ON INDO-PAK COOPERATION: A REPLY TO HOODBHOY

Arshad M. Khan

Sick of the toadying in Dawn and the shameless aping of the worst in Western culture by Daily Times, I have not read either of these organs in a long time.  The Hindu is a different matter (and Sainath a magnificent journalist) though I missed Pervez Hoodbhoy’s recent article until I came across a reprint in ZSpace.  People in Pakistan should be grateful to activists like him although some have accused him of the native Orientalist or brown sahib syndrome (http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid12022009.html),  Along with Ahmad Rashid the peripatetic apologist – thus best-selling author – for US imperialism who never met a war he didn’t like, Hoodbhoy is a strong supporter of fighting the Taleban.  He now wants India to join in the fight against all terror groups.  Attractive superficially, closer analysis shows the idea is dead wrong or perhaps more correctly half-wrong.  Closer cooperation between the two countries is long overdue, but jointly fighting terror groups fostering multifaceted agendas where religion is merely a tool for political goals is an impossibility.

That religion is not the main motivator behind the Taleban, is clear from the fact that there was no Taleban directed violence in Pakistan just a few years ago.  It is only after hundreds of Pashtun civilians (and now thousands) had been killed in bombings that the Taleban reacted.  Why should India join in an idiotic, unnecessary war caused by Pentagon war planners who went to fight al-Qaeda and ended up fighting the Pashtun people?  Why should India wish to turn its capital into the bomb-ravaged Islamabad described by Hoodbhoy or Amritsar into its neighbor Lahore?  The idea that the Taleban will take over Pakistan, or its military or its nuclear weapons (threatening India) is idle speculation particularly as the military has shown itself to be disciplined even in fighting a civil war.

Tracing the history of the conflict, it is easy to chronicle the errors in judgment starting with the war itself.  It might well have been avoided if we in the US had understood Pashtun customs and traditions (Pashtunwalli).  We would have known they would never surrender bin Laden – a situation no different from the present one in that he is still at large – but we could have negotiated terms rendering al-Qaeda impotent and vulnerable to a later Special Forces operation.

When George Bush decided to join the baying for revenge, he chose the cheap way.  Starting with a massive bombing campaign costing thousands of innocent Afghan civilian lives, he reduced our casualties at the cost of alienating the population.  Next using the Northern Alliance, in effect joining them in what was until then an incipient civil war, further embittered the Pashtuns.  At the conclusion of operations, the Alliance reaped the rewards, becoming the Afghan army — still led by Tajik officers with little or no majority Pashtun participation — and monopolizing the important cabinet positions in the government.  All of this heightened by corruption especially at the lower district levels has thrown Pashtuns into the arms of the Taleban.  Insurgencies cannot sustain themselves over a long period without the tacit support of the local population, and this support was demonstrated openly in the recent election fiasco with a non-existent voter turnout.

How can Afghanistan have representative government without the active support of the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns?  And how can the Pashtuns be represented without the participation of their most ardent defenders, the Taleban.  Any political settlement will have to include them or the war will continue.  Thus a more useful role for NATO including US forces would be to set up as a peacekeeping force and broker an agreement between the Northern Alliance and the Pashtuns.  That the religious Taleban will be included is a natural consequence of US policy in the region alienating the public from impotent secular parties. 

So, should India and Pakistan work together?  Yes, of course but not in war; instead in joining for economic development.  I have in mind a grand design modeled on the European Union that finally discards the legacy and shackles of colonialism.  It would include India, Pakistan and Bangladesh with the possibility of adding Afghanistan at a later date.

As with the European Community, the advantages are manifold – a few highlights:

• The savings in military expenditure could, at the very least, revamp the decaying infrastructure in each country.  The urban elite constantly touting progress should spend a couple of hours in a third class compartment in summer, or ride a city bus, and then compare the experience to Korea (South or North), a place similar or worse economically after the Second World War.
• The territorial imperative would be reduced to irrelevancy, and it would finesse the Kashmir problem, particularly if a later unified Kashmir is promised autonomy within the larger whole.
• Indian would acquire large additional markets in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
• Pakistan and Bangladesh would have access to technological expertise supplementing their own resources.

On a final note, I wonder if any readers have visited the campus of an American university lately.  Among the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students there, they will see an unexpected coalescing of groups.  The Punjabis (Indian or Pakistani) group together and the same holds for Bengalis.  Given the freedom, it seems language and culture surmount artificial national borders in human interaction.

Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to suggest the following but I bet if Manmohan Singh had the choice of spending an evening with a fellow Punjabi, Gilani, or with a Gujarati or Bengali or South Indian for company, he would choose Gilani.  And Advani (a fellow alumnus with Musharraf of St. Patrick’s in Karachi) would surely love to retire in his beloved Sindh — one is, after all, an outsider everywhere but in his land of birth.

Let’s get to work.

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