A longing for war
Pakistan’s stygian journey, as “Land of
the Pure,” has been the destabilization and (ultimate) demolition of
‘Hindu’ India, before the restoration of a pristine caliphate of Islamic
power and glory. An All-India Muslim League resolution piloted by
Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his acolytes, in the aftermath of World War II,
called for an immediate British withdrawal from the subcontinent, enabling
the forces of militant Islam to reignite the iconoclastic practices of
Ghaznavi, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah and Abdali — grist to the mills of an
ideologically-driven messianic entity.
It was in the reading room of the old
India Office Library in London (now part of the magnificent British
Library) that I read the above incendiary sentiments following an
accidental reach of the arm to the open shelves and the discovery of the
appropriate volume of the Indian Annual Register. Christine
Fair, an academic at Georgetown University in the United States of
America, has written a meticulously researched and insightful book, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, which explores its jihadi
psyche and the compulsive addiction to conflict with India. This,
surely, is a matter of moment as the Pakistan military and its jihadi affiliates are the country’s true masters.
Fair resolutely avoided personal exchanges, because her subjects were
given to hiding what the false heart doth know behind the false face: in
other words, they trimmed their words to fit the liberal sensibility of
a Western visitor. Wise to such ways, Fair trawled piles of
authenticated documents to give the unhinged Pakistani military voice
its true vent. She might, profitably, have complemented this with the
contents of a US state department minute in 1949 — shortly after the
visit of the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to Washington —
suggesting that his country’s “national traits… if not controlled, could
make India Japan’s successor in Asiatic imperialism. In such
circumstances, a strong Muslim bloc under the leadership of Pakistan and
friendly to the US might offer a desirable balance of power in South
Asia.” In 1971, the US president, Richard Nixon, and his national
security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were similarly excoriating in their
judgment of India; Nixon subsequently told the British foreign
secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, that Indian independence was undeserved.
Fair says, in conversation with an Indian scribe: “What
Pakistan is trying to do is use jihad to mobilize and to boost the
morale of their troops so that they are on perpetual war footing with
India… They always pitch India as a ‘Hindu’ nation… because they are in
this civilization battle… the Kashmir issue is not causal, it’s
symptomatic.” Reading this took me down memory lane, to London in
the aftermath of the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, and the liberation of
Bangladesh. The former air commodore, M.K. Janjua, the first head of the
Pakistan air force, was one of the early supporters of the Bangladesh
movement. He had been arraigned, incarcerated and cashiered for his
alleged involvement in the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. The
celebrated Pakistani poet and leftwing activist, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was
also imprisoned; both men were released when the trial collapsed,
following the assassination of then Pakistan premier, Liaquat Ali Khan.
Faiz assured me at a sumptuous dinner in a lavish Mayfair apartment,
belonging to a well-heeled Pakistani businessman, that Janjua, poor man,
was neither a communist nor a conspirator, as charged, but simply the
fall guy in a factional conflict within the country’s military. Faiz, I
may add, was noticeably partial to a good table, withstanding the
formidable challenge of his cups with a careless rapture beyond the
reckoning of hoi polloi.
Janjua had been a fervent Pakistan
enthusiast during the turbulent years leading to Partition. He was
deeply shaken and shamed by the Pakistan army’s massacres of their
fellow citizens in what was once designed as a safe haven for Muslims of
the subcontinent. Being at the right place — a popular Soho watering
hole — at the right time, I was all ears as Janjua delved into his past,
relating a string of anecdotes in boastful military mess-talk of
“bleeding the b******s” across the border. This could recoil on the
progenitor, Janjua warned Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, much given to absurdist
expositions of Pakistan’s coming triumph in a projected 1,000-year war
with India. The war, when it came, ended in a fortnight with a
resounding Pakistani defeat, in spite of the best efforts of the US and
Maoist China — de facto allies against the erstwhile Soviet Union
and, by extension, India as well — to rescue their regional client from
a self-inflicted catastrophe.
In May 1998, India and Pakistan were officially declared nuclear weapons states. How
Pakistan acquired its nuclear capability has been explored in great
depth by the formidable investigative duo of Adrian Levy and Catherine
Scott-Clark in their riveting book, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy,
which gives the subject a trenchant analysis, from genesis to
consummation. The pace quickened in the 1960s with the admission of the
Pakistan foreign minister, Agha Shahi, of China’s confidential promise
to aid Pakistan’s quest for nuclear weapon capability with cost-free
access to Beijing’s most prized technological secrets, and its denouement
was reached in 1990 with the gift of a tested, readymade Chinese
nuclear device to Islamabad. Well before this, the Pakistani rogue
scientist A.Q. Khan, working at a nuclear facility in Holland, purloined
a treasure-trove of its advanced nuclear technologies. Khan’s imminent
arrest by the Dutch government was thwarted by the personal intervention
of the US president, Ronald Reagan, whose neocon-infested
administration viewed Pakistan as a high priority asset in the struggle
with the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When Richard Barlow, a
senior Central Intelligence Agency officer, kept badgering his superiors
about Khan’s clandestine proliferation activities, he was declared
mentally disturbed and unceremoniously sacked. The US’s own crusade in
Afghanistan included jihadi levies like al Qaida, the Taliban and
their disparate associates. The nexus of war and politics has given
rise to strange bedfellows down the ages, so why should ours be any
different? As Levy and Scott-Clark reveal in their robust narrative,
deceit, double talk, double-cross and multiple casuistries continued to
gain traction in the crime syndicate march of folly. The George W. Bush
administration’s “War on Terror” shows few signs of abating. The Barack
Obama dispensation’s pitiless drone strikes, which make no distinction
between the culpable and the innocent, and the mass surveillance
techniques of the national security State are now part of the official
US canon. F.D. Roosevelt’s call for freedom from fear is dead in the
water. Bush and Obama prefer to describe US policies in Iraq and Libya,
Afghanistan and Pakistan as promotional exercises for peace, stability
and the furtherance of human rights, the last appearing to exclude the
primary right to life. Traumatized populations see only a desolation,
from whose fissures have emerged a murderous horde of jihadis of
the Islamic State, terrorizing and executing minority Christians and
Yazidis at will, communities embedded in the land across the centuries;
those fortunate to escape their hideous fate hear only the wails of the
bereaved and the maimed.
Christine Fair asks why her country, the US, had given Pakistan a military and financial aid package worth $20 billion,
its rite of Congressional passage bearing the imprimatur of the
senators, John Kerry (now the secretary of state) and Dick Lugar. China
is a parallel profligate donor to Islamabad’s military coffers. Question
follows question in the fog of war where truth is often the first
casualty. How does the Pakistani conundrum in the Sino-American
relationship square with their intensifying political rivalry? Is this
leavened by a discreet strategic understanding? And what does this augur
for India and the Asia-Pacific region? Pakistan is a case of the best
laid plans of mice and men gone badly astray. Bleeding India is an
expensive business, particularly when the assailant is self-destructing
with a thousand cuts.
Kemal Ataturk’s caution to Turkey’s new
national assembly in 1921, in the wake of the Ottoman defeat in World
War I, has a searing relevance for contemporary jihadi States.
“We did not serve pan-Islamism. We said we would, but we didn’t… Rather
than run after ideas which we did not and could not realize… let us
return to our natural, legitimate limits. And let us know our limits…
those who conquer by the sword are doomed to be overcome by those who
conquer with the plough, and finally, to give place to them. That is
what happened to the Ottoman Empire.”
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