Pakistans Taleban Dilema

Pakistan has been slowly eroding from the edges for a number of decades, and because Pakistanis are the largest Muslim Group in the UK (and the source of many of our Islamist attackers), this blog has followed these events closely.

Pakistan was formed in 1947 from the British Raj, mainly because one man, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, could not come to a compromise with the Hindu's of India, and insisted that India's Muslims should be ruled as a separate country.

The new state of Pakistan could have opted for becoming a secular style democracy, after all it had inherited many democratic institutions and experiences from the period of colonial rule, and was itself the creation of a democratic process involving national elections, parliamentary resolutions, and a referendum. Or it could have become an Islamic emirate because the 'Pakistan Movement' was based on the theory that all the Muslims of India were a 'nation', and had a right to separate statehood and to be ruled in line with 'Islamic principles'.

But instead of making a clear choice, the early leaders tried to mix the two, and inadvertently sparked a series of political, legal, and religious debacles, that defined today's Pakistan. Since then, the inconsistencies in the constitution of a state, which has tried to be a secular state, based on Sharia (religious) laws, has led to parts of Pakistan falling under the power of an increasingly a hard line theocratic insurgency movement.

Mr Jinnah must take a lot of the blame for laying the seeds of the destruction of Pakistan as a viable state, because he set the precedent of just ignoring the constitution, when he dismissed the Congress-led government of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP i.e SWAT) by decree and instead of ordering fresh elections, appointed a Muslim League leader as the chief minister, with the special mandate to whip up parliamentary support for himself.

He then ignored the needs of half the state, when he declared to a large Bengali speaking audience in Dhaka, the capital of then East Pakistan, that Urdu would be the only state language.
This led later to the first dismissal of a genuinely elected government in 1953 by a 'Governor General', and the 'legal' precedent cited, was Jinnahs dismissal of the government of the North West Frontier Province, and it this that's been cited ever since, under a 1954 court ruling called the 'theory of necessity'.

The first military coup (by Ayub Khan) followed in 1958, and that set a pattern of rule between Army and civilians that has gone on ever since. With the governor-generals, presidents. and army chiefs having dismissed as many as ten civilian governments since then, and that altogether only ruled the country for barely 27 years. The remaining 33 years have seen direct military rule.

Pakistan then broke up as a single state with the secession of East Pakistan (whose inhabitants had been effectively disenfranchised by Jinnahs 'Dhaka' pronouncement), into the state of Bangladesh, but since then, its endless succession of military dictatorships, interspersed by corrupt civilian governments, has allowed the armed religious groups to take a grip in many of the regions.

This has left the central Government so weak, that effectively its writ fails in the 'badlands' of the Afghan borders and even outside the major cities (Islamabad the capital is actually partially surrounded by Taleban areas). The state has therefore failed to develop into an effective democracy, theocracy, or even a permanent military dictatorship. The US has also tended to 'support' the military governments, whilst distrusting the civilian ones (because of the 'culture of corruption' that appears endemic in the ruling families), and which has just further weakened the role of the constitution.

Finally the rule of law has simply collapsed, with the rich able to walk across the rights of the poor, elections often just corrupt exercises in electoral fraud by landowners who are little more than "feudal princes", ruling over the rural poor. The state institutions have withered and eroded, becoming government tools, rather than the back bones of the state.

The "Talebanisation" of the north-western region is one manifestation of the prevalent disorder; an unending separatist campaign by nationalists in the south-western Balochistan province is another.

Thus, Pakistan continues to reamin in a spiral of evermore corrupt or despotic regimes, using religious extremists and external support to keep the weak secular democratic forces at bay; and when these forces do assert themselves, to tie them down in legal constraints that are designed to ensure their failure.

It is the story of a society, that has been going round in circles for the last 60 years, however recently there has been a decided lurch towards the possibility of a Taleban style government in Pakistan.

As discussed earlier, the Taleban in SWAT have been bombing girls schools and women are now banned from markets and restaurants in Quetta, but alongside the insurgencies comes an economic collapse as well. The city of Peshawar is in danger of falling out of Government control, and SWAT region is now openly controlled by the Taleban (with a few army bases the only government presence), and then came today's news that the government has sued for a ceasefire in SWAT region, and in return for the ceasefire have promised to enforce Islamic law in the district.

In effect the central government has admitted defeat, and finally lost control of the region, with Pakistani President Asif Zardari warning that the country is fighting for its survival against the Taleban, whose influence he said has spread deep into the country, and he admitted that the Taleban had established a presence across "huge parts" of Pakistan.

If you visit Pakistani blog sites, you will find an almost ostrich like view of the 'Talebanisation' of Pakistan .... they can see it happening, and they understand that someone has to 'do something' (that 'someone' is the poorly led and paid, conscript army whose members are as likely to join the taleban), then return to discussing middle class concerns such as University results, as if these will survive the Talebans taking power!

If you look back to the fall of the Shah in Iran, he and the middleclasses found that the poor illiterate conscript army was in fact largely sympathetic towards the Khomeni radicals and so the regime fell ......... and "thus spoke Zarathustra"