The trouble with Pakistan
Jul 6th 2006
From The Economist print edition
A country that everyone should worry about
TERRORISM has many sources and claimed justifications, but if it can be said to
have a centre, it lies in the training camps, madrassas and battlefields of
northern Pakistan and south-eastern Afghanistan. There the Taliban and their
ally, al-Qaeda, were both formed. From there, in hellish diaspora, jihadis have
fanned out across the globe. Add to that Afghanistan's lawlessness and ability
to produce vast amounts of opium, not to mention Pakistan's wretched history of
venal democrats and clumsy dictators, and its lamentable record on nuclear
proliferation, and it is clear why what happens in those two places is of huge
importance to the rest of the world. From neither place is there much good news.
The West has invested a huge amount in Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf, who seized
power in October 1999. This newspaper was prepared to give him a chance on condition that
he acted swiftly and firmly to rein in extremism and sort out the economy, and then
returned to barracks. He failed to do any of that. After September 11th 2001, however, he
was recast as a provider of relative stability in a dangerous neighbourhood, and an
essential ally in the "war on terror". Money was showered upon him; he was
feted in Washington, DC, and London. Only gradually has it started to dawn on his
admirers that, in the past five years, he has not done very much to make Pakistan a less
dangerous place.
A destroyer of democracy
True, the economy has improved quite a bit since 2001—and not just because of
all that donor money. But promises, made even before September 11th, to bring
the country's most radical madrassas under control have not been kept. The
training camps that Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
agency has long tolerated because of their usefulness against India and in
Afghanistan still exist, though they have been told not to mount any operations
for now. The most dangerous outfits, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (the Army of the
Pure), have been banned, only to reappear under new guises. Not until 2004 and
under the most intense American pressure did Pakistan arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan,
the scientist who had cheerfully sold nuclear secrets to anyone prepared to pay.
But perhaps the most damning criticism of General Musharraf is that he
continues to do grave damage to the long-term political health of Pakistan (see
our survey). In his seven long years in office, he has insinuated the army into
every nook and cranny of Pakistani public life, weakening institutions that
were feeble already, emasculating its political parties and reducing parliament
to a squabbling irrelevance. He has sacked judges when it suited him, created
and dismembered parties at his own convenience, rigged a referendum on his
presidency and used Pakistan's constitution to write his own job description.
None of this bodes well for a post-Musharraf future—which could arrive at any
moment given the enthusiasm of his enemies for trying to kill him.
Like a previous "caretaker" dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, who held power for 11
years before being killed, General Musharraf has been unable to resist the temptation to
play politics with Islam, even if, unlike Zia, he has also had some success at purging
fundamentalists from the top ranks of the army. He has forged a disparate group of
Islamic political parties into a block that has helped him outmanoeuvre the democratic
opposition; these Islamists are pushing hard for the extension of sharia law.
And then there's Afghanistan
It would not be fair to blame Pakistan for everything that is going wrong in
Afghanistan. The government of Hamid Karzai is weak and corrupt; because of the
West's continued failure to live up to its promises, much of the country,
outside the big cities, is in the grip of bandits and warlords. But Pakistan's
contribution to Afghanistan's chronic insecurity should not be underestimated.
Both the Taliban and the remnants of al-Qaeda are able to take refuge on
Pakistani soil, which makes the job of the soldiers from Western countries who
have been struggling to eliminate them for the past five years much more
difficult. The Taliban, after all, were in part a creation of Pakistan's ISI,
which saw in them a way to establish a friendly state on their western flank, a
vital strategic consideration for an organisation that sees itself as locked in
perpetual conflict with India to its east.
General Musharraf, by contrast, contends he is doing all he can to root out
Taliban fighters from their sanctuaries in the tribal areas, and Pakistan has
lost more than 600 soldiers fighting there. Even so, say the critics, it could
try much harder, especially given the size of its army. And as for al-Qaeda,
none of General Musharraf's protestations can hide the fact that Osama bin
Laden is generally reckoned to be holed up on Pakistani soil. Lesser terrorists
such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the September 11th attacks, have
been caught and handed over by the general, but Mr bin Laden goes on evading
capture.
The danger is that Afghanistan may now, thanks to Pakistani meddling and
Western neglect, gradually revert to what it was before September 2001: a state
partly captured by the most dangerous Islamists. Belatedly waking up to this
threat (see article), Britain is leading NATO into risky action in
Afghanistan's southern provinces, a swathe of territory where the Kabul
government's writ is ignored and where a record-breaking crop of poppies was
recently harvested. With a remit that has been altered to war-fighting at short
notice, inadequate numbers and an apparent lack of enough helicopters and
armoured support, these soldiers are taking politically painful casualties.
There is a risk that the will of the politicians back home to go on fighting
will swiftly fade.
An unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan, intertwined with a chaotic and Taliban-dominated Afghanistan: it is not a settling prospect. It has all happened before, of course. The result was September 11th, swiftly followed by a terrorist outrage in Delhi that came close to provoking full-scale war between Pakistan and also-nuclear India. What will happen next time?
