Pakistan - Complexities at Birth Endure

“The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience” - Morgenthau

Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations written in 1948 is considered a tour de force in the realist school of international relations. He set out six principles of realism:

• Politics is governed by objective laws that have roots in human nature;
• Statesmen conduct themselves in terms of interest defined as power;
• Interest determines political conduct with the political and cultural context in which foreign policy is formulated;
• Prudence is the supreme virtue in international politics;
• Nations are entities that pursue their interests as defined by power and should not be judged by universal moral principles;
• Political realism rejects the legalistic-moralistic approach to international politics.

 The subcontinent as it is called so due to the context of its ‘isolated’ geography. It has the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea towards the south arc. The Northern arc is comprised of mountains in Baluchistan rising northwards into Hindukush and then swerving eastward towards the Karakoram ranges and then becoming the Himalayas and then extending to the Rakhine Mountains at Myanmar. This enclosed land region including the trading zones via sea extending from east Africa, Middle East to South East Asia historically has been an organic region exchanging goods, ideas and people with India as its core. Threats to the Indian subcontinent have arisen from the Afghan-Pakistan border via Punjab the only practical crossing point or via sea. Technological and infrastructure development may have reduced ‘space’ with China but it still does not ease the situation for massive armies to cross the Himalayan ranges.

The attraction of India through the ages for premised on its bountiful fertile lands created by the river systems endowed by Himalayas / Tibetan plateau in a largely agrarian world before 1800s.

Rank	Country	Cultivated land (km2)	Cultivated land (%)	Arable land (km2)	Arable land (%)	Total land area (km2)
—	World	17,298,900	11.61	15,749,300	10.57	149,000,000
1	United States	1,669,302	18.22	1,650,062	18.01	9,826,675
2	India	1,535,063	51.63	1,451,810	48.83	3,287,240
3	China	1,504,350	16.13	1,385,905	14.86	9,640,821
4	Russia	1,192,300	7.28	1,174,284	7.17	17,075,400

 

The Indians had two large neighbours – (1) Han China – which the Himalayas kept away and (2) Islam which inhabited the arc from Arabia to Central Asia – who came in the 10^th century via Pakistan’s Punjab.

Islam in Pakistan 

While Islam ruled large parts of India till the British supplanted their rule, it is only when elements to parliamentary democracy was introduced they realized that the numbers altered the power equations that existed for centuries before. This also led later to demands for separate electorate i.e. Muslims electing Muslim representatives and Hindu electing Hindu representatives with equal number in Parliament. The next fork came in the definition of Indian nationalism in terms of territory as against religion. These conflicting views came down to division of the territories based on religion but when it was born the Pakistani state espoused a secular status only to change too soon. By 1948 it was adopted, “sovereignty belongs to Allah” and for people to live based on the teachings of Islam.


Pakistani scholar, Waheed-uz-Zaman elaborated two decades later, “the wish to see the kingdom of God established in a Muslim territory...was the moving idea behind the demand for Pakistan, the corner-stone of the movement, the ideology of the people, and the raison d'etre of the new nation-state.... If we let go the ideology of Islam, we cannot hold together as a nation by any other means.... If the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians, God forbid, give up Islam, the Arabs yet remain Arabs, the Turks remain Turks, the Iranians remain Iranians, but what do we remain if we give up Islam?”

This state, thus, born had no core moorings to latch onto except Islam. It adopted the philosophy of Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudidi, the opposing pole of Jinnah. Maudidi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, was the founder of Islamic fundamentalism in South Asia and one of the most powerful influences globally, writes Francis Robinson. He expounded that there was no difference between the physical and metaphysical world and therefore wrong to divide Islamic community into nations (exactly the nature of movements that IS and Al Qaeda lead to form a global caliphate). At Pakistan’s birth, he argued, if a secular and Godless constitution was to be introduced and if the British Criminal Code was to be introduced instead of Islamic Sharia what was the sense in all this struggle for a separate Muslim Homeland?

The Islamists continued to prod with naming of Pakistan as Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1956 and then under Zia country was embedded more deeply with Islam with even madrassa’s issuing degree. Under Zia, the military was to also be the safe-keeper of the nation’s ideology. In addition, at the time of partition, Pakistan got a third of the army of British India, a disproportionate number compared to its geography, which many analysts associate with the dominance of the army. These new areas the state of Pakistan occupied did little to connect its populace with the rich history of Islam in South Asia. The partition of Bangladesh which today has 133m Muslims as against Pakistan’s 176m and India’s 167m make the establishment of even the Islamic identity subject to question. But an identity was nonetheless required, in August 2009 Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani stated that “Islam is the soul and spirit of Pakistan. It is our strength and we will always be an Islamic republic.” But whose Islam, Shia or Sunni, has resulted in another angle of rivalry which has drawn Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The identity crisis is the core of the continued competition with what is identified as “Hindu India”. This crisis continues to intensify as the reach of Indian ideas, in an area which has always been the cultural dominion of India, through Indian channels, movies or internet continues.  After the wars of 1948, 1965, 1971 and Kargil, the war against India has become a continues state of low intensity conflict under the camouflage of a nuclear threat. A similar case transpires against Afghanistan. In search for strategic depth and the to overcome the question regarding the permanence of the ‘Durand Line’ from the Afghans, a similar conflict continues on the other side of the border (i.e. the ISI cell to manage Afghanistan was set at least 5 years before the Soviet intervention!). This permanent state of conflict has resulted in significant acts of violence by terror organizations in Pakistan where the Army in fear of a potential revolt by the military due to confrontation with the Islamic brethren and terrorists it helped create has entered into pacts. This has also stunted the economic growth of the country. Pakistan’s per capita income in 2007 was $1,045 and in 2015 was $1,152 as against $1,165 and $1806 respectively for India.

Regional Differences

Meanwhile, the underlying regional differences with the dominant Punjabi heartland came to the fore. Pakistan was born with five provinces and now has four.

• Bangladesh with its Bengali identity and divided from the Punjabi heartland by India in between separated in 1971, two decades after its birth as dominant Punjab sought to deprive Bengali Muslims a fair share in power;
• The NWFP which shares the border with Afghanistan, has been a contested border as Afghanistan does not recognize the Durand Line which separates the two countries. The region has faced continued instability with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then ‘Talibanisation’ after Soviets withdrew and then after 9/11;

• Baluchistan occupies the largest landmass of Pakistan with rich energy and mineral resources and Gwadar port ceded to Pakistan in 1958 by Oman which since the 1960’s has been part of every Pakistani planner (and the Soviets as one of the reasons for Afghan occupation) dream to make it a transport hub for Central Asian resources and potentially link Middle Eastern oil and markets with China. Kaplan says in, “Baluchistan…is a Turko-Iranian, step child of the Middle East that has chafed for decades under the domination of darker skinned, urbanized and, and so it is alleged, sharper-in-the-ways-of-the-world Punjabis.” Despite providing for most of the gas for the Pakistani state, its GDP is less than 5% of Punjab. Selig Harrison says regarding the 1973-1977 Baluch war with the Pakistani state, “frustrated by their inability to find Baluch guerrilla units…Pakistani forces bombed, strafed and burned 15,000 families”. What he refers to as a continuation of “slow motion genocide” in recent years F16s and Cobra helicopters were used against the masses, large scale government organized kidnappings and the Baluch leader Nawab Bugti was also killed in 2006. Moyuddin Baloch, erstwhile Prince, in Feb 2015 suggests that from 1976 to 1999, the situation remained comparatively peaceful in the province but afterwards it went downhill, “Today we see use of force, mutilated bodies dumped in deserted places, even I could have got killed but let me make it clear that at present Baloch people are not at war but are staging protests and even those who have climbed to mountains tops are not engaged in fighting,”.
• Kaplan writes, “Sindh had been part of the Bombay Presidency, a province of British India until 1936, when it became a province in its own right tied to New Delhi. Sindh joined Pakistan less because it was Muslim than because the new state promised autonomy which it never got.” Sindh houses the port city of Karachi with 24m people which has dominated the economic landscape of Pakistan. Karachi has a GDP excess of US$32bn (>10% of Pakistan). Today Karachi, is a melting pot of Pushtuns, Punjabis, Indian Muslims (Mohajirs) and Sindhis torn by ethnic riots in a competition for resources (http://thediplomat.com/2015/05/karachis-deadly-unrest/).
• Punjab, a largely agrarian province, with 56% of its population is the core of Pakistan. Most of the Army, judiciary and the bureaucracy comprises of Punjabis. It is also the hot bed of anti-India Islamic groups. The core issue this province faces is water - In a report published in 2013, the Asian Development Bank described Pakistan as one of the most “water-stressed” countries in the world, with a water availability of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year — a fivefold drop since independence in 1947, and about the same level as drought-stricken Ethiopia. This also makes the Kashmir issue pertinent given that the upper reaches of the Indus water flow through this region, allowing India the possibility of restricting water availability.

Rentier State

Pakistan after independence allied itself with the US as the Indians found solace with the Soviets. It worked with Saudi’s during the Afghan war (along with the US) and provided forces for defending the Royal family to even potentially have an arrangement to provide them a nuclear bomb in case of an existential threat. In return Saudi’s provide substantial financial support. It supplied nuclear material and know-how to North Korea and Libya, while it itself smuggled parts for its nuclear program (the Chinese had provided Pakistani with designs for the nuclear device). China has committed to invest $46bn in China Pakistan Economic Corridor running from Xinjiang province to Baluchistan to enable energy and goods to be directly routed from the Arabian Sea via Gwadar without having to cross the Straits of Malacca, potential choke point around Singapore. But above all, the support it receives keeps Indian resources and mind bogged at the North Western front. A settlement would allow India to devote national resources to build its blue water navy, something both China and US see detrimental to their command of the Indian Ocean and beyond, although with differing time horizon and level of development they can tolerate.

Reconnecting

If we were to now see Pakistan through the prism of Morgenthau’s principles, we would arrive at the following aspects regarding Pakistan:

• Given the insecurity in the current anchor of the state, its need to identify itself in terms of a Pan-Islamic identity making ideologies of Lashkar, Wahhabism, Islamic State or Al Qaeda easy to seep into society. The Afghan-Pakistan region is dominated largely by tribal affinities which makes modern nation state an anathema. This region has historically been used as a transit point to India given its agricultural bounties and consumption ability, the future may see no difference with the dramatic drop in water resources of Pakistan and desire of the coastal regions (Gwadar or Karachi) to trade, as historically, with India and the Middle East;
• In the context the leadership of Pakistan (i.e. the Army) is responding in the manner it can, deepen the Islamic connect and focus the nation towards external enemies (i.e. India and Afghanistan) and identify with global Muslim causes and consequently see Israel and US as enemies. This is the only way the state preserves itself. Given the permanent state of battle internal and external, low level of education / development; the resources of the nation outstrip its internal capacities which turns it to seek a benefactor (US, Saudi Arabia and China) which consequently means it is consistently balancing between the demands of these countries and playing one against the other.;
• Given the context of the birth of the nation which has no shared identity, unification via creating a pan-Islamic identity or finding events in the subcontinent’s history to create an appropriate narrative has proven exceedingly difficult. But in justifying its Islamic identity has led it to perpetrate violence across the region. This is path they thought prudent but the genie is beyond their control;  
• As Morgenthau said, there is no point in seeing the interest of Pakistan from the prism of legalistic-morality, and I am sure India or any other nation will intervene in Pakistan in their own self-interest or for that matter Pan-Islamic organizations. Given the weak institutions, it will almost subjugate domestic and international politics of Pakistan.

Morgenthau observed in 1956, six decades back “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification in history, ethnic origin, language, civilization, or the consciousness of those who make up its population … Thus it is hard to see how anything but a miracle, or else a revival of religious fanaticism, will assure Pakistan’s future.”

In this context, whether India or Afghanistan suffers what emanates from Pakistan is only based on choice (i.e. fear of consequence of reaction) or a constraint of national power. If Modi seeks to change the terms of reference of any discussion (i.e. Baluchistan or Northern Areas or POK) or incremental intervention it is contextualised in the manner in which he sees “diplomatic power” (“diplomatic power combines different elements of national power into an integrated whole”) of the state; so be it. That he has given himself greater latitude or even potentially put China on notice for its massive investment in the corridor that passes through this region can be a matter of debate but not outside the realm of possible reaction for what has occurred. That he will seek to reframe India is something I had discussed much long ago. The Nehruvian speak on non-alignment and passivity is unnatural. In a sense doublespeak – were we not aligned to the Soviets during the cold war and did we not intervene in Sri Lanka? The more critical element in the context of Pakistan is the manner in which national power is now used to maintain credibility of spoken words and achieve national self-interest.    

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Quid-i-Azam, the creator of the state that many have called the most dangerous and explosive in the world, is buried in the middle of a vast immaculately landscaped garden in central Karachi. Just as the tomb looked out of place amid Karachi’s ratty mishmash, Jinnah’s model-state has so far proved unsuited for the ground-realities of a messy world” - Kaplan