Pakistan's Slide Into Misery

Sumit Ganguly

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002

Summary:  Three new books detail 50 years of misrule in a country ill served by its overweening military. Now Pervez Musharraf seems bound to repeat these mistakes.

Sumit Ganguly is Professor of Asian Studies and Government at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947.

The flaws in Pakistan's leadership have not been confined solely to the realm of foreign policy. Military rulers (and, on occasion, civilian regimes) have exacerbated the country's ethnic and sectarian cleavages. The greatest debacle, the secession of Bangladesh in 1971 (which Jones describes and assesses in some detail), stemmed from the overweening ambitions of a civilian politician, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (Benazir's father), and the callousness of an inept military dictator, Yahya Khan. General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, another military ruler, made Pakistan's ethnic and sectarian tensions still worse. Zia, in attempts to bolster the legitimacy of his own regime, actively courted religious zealots within the country. During his decade-long reign (from 1977 to 1988), he instituted a separate Islamic court system, encouraged the formation of madrassas (religious schools, many of which were funded by Saudi Arabia), and promoted Islamist officers within the army. These policies unleashed pernicious social forces on Pakistan: most notably, Wahhabism, a form of virulently intolerant Islam that now threatens the cohesion of the Pakistani state.

With the tacit consent of the CIA, Zia directed the bulk of American aid dollars to Islamist Afghan mujahideen. Benazir Bhutto, his civilian successor, followed essentially the same course under the tutelage of her interior minister, General Naseerullah Babar. In their quest for "strategic depth" in the event of a war with India, Bhutto and Babar connived to foist the brutal (and, they hoped, pliant) Taliban regime on Afghanistan -- much to the later detriment of that country, the region, and the world.

Not content with promoting the interests of religious zealots at home and in Afghanistan, General Zia directed many of these condottierri toward the already-troubled Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. Their heirs, most prominently the militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-i-Taiba, have engaged in murder, mayhem, and rape in that region while ostensibly seeking to free it from Delhi's misrule. It was Pakistan's support of these terrorists that led to yet another confrontation with India earlier this year -- and brought the two countries to the brink of full-scale war in June. It took extraordinary intercessions from the United States and other countries to prevent such a conflict.

CRASH COURSE

Fourteen years after Zia's demise, the strategic culture of Pakistan's military has not changed, and it continues to pursue foolhardy operations. The most recent misadventure, the Kargil crisis of 1999, came about a year after the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. Jones provides the most cogent and revealing account of this crisis to date. He suggests that Pakistan's military can be held almost solely responsible for this singularly ill-conceived adventure, which also brought the countries to the brink of war. The army high command, Jones reveals, had started planning the operation in about 1994 in an attempt to disrupt India's ability to supply its troops on the disputed Siachen Glacier. Indian artillery barrages that year interdicted Pakistani troop movements and thwarted the original invasion plans. But Pakistan's generals were undeterred and decided to await a more propitious moment. This came after the 1998 nuclear tests; the army assumed that India would not expand its military operations for fear of provoking a nuclear exchange. The generals were also concerned that, after a decade, the Kashmir insurgency -- the raison d'etre of their high military budgets -- was starting to taper off. Finally, they calculated that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, distracted by his efforts to improve relations with India, would blithely approve what then looked like a small tactical operation. As Jones reveals, however, even the military brass gave only scant thought to how to actually secure the salients they planned to capture -- and this lack of foresight doomed the operation from the start.

Sharif's willingness to seek a diplomatic resolution to the crisis after it erupted contributed to his overthrow in October 1999. Unlike during much of the Cold War -- when Washington overlooked the many shortcomings of Islamabad's military rulers -- this time the United States sharply upbraided Musharraf for his coup and imposed new sanctions on Pakistan. Indeed, the White House came close to labeling Pakistan a state supporter of terrorism due to its close links with the Taliban. It was only after September 11 that American policy toward Pakistan underwent a fundamental shift, and Islamabad once again became a close military ally of Washington. Sadly, the U.S. zeal in the war on terror seems to have propelled it to adopt a deafening silence toward Musharraf's abuses.

The unwillingness of Pakistan's elite to induce political reform has ill-served American interests, however. As Jones depicts, military rule in Pakistan, particularly under Zia, spawned many of the groups that the United States now so ardently seeks to eliminate. The effect of uncritical U.S. aid has been to extend and strengthen the violent grip of the Pakistani military.

This error is all the more tragic because only the United States can force Pakistan to reorder its domestic and external priorities. In the absence of substantial American economic assistance, diplomatic support, and multilateral loans, Pakistan would plunge into economic distress and social dislocation. Washington's clout is therefore enormous, and it could demand meaningful and long-lasting changes to address Pakistan's myriad woes. Whether the United States will prod Musharraf into changing the course he is so carefully plotting -- a route toward ever increasing military dominance and ever more limited democracy -- remains uncertain, however. Meanwhile, the fate of Pakistan's 140 million citizens hangs in the balance.