Clarion Content

The New York Times Week in Review section this Sunday tried to dissect the underlying failures of Pakistan in an article called "Ghosts that Haunt Pakistan" (01.06.08) They wanted to understand why under dictators and elected politicians alike Pakistan has remained one of the most corrupt countries in the world, with some of the highest levels of malnutrition, infant mortality and illiteracy. They conclude that democracy has never had time to fully take root in Pakistan. This is a specious conclusion that underlies the benign rational for the continuing American occupation of Iraq as well. Like most Western commentators and politicians of the last fifty years, the NY Times misunderstands the fundamental underlying problem haunting Pakistan. It is not a lack of democratic institutions or attempts to establish them. It is rather the lack of a central national consciousness. In short, there is no Pakistan.

Their article hints at this theme noting Pakistan's first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was killed by a Pashtun separatist. They note that the recently deceased Mrs. Benazir Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was Prime Minister twice, for a total of six years, during the 1970's, was hung over a Baluchistani dispute. They also relate that even Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah was Gujarati. And more recently they mention, twice Prime Minister, the deposed Nawaz Sharif, who tested Pakistan's nuclear weapons, is a Punjabi. None of these nations or nationalities are countries. Of course, when one of their own is holding power in the imaginary creation of the West, the state of Pakistan, they are going to try to grab all of the spoils of governmental power they can. U.N. aid budgets, I.M.F. loans, military budgets, federal contracts, etc. are all dispensed by the central state. But this state has no real constituents who identify with it, it is not a nation. There is no loyalty to Pakistan. The generals and dictators have taken the reigns of power for the same reason, plunder, some come with a tribal or ethnic constituencies, for others, the military itself is the organ expecting to feast on the state.

The same thing is going on next door in a faux Western creation. Afghanistan is a state divided among the peoples who are first Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara and Turkmen. There is no loyalty to the center, look at the tortured attempts to produce a semblance of a parliament. When the strong man is removed the power of the state collapses and only the budget(the spoils) remain. Neither the Soviets, nor the Taliban held the Afgahni state any more together than current Primer Minister Hamid Karzai.

Witness the disintegration of Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein. There is no Iraq. Before the invasion a dictator held together a figment of the western imagination that contained scads of different Shia and Sunni Arab tribes, plus Kurds, Persians, Armenians, Assyrians, Turkmen and Marsh Arabs. Who in an Iraq is first and foremost an Iraqi? If one declared that loyalty in Baghdad who would one turn to for protection first? Quite likely an American, as opposed to one of one's own, because to identify with one's own is to explicitly identify as something other than an Iraqi first. Again, note the agonizingly slow process of attempting to negotiate the division of anything in Iraq. The fact that all patronage and power has to have a division of turf, booty and loot speaks volumes about the non-existent unity of Iraq.

The ethnic and religious divisions in these states are not like the American melting pot, gradually stirred together into a sauce over a hundred years. Unfortunately, they are far more reminiscent of the virulent ethnic and religious divisions that brutally ripped apart that faux state of Yugoslavia. The West has to address this quandary, and immediately, if it has any hope of peaceably resolving the torment facing Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq. Supporting the dictators that suppress these divisions simply cannot be American policy. Nor can vainly promoting the ideals of democracy while handing out the spoils of global capitalism to a favored few chosen by the state.


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Labels: Middle East, Politics