AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Tuesday, October 30, 2001
You don't need a crystal ball to see what the future holds for South Asia: you
only need to look at its past. More than most regions of the world, the Indian
subcontinent has a tendency to repeat its history, over and over, without
learning anything from one cycle that might be constructively applied to the
next. Last Tuesday, I offered a calendar of events to come in Afghanistan. Now
let's look at the road ahead for Pakistan.
But first, let me repeat the warning I issued last week: Don't read this if you
are an optimist.
It's easy to be pessimistic about Pakistan these days. The country is under a
military dictatorship, and nothing good ever came out of that particular form of
government. Nothing good for ordinary people, that is: the generals usually do
pretty well for themselves and their cronies.
And they will again. If history is any judge, up to 50% of the aid money that
will pour into Pakistan from a grateful U.S. will end up in the Swiss bank
accounts of the regime's more venal generals. (To be fair, President Pervez
Musharraf has thus far seemed pretty clean personally. But rumors abound in
Islamabad about his fellow generals taking cuts out of defense contracts. And
let's not forget that General Zia ul-Haq's regime had initially seemed clean;
only after the dictator's death did we learn of the senior officers who had
their snouts in the trough the whole time.) Another 30% will be distributed
among Pakistan's feudal landlords, probably in the form of pork-barrel projects
that the country doesn't need. If the people are lucky, 10% of the aid will
actually be spent on the things Pakistan really needs -- education, healthcare,
etc.
The remaining 10 percent? I'll come to that momentarily.
Meanwhile, the people to watch carefully in Pakistan in the months ahead are a)
the angry Islamic extremists who are demonstrating against the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan, and b) the Afghan refugees who are seeping through the highly
porous borders. When the bombing stops and the U.S. withdraws its troops (see
last week's timetable), those mobs will turn their anger on the ruling junta,
the generals who, in the extremist view of things, sold out to the Western
infidels. As for the Afghan refugees, most of them are now wondering how they
will get through the winter in their tents; in due course, they too will resent
the generals for betraying their country and putting them in this predicament.
What do military dictators do with disaffected sections of their people? If
they're reading from General Zia's textbook (and Musharraf has thus far shown
himself to be an exemplary student), they channel the anger away from themselves
and toward another enemy. The last time the country had a sizeable population of
angry young men -- Afghan refugees and jobless Pakistanis -- Zia's proteges in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) trained them in
combat (with the help of some of the more extremist Islamic schools) and sent
them off to fight the jihad against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. You
may have heard about them, they were called the Taliban.
Of course, it will cost a fair bit of money to expand existing training
facilities for militants and to arm the thousands of new recruits. Remember that
spare 10%? That money will be spent on the creation of the New Taliban.
The generals will also need another jihad in which to deploy the New Taliban.
Conveniently, there's one taking place right next door: in Kashmir.
Next week: What it all means for India
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