Pakistan: State of Doom

AN ADVERTISEMENT OF Pakistan’s humili­ation and complicity in its jihad against Hindus in Pahalgam is the photograph that shows its senior military and political leaders mourn­ing the death of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist Abdul Rauf who was killed in Operation Sindoor. The mourning was also a celebration of Rauf’s martyrdom.

The spectacle harkens back to the 11th-century when Mahmud of Ghazni’s nephew Salar Masud was defeated by Raja Suhel Dev. Masud’s band of Islamic warriors and his biographer Abdur Rahman Chishti bewailed his martyrdom and hailed him as a true Ghazi, a holy warrior, who had inflicted untold horrors upon the infidel Hindus in the service of Islam before “drinking from the cup” of Shahadat. They spun divine explanations meant to erase the taint of his defeat just as Pakistan’s disinformation machinery is now claiming victory over India. As it has done ev­ery time India has battered it. The posthumous body of eulogistic mythology created around Salar Masud forms staple reading in the abundant syllabus of Islam’s conquests in Hindustan. It is also a precedent that created Pakistan’s modern mythology which traces Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s ancestry to Prophet Muhammad; to the True Believers nothing else explains how Jinnah managed to “create” Pakistan in 1947.

Pakistan embodies the stages of a tragedy: how evil first destroys the good and finally consumes itself. Today, Pakistan appears to be in the last stage. This artificial nation is an unlikely creation of a Faustian farce in the person of Jinnah who preferred to be the sultan of the nether world than remain as the second-in-command to God.

Then there’s the cliché—that the Pakistani army owns the country. While true, the humiliation it has suffered at India’s hands in the latest bout shows that it is an army that does not know what to do with itself. It is difficult to see through the tornado of rumours emanating from Pakistan itself—whether General Asim Munir will depose Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif or whether Munir’s own head will be taken. Either possibility is not only unsurprising but normal.

Perhaps at no point in its existence has the Pakistani military been so thoroughly boxed in from all sides. Exactly two years ago, thousands of inflamed supporters of Imran Khan had vandalised and torched the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) building and Paki­stan army headquarters in the wake of his arrest. The incident dem­onstrated how fragile and vulnerable Pakistan is from within—that a determined mob of its own citizens could lay siege to its govern­ment and military HQ if the right trigger was activated.

It also does not help that Pakistan’s army finds itself increasingly powerless to combat the Great Encirclement of its own scripting.

The Baloch rebellion that erupts at random intervals has proven devastating to the extent that on May 10, the Baloch Liberation Army prac­tically conquered Mangochar and de­clared independence from Pakistan.

At the other end in Afghanistan, the Taliban ‘government’ was among the first to condemn Pakistan’s jihad in Pahalgam, another clear indication of its escalated hostilities against its former patron.

The less said about the frequent outbursts of sectarian bloodletting on the streets of Pakistan—some requiring military interven­tion—the better.

India’s retaliation to avenge Pahalgam has also unravelled the façade of Pakistan’s bullying and bluster, which were kept oxygenated by the passivity of Congress governments. The lull in the interval between the Pahalgam misadventure and India’s retribution on May 7 was filled with ominous statements from Pakistan’s panicked leadership.

Narendra Modi is perhaps the first prime minister to give ab­solute freedom to our armed forces to deal with Pakistan in the manner they deemed fit. The results were writ on the faces of a distraught Sharif and the Pakistani military establishment.

To grasp Modi’s decisiveness and Pakistan’s unravelling we need to recall that during the two successive United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments, there was a jihadist attack every six weeks on average—including 26/11, perhaps the worst indictment of Congress.

But now India’s reprisal has bombed Pakistan’s military infra­structure back by at least 10 years. The selection of strategic targets and the scale of the devastation inflicted on our rogue neighbour is tell­ing—Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Gujranwala, Lahore, Muzaffarabad, Sialkot, and Muridke.

Our no-holds-barred punishment of Pakistan, among other things, is one of the greatest triumphs of Modi’s foreign policy. A substantial portion of his first term was dedicated to a whirlwind world tour, building trust and clear alliances. This set the tone for what followed, and the last decade is proof of India’s diplo­macy working towards a clear plan. India got every major—and minor—nation on its side and isolated Pakistan to the extent that even Saudi Arabia, its former benefactor, has shunned it. Which is why, today, Pakistan has zero sympathy even from its cynical and fair-weather supporters. The primal law of nature as of international relations is that the world respects strength; even Buddha counselled an injured snake to bare its fangs and hiss and not accept passive nonviolence as a method of deter­rence. Pakistan’s unravelling could not have happened other­wise. Its past successes at blackmailing India owed to two major factors: support from America and the pusillanimity of Congress governments. Operation Sindoor wrote the epitaph for both. Christopher Hitchens was especially scathing in his analysis of American policy towards Pakistan: “[O]ur blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the gross­est way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sover­eignty of India as well as Afghanistan… Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs… By the start of the millennium, Pakistan had become home to a Walmart of fissile material, traded as far away as Libya and North Korea by the state-subsidized nuclear entrepreneur A.Q. Khan… This is well beyond humiliation. It makes us a prisoner of the shame, and co-respon­sible for it.” (‘From Abbottabad to Worse’, Vanity Fair, July 2011.)

In a sense, America’s Pakistan policy has come full circle. Its ca­pacity to issue imprimaturs to India, directing us to swallow Paki­stan’s roguery has dwindled. Thus, despite agreeing to a ceasefire, Modi has made it clear that India will not accept America’s media­tion on an issue that concerns India’s sovereignty. However, it is always better to err on the side of caution; one hopes that this cease­fire will not eventually remind us of the fatal blunder committed by Prithviraj Chauhan who repeat­edly forgave Muhammad Ghori, thereby paving the way for India’s loss of freedom.

The ceasefire has understand­ably evoked outrage against the Modi government even from supporters who view it as a climb-down. The anticipation that India would irreparably devastate Paki­stan has culminated in an anticli­max no one saw coming. While this argument holds merit, it is equally true that India continues to operate on its own terms. But the revelations in the aftermath, too, deserve our attention.

The apparent ease with which India pummelled almost all of Pakistan’s key airbases, shattered its communications, and dared its nuclear bluff is what spooked its military echelons. This among others is the clearest demonstration that Pakistan has been in free fall over the last half-century. The present, shortlived war merely showed the full extent of its free fall.

PAKISTAN’S DESCENT INTO self-destruction began in the mid-1960s, more so after the 1965 war in which it was routed. Since its founding years, the country has been in the thrall of generations of Muslim feudal lords in league with the landed gentry of Punjab and the Ashraf class of the United Provinces of undivided India. Add to this the bevy of bigoted bar­risters, British-educated Islamic demagogues and wealthy clerics, and we get the recipe for the putrid feast the current generation of Pakistan is consuming. This elite has shown an insatiable appetite for plundering its own country and has escaped unpunished.

It is instructive to study travelogues and reportage from Paki­stan in the 1960s to the emergence of the Taliban. These are first­hand testimonies recording the full trajectory of the self-scripted implosion of a deluded Islamic republic which sculpted a repro­bate nation-state. Perhaps the most insightful work on the subject is VS Naipaul’s Among the Believers. Analysing the folly and impos­sibility of Pakistan’s belief that only Islam and Allah would save it, Naipaul says: “The construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim… The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than in Pakistan… Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Paki­stan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost

their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and repu­tation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state… only the armed forces flourished. They were seen at first as the defenders, and extenders, of the Islamic state. Then it became apparent that they were the state’s only organized group. They became masters, a country within a country… The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the… faith was flawed… but because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for… [there] was the other side of the life of faith. The faith was full of rules. In politics there were none. There were no political rules because the faith was meant to create only believers.”

Naipaul’s book was published in 1981; the Taliban had not even been conceived nor had anyone heard of Osama bin Laden.

In less than 20 years, the Taliban, indoctrinated by mullahs from the Deobandi school and Saudi Arabia, and patronised and trained by the Pakistani army, had established a ‘government’ in Afghanistan. Post 9/11, Osama became Pakistan’s state protectee and its worst-kept secret. It was also the time when the most fa­voured name given to newborn male infants in both Pakistan and Afghanistan was Osama.

What exactly flourishes then in Pakistan—the Land of the Pure—75 years after its founding? Political corruption, military coups, jihadist factories, arms smuggling, drug trade, human trafficking, sectarian combustion, illiteracy, poverty, medieval tribalism. None is a secret.

Robert D Kaplan, who toured Afghanistan and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, predicted the mess that Pakistan finds itself in today: “[T]he Taliban won’t play the role of puppet. And Afghanistan’s religious extremism is accelerating Pakistan’s, through the network of madrassas. Just as the Taliban rose and spread like Islam itself, they could also descend into disorderly power struggles, much like the medieval Muslim rulers who followed the prophet Mohammed.” (‘The Lawless Frontier’, The Atlantic, September 2000.)

In spite of all this, it takes some feat of fantasy for Pakistan’s leadership to boast that its greatest achievement is its nuclear bomb—an Islamic bomb, in the eyes of the faithful. Pakistan’s obsession with the nuclear bomb is the direct outcome of its obsession with destroying infidel India. The levels of its nuclear mania are laid bare in a detailed ground report (June 25, 2000) in the New York Times by Jeffery Goldberg: “It was quite a party. A big cake, lots of speeches, lots of dignitaries, including Gen. Pervez Musharraf… It was a vanilla sheet cake, and written in lemon frosting across the length of it were the words, “Second Anniversary Celebrations of Youm-e-Takbeer.” Youm-e-Takbeer can be trans­lated as “the day of God’s greatness,” and in Pakistan it refers to May 28, 1998, the day Pakistan first exploded a nuclear bomb. The birthday party, under the auspices of Pakistan’s mili­tary leader, was a birthday party for the bomb.”

But there’s more: “Pakistan has fetishized the bomb. In the traffic cir­cles of every sizable city… a full-scale model of the country’s home-grown long-range missile stands proud. In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, a model of a missile is aimed at India… Parents dress up their children and photograph them standing before it.”

And now Pakistan has learned painfully the true limits of the power of God’s own nuclear bomb. Operation Sindoor has neu­tralised two major jihadist training camps—Shawai Nalla and Syedna Bilal—in Muzaffarabad.

Pakistan’s descent into anarchy becomes starker when we consider what the country has lost in its unachievable quest of an unsullied and perfect Islamic state, which supposedly existed in the 7th century.

By the 1970s, every vestige of art and culture that Pakistan had inherited from undivided India was hurtling towards extinction. The extermination of Hindustani classical music is perhaps the most representative of this wilful embrace of medieval tribalism based on bigotry. For centuries, large parts of what would become Pakistan were hubs of flourishing Gharanas; today, you scarcely find a Pakistani Muslim musician who sings or plays Hindustani classical music.

One of the biggest blockbusters of Pakistani cinema was a 1990 movie titled International Gorillay (International Guerrillas). It was a celluloid revenge against Salman Rushdie who, in the climax, is shown to be charred to death by three massive Qurans appearing in the sky. The film depicts Pakistan as a fortress guarding Islam in the modern world, protecting the faith from the sins of American materialism and immorality. Its success is a grim commentary on how Pakistan’s political and religious class has shaped the mind­set of the average Pakistani.

Pakistan, and especially India, must remember the fact that Islamabad did not exist before 1960, and Lahore, Karachi, Rawal­pindi and Hyderabad were all hubs of the Indian freedom move­ment—the very cities India has now bombed.

There is a history lesson in all this. All great empires fell due to an excess of prosperity but Pakistan’s doom had accompanied its conception.

2025 India-Pakistan wararms smugglingdrug tradehuman traffickingjihadist factoriesmilitary coupsOperation SindoorPahalgamPakistanpolitical corruptionsectarian combustionterror attack