The writer is UPI’s Arnaud de Borchgrave Distinguished Columnist. He is Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council
As many Pakistanis do not understand American politics, American understanding of Pakistani politics is even more superficial. Aside from media reporting on the Afghan conflict, occasional flare-ups between India and Pakistan, whether over Kashmir or Mumbai-like terror bombings, the horrors of the massacres at the Army Public School in Peshawar in 2014, and the Easter abomination in Lahore targeting Christian children in a playground, Pakistan remains less a mystery and more largely ignored by a wide margin of both American politicians and Americans.
At last week’s nuclear security conference held in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama did indeed raise the issue of the subcontinent and the nuclear danger potentially posed by the India-Pakistan military standoff. Despite the fact that during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union had many tens of thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons pointed at each other, Pakistan’s decision to dramatically increase its shorter-range, tactical warheads as a deterrent to India’s so-called “cold start” strategy to overwhelm Pakistan’s army with a no-notice attack makes little sense to Americans who worry about these matters on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and both sides of the Potomac River in Washington.
While this is indeed an important issue, and more follows below, the greatest and most perplexing problem is the broader lack of understanding on the part of Americans and many of its leaders about Pakistan and its past, present and future. Of course, the general absence of American global understanding has haunted its actions often catastrophically, such as the Vietnam War 50 years ago. The conflicts in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan likewise were plagued by an absence of knowledge along with gross strategic misjudgments often based on ideological beliefs immune to fact and truth.
The history of US-Pakistani relations has been almost entirely shaped by the Cold War, and the later war on terror following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Since the Eisenhower administration, 1953-1961, Pakistan was a pivotal partner from joining alliances (SEATO and METO/Baghdad Pact) against the Soviet Union to allowing U-2 spy planes from using its bases even after Gary Francis Powers was shot down over Siberia in May 1960. The US tolerated Pakistan’s military dictatorships to that end. And when Pakistan’s Yaya Khan foolishly provoked India into a war over East Pakistan that ended in its independence as Bangladesh in 1971, President Richard Nixon famously “titled” towards Islamabad to stop the Indian advance.
After the Cold War ended, Pakistan was largely forgotten although its twice prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, educated at Harvard and Oxford, was highly admired by Americans. In the late 1990s, Pakistan’s decision to test a nuclear weapon led to a chilling of relations in the Clinton administration. All of that changed in the fall of 2001 when Osama bin Laden made al-Qaeda a household name. Famously, the then US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, was sent to Islamabad to encourage, some say threaten, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president and army head, to join the alliance against al-Qaeda.
In the 15 years since, the US and Pakistan enjoyed a most uneven relationship that reached rock bottom after the Raymond David case (a CIA officer who shot and killed two Pakistanis surveilling him, and a third innocent Pakistani hit by his car as he fled the scene), and the Abbottabad takedown of bin Laden in 2011. Pakistan repeatedly accused the US of continuously imposing on its sovereignty, whether in aid packages filled with restrictions or in the war on terror and in Afghanistan. The history is well known.
What virtually no American knows is how Pakistan arrived at its current state in which radicalism seems to have embraced most of the country, and why Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services-Intelligence bureau (ISI) seem to act duplicitously in Afghanistan supporting groups such as the Haqqani network and various groups of the Taliban. The fact is that despite a patina of democracy, Pakistan remains a feudal-like state dominated by land owners, and has been ruled by three and a half ‘families’ since its inception: the Bhutto-Zardaris; the Sharifs; the army, which has been the ‘big daddy’; and the Chaudhrys.
After the disastrous and short 1971 war, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto served as both president and prime minister. Educated in the US and England, Bhutto began the transformation of Pakistan’s economy by nationalising much of it. Overthrown in 1977, and executed two years later by General Zia-ul-Haq, who began radicalising the country towards the more extreme sides of Islam. And with the Soviets trapped in Afghanistan beginning in 1980, Zia was, of course, a close US ally. Zia died in a still unsolved incident in 1988 in which his C-130 exploded, also killing the then US Ambassador Arnold Raphel and Defence Attache Brigadier-General Herb Wassom.
Despite the elections of 2008 and President Musharraf’s abdication of power, and the peaceful transition of government three years ago from the PPP to Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, Pakistan remains a country whose future as a functioning democracy is by no means assured. Radicalism is on the rise. The embrace of Mumtaz Qadri as a hero for murdering the then Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer, who supported a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, and the celebratory march of many thousands from Rawalpindi to Islamabad marking 40 days after Qadri’s execution suggest the reach of radicalism.
Still preoccupied with the threat of India, Pakistan relies on terrorist groups in Kashmir, and building short-range nuclear weapons as means to deter and minimise India’s aspirations. And even with nearly 60,000 of its citizens killed by Islamist terrorists, that fight continues with little end in sight.
In discussions with very senior US leaders, it is startling how little is really understood about Pakistan. So when Pakistanis scratch their heads about American politics, they probably know far more about us, then we do about them. www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/07-Apr-2016/riddles-and-enigmas-paradox-of-pakistan
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