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Will the Army policies break up Pakistan?

Reza Hossein Borr - 5/19/2009

Unintended consequences of mass migration of civilian residents of Sawat and the neighbouring regions will be very grave in very new future. The people who have been uprooted by the military operations of Pakistan's army will create immense problems. The Taleban will move with them in disguise in different areas of Pakistan which are closer to the capital of this country. If they could not move freely before, now they can freely travel everywhere they want in search of job and a better life. Wherever they go they will carry their ideology with them. They were confined before in small areas. Thanks the army, now they have been forced to spread. It is like breaking up a jail and discharging a large number of potentially dangerous people.

Like all indoctrinated people, the Pashtuns in general and Taleban in specific, have become religious people who carry with them their ideas wherever they go. They were quite satisfied in living their own way of life they had developed for centuries in their regions. Their culture was providing a way of life for them. When their land was joined officially to Pakistan in the Sixties, their way of life and culture was partly interrupted and replaced with the kind of system which did not fit in their culture. Since then, they have been campaigning for the restoration of their old traditions and systems in which Sharia was only a part. This fact was recognised by several governments. The same government that today is destroying their area signed an agreement with them which officially recognised that. This was an acknowledgement of their legitimacy in seeking their own favourable system.

Ineffectiveness of the system that was imposed on them dropped them to this conclusion that the good old days that they were capable of governing themselves and resolving their disputes in their traditional manner, were good days. Their system was very effective, locally born, native and efficient in its own way. The nostalgia for the old days drove them to seek an Islamic system of their own choice which was in contrast with the human rights charter and civil laws of the country. But this is not only the Taleban who have been breaking the law and violating human rights charter. The governments and other institutions and organizations have broken the law and violated the human rights charter more than Swati Taleban. If it is the respect for the law, it must be observed by the governments and its affiliated organizations first. The masses follow the behaviours of their leaders. If the leaders respect the law and human rights, the masses will do the same. Those who have caused the disappearance of hundreds of people are not eligible for defending the law. Those who have broken the law for sixty years cannot brake the acceleration of Talbanism.

As one of the Pakistani generals has written in a book, Talebanism is the product of injustice in Pakistan. Bringing justice cannot be possible by creating and repeating more injustices.

In the name of Taleban, the government has hit very hard a large number of Pashtuns. A disaster has been created because of lack of long-term vision and strategy. Pakistan like any other country must act according to the interest of its people, not under the pressure or not definitely for money. The money which has promised is not even enough for rehabilitating these displaced people and reconstructing their region that has been destroyed.

The present scenario that displaced 1.5 million Pashtuns, according to UN, is similar to what happened in Pakistan in the 1970s. The People's Party Leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the Prime Minister. Civil unrest began in Baluchistan. Under pressure by the Shah and Americans, Bhutto brought the army to crush a civil unrest which led to the death and displacement of a large number of Baloch people. A mass movement began against Bhutto in which the army took over the power and hanged him for what the army was doing.

It is claimed that the Pakistan army is dominated by the Punjabis and Punjabis use ruthless policies and actions to suppress the smaller provinces of Sindh, Baluchistan and North West Frontier. When General Musharaf was the chief of the army and president he used the army for controlling Taleban in the North West Frontier very skilfully. He did not take actions of such scale as he knew there would be huge unintended consequences that he could not resolve. Now the civilian government of the Pakistan People's Party has instructed the army to use force to eliminate Taleban. The Army has been waiting for such a moment. They did not want definitely to take the responsibility directly for such actions. Now the government is responsible. The army is using the kind of strategies which are contrary to the guerrilla war. Consequently they caused the mass migration of a large number of people. The ones who would be responsible for this disaster will not be the army and General Kiyani but the People's Party leaders, Zardari and Gilani.

This disaster will create its own disastrous results for the Pakistan People's Party. When the mass movement against the present government will begin, the army will act in the same way that it acted in Seventies and follow the same policies. Zardari has committed a grave mistake, a mistake that has dug his grave. If he is very smart politician he will find a way out of this disaster but it is very unlikely. Once more, Punjabi dominated army has found a new Sindhi victim. The army spokesman emphasises that the army has acted according to the instructions of the present government to pass the responsibility to him. Most of the people would blame Zardari more than the army. The army would suppress the Pashtuns and victimises Zardari, hitting very hard at two of its enemies at the same time.

The people who have lost everything are prepared to take revenge. The Pashtuns are very revengeful people who have never forgotten their enemies. They are closely interrelated to each other. Whether they live in Afghanistan or Pakistan they have a great sense of shared identity, destiny and vision. Islam has been a great tool for their advancement since the advent of Islam. In whatever way they accepted Islam, they believed in it firmly and used jihad as a tool for conquering the neighbouring regions. They have gained from Islam enough to employ it again right now for achieving their political outcomes now that different governments of Pakistan have failed to deliver the most basic services.

The Americans have emphasised again and again that the Pakistani governments have not been able and are not able not to deliver the basic services. When the governments cannot deliver the basic services, what the people are supposed to do? The American people have the choice of changing their governments in elections if they do not like them. The people of Pakistan clearly have been deprived of this choice for a long time. The insistence of Americans for pacifying the people who want a better life is like this scenario that George Bush making himself president for life using the power of the army and security forces. America has never adapted a policy to empower the Pakistani people to empower themselves for improving their lives. Instead, the Americans always helped the dictators who never had long term visions for the country and therefore, they never planned any vision that could guarantee the improvement of lives of the masses.

Pakistan has been under the influence of the West since its foundation and if it has not been able to deliver the basic services for the last sixty years under Western systems, how they can stop people from looking for a new system by which they think they can achieve descent standards of life. An Islamic system will not be able to deliver any tangible results as the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran has proved but what other options are available to the people of Pakistan when there is no enough freedom of press and democracy for debating and discovering new systems?

Lack of long-term vision by the West and other countries for destroying the Soviet Union in Afghanistan generated unintended consequences they never thought of. Like all short-sighted politicians, they abandoned Pakistan and Afghanistan after they destroyed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was destroyed because the two superpowers were fighting their wars in Afghanistan instead of fighting it in Europe. They abandoned a destroyed country and they abandoned a large number of Jihadist that they had brainwashed to go and get killed and kill the Soviets. Well, you cannot abandon indoctrinated people like that and go and rest at home. The West was responsible for everybody who fought alongside with them in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. They were also responsible for reconstruction of Afghanistan but they did not do it. They were also responsible for unintended consequences of their behaviours both in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

What the Pakistani army is doing under pressure of the West will generate even more unintended consequences which in turn will create more problems for Pakistan and the region. It seems that the West has lost the idea of long-term visions and strategies and how to design policies that can work over a long period of time. Once it was rumoured that the West planned for the whole world for decades, now they cannot plan for even a few years and for themselves. Such circumstances made the emergence of new powers in Asia inevitable. The newly emerging powers are gaining more moral authorities than the West. A public poll in the Middle East indicated that President Ahmadi Nejad of Iran and Hassan Nasrrallah of Hezbollah were the most popular leaders in the region.

Pakistan made the same mistake in Baluchistan when it bombarded the headquarters of Akbar Khan Bugti, the respected Baluch leader. The army turned a peaceful movement for more rights for Baluchistan into a mass movement for independence of Baluchistan. The Pakistani army invaded the Bugti area and displaced thousands of people who are still living a life of misery and provide recruits to the Baluch fighters who have been seeking independence as a result of Pakistani policies.

The Pashtuns believed for a long time that they were indispensable partners of Punjabis, but the present situation proved that they were wrong. The Punjabis did not hesitate to massacre and rape millions of Bangladeshis, they did not hesitate to hang Bhutto, they did not hesitate to kill ultra-respected Baloch leader Akbar khan Bugti and they will not hesitate to massacre and displace millions of Pashtuns when it comes to billions of American Dollars.

You can displace the masses by force but you cannot replace their religion by force. The psychology of forced migration has proved that when people are on the move, their religion gets more consolidated. A new sense of nationalism will emerge and triggers the development of an ideology which is a combination of nationalism and religion. The present miseries they experience aggravate that ideology.

The nostalgia for returning home and experiencing the comfort and privileges of living among their own people is so powerful that the majority of people who had been forced to leave their homes had returned to their homes after decades even when they have found a better life somewhere else. The Jews are a good example.

The Pashtun nationalists are very angry at the kind of actions that caused catastrophic mass migrations. If the nationalists do not indicate a sense of sympathy with the displaced people and Taleban, they will isolate themselves and give further chance to potential expansion of Taleban among other Pashtuns as the only source of resistance against miscalculated military operations. The policies of the present government and the behaviours of the Army have given a golden opportunity to Taleban and Pashtun nationalists to look at each other more favourably and work together in future for salvation and consolidation of their joint and shared sense of identity and destiny.