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Then what are the other power centers? They are the “non-state actors” that the administration keeps referring to when confronted with glaring evidence that terror attacks have been launched from Pakistani soil. The latest such evidence relates to last month’s terror attacks on Mumbai that killed nearly 200 innocent civilians and wounded hundreds others.
Who sustains these non-state actors? Pakistan’s armed forces and its infamous spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, have a vested interest in keeping them as stock-in-trade to foment trouble in India. Their complicity is legend in sending terrorists to Indian Kashmir and earlier, fomenting the Sikh insurgency in the Indian state of Punjab.
But, the magnitude of the attack on Mumbai was unprecedented. The attack was meant to create maximum havoc and disrupt India’s economic and social life. India – secular, democratic and a growing economic powerhouse in Asia – is a threat to Pakistan, which has turned into a failed state. To stay afloat as a nation, Pakistan’s ISI and armed forces have to strike at the very heart of India’s ethos.
Pakistan could have had the same ethos by now had the armed forces not held democratic and civilian institutions to ransom for most of the 61 years since both were born as nation states.
With a couple hundred feudal families controlling Pakistan, it was obvious that leaders would emerge from the wealthiest and strongest among them. Instead of bettering the lives of ordinary Pakistanis in the rural areas, and those living in remote and inhospitable terrain, they polished off the exchequer among them and parked their loot abroad.
The few lucky ones among the impoverished managed to take up menial jobs in the immigration-free Britain of the 1950s and early 1960s. The rest became easy meat for religious fundamentalists with little education beyond the the anti-West venom spewed out at Islamic madrassas. And thanks to General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the only jobs available to them were in the armed forces. No wonder the Pakistani army has lost all the wars it initiated against India.
The only motivation for the religiously radicalized Pakistani soldier was the belief that he occupied a “moral high ground,” from which a Hindu-majority India could be taught a lesson for holding onto the Muslim-majority territory of Kashmir.
To quell the insurgency in East Pakistan in 1971, West Pakistani troops – Punjabis, Balochis and Pathans – were sent on a mission to crush a “Hindu” rebellion. The Bengali Muslims, influenced by the poet Rabindranath Tagore and neighboring India’s West Bengali language and literature, were not considered Muslim enough.
Officials in Pakistan’s armed forces and civilian think tanks outside the country, wedded to the Hindu India-Muslim Pakistan theory, feel that India has enough fault lines – like the caste disparity and homegrown dissent – to make it easy for insurgents to manipulate the people. India, they believe, has weak joints.
India’s Muslim population numbers more than that of Pakistan and is second only to Indonesia’s. Yet India’s secularism, uninterrupted democracy, and surge as Asia’s second economic powerhouse after China, are a threat to Pakistan’s military and the “non-state actors” it harbors.
The United States needs Pakistan now more than ever. As U.S. and NATO troops battle terrorists in Afghanistan, crucial supplies of arms and food must be routed through Pakistan.
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to send a special envoy to Kashmir to help solve the India-Pakistan problem, in return for Pakistan’s assistance in fighting terrorists along its border with Afghanistan, could be a wrong judgment. So could U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s attempt to blame the Mumbai mayhem on al-Qaida to cool the anger in India. Everyone, including Pakistan, is a victim of their heinous acts.
How long can the world’s strongest democracy, the United States, continue to support the world’s strongest nuclear-powered rogue nation, Pakistan, at the expense of the largest democracy, India – when Obama’s presidency is supposed to be all about change?
Pakistan may put on an act and imprison some members of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group – which is masquerading as a non-governmental organization – until the dust settles. And then, who knows? Maybe the ISI will facilitate its rehabilitation under a new name. Can India ignore public sentiment and anger when vicious attacks, planned on Pakistan’s soil, continue?
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(Susenjit Guha is a freelance writer living in Kolkata, India. He can be contacted at sguha60@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Susenjit Guha.)
