country Report on terrorism, 2009, US State Department), '[hosting] more terrorists per square mile than any place else on earth'(Bruce Riedel), 'Wal-mart of proliferation' (El Baradei) etc.

And, yet, Pakistanis are not perturbed in the least by such epithets, adjectives and descriptions. They dismiss all these with a wave of their hand, as simply motivated attempts by infidels to run down the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons. Pakistanis are more concerned by the 'image' of honour and dignity rather than by real honour and dignity which unfortunately lies in tatters. Something is etched, imprinted deep in their minds and they are resolutely unwilling to shake it off or erase that and move on with times, redefining their goals and strategies. Why should they go to such extraordinary lengths of even placing the future of their nation in great peril ? At every crisis, they end up creating a bigger crisis for themselves, for their neighbours and the world at large because they resolutely cling to their false and manufactures pre-Independence theories and myths. They simply refuse to see the writing on the wall. Why should a nation be so irresponsible to itself and the rest of humanity ?

With great perspicacity, a former Spanish ambassador to Pakistan is said to have made this statement, in the 1960s, “. . . this country [Pakistan] will drift from crisis to calamity, from calamity to catastrophe, and from catastrophe to disaster.” While I derive no schadenfraude from what is happening in Pakistan today, one cannot but admire Perico, Duke of Amalfi, for his ability to look far ahead and so early too.

Pakistan has gone through a tortuous course since its Independence and almost all of that is its own making. Military coups, economic meltdowns, superpower playground, terrorism, fundamentalism, Islamic sectarianism, wars, secession, genocide, duplicity, fraud . . . you name it and Pakistan has done it all or is continuing to do them all with no signs of any abatement, in the span of six-and-a-half decades. What ails this country and why is it unable to unshackle itself from these vicious things that immobilize Pakistan from behaving like a normal nation state ?

In the context of the 'enduring hostility' between India-Pakistan (which should be more appropriately called, 'enduring-one-way-rivalry-with-India-by-Pakistan'), Pakistan went to war with India in 1947, 1948, 1965, 1971 (Western front) and 1999. In 1947, they could not achieve their goal of walking into Kashmir on October 26 to celebrate the Eid. In 1965, India went almost up to the outskirts of Lahore. In 1971, they lost more than half their nation within a fortnight and India took 93,000 PoWs (Prisoners of War). In 1999, they had to seek American intervention to extricate themselves after suffering massive casualty that even led to revolts in some places within Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK). So, what did they learn from these various wars and defeats ? Nothing, would be the only answer. A revisionist Pakistan, instead of re-aligning its goals vis-a-vis the status-quo power India, decided to simply do more of the ruinous same after every calamitous outing. More money was therefore spent for the military at the direct cost of the welfare of the people of the impoverished country.

The policymakers of Pakistan realized quite early that Pakistan could not defeat India militarily and hence went in for military pacts with other powers to achieve their irredentist dreams against India. This brought Cold War to the Indian subcontinent in the 50s. The devastating 1971 defeat taught the Pakistanis to go in for nuclear weapons even if the people were 'to eat grass', and employ jihadi terrorism as an instrument of state policy. The 'secret jihad' that Pakistan has been waging against the Indian state since c. 1947, got further impetus after the US set up the Bear Trap for the Soviets in Afghanistan with Pakistani assistance in c. 1979. The mujahideen tanzeems and their tactics were transferred to the eastern front of Pakistan after c. 1989. The euphoria that followed this event made even a moderate leader like Ms. Benazir Bhutto thunder “Azadi, Azadi, Goli chalao” (Freedom, Freedom, Shoot) in a public meeting in Muzzafarabad (POK). The 1999 defeat taught Pakistan to give a lot more support to terrorism against India using non-state actors, to subvert a growing Indian economy through fake Indian curreny notes (FICN) etc. The new CEO of Pakistan Gen. Musharraf, who came via a military coup, said in Muzzafarabad on February 5, 2000 that jihad had decisively shifted from Afghanistan to Kashmir. What he meant was probably the whole of India, not Kashmir alone, because it was in his regime that too many audacious terrorist attacks were mounted on various cities of India by the ISI. After the events surrounding 9/11, the Pakistani Army and its notorious intelligence agency, the ISI, have even given up all pretensions to their earlier policy of 'plausible deniability' and have been openly involved in supporting the terror activities against India by the various jihadi tanzeems. Thus, the French proverb Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (The more it changes, the more it remains the same) fits the Pakistani situation exceedingly well.

While it will be too difficult to find a single silver bullet or even possibly several of them for such incredulous behaviour by Pakistan, one must look deep into the background to the creation of Pakistan itself to partially understand today's events.

By the turn of the Twentieth Century, the Muslims were acutely aware of the fact that they had seen better days and their glory was on the wane irrecoverably. The previous two centuries had seen the European powers like Great Britain, Russia, and France vanquish Muslim rulers in India, Central Asia and parts of North Africa respectively. By early Twentieth Century, the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating. Muslims all over the world, and especially in India, were introspecting and came to the conclusion that their misfortune was because of moving away from Islam. In India, Emperor Akbar’s accommodation of Hindu philosophy had already raised the ire of the fundamentalists. The backlash came swiftly in the form of his successor Emperor Aurangazeb who implemented a strict form of Islam and treated the Hindus as dhimmi. Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi, who was a religious teacher of Aurangazeb, ensured fundamentalist ideas were firmly entrenched in governance. This later led to the emergence of such hardcore fundamentalists as Sheikh Waliullah and Ahmed Berelvi who took his volunteers to Afghanistan border to fight the British and the Sikh kings, in an act reminiscent of Prophet Muhammad’s hijra from Makkah to Medinah. The Afghan borders have never been the same after this emigration by Ahmed Berelvi. While some Muslims raged at their impotence to fight the British, others plotted to regain power through an association with the British. The Indian muslims were thus divided into two groups. The First War of Independence in c. 1857 by Indian soldiers (in fact, many would say that the First War of Independence was in c. 1807 when sepoys mutineed in the Vellore Fort) under the flag of the Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar and the ruthless manner it was put down followed by his deportation to Burma where he died eventually unsung, created revulsion in the minds of Indian Muslims. Later in c. 1915, a Deobandi cleric Ubaidullah Sindhi was sent to Afghanistan to contact the Turkish and German missions there and organize an uprising against the British in India. However, the Afghan King, Habibullah Khan, the son of the founder of modern Afghanistan Abd-ur-Rehman, refused to allow any anti-British plots from the Afghan soil. In c. 1920, when the Khilafat Movement in India was at its peak, several thousand Indian Muslims wanted to emigrate from the British-ruled Dar-ul-Harb to Muslim-ruled Afghanistan of Dar-ul-Aman but this time too, the Afghan Government, led by Amir Amanuallah Khan, son of Habibullah Khan, turned them back.

The Berelvi (also known as Ahl-e-Sunnat) influence in Pakistan was widespread in 1947. Slowly, that influence was overtaken by Deobandi and later Wahhabi interests. The Deobandi influence began to wax when the Deobandi clerics overwhelmed Liaquat Ali Khan and succeeded in passing the Objectives Resolution (‘Qarardad-e-Maqasid’) in the Pakistani Constituent Assembly in c. 1949. The Wahhabi influence began to wax when the Saudi oil money began to play an important role in Pakistan consequent to the Afghan jihad.

(To be Continued . . .)

Turbulence in West Asia and its Impact on Pakistan - Part II

Bahrain, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, Syria, Jordan are all experiencing churning and turmoil, some on a largescale and widespread and others on a much smaller scale. These have not erupted all of a sudden, as some may think. The Islamic world has been experiencing convulsions since the 18th century. Before we understand the modern foundations for this upheavel, we need to look historically at the period for three centuries before and see the impact of various events and dramatis personae had on today's turn of events. Pakistan is equally affected by these historical facts and it serves therefore to understand them.

Modern day Islamists are inspired by several Islamic scholars, not the least of which is ibn Taymiyya (c. 1263 - 1328). Indeed, he is the fountainhead of today's jihadi Islamism. Present day Islamist jihadis have used his fatwa (Islamic religious decree)that ‘if infidels (kafir)take shelter behind Muslims, and these Muslims become a shield for the infidels, it is permitted to kill the Muslims in order to get at the infidels.’ This was known as the Mardin Declaration referring to the city of Mardin in Turkey where Ibn Taymiyya was living at that time. The Mongol devastation of Syria radicalized his thoughts. The Wahhabi movement reveres ibn Taymiyya. He claimed that he was following the first three generations of Islamists (salaf in Arabic, meaning ancestors) and hence he is considered the ‘Architect of Salafism’. In c. 2010, a group of Islamic scholars from various countries felt that the Mardin Declaration (fatwa) was misunderstood due to a minute typographical error. A manuscript copy of the fatwa present in a Damascus library is considered to contain the correct wording. Whatever be the truth, who cares ? The damage is already done and irretrievably too. It means little now if an insignificant group of ulema talk of a typographical error.

In India, in the meanwhile, were born a series of Islamist scholars in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries who dominated the scene and created a fertile situation for today's jihad in the Af-Pak areas. During this period, India was largely ruled by the Muslim invaders whose grip was fast loosening. The first of such Islamist scholars was Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi of the 17th century. He belonged to the Naqshbandi order (a Sufi order of Islam named after the Tajikistan-born mystic Bhauddin Naqshbandi). He is also known as Mujaddid-Alf-e-Thani (Reformer of the Second Islamic Millennium). There is a reason why he was given that title. By sixteenth century, Sufism had taken a stronghold in India and it helped to bridge the divide between the liberal polytheistic Hinduism and the rigid monotheistic Islam. During the reign of the Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, the synthesis between Islam and Hinduism reached greater heights. The Chishti order (another of the Sufi orders of brotherhood) took predominant roots over other Sufi forms such as Qadriyah, and Naqshbandi (It continues to have a wide following in the Indian subcontinent) Emperor Akbar’s accommodation of Hindu philosophy and his creation of a new faith Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith)was detested by the orthodoxy of Islam. To this day, Akbar is hated by the Islamists of Pakistan for that reason. After the codification of Islamic jurisprudence and the formation of the four schools or madhhab(Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafii) by the early 9th century, the ulema had shut the doors on any further interpretation of Islam. Akbar's actions therefore violated this ban and hence considered heretical. In Pakistan, history textbooks trace their nation only from the conquest of Mohammed bin Qasim in areas of Sind in 712 AD, then skip to Mahmud Ghaznavi in the early 11th century, thus skipping the intervening three centuries, then move to Mahmud Ghori of the late 12th century, again skipping nearly two centuries, refer to the establishment of the Mughal empire by Babur and later the rule of Aurangzeb (Akbar's great grand-son and a fundamentalist Islamist) skipping the rule of other emperors most notably Akbar, then move forward to the First Indian Independence War of 1857 only because the soldiers who mutineed looked upto the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, and then stop at the emergence of Jinnah in 1920s).

Sirhindi's time coincided with that of Jahangir (Nur-ud-din Salim Jahangir, son of Akbar). Jahangir’s grandson and a religious bigot and tyrant, Aurangzeb, was greatly influenced by Sirhindi. Sirhindi ensured that the ijtihad of Akbar did not allow the influence of Hinduism on Islam. Many credit Sirhindi for having introduced communalism that led to the creation of Pakistan three-and-a-half centuries later. He reportedly praised cow-slaughter in India as a great Islamic act.

Next in the line of such Islamist thinkers was Shah Waliullah Dehelvi (c. 1703-1762). He came at the time the Moghul empire was declining after the unpopular and tyrannical rule of Aurangzeb, with the Hindus and the Sikhs revolting. Waliullah helped the Afghan king Ahmed Shah (also known as Ahmed Shah Durrani or Ahmed Shah Abdali) to overcome the Mahrattas in the Panipat war in 1761. He also belonged to the Naqshbandi order of Sufism and was educated in Makkah and Madinah. Waliullah was a Sufi but his stay at Makkah and Medinah coincided with ibn Wahhab's time. He was greatly influenced by him. Upon his return to India, he decided to rid Islam in the Indian subcontinent of Hindu practices and influences. In this he was like ibn Taymiya who also started as a Sufi but ended up as a Hanbali votary. Waliullah's recipe for recovering from the decline of Islam was by making its practice more rigorous. However, he was for constant ijtihad (creative reinterpretation of Islamic jurisprudence) but wanted to get rid of the Hindu practices that might have corrupted Islam. He wanted an intensification of Aurangzeb’s efforts. His thoughts led to the formation of the Berelvi sect later on. Shah Waliullah’s contribution was the linkage he formed between Deobandi Islam and the Hanbali Islam of Saudi Arabia during his sojourn in the Hejaz area of Saudi Arabia. Waliullah believed in the absolute truth of the Koran and the Sunnah (Hadith) and the times of the salafs (ancestors). He thus laid the foundation for Ahl-e-Hadith sect. The madrassah at Deoband, Saharanpur Distt. of Uttar Pradesh (UP), largely teaches Islam based on the interpretation of Waliullah. Ahmed Berelvi, whom we shall see next, was a disciple of Waliullah’s son, Shah Abdul Aziz.

The third and the last in this triumvirate list is Sayyid Ahmed 'Berelvi'. He founded the Berelvi sect of Sunnis. He introduced militancy into Islam hitherto practised in India, for fighting the Hindus, Sikhs and the British. He created Tariq-e-Muhammadiyah (Way of Muhammad) that combined sufism and orthodox Islam. At this time, Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Maharajah of the Punjab, was beginning to conquer Afghan territories west of the Indus. In c. 1820, Kashmir became his vassal state. Sayyid declared jihad against the Sikh rulers and wanted to establish an Islamic state in the Indo-Afghan border (the present day Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa or what was until recently known as North Western Frontier Province, NWFP)where he emigrated to with his followers, a la hijra of Prophet Muhammad, in circa 1826. Such a migration was to take place from Dar-ul-Harb (Land of War) of India to Dar-ul-Islam (Land of Islam) of Afghanistan in the early part of the 20th century too after the Ottoman Empire and thus the Caliphate was dismantled in Turkey. Thus, Berelvi set the precedence. The second migration was also to end in failure, just like Berelvi's, because the Afghan King, Amanuallah Khan, son of Habibullah Khan and grand-son of the founder of modern Afghanistan Abd-ur-Rehman, unwilling to antagonise the British, turned the emigrés back. The Afghan borders have never been the same after this emigration by Ahmed Berelvi. The Yusufzai tribes rebelled against him for his attempts to enforce rules contradictory to the Pashtunwali code (the tribal code of conduct practised for centuries). Maharajah Ranjit Singh exploited the situation and his army ambushed the forces of Berelvi near Balakot and killed his followers along with the grandson of Shah Waliullah, Sayyed Ismail. Berelvi was defeated and then executed by the Sikhs in circa 1831. There is evidence that the British, in order to protect their geopolitical interests, actually helped Sayyid Ahmed to fight the Sikhs, especially because the Sikh rulers had turned to the French. Though a large number of Pakistanis are Berelvis, Deobandis have made significant inroads in Pakistani society too.