Book Review (Spring, 2007)
This volume by Professor Haqqani purports to represent an independent study of the changing role of Islamic ideology from the partition of India in 1947 until Pakistan's ambiguous participation in the Bush administration's so-called "war on terror." Haqqani sketches the religious affiliation of the Muslim League, headed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, describes the evolution of the Muslim faithinto the unifying ideology of the Islamic state, and the subsequent redirection of that faith into various jihadi movements opposed to the Soviet occupationof Afghanistan and secularist (but majority Hindu) India. He concludes that the state should be sundered from Islam, with state power transferred (at US behest) from the existing military-political apparatus to secular political leadership expressed in the English-based parliamentary form favored by trans-national corporations. If the leit-motif of the Pakistani military leadership be correct, that only militant Islamic ideology is strong enough to cement a political superstructure constricting the Sindi and Baluchi nationalities under the boot of a Punjabi military clique, Haqqani's recommendation might be read as recommending the dissolution of the Pakistani state into its component nationalities prior to the reintegration of the disparate nationalities into the neighboring Indian state structure. One may speculate that while such a scenario might gratify Israeli strategic planners, invariably hostile to the prospect of an Islamic state disposing of nuclear capabilities, one might legitimately inquire if such an outcome would be met with unalloyed joy at the Red Fort in Delhi. For as events (not wholly planned) have transpired, both Pakistan and Bangladesh function as Muslim buffer states protecting the Hindu core of the sub-continent from both the reverberating echoes of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, to the west, and the readily predictable conflicts between Muslim majorities and Chinese minorities in the east. It would represent very questionable strategy to eradicate the Pakistani state mechanism in order to import its constituent Muslim nationalities into India proper, transferring thereby manageable external tensions into uncontrollable internal uprisings. Pakistan's mililtary cooperation with the PRC is well documented, although not in the present work. To suggest as a remedy for the perceived ills of an incompletely commercialized pseudo-democracy, that the country should be transfered in the Pentagon's inventory from Central Command to Pacific Command, is puerile.
Some characteristic deficiencies in this essay in haut vulgurisation are apparent from the first pages, where no foreign diplomatic comment on the 1947 partition are cited, where M.K. Ghandi's opposition to partition is ignored, and when all the secondary sources cited are in the English tongue. Throughout the text, where the argument appears to call for a summation or original conclusion, the author repeatedly eschews a scholar's responsibility to assert an independent judgment by quailing behind a secondary citation. On occasion, a quotation is introduced, being distingiuished neither by originality of thought nor uniquely expressive phraseology. It is striking that the Washington practice of utilizing Islamabad as a "back channel" to Beijing began with Kissinger and Nixon, who apparently never conceived that the Pakistani elite might exploit that same channel to achieve common Eurasian goals, preeminently to constrain and expel American military force structures from the Asian continent. (One may speculate that Dr. A. Q. Khan's nuclear network represented a Streik in this shared strategic vision.) In ultra-nationalist circles, such a policy might be advocated as a justified "pay-back" for Washington's refusal to intervene against the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. This climate of opinion no doubt assisted General Zia-ul-Huq's support of a militant jihadist ideology among the officer caste, and his reinforced emphasis on defining Pakistan as an Islamic state.
The movement away from a secular state toward an ultra-nationalistic military regime was assisted (however involuntarily) by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The former civilian prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was accused of a plot (apparently fictitious) to murder an opponent, and was executed in April, 1979. In effect, Bhutto was made the sacrificial lamb whose death would expunge the army's guilt for its inability to prevent the secession of East Pakistan. Further, he had angered American financial circles by nationaliing the banking industry as well as several industrial sectors. Bhutto accused the Americans of orchestrating popular demonstrations ("rent-a-mob") against his government. The actions of the President-General did not inhibit the Washington regime from increasing its flow of military aid to Islamabad, as the Zia cllique exploited the usual anti-socialist reflexes that dominate American corporate boardrooms. The Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) funnelled some two billions of dollars (allegedly) to Islamic resistence elements in Afghanistan, later familiar as the "mujhadeen."
Haqqani correctly points out that Zia's Islamization initiative accentuated sectarian differences within the multi-national state. Regrettably, he remains silent on the multi-ethnic nature of the Pakistani state, preferring to accentuate a speculative rivalry between the Saudi-inspired Wahabbites and Iranian Shi'ites for influence within the administrative apparatus. The author's tendency in this Manichean interpretation appears to follow M.N. Pokrovsky's dictum, that history is current politics reflected back on to the past. In the end, it was the 1983 riots in Sindh, and reaction against burgeoning Islamization, which presaged mounting resistence to Zia's government before his death in a mysterious aircraft accident in August, 1988. The alliance between mosque and military (the author's favorite thesis) generated a profitable collusion between a clique of nationalist military officers and selected mosques in the Punjab, but which was incapable of prevailing in Baluchistan or Sindh.
Insecure at home, with an insufficient power base in the Punjab, the Pakistani officer caste attempted to compensate for its domestic weakness by sponsoring local jihadis in Afghanistan to contest the Soviet occupation. Afghanistan had never accepted the British-imposed Durand Line of 1893 as a permanent boundary. Indeed, in 1947-48, Kabul was even reluctant to acknowledge Pakistan's "right to exist." The Afghan leadership demanded an independent Pashtunistan. The Pakistani generals portrayed themselves as a bulwark against Communism , leaving arch-enemy India aside, temporarily, possibly for financial motives. In Kabul the new prime minister, Mohammad Daud, welcomed Russian financial assistance. An uprising in Baluchistan occurred from 1971 to 1975. In Kabul, Daud overthrew King Zafir Shah, signed 70 development projects with Moscow, and supported the Baluchistan rebellion with money and small arms. En revanche, the Pakistani officers supported Afghan insurgents against Daud and his Soviet advisors. In effect, a low-level proxy was conducted between the two regimes from 1973 to 1977, which Pentagon and Wall Street strategists viewed as an opportunity to support a "community of faith" against the radical social extremists of "atheistic Communism," whose Pakistani fellow-travellers might imitate by nationalizing the banking industry once again. After Daud was overthrown by military officers and replaced by the more moderate Taraki, the Washington-Wall Street combination remained cold to Islamabad's requests for more financial aid. But when the Shah of Iran was exiled by an Islamic-oriented popular rising, Washington and Islamabad revived their symbiotic relationship at the intelligence agency level. Some Washington war-gamers even argued that Moscow's aims (in Kabul!) were to control the Persian Gulf. In 1988, 1,000,000 Afghan refugees had fled into Pakistan. And mujahadeen volunteers trekked to Pakistan to take up the struggle against the pro-Russian occupation regime in Kabul. Two years after the United States began supplying the mujahadeen with surface-to-air missiles, General Zia entered an agreement under which Soviet forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan. A half-year later, he was dead, but the officer caste and the ISI did not abandon the jihad strategy. They continued to support militant Islamists in Afghanistan, while pursuing a nuclear weapons program behind a civilian facade provided by Benazir Bhutto. She became a "tolerated prime minister" in order to facilitate the continued delivery of American funds to the Pakistani military. At the ISI, General Beg believed that a nuclear weapons capability represented a strategic asset and that the Americans would not abandon--much less attack!--a nuclear-armed Pakistan. He was correct. Bhutto became prime minister in December, 1988, but was immediately weakened by economic rivalries between Punjabi industrialists and the central governing apparatus. Religious disorders that followed the publication of S. Rushdi's Satanic Verses further eroded support for the Harvard graduate, and she was dismissed in August, 1990. The author does not presume to adduce his own conclusions as to the proximate cause, preferring instead the prudential path of hiding behind a quotation (pp. 209-10). It could conceivably represent a military reaction to the meeting between Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi in December, 1988, in the context of which the American ambassador, Robert Oakley, advocated a soft-pedalling of the jihad strategy. But this State Department policy was to be short-lived. Bhutto was dismissed on August 6, Hiroshima Day, four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, allegedly as punishment for slant-drilling under the border to extract Iraqi oil. A shared officer caste gambit was initiated to unite the American and Pakistani militaries in manufacturing an Islamic (jihadi) front against the secular Ba'athist regime of the late Saddam Hussein. (Haqqani ludicrously avers that the United States was "distracted.")
Two years later the ISI accused the Bhuttos of being linked too closely to the purported "Indo-Zionist lobby" in Washington, and of "selling out" Pakistan's nuclear program. The new prime minister, Narvaz Sharif, genuflected dutifully before the idols of the barracks, promising to achieve nuclear status at all costs, and to liberate Kashmir into the bargain. But privately he broached the concept (Israel-Indian inspired?) of abandoning Islamabad's nuclear program in exchange for the cancellation of Pakistan's international debt. These ballons d'essai brought him into contradiction with the powerful ISI, whch continued to press for an Islamist government in Afghanistan and which now initiated guerilla operations in Kashmir. Sharif was dismissed after a confused imbroglio, and Benazir Bhutto was returned to office as prime minister in 1993.
More prudently than her late parent, she now advocated a restricted privitazation of the state sector, which advocacy generated a new inflow of foreign capital. As previously, however, she came in conflict with regional nationalism in Sindh, where rioters in Karachi attempted to expel Muslim migrants ("illegal emigrants") from India. The government closed the Indian consulate in Karachi. Matters worsened when her brother was killed by police as a terrorist in September, 1996. Pakistani support for Muslim insurgents in Kashmir spiked as the civilian camerilla arouond Bhutto sought to appease the officer caste's Islamist ideology, partly because of apprehension that the ISI would remove them, following established precedent. Bhuto was slowly pressured into supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but to no avail. The president, with Army backing, removed her from office a second time, a demarche accompanied with the usual allegations of corruption.
In an election characterized by strikingly low voter participation, Nawiz Sharif was returned as prime minister in 1997. But when the Chief Justice was deposed by his associate justices, Sharif was implicated in the public mind . He was accused of two transgressions: being too authoritarian, and favoring iimproved relations with India, the officer caste's bete noir. Nevertheless, when India tested nuclear weaponry in May, 1997, Sharif resisted US president Clinton's appeals for procrastination. He ordered the detonation of five atomic bombs. In public he asserted, perhaps credibly, that these tests were necessary to foil an alleged Indo-Israeli strategic plan to bomb Pakistan's research facilities.
Further , he prudently froze $11.8 billion of foreign currency held privately, to forfend a manipulated capital flight, while acceptioning financial support in petrodollars from affluent Arab (i.e., Muslim) governments. But in a fatally flawed judgment, he appointed General Perez Musharraf as army commander. Musharraf promptly executed the officer caste's ideology by launching an incursion into Indian-controlled Kashmir at Kargil. This destabilizing action propted public condemnation by an ad hoc alignment of China, India and the United States. Apprehensive that he would be relieved, Musharraf embarked on a public relations tour of military garrisons to enlist support, and overthrew the prime minister in October. Although some constitutionalist circles wrung a promise from him that he would resign his post as army commander at the end of 2004, he honored his commitment with the same fidelity he had previously shown his prime minister. He didn't.
Once again, the military declared its unfaltering allegience to two overriding strategic principles: the acquisition of nuclear weapons status, and the recovery of sundered Kashmir (irredentism). During Gulf War I, the Jamaat-e-Islami party argued, correctly, that the introduction of Amrican troops into Kuwait and Iraq would impant American imperialism into the center of the Muslim heartland. They were only wrong by a few years. General Beg asserted that the Gulf War represented implementatin of Israel's strategy of asserting regional predominance (by proxy), and was promptly retired for voicing an "inconvenient truth." Musharraf soft-pedalled his former aspirations in Kashmir in favor of the Bush's proclaimed "war on terror" (sloganeering) and switched his sights tohis troublemsome, but infinitely northern neighbor, Afghanistan. In this endeavor General Beg's succesors represented their jihad to the so-called "international community" of financial interests as pro-Western (after expelling the British), pro-democratic (after a military Putsch) and pro-American (rekindling a Cold War reflex). The Pakistani mililtary remained warmly engaged with the American Central Command generals residing in the sunny sea-side resort city of Tampa, Florida , administered by the president's brother, Jeb Bush. But although the ISI assisted jihadis to enter Kashmir, this reviewer must dissent from Haqqani's assertion that Kashmir became "...linked with the global jihad of the Islamists" (p. 288) and "...the Pakistani military's decision to make Kashmir an arena for global jihad" (p. 289). Israelis may assert this, but it is a phantasm. The very cold-minded strategists of ISI are making use of a specific distorted tendency in Islam exclusively for the advancement of Pakistan's state interests, as they conceive them. Globalization barely registers on their bureaucratic radar. The ISI , for example, did not mastermind the Madrid train bombings. They have not adopted the cult of the Caliphate, as put forward by Osama bin Laden. It is not the Japanese Red Army Faction, attacking an Israeli airport. Association is not subordination.
Recognizing this actuality, the American government continued to support the jihadi movement, furthered by ISI chief General J. Nasir, for a full year after Soviet troops left Afghanistan. Ignoring military cooperation, howevr, Secretary of State James Baker III warned that the first of the Bush dynasty might designate Islamabad as a "state sponsor of terrorism." General Nasir again fingered the "Indo-Zionist lobby" in Washijgton as the motivating force behind this threat. Some two months after the Bombay Stock Exchange (not Jerusalem) suffered a terrorist bomb blast, American pressure forced the resignation of General Nasir. In one stroke this this action simultaneously demonstrated the strength of the "Israel-Indian lobby," and disproved the author's contention that Pakistan had become a fully militarized society. (p. 300) Regardless, it has been estimated that some eighteen factional organizations dedicated to the "Kashnmir cause" were operating on Pakistani soil. In 2001, India again pressured Washington to declare Pakistan a "terrorist state." Unwilling or unable to reverse the officer caste's dedication to jihadi principles, Musharraf obfuscated. Professor Haqqani avers that jihadi movements directed against either Afghanistan or India can recur at any time, apparently inclining towards the Weltanschauung of Professor Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, that Pakistan is a "ticking time bomb" of Islamic militancy. If so, this would not make it unique among the Muslim states encompassed by Israel's expanding security perimeter serving the axis of interest between the synagogue and the IDF.
In his somewhat stumbling conclusion, Professor Haqqani argues that Pakistan has become increasingly dysfunctional in the last two decades, that the Pakistanis (ignoring internal national differences) are not crusaders, and that the strengthening alliance between mosque and military has heightened their sense of insecurity. He himself advocates a crusade of conventional shibboleths such as "democratic reforms" and "investment in education" to cut the nuclear Gordian knot of faith and force with...the wand of a power-point projector! The ruling military clique will not be impressed. Musharraf's manipulations provide a perfect camoflague for extracting more petrodollars from the pampered mini-states of the Persian Gulf. Someone, after all, has to pay for those Chinese fighter jets on order from Beijing.
The Anglo-Israeli-American assault on Iraq may prove, after all, to be an extensive but temporary catastrophe (Nakba), for the House of Islam will always be there. Consider the raw figures: from 1954-2000, Washington doled out a penurious $13 billion in predominantly military aid to Pakistan, while constrained by New York financial interests to disburse, from 1948-2006, some $93 billion to the Jewish enclave in The Levant. It would make an piquant study in opportunity costs to conduct a "thought experiment" to estimate how effective the same sum would have been, if invested in improving Mexico, obviating unnecessary border tensions.
The bald assertion that American financial aid has exacerbated administrative disfunction and accentuated structural flaws seems extraordinarily uninformed when one regards the Middle East as a regional theatre of operations. Why has not Israel collapsed under the boot of the "almighty dollar?" The author is apparently on course to recommend yet another fashionable "regime change" in Pakistan. To extropolate from the demonstrated American record from Vietnam to Haiti to Iraq, another regime change du jour could only work to the detriment of both states. It is as impossible to remove Islamic coloration from Pakistni politics as it would be to enforce it on Peoria. Brezhnev and Trotsky both discovered it is impossible to export the socio-political structure of one linguistic-ethnic group on another by bayonets and tanks. Lyndon Johnson learned the same hard lesson, as did the prestigious politicos of the Fourth French Republic. Olmert cannot cope with Hezbollah, or the gathering accusations of corruption. Professor Haqqani's tediously crafted and lumbering scholarly bomber is attempting a perilous cross-wind landing at Chelabi International Airport servicing a political Disneyland.
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