Posts Tagged → Imran Khan

Pakistan could be in U.S. doghouse

PAKISTAN’S REFUSAL TO allow a CIA base in its territory has pissed off the Biden administration. The Americans also resent Pakistan’s close ties to China, their global adversary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that, given Pakistani Muslims’ bitterness toward the United States, allowing Americans a base for hostile operations in Muslim Afghanistan would be “suicidal” for his administration.

Islamabad fears a downturn in its relations with Washington, which has almost always been the case after Pakistan failed to comply with a U.S. military or security demand. The worst case, some Pakistanis say, occurred when Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, decided to get rid of a U.S. military base in Pakistan to avoid antagonizing what used to be the Soviet Union.  These Pakistanis link Liaqat’s decision to his assassination in 1951, referred to in declassified U.S. documents. Others, who included former Pakistani prime minister and my mentor Nurul Amin, accused the United States of orchestrating disruptions of Pakistan’s democratic process through its military and bureaucratic elements.

Amin told me in 1969 that the United States had got Pakistan’s second prime minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, fired by the bureaucrat-turned Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad.  Nazimuddin, Amin’s close friend, had refused to join the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact unless the pact had a clause stipulating that America would defend Pakistan against “external threats” (India).  My mentor said Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, had carried the Pentagon’s instruction to Ghulam Mohammad and was sipping tea in Mohammad’s portico when the governor-general fired the prime minister. The governor-general, a titular head of state, didn’t have the constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister and would not let Nazimuddin convene the parliament (Constituent Assembly) to demonstrate the support of a parliamentary majority behind him. But Gen. Ayub and the military brass signaled to the deposed prime minister that they supported the governor-general’s action.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto wrote in her autobiography that the United States was behind the overthrow and execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, because Z.A. Bhutto had defied Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.

President Biden’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 has been followed by a dramatic Taliban offensive against the forces of the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an American protégé. The George W. Bush administration had invaded and occupied Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which the United States had dislodged from power in Iraq and Syria, have also increased their activities in in Afghanistan.  Intelligence officials have told Biden that even though the United States and its allies have “diminished” the militant forces in Afghanistan, they could threaten the U.S. homeland again in about two years.  The Biden administration is looking desperately for CIA bases to keep them in check.

Pakistan’s rejection of the CIA base proposal follows a long and devastating “war on terror” in that country, sponsored by Washington. Mostly Muslim Pakistanis have always opposed their country being dragged into a U.S. war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Still, Pakistan had to agree to participate in that war after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened the head of Pakistan’s intelligence services that America would “bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age” if it did not join the U.S. fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. More than 70,000 Pakistanis perished in that war, which was ratcheted up by President Barack Obama (after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize!), infuriating further Pakistanis of all political stripes.

Most Pakistanis, too, feel bitter about U.S. support for each of their four military dictators and America’s hostility to the democratic governments who failed to fulfill U.S. demands. Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister, had angered the Harry Truman administration, not only by asking America to pull out its base outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Liaqat was friends with then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and had turned down an American plea to pressure Mosaddeq to drop his plans to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of the BP). In 1953, four months after the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA station chief in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, and the U.S. ambassador there, Loy Henderson, openly incited and bribed Iranian army officers and bureaucrats into staging a military coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, whom the Eisenhower administration replaced with the tyrannical dictator Mohammad Riza Pahlavi.

The United States has often had direct links to Pakistani army generals independently of the country’s civilian authorities, but Imran Khan doesn’t seem to be in the danger of being overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Khan has been coopted by the Pakistani army generals and is running the country, especially its foreign relations, at the generals’ behest. The Pakistani decision not to have a CIA base was basically made by those generals, who know that a U.S. base could trigger civil unrest in the country.

The Pakistani economy is in shambles, and Islamabad fears that the Americans could deny it the needed economic support and punish it diplomatically and otherwise for rejecting their base request and also for maintaining Pakistan’s historically close relations with China. The Biden administration apparently believes that having had Pakistan’s giant neighbor, India, in its corner in an anti-Chinese alliance (Japan and Australia being the other partners), it can afford to sideline Pakistan. Washington seems indifferent to the possibility of Pakistan joining a growing number of unfriendly Asian countries including China, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

~ Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for the late Nurul Amin, Pakistani prime minister and vice president.

  • Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for Nurul Amin, a former Pakistani prime minister and vice president.  He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.’

China plots to encircle India

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and President of China Xi Jinping before the beginning of the 2017 BRICS Leaders' meeting

“Yay!”

I exclaimed within myself. China was going to upgrade the Sylhet airport, said a blurb on the Internet. Sylhet is my hometown in northeastern Bangladesh.

Sylhet’s Osmani airport is rather small and every time I fly in to the city, I have to hustle through a crowded arrival lounge into the hurly-burly of a packed parking area. Sylhet, too, is close to the Indian state of Assam, where I was born. I felt good about the prospect of traveling more comfortably from Sylhet to see my friends and relatives in India.

I was browsing through news sites on my laptop in my living room in the Washington suburbs. I now wanted to know more about the airport project and gradually found out, through Google search, that it was a much bigger story than I had thought. The modest $248 million project was just the tip of an iceberg of growing bitterness between Bangladesh and India, and more startlingly, part of a grand Chinese strategy to contain India.

The Chinese venture in Sylhet was big news in the Indian media. Some Indian bureaucrats and pundits were fuming at the Bangladesh government for cozying up to China and giving the airport contract to a Chinese company when India was reeling from its border clash with the Chinese in the Himalayas that killed 20 Indian troops. One commentator pointed to Sylhet being next door to Assam, a caldron of unrest against India. Was the Bangladeshi airport going to be a nest for Chinese spies, fomenting trouble for India in Assam? The Bangladeshi government was ignoring these Indian criticisms and not making secret of serious strains in its relations with India.

A report attributed to the Bhorer Kagoj (Morning paper), a Bengali-language Bangladeshi daily, revealed that for four months the Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, had been turning down requests for a meeting with the Indian high commissioner (ambassador) to Dhaka, Riva Ganguly Das. Some in the media speculated that Hasina did not want to hear any Indian carping about the growing Bangladeshi-Chinese ties. In mid-July India finally decided to remove its envoy from her Dhaka post.

The relationship between Dhaka and New Delhi had been flustered, as never before, by two apparently anti-Muslim measures adopted by the Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A new Indian law provides Indian citizenship to immigrants of all faiths from neighboring countries – with the exception of Muslims. And nine out of 10 Bangladeshis are Muslim. Then a new survey of citizenship status of people in Assam, widely criticized as a Muslim witchhunt, has stripped 2 million Assamese, mostly Muslims of Bangladeshi origins, of their Indian citizenship. As a result, anti-Indian outrage was sweeping Bangladesh, and the Hasina government, which had been chummy with New Delhi, had to downgrade its ties to India to an all-time low.

China obviously lost no time in exploiting the animus between Dhaka and New Delhi and reached out to Bangladesh with largesse. Besides taking up the Sylhet airport project, Beijing is working on other trade and investment ventures in Bangladesh. On June 19 Bangladesh and China signed a trade agreement under which China provides duty-free access to 97 percent of 8,200 Bangladeshi products, an undreamed of bonanza for Bangladesh. Then Beijing signed an agreement with the Hasina government to build a submarine base at the Cox’s Bazar harbor of Bangladesh.

While this was going on, the Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, surprised the region by making a widely publicized phone call to his long-estranged Bangladeshi counterpart, Hasina. Khan complained to her about India’s annexation of the Muslim-majority Kashmir state. The call had considerable optical implications. In 1971 India went to war with Pakistan to let Bangladesh (then Pakistan’s eastern province) secede from Pakistan and become an independent state. Ever since, relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan had been on the rocks. It appeared that China’s long arm of diplomacy had got Khan to call up Hasina as part of Beijing’s broader anti-Indian strategy.

Besides Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nepal has also been at loggerheads with India. For years the Nepalese have been accusing India of having illegally annexed three of their territories.  The festering feud led Kathmandu to try to wiggle out of India’s economic orbit by courting China. Beijing grabbed the overture enthusiastically, dishing out loans, aid and investments to Nepal. Last year, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Kathmandu, the two countries upgraded their relationship to a “strategic partnership.”

The Nepali-Indian tensions heated up in May when India opened a new road through the territories claimed by Nepal, which reached the Chinese border. China was not amused. New Delhi also put out a map showing the territories claimed by Nepal are part of India. Nepal responded by publishing its own map showing the disputed territories to belong to Nepal. Indian politicians and news media are accusing China of orchestrating Nepal’s anti-Indian moves. They are branding Kathmandu a Chinese “proxy,” trying to create troubles for India at Beijing’s behest.

China isn’t bothering to deny these Indian accusations. On the contrary, it apparently has decided to put its potentially anti-Indian ducks in a row. On July 27 Beijing held a virtual conference with Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan, ostensibly to adopt a four-point plan to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. But significantly, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, also discussed plans to boost economic recovery in the region and prodded Afghanistan to get on with Beijing’s global infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Largest of its kind in history, the BRI is focused on making huge investments in transportation, communication, education, power grid, iron and steel manufacture, and so on. China expects the initiative, involving more than 68 nations, to accelerate economic growth across the Asia Pacific region, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe.

Pakistan was among the first countries to jump into the BRI. Bangladesh and Nepal then joined in. And impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely to pass up the opportunity to embrace the mammoth project that would accelerate its economic growth.

The United States, India, Japan, Australia and some other pro-Western countries have stayed away from the BRI. Some have denounced the project as China’s mega strategy for world domination, a mechanism to financially trap countries into the Chinese orbit. Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros warned governments against joining the venture, calling China a “mortal threat to open societies.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had joined the BRI, has dissociated his country from it, citing Chinese persecution of Uighur Muslims.

All the same, China has invested billions of dollars in India’s neighborhood – in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. It obviously is now using those investments and the lure of the BRI to stitch these countries together into a pro-Chinese albatross around India’s neck.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Pakistan’s scary quest for roots

WHY IS PAKISTAN being riven by Sunni-Shia and Sunni-Ahmadi strife?

A scholar at Columbia University shares his thoughts on the question in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Pakistan’s tyrannical majority.”

Manan Ahmed Asif quotes Muhammad Ali Jinnah telling Pakistanis: “[E]very one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his color, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations.”  And Asif deplores that the promise of Pakistan’s founding father for “religious equality [has] proved false,” that the country’s Sunni majority has been on a witchhunt of the Shia and Ahmadis.

Sadly, it’s true. I was hoping, however, that the professor would tell us why sectarian hatred among Pakistanis appears to have deepened since their independence from British colonial rule. But  he doesn’t delve into it beyond blaming Pakistani politicians for pandering to the anti-minority Sunni masses. Targets of his criticism include then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and today’s Movement for Justice party leader Imran Khan, both leftists.

Asif mentions that among the early victims of sectarian intolerance is Pakistan was Sir Zafrullah Khan, an Ahmadi who was “hounded out” of his Cabinet post.  Ahmadis don’t believe that Muhammad was God’s last messenger to mankind, as the Quran says; but that their religious leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed was.  Therefore, most Islamic theologians and Muslims in general consider them outside the pale of Islam. The professor scorns Bhutto and Imran Khan for endorsing this theological position on the Ahmadis.

The question here is not whether Ahmadis are true Muslims. It is whether they deserve to be barred from holding jobs or subjected to social discrimination, which Islam itself forbids.

Unfortunately, societies have historically gone through one kind of prejudice or another. In 1954 when Zafrullah Khan was forced out of his foreign minister post in Pakistan, America was convulsing with virulent racism; African-Americans were disenfranchised, segregated and still being lynched.

It doesn’t mean that we should justify or discount social prejudices. But unless we know the sources of  a prejudice, we can’t explore its correctives.  Jinnah and his second in command, Liaqat Ali Khan; Mahatma Gandhi and his top lieutenant, Jawaharlal Nehru, were all  products of a British education, and they shared many Western values.  British India was steeped in widespread illiteracy and despair from nearly two centuries of colonial subjugation and suppression.  The political idiom of the subcontinent’s Western-educated elites was shaped by Western values and standards.

Independence from colonial rule, followed by the spread of democratic values and education in a domestic setting, has engendered self-respect and pride in indigenous cultural heritage among the elites and masses in South Asia and other developing countries. More and more, people in these societies are differentiating  themselves along their indigenous cultural fault lines, rather than the mostly artificial boundaries of their “nation-states,” created by colonialists and their own Westernized elites.

Their affinity with their religious and ethnic communities is often deeper than  with their state institutions. Hence the increased antagonism between many of these communities. Shia-Sunni conflicts rock not only Pakistan, but most of  Muslim west Asia and North Africa.  In India, the phenomenon has triggered the dramatic rise of the anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist movement.  In fact Pakistanis have never given their Islamist parties more than 6% of votes; but in India, the Hindu nationalist Bharatitya Janata Party has twice been voted to power. And the instigator of the harrowing Muslim massacre in Gujarat, Narendra Modi, is one of India’s most popular leaders and is could become its next prime minister.

Today nationalist bigotry and hubris stalk much of the West, while communal prejudice swirls much of the rest of the world. Muslim and other post-colonial societies have to find ways to douse their people’s communal animosity. As military and political hostility between the nation-states of Pakistan and India abates, politicians and civil society groups there should get on with promoting tolerance and resisting violence between their religious and ethnic communities.

◆ Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog Islam and the West.