'Clash of civilizations' renewing lives, communities

Tag: Pakistan

China plots to encircle India

“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.

Can Israel digest 30% of West Bank?

WASN’T BENJAMIN NETANYAHU going to extend “Israeli sovereignty” to 30 percent of the West Bank, beginning July 1? Well, July 1 came and slipped quietly away, but the Israeli prime minister didn’t annex an inch of the Palestinian territory.

What has happened to his plan?

Rabbi Sharon Brous tells us what has. An influential leader of American Jews, she indicated that wiser Jewish views drove home to Netanyahu that annexing a large chunk of Palestinian land would be “catastrophic” to Israel. Writing in the online newspaper The Forward, the Los Angeles rabbi said that these Jews are worried that taking in 30% or even less of the West Bank with its large Palestinian population would whittle away Israel’s Jewish culture and democratic institutions.

Her argument touched a chord in me as I have been exploring in my political memoir if or how a liberal democratic state can handle cultural pluralism. Western democracies don’t face the problem because they are mostly white-Christian cultural monochromes. The democratic process in these countries turns up governments that represent the bulk of the populations and their values and cultures, and government policies don’t alienate or estrange significant segments those societies.

In Pakistan, where I lived many years, the first nationwide democratic elections in 1970 triggered a secessionist movement that led to the breakup of that country and the rebirth of its Bengalee-inhabited eastern province as independent Bangladesh. In
neighboring India, where I was born, the last two elections have produced a
virulently anti-Muslim government, whose policies and actions have endangered the rights and cultures of 200 million Indian Muslims. Mind you, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was elected in 2014 and reelected in 2019 by large majorities of
Indian Hindus, who make up 83 percent of the Indian population.

Liberalism has given us freedom and democracy. The two concepts can, and often do, clash in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies, as they have in Lebanon, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Democratic elections in those countries have often threatened the freedoms of their minorities. The agony of liberal democracy has been aggravated by the rise of people’s consciousness about their faiths and cultures. More and more people are voting for their ethnic and religious interests, leading to violence between rival ethnic and cultural groups.

In Israel, gone are the days when secular socialists ruled the country. The last several elections produced right-wing Jewish governments that are gobbling up the lands of Palestinian Muslims, threatening their lives and culture. Rabbi Brous and other cool-headed Jews are worried that Israel’s further expansion would dangerously enlarge and stimulate Israel’s Palestinian Muslim subculture that could destabilize the Israeli state and society. This ties into a theme I am trying to tackle in my memoir: Does majoritarian democracy fit societies with robust, incongruent cultures?

Brous reminded me of an encounter between a Pakistani diplomat and a Pakistani politician I witnessed in New York decades ago. I was covering a U.N. General Assembly session in New York for the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. On the evening of Oct. 9, 1971, I got a bombshell of a scoop. Over dinner in his kitchen in Washington, the departing Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Agha Hilaly, told me on condition of anonymity of a visit from Henry Kissinger, then U.S. national security adviser.

“The CIA has learned,” the Pakistani envoy quoted Kissinger to me, “that India will overrun East Pakistan in mid-November.” Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her security Cabinet had made the decision the previous week.

“How reliable is the CIA’s source?” I asked.

Reminding me of the not-for-attribution basis of the interview, the ambassador speculated that Morarji Desai, then deputy prime minister of India and Indira Gandhi’s nemesis, might have leaked the information to the CIA. I suspected that Yahya’s unceremonious recall of Hilaly had prompted the ambassador to spill the beans to me.

A secessionist movement among ethnic Bengalees had been raging in Pakistan’s eastern province. A Pakistan-wide election the previous year had got a Bengalee political party, the Awami League, a parliamentary majority. That party had been agitating against repression by Pakistan’s military dictatorship and exploitation by economic interests supported by it. The Awami League wanted to tear East Pakistan away from West Pakistan, the bastion of Pakistan’s military and economic power. Democracy had given the party the opportunity to gain the independence of the province it already had been calling Bangladesh. In a desperate attempt to forestall its secession, Yahya brushed aside the electoral verdict and launched a brutal military crackdown in East Pakistan. And the dictator had got two Bengalee politicians from East Pakistan to lead Pakistan’s U.N. delegation to try to show the world that some East Pakistani leaders loved Pakistan and opposed the secession of East Pakistan, which they indeed did.

Back from the Hilaly interview, I called up Mahmud Ali, the Bengalee leader of the Pakistani delegation, from my room in Hotel Carlton in Washington. Ali was staying at Plaza Hotel in New York.

I asked Ali if he was with any visitors.

“No, go ahead,” he said.

“Do you know about the CIA tip that Nixon has sent to Yahya Khan?”

“What was that?”

“That India is going to invade East Pakistan in mid-November.”

“Who told you this cock-and-bull story?” he said.

I realized that Yahya was continuing to use the Bengalee leader without telling him about the impending Indian invasion of his native East Pakistan.Then I rang up the Bengalee deputy leader of the delegation, Shah Azizur Rahman, at Tudor Hotel in New York. (Eight years later he would become prime minister of Bangladesh.)

“Shah Bhai,” I said. “I’m returning tomorrow morning. I want to see you. It’s very important.”

Shah Aziz’s eyeballs were popping out when I narrated my conversation with Hilaly. He then drooped forward, holding his head with both his palms. A minute later he slowly leaned back against the back of his chair, staring blank at the ceiling.

Having regained his composure, the East Pakistani leader got up. “Let us catch Alvi,” he said, picking up his jacket. “Let’s see what the bastard has to say.”

M.A. Alvi (I forget what “M.A.” stood for) was Pakistan’s assistant foreign secretary, accompanying the delegation. In his Plaza Hotel suite, Alvi looked intently and incredulously into my eyes as I rehashed my conversation with Hilaly. He asked me if the ambassador had given Nixon’s message “directly to the president,” Yahya Khan. It was obvious to me and Shah Aziz that Alvi, too, had not heard about the CIA alert.

But the Pakistani diplomat decided, anyway, to embark on an anti-India tirade. If Indira Gandhi were to “make the stupid mistake” of sending Indian troops into East Pakistan, he roared, Pakistan would “bomb every major Indian city” and march on to “Delhi and Lucknow before the bitch can tell what is happening” to her country.

Shah Aziz was in no mood to listen to the bullshit from the megalomaniac diplomat.

“Mr. Alvi,” he said, “for Allah’s sake, please don’t conquer India.” (Pakistan had lost its two previous wars with India.) He laughed loudly to vent his sarcasm. Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, he continued, “struggled very hard and made enormous sacrifices” to slice out “a piece of land” from old India to create “a Muslim homeland,” Pakistan.

Getting up to leave, Shah Aziz asked Alvi, again sarcastically, if he “want us to rejoin India” through an invasion. Did Alvi want to let Indian Hindus “demolish our mosques and ban the Qurbani?”

On their Eid al-Adha festival Muslims kill cows and goats to commemorate Abraham’s preparation to kill his son at the behest of God. The ritual is called Qurbani. In many places in old India Hindus used to attack Muslims for killing cows, which are sacred to them. 

Ironically, India’s Hindu nationalist government today appears to be vindicating the Muslim argument that had led to the creation of Pakistan, namely that India’s huge Hindu majority would subvert Islamic culture and the interests of its Muslim minority. Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has abolished the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state and restricted the domicile and citizenship rights of Muslims in Assam state. It has renamed a host of towns and cities that bore Muslim names and
looked the other way as its supporters abused and lynched Muslims.  And cow slaughter and serving meat in restaurants are banned in several Indian states.

Democracy in India has clearly undermined the freedom of its Muslim minority, as it has the freedom of minorities in many other non-Western societies. Enlightenment thinkers, living in white-Christian societies, could not obviously anticipate the plight of these minorities in democratic non-Western societies. It’s time for more inclusive, communitarian political models for freedom-loving, identity-conscious minorities in societies outside the West. 

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

India’s empty threat to Pakistan

Pakistan was protesting, vociferously, India’s decision to wipe out the “special status” of the part of the Jammu and Kashmir state under its occupation. Rajnath Singh, the Indian defense minister, told Islamabad to hush up. He said New Delhi may be changing its “no-first-use” policy on firing nukes.

India adopted the policy of not using its nuclear weapons against an adversary unless that adversary had attacked it with nukes first.

Singh warned Pakistan, in effect, that the Indians were now prepared to rain their nuclear bombs on Pakistan without waiting to be targeted by a Pakistani nuke.

The Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir principality was never part of the Indian mainland, even though Indian emperors occasionally had invaded and occupied it. In 1948, after “British India” had been split into independent India and Pakistan, Pakistani tribes overran a third of the Muslim-majority kingdom, while India grabbed the other two-thirds. The dispute went to the United Nations, where then Indian prime minister, Kashmiri pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, promised to hold a plebiscite to let the Kashmiri people decide whether to join India or Pakistan or to remain independent. India eventually reneged on its plebiscite commitment and, instead, allowed Kashmir a “special status” with wide autonomy. Two weeks ago India’s Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s special status, triggering a new round of row between India and Pakistan, which had fought two wars over the fate of Kashmir.

As I read Singh’s comment online, my mind raced to the dreary, darkish afternoon of Jan. 21, 1972. My friend Asrar Ahmed had dropped in to see me in the Pakistani vice presidential compound on Peshawar Road in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I worked as press secretary to Vice President Nurul Amin. My boss was in the living quarters and I was drafting a speech he would be delivering he next day at a student gathering in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“Bhutto stirred up the Qiyamah in me,” said Ahmed, seating himself on a coach next to my desk. Ahmed and I had become friends a couple of years before when he was elected president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists of which I was an active member.

“Qiyamah in you?” I said, staring into my friend’s eyes.

In Islamic scripture Qiyamah means the Day of Judgment when terrified throngs of resurrected humans would be streaming to the field of Arafat in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, (by some accounts, somewhere in greater Syria) to be dispatched to hell or heaven, depending on their sins or virtuous deeds in their lives.

Ahmed asked for tea, which I ordered.

He said the day before he had “sneaked into” a meeting of leading Pakistani physicists, nuclear scientists and engineers in the city of Multan. He had got a tip, saying the new Pakistani president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had called the meeting to talk about a “new security strategy” for the country, which had lost its eastern half to an invading Indian army just six weeks earlier.

India had invaded East Pakistan, facilitating its secession from West Pakistan and emergence as independent Bangladesh. The Pakistani army’s Dec. 16, 1971, surrender to Indian forces in Dhaka, the East Pakistani capital, had led the Indians to drag 93,000 Pakistani troops and civilians into Indian detention centers as prisoners of war. Some Pakistanis I had talked to asked whether India would now be using its overwhelming military might to pulverize the rest of Pakistan.

Ahmed said that on his way to the Multan meeting he had wondered if Bhutto, a widely known boozer, had been “drinking too much” as he was trying to get “people who only know to peep into microscopes and telescopes” to help him hash out a national security strategy

Bhutto warned the gathering that what had been left of their country after the secession of Bangladesh existed “on borrowed time.” India could chop up the rump of Pakistan, too, but was giving the world the time to “digest its tearing up a sovereign country.” A time could come, the president warned, when New Delhi could decide to turn Pakistan into another “Muslim Spain.” In the fifteenth century Catholic armies and militias had reconquered all Muslim domains in Spain and Portugal, obliterating the flourishing Islamic civilization there.

The president told the scientists that Pakistan’s only defense against India lay in acquiring the nuclear bomb. He kept asking them: “Are you going to give me the bomb”? Pakistan’s Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam was among the first to assure him that he would get his wish. Bhutto then wanted a time frame. One scientist said it would take five years to build a nuke from a scratch. “Five years!” the president howled. “Can’t you do it in three? Come on, three years!” Siddique Butt, a younger physicist, jumped to his feet and punched the air with his fist. “Yes sir,” he declared. “three years. You will get it in three years, Mr. President.”

Ahmed told me that he didn’t “really know how long it will take” Pakistan to get the bomb, but that he, too, believed now that “Pakistan can’t survive without the bomb.”

Forty-seven years later Rajnath Singh’s threat to nuke Pakistan vindicated to me the panic that had driven Bhutto into his no-holds-barred, whirlwind drive to get Pakistan its own nukes.

Getting Pakistan the bomb became Bhutto’s all-consuming mission in life. He probably gave his life for it. On a visit to Pakistan in August 1976 Henry Kissinger, then U.S. secretary of state, twisted Bhutto’s arms brutally to get him to abandon his nuclear program. When Bhutto refused, Kissinger warned the Pakistani statesman – in presence of Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir; and then deputy chief of the US mission in Islamabad, Gerald Feuerstein – that in that case “we will make a horrible example of you” of resistance to U.S. will. Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto believed through their dying days that Kissinger and the CIA had got Gen. Ziaul Haq to overthrow the father of the Pakistani bomb in a military coup and then hang him on trumped-up murder charges.

Singh’s bluster reminded me that the populist Pakistani leader’s mission had been crowned with success. New Delhi’s threat to launch a nuclear strike on Pakistan was actually empty. Hindu nationalist Indians are of course going bonkers with their animosity toward Pakistan. But I doubt that they’re total loonies. They know that Pakistan, with its stockpile of more than 150 nuclear warheads, can turn such an act into a suicide mission for India. That makes such a misadventure highly unlikely.

To get Pakistan to this point, Bhutto had once declared, “We will eat grass, even go hungry. But we will have our own [nuclear bomb]. We have no choice.” With their near-melting economy, Pakistanis are eating grass, so to speak; but thanks to their hard-drinking, “Islamic socialist” leader, they’re unlikely to be herded into Indian detention camps again.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog. 

Bangladesh, Pakistan trade luck

Bhutto

I FEEL GOOD about living to see this day.  Bangladesh, whose creation I once opposed, is belying my forebodings about its future. It has surpassed Pakistan and, in some cases, the economic behemoth of India in economic development and well-being. Bangladeshi economic performance glows brighter when you compare that with the near-meltdown of the Pakistani economy.

Here’s how Bangladesh compares with Pakistan and India economically and socially, as shown by four key indicators. The first three are from the World Bank database, and the fourth from that of UNICEF.

Economic growth rates: Bangladesh – 7.9%; Pakistan – 5.4%; India – 7%.

Per capita income: Bangladesh – $1,700; Pakistan – $1,400; India – $2,000.

Life expectancy: Bangladesh – 73 years; Pakistan – 67 years; India – 69 years.

Literacy rate (15-24 years): Bangladesh – 73%; Pakistan – 56%; India – 69%.

First, a bit of the genesis of Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 1947 old Pakistan was carved out of two Muslim-majority slices of the Indian subcontinent, separated by 1600 miles of Hindu-majority India. East Pakistan, agrarian and flood-prone, was inhabited mostly by impoverished Bengalee Muslims. West Pakistan, especially its Punjab province, throbbed with industries and flourishing farms and was the locale of most of the country’s armed forces.

Bengalee Muslims had struggled onerously to create the “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan while the ethnically diverse Muslims of what became West Pakistan were opposed or indifferent to the Pakistan movement. The irony of ironies, 24 years after the creation of Pakistan, Bengalee Muslims in East Pakistan split Pakistan to make their eastern province independent Bangladesh. They had become fed up with army rule, economic exploitation and political suppression by West Pakistan’s mostly Punjabi military, feudal and political elites. Ever since Pakistan is what had been West Pakistan. 

Bangladesh’s quite rapid economic progress and strides toward modernization have been an agreeable surprise to me because I had underestimated the progressive and creative potential of my fellow East Pakistanis. I believed that the relatively backward East Pakistan, with its stagnant economy, couldn’t survive, or at any rate would suffer, without the support of Pakistan’s western wing. In my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital, I argue repeatedly that the “real task before us,” East Pakistanis, was to restore democracy in Pakistan, not dismember the country, which we had fought hard to create. East Pakistanis accounted for 56 percent of the Pakistani population, and I maintained that under a democratic system that would ensure free and fair elections, “we will rule Pakistan,” ending military rule and economic exploitation of the Punjabi clique.

On the morning of March 22, 1969, I was abducted at dagger-point from Dhaka by a dozen or so rowdy activists of the Bangladesh independence movement. My kidnappers called me a “Punjabi agent” and tormented me for my “filthy writings” against the Bangladeshi “national liberation.”  They eventually let me go with the warning that if I dared to write “one more word” against their movement, my corpse would be “floating in the Burigunga,” the river snuggling Dhaka’s southern border.

I soon dropped my byline from my commentaries and the Observer’s publisher, Hamidul Huq Choudhury, arranged to send me out to work as the paper’s London bureau chief. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that I was among about 200 East Pakistanis who had become persona non grata in the newly independent Bangladesh. I immigrated to the United States as a political refugee.

From America I began to watch Bangladesh’s steady economic rise, after two decades of economic downturn, a famine and two military coups. It led first to my confusion and then soul searching and research. From my inquiries I realized that Bangladeshis’ innate spirit of enterprise and ingenuity, which I suspect party derives from their genetic inheritance, have been propelling their rapid rise. I was at once embarrassed and elated. Embarrassed because of my underrating Bangladeshis’ capabilities and opposing their independence struggle, and elated because of the accomplishments of my fellow natives of the new nation. 

Bangladeshis are a hybrid racial strain, belonging to Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Australoid other racial stocks. In 2014 I ran into two German researchers in Dhaka who were investigating the genetic components of Bengalee ethnicity in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, also inhabited by Bengalees. Ninety-eight percent of Bangladeshis are ethnic Bengalees. Fritz von Meyer, from Lower Saxony, told me that the “very rich racial mixture” in their genome had made Bengalees more inquisitive and innovative than people with less variegated racial and ethnic genealogies. I realized that prolonged military-political suppression by the Punjabi-led West Pakistani elites had, partly, kept that ingenuity and creativity from flowering among Bengalees in East Pakistan. 

Today I see the same deplorable drama playing out in what is left of Pakistan. I didn’t research the genetic or societal characteristics of Pakistan’s diverse ethnic communities, but Punjabis are known for their talent and enterprise, Pashtun for their indomitable courage and perseverance, Baloch for their vigorous spirit de corps and artistic aptitudes, and so on. If harnessed, these gifts of character and abilities could catapult Pakistan into high levels of progress and prosperity. 

Yet Pakistan is facing the deepest crisis in its history. In April a Pakistani economist warned that his country had “reached the point of collapse.” Kaiser Bengali said, “The alarm bells are ringing. We have no choice but to beg. I fear starvation, poverty and unemployment.”

Prime Minister Imran Khan, once an internationally famed cricket star, came to power promising to create 10 million new jobs and 5 million new houses and revitalize the economy. Little did he know that the burden of running an impoverished country with domineering army generals looking over his shoulders is quite a bit heavier than running through the cricket field with leg pads, thigh guard, helmet and gloves.

Pakistan’s growth rate has plummeted to a nine-year low, to 4 percent; 35 percent of its population languishes below the poverty line. Yet curbs imposed by the IMF bars the government from launching public sector programs that could have alleviated the hardships of the poor. The IMF has given Pakistan $6 billion in loans to help stabilize the economy, imposing constraints on the government’s economic and financial policies. Meanwhile, prices of sugar, flour, electricity and most other essential commodities and services are rising unremittingly. On top of it, the Pakistani government has had to announce a sharp tax hike, also under IMF pressure, which, when presented before the parliament, drew angry shouts and howls. The country’s productivity, reflected in its export earnings, has dropped significantly. It’s telling to recall that as late as in 1992 Pakistan’s per capita real GDP, adjusted for purchasing power of the currency, was 65 percent higher than India’s. Today it’s 28% lower than that of its larger neighbor.

The rise of productivity, a fast rise, would be the key to restoring Pakistan’s economic health, and with it political and social advancement. But raising productivity requires a motivated manpower with animated hopes and aspirations. The problem is you can’t truly motivate people into doing anything consequential if it doesn’t enkindle their creativity and energy and offer them a stake in the outcome of their drudgery. It all calls for social and political freedoms, which Pakistan’s power-drunk military brass, landed aristocracy and government bureaucracy have resisted tooth and nail so far.

The military, in collaboration with the aristocracy and bureaucracy, has continually interrupted in the democratic process throughout Pakistan’s history. Imran Khan is Pakistan’s 19th elected prime minister. Thanks to military-bureaucratic interventions none of the 18 before him completed his or her five-year term in office. Khan is trying to do so by accepting the military tutelage – practically ceding foreign relations to the generals and clearing his key domestic programs with them. That’s not a recipe for economic recovery or growth, let alone promoting freedom and democracy in Pakistan.

As I said on other occasions, I’m an optimist who is waiting for the day Pakistanis say enough is enough. That day they will rise to beat their swashbuckling generals and colonels back into the barracks – as the Turks did in the wake of the aborted Turkish military coup in 1916 – and win their freedoms and their and their children’s’ future.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog.

No ‘cakewalk’ to Pyongyang, please

ON WEDNESDAY I was about to head out to a seminar on cyber security at Wilson Center in Washington when I peeked into the Internet to check the latest news.

“U.S. quietly plans to occupy North Korea after war,” a banner headline in London’s The Sun newspaper screamed at me. I remembered that President Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had said, too, that military action against North Korea is a  possibility.

The story led to a Newsweek link. Clicked, it opened a piece in which German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel was quoted as saying that a war between the United States and North Korea “could be deadliest conflict in history,” more catastrophic than the Second World War.

The seminar was about security threats from North Korea, China and Russia.  James Lewis, vice president of Center from Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, talked about a “deterrent” against cyber threats from Pyongyang.

I told him that North Koreans had been saying that their nukes are meant to be “a deterrent against American invasion.”  I also mentioned that I had heard Sunni Arab leaders in Iraq lamenting that if Saddam Hussein had a few nuclear weapons he could’ve “deterred the U.S. invasion” of 2003, sparing both Iraq and America the “unnecessary and catastrophic war.”

Lewis nodded, apparently signaling that he was aware of it.

Continuing, I inquired if Iranians wanted to have “a couple of nukes,” which they insisted they never did, won’t those warheads also serve as a deterrent against Israeli or U.S. military action? I couldn’t conceive, I added, of Iranians wanting to “commit national suicide” by initiating a nuclear conflict with Israel or the United States.

I asked the CSIS executive what he thought of Kim Jong-un’s reasoning for a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. invasion.

The panelist didn’t answer my question, but warned, instead, that North Koreans “would be deluding themselves” if they thought that a few nukes “would give them immunity” against the U.S. military power. The United States could “get rid of the problem” posed by Kim, regardless of his nukes.

Was he hinting at a possible regime change in North Korea? I wondered.

Explaining the reason America was determined to prevent North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, Lewis said, such weaponry could tempt those countries “to evade their responsibilities under international law, to violate international law,” and threaten their neighbors and international security.

I thought of asking him the obvious question of whether the United States and other nuclear powers weren’t potentially violating international law over and over because they sat on nuclear stockpiles.  Nuclear arsenals have given them the ability to commit illegal aggression against non-nuclear countries. Also, they have equipped them with veto powers at the U.N. Security Council, practically shielding them against accountability for violations of international law. But I didn’t want to get into an argument with the panelist.

Martin C. Libicki from the U.S. Naval Academy, another panelist, picked up on my comment about Iran. He said Iranians would be “right to think that Israel can do things with its [nuclear] capabilities that its neighbors can’t.”  But the Israelis needed that capability for their national security, added the professor of cyber security studies.

Their comments reminded me of a complaint that my Pakistani mentor had made to me several times in the early 1970s. Nurul Amin was prime minister and later vice president of Pakistan, and I worked as his press aide.  He would lament to me about America’s “blatant and illegal” military interventions, and often regime change, in Iran, Lebanon, Vietnam, Congo, Ghana and elsewhere. “Independence from colonial rule lets us [Asian and African nations] have our own brown and black rulers,” he would say, “as long as we toe their lines.”

On the subway train back home from Wilson Center, it occurred to me that Nurul Amin’s comment of the Cold War era doesn’t quite apply to the new world we live in. Yes, in 1953 the CIA under the Eisenhower administration could have Iran’s democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq easily overthrown in a military coup. But by 1979 Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries bundled out the brutal pro-American monarchy of Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, whom the Americans had installed in Tehran.

In 1958 the Iraqi army overthrew the pro-Western monarchy in Iraq while Muslim insurgents in neighboring Lebanon rose up against the pro-Western Christian minority government of President Camille Chamoun. Chamoun asked for U.S. help, and the Eisenhower administration immediately rushed some 14,000 troops to Lebanon. The Muslim insurgents ran for cover and the invading American troops hit the beaches in Beirut.

“We drank a lot,” as the U.S. Marines corporal Thomas Zmecek would recall later. “We were provided with swimming trunks and swam with the daughters [of Christian hosts] and had a grand time.”

Twenty-five years later a U.S.-led multinational force was stationed in Lebanon to intervene in a brewing civil war between the Israeli-backed Christian forces and Syrian-backed Muslim and Druze activists. When opposition forces threatened the presidency of Maronite Christian Amin Gemayel, the Reagan administration, prodded by the Israelis and Secretary of State George P. Schultz (against the strenuous objection of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger) ordered an American contingent to rush to West Beirut to protect the Gemayel regime. But the new Lebanese generation didn’t go into hiding as had their parents and uncles in 1958. They were infuriated by the America intervention in their internal affairs and began to mobilize to resist it. But one of them, a Shiite Muslim, spared them a prolonged fight. He went on a suicide mission, piling up explosives onto a truck and detonating it at a U.S.-French Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen. That led to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon.

American politicians and bureaucrats have had difficulty grasping the changed social ethos and worldviews of contemporary generations of post-colonial societies. Many people who grew up under European colonial rule or in the shadow of the colonial era were tolerant of Western military interventions and hegemony. Their children are not. Born in independent countries and exposed to Western values of freedom and democracy, disseminated by myriad communications media, they’re mostly allergic to foreign domination and presence of foreign troops on their lands.

American neocons and Cold War retirees who planned the Iraq war were ostriches with their heads buried in the sand, without having a clue about the dynamics of the Muslim youth of the day. During the run-up to the war neoconservative security expert Ken Adelman proclaimed he was “reasonably certain” that the Iraqis would greet invading U.S. troops “as liberators.” He probably was musing over Lebanese Christians reveling at the arrival of U.S. troops in 1958. Or maybe images of Koreans hailing U.S. Marines under Gen. Douglas MacArthur after their heroic victory in Battle of Inchon was flashing back on his mind.

But in 2003 Iraq had a fiercely independent-minded breed of Arabs who, despite their sectarian feuds, were deeply hostile to foreign domination, as I had observed during three trips in previous years. Their resistance to the U.S. invasion led to the rise of the Islamic State, sectarian blood-letting, unraveling of the Iraqi state, and the security of America and the West.

I’m not sure that the United States can launch a successful invasion of North Korea. Unlike Iraq, that Communist country is believed to have between six and 16 nuclear weapons, most or some of which are in locations unknown to Americans.  “It is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, [intelligence] collection nations that we have to collect against,” Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, told Congress in May. Even if America can succeed in taking out all of Kim’s nukes before an invasion, which is extremely unlikely, I doubt that North Koreans would hail American invaders as “liberators” anymore than did Iraqis.  North Koreans are extremely xenophobic people, usually suspicious of foreigners.  A U.S. occupation force would very likely get bogged down in the Hermit Kingdom for years, which the war-wary American public is unlikely to accept.

If the Trump administration blunders into an invasion of North Korea, I’d be as concerned about the catastrophe it would spawn for Americans and Koreans as is Gabriel, the German foreign minister.

– Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts this blog.

‘Islamic bomb’ scare, again!

“Persuading Pakistan to rein in its nuclear weapons program should be an international priority.

“The major world powers spent two years negotiating an agreement to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran, which doesn’t have a single nuclear weapon. Yet there has been no comparable investment of effort in Pakistan.”

The New York Times Editorial Board

HERE AGAIN is an ‘Islamic bomb’ alert! And the scaremongers this time aren’t some Islamophobic American politicians, but the editorial board of America’s greatest newspaper.

We just saw that American and European governments get struck by amnesia when someone asks about Israel’s formidable nuclear arsenal of 200 or more nukes, but they did not rest until quarantining Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

The same way they and the “free press” in the West have been scaring the Westerners about Pakistan’s ‘Islamic bomb’ for four decades. They have been doing so ever since Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime felt compelled to begin exploring a bomb after India had detonated its first nukes in 1974. Three years earlier, the Indira Gandhi government in New Delhi had invaded and dismembered old Pakistan. Pakistanis – not just politicians and generals, but everyday workers and shoppers – were scared to death of India getting nuclear bombs, besides having conventional military forces that were three times bigger than Pakistan’s. To allay the widespread panic, one evening Z.A. Bhutto went before TV cameras to assure his nation that he would do all he could to counter Indian nukes.

“We shall eat grass,” he paraphrased an earlier comment in his innately colorful language, “and make the bomb, and fight India for a thousand years.”

The phrase “eat grass” was meant to show how hard it would be for impoverished Pakistanis to spare their meagre resources to build a nuclear deterrent against the India, but that after India had once broken up their old country, people in what was left of Pakistan had no choice but pursue the bomb.

Yet the Times editorial board is mum about India’s nuclear weapons stockpile, and wants Pakistan to unilaterally disarm!

It reminds me of the late Pakistani statesman Mahmud Ali, who had been angered by Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure on Z.A. Bhutto to dismantle Pakistan’s nascent nuclear program. In his August 1976 meeting with Bhutto in Lahore, the U.S. secretary of state even warned that the Pakistani prime minister would “make a horrible example of yourself,” if he defied the American instruction. (The quote is from Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny). Ten months later Gen. Ziaul Haq overthrew the enormously popular Pakistani prime minister and hanged him in 1979, despite intense international pressure to spare the life of the democratically elected prime minister.

Meanwhile, about two months after the fateful Kissinger-Bhutto meeting, Mahmud Ali, a former minister in the Z.A. Bhutto Cabinet, had told me on the phone from Islamabad about Bhutto’s decision to brush aside “the enormous American pressure to terminate our nuclear program.”

“See,” added my political mentor, “Christians can have the bombs. Jews can have them. The Hindus can have them, too. And Russian and Chinese Communists also can. No problem. If only a poor Muslim country tries to have a couple of them to defend itself against a mortal enemy … skies would be coming down.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opinion/sunday/the-pakistan-nuclear-nightmare.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Declare Middle East nuke-free

Persian Gulf monarchies are petrified by the anticipated Iran nuclear deal, being negotiated in Geneva. Last week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates threatened to try to acquire nuclear weapons technology if they didn’t get one of two things from the Iran deal.

One, they wanted the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment program shut down completely. Iran would never agree to that. Secondly, if the program is allowed to continue, albeit at a reduced level, the United States should sign a security pact with them. In practical terms, that would mean insuring the security of their thrones from external and internal threats.  These Arab rulers know that the Iranians have better things to do than lurch into a military adventure. On the other hand, domestic threat to their regimes has heightened since the Arab Spring.

The Obama administration knows that too, and the president recently said so publicly. He said the real security threat facing the Gulf Arab monarchies could come from their disenfranchised and “alienated” public. In recent weeks the administration let the Gulf Arab governments know that while America would be willing to defend their countries against external aggression, it wouldn’t intervene in their domestic feuds and unrest. The message left the Arab royals mopey and grumpy.

The White House had invited all six monarchs of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to meet the president on Wednesday to discuss the Iran deal and their security concerns. Led by the Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, four of the six kings declined the president’s invitation, sending in their surrogates, instead. Obama apparently ignored the snub and made the best of the occasion. He reiterated to his guests America’s “ironclad” commitment to defend their countries against any “external” aggression.

Meanwhile, some American media pundits and others have voiced concern about the possibility of Saudi Arabia following up on its vow to seek the nukes. If it does, the Pakistanis would find themselves in a thorny dilemma. The Saudis underwrote Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program with the apparent understanding that Islamabad would supply them with the nuclear technology if they need it. Moreover, the kingdom has been a generous benefactor to Pakistan for decades. In fact, because of the late Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, the current Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is alive today. Then Pakistani military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had overthrown then Prime Minister Sharif in a 1999 military coup, was bent on killing him. Fahd pressured Musharraf into sparing Sharif’s life and sending him  to exile in Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, it would also be very hard for Islamabad to defy the inevitable American pressure against sharing its nuclear knowhow with the Saudi kingdom. The Sharif government’s – and top Pakistani generals’ – decision to let the Americans kill Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan showed the efficacy of Washington’s clout over Pakistan. (The United States demanded Pakistani cooperation in the U.S. Navy Seals raid on the bin Laden compound after a Pakistani intelligence officer had tipped off the CIA station chief in Islamabad about the Al Qaeda chief’s whereabouts in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.)

All the same, the whole brouhaha about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is a smokescreen around the root cause of the bugaboo: the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Americans would let Israel hold on to its more than 200 sophisticated nukes and then try to keep Arabs and Iranians from pursuing nuclear weapons capability. America’s prodigious exercise to keep Iran from approaching a nuclear “breakout” is meant to deprive the Iranians of a deterrent against Israeli nukes, if they wanted one.

Iranians and Arabs have long been calling on the international community to declare the Middle East a “nuclear-free zone.” That would be the best and most effective nonproliferation program for the region. But Israel and America wouldn’t heed their call because such an arrangement would require Israel to abandon its nuclear weaponry.

It’s about time Americans reviewed their perilous policy on the Israeli nukes to forestall the danger of proliferation in that increasingly unstable region. Washington should get  the U.N. Security Council to designate the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.

  • Mustafa Malik, a columnist in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Beyond Freedom’ (https://beyond-freedom.com).

Terror bred by grievances, not Islam

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech at this week’s terrorism conference in the White House sounded to me like a broken record from the George W. Bush administration. Bush and his advisers attributed Muslim terrorism to Islam.

“Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” said John Ashcroft, Bush’s attorney general. “Christianity is a faith where God sent his son to die for you.”

President Obama, too, believes that Islam is a major source of Muslim terrorism. His aides have lined up a group of Muslim clerics, activists and governments to present a “moderate” interpretation of Islam to their fellow Muslims. But unlike his Republican predecessor, Obama is more sensitive about the sentiments of mainstream Muslims, who resent linking their religion to heinous acts like terrorism. Hence he camouflaged his reference to Islam with the phrase “distorted ideology.”

The Muslim “religion,” in the sense religion is understood in the West, has little to do with terrorism. I tried to explain in my last segment that Islam, unlike Western Christianity, doesn’t segregate a Caesar’s domain from God’s. All Muslim domains, private and public, belong to God. In practical terms, the Muslim public sphere is suffused with Islamic values and social outlook.

Of late that the Muslim public sphere has all but submerged under waves of anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. Surveys after surveys have shown that between 72% and 94% of populations in Muslim countries are hostile or antipathetic to America. Their antipathy derives mainly from U.S. foreign and defense policies toward Muslim societies.

Muslim societies are modernizing fast, while becoming more and more attached to Islamic values and Islamic cultural patterns. They’re more concerned about Islamic causes and the global Muslim community.

Obama’s attribution of Muslim terrorism showed his gross misunderstanding of Islam as well as the motives that propel some Muslims into acts of violence. The president came into office with very little grounding in international affairs, and has stuffed his administration with holdovers from the Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He is, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, getting the same kind of off-the-wall, jingoist advice that doomed both previous administrations’ Muslim world policies.

Islam, as I said, is a both a private- and public-sphere religion. These days most Muslims are channeling their grievances against America or their own governments in the public sphere through the democratic process. They’re engaged in democratic movements and, when permitted, pushing their agendas through the electoral process. It signals a dramatic and healthy evolution of these movements since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when their watchword was “Islamic revolution.” Those days some of my Islamist acquaintances in Pakistan and Bangladesh espoused armed struggle against the “enemies of Islam” at home and abroad.

Among them is Motiur Rahman Nizami, the head of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh, now on the death row for his alleged involvement in the killing of Bangladeshi independence activists in 1971. I met him in 2003 after the Jamaat had won the second-largest number of seats in a Bangladeshi parliamentary election, catapulting him to the post of industries minister.

His sparsely furnished office was tucked away in the Motijheel business district in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.

Did the Jamaat “still believed in armed struggle?” I asked.

He smiled, and instead of answering my question directly, he said, “Democracy is the best tool for us to spread the message of Islam.”

Because Islamic spirit and values are spreading quite rapidly in most Muslim countries, mainstream Islamists everywhere have come to believe that they no longer need violent methods to pursue their Islamization agenda. They’re avidly participating in democratic activism.

A second group of Islamists, known as terrorists, continue armed struggle to achieve their goals. They’re generally focused on resisting occupation and aggression by armed opponents. They include Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad in Kashmir, Riadus Salikin and the Islamic International Brigade in Chechnya, the ETIM in China’s Xinjiang province, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Levant, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad and Niger, and so on. All these terrorist groups see themselves fighting to liberate their peoples from foreign occupation or defend them against domestic persecution.

Obama was talking, specifically, about the Islamic State terrorism in Syria and Iraq. The IS emerged to defend Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who suffered horrible persecution and ethnic cleansing from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Iraqi Shiite governments and Shiite militias and the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria. As many other terrorist groups do, the IS also has engaged in gruesome slaughter and brutal persecution of innocent civilians. The world shouldn’t tolerate such crimes.

The fact remains, however, that these terrorist groups have been fighting for political, not religious, causes. They’re inspired or instigated by political and social grievances, not by the Quran or some “distorted ideology” based on it. Whether their causes or methods of operation are justified (Nobody would justify the slaughter of innocent people), is another matter.

Cow, crescent and star

 Published in  Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; December 5, 2014

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is investigating the impact of Hindu nationalism on liberal values and democratic institutions in his native India. Earlier, he conducted fieldwork on religious movements and nationalist experiments in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

LAST MONTH President Obama accepted India’s invitation to be the chief guest at its Republic Day celebrations. He will be the first American president to do so.

I was in Kolkata (Calcutta), India’s “cultural capital” when this was announced. Most of my interlocutors there were euphoric about the news, especially the supporters of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP). Narendra Modi, the BJP leader and prime minister, had invited the American president to the January 26, 2015, events. On that date 67 years ago, newly independent India adopted its democratic constitution.

Most Hindu nationalists in India viewed Obama’s gesture as America’s acceptance of Hindu nationalism.  I saw it as the president’s doing business with a democratically elected government that happens to be Hindu nationalist. Two years ago, the Obama administration embraced the Islamist government of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who had come to power through a free and fair election. The Morsi government has since been overthrown in a military coup, and Morsi languishes in jail.

Nevertheless, secularists and liberals in the West who throw a fit on hearing the word “religious fundamentalist” or “militant” might consider following Obama’s lead on the issue. Not that we should approve of religious militants’ violence or other destructive conduct, if they engage in it. However, we need to understand the sources of their militancy and encourage their evolution into more peaceable social or political categories, and participation in the democratic process is one of the best roads to that goal. So far, though, bombing Muslim militants has been America’s and NATO’s preferred method of dealing with them, it has served only to multiply them and bolster their capabilities.

Today religious values and ethos permeate most postcolonial societies, whether Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or others. Unfortunately, the religious upsurge also has ratcheted up interfaith hostility in many countries. The BJP is a glaring example. The party and allied Hindu nationalist organizations plan to change India’s traditionally multi-cultural society into one based on Hindu religious and cultural values. They have come a long way toward that goal, but their march has been accompanied by widespread discrimination and violence against Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, numbering around 160 million people.

Modi has long been in the vanguard of the movement to Hinduize Indian society. He was banned from visiting the United States for nearly a decade for his alleged connivance in the horrific anti-Muslim riots of 2002. Nearly 2,000 Muslim men, women and children were hacked, beaten and burned to death by Hindu mobs. The all-important question haunting many Indian minds, including mine, is whether these faith-based communal conflicts will abate. And if they do, how?

I disagree with those who fear that the new wave of religious resurgence, especially among Muslims, might lead to the kind of sectarian or interfaith bloodbaths that ravaged Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some historical records show that 35 percent of the population perished in those waves of intra-Christian militancy. But these are different times. Thanks to the spread of the Enlightenment values of freedom, tolerance and humanism, people around the world are increasingly getting used to divergent ideologies, religions and cultures. Everyday people in most countries are more tolerant of the religious or ethnic Other than they were 50 years ago.

The growing acceptance of the Other has been facilitated by globalization and the 24/7 electronic and digital interaction across countries and continents. Of course, most diehard liberals (Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls them “liberal fundamentalists”) and religious militants have yet to feel the winds of pluralism and contestation with discrepant ideologies, faiths and communities. I also do not rule out further aggravation of Muslim hostility by the military aggression and political and diplomatic tutelage America and its allies are using around the Muslim world. But I see this approach running its course before too long, as its futility and backlash begin to dawn on its practitioners.

Meanwhile, there has been a growing search among intellectuals, the media and others for the sources of the what is commonly known as religious militancy and violence. A host of sociologists and social scientists has concluded that the religious pull being felt by people in postcolonial societies stems, in large measure, from their quest for dignity and authenticity. This is also fostered by their pervasive exposure to Western ideas of freedom and selfhood. Modernity’s corrosive effects on societies are another source of religious upsurge. “Modern societies,” says Daniele Hervieu-Leger, a leading French sociologist, “may corrode their traditional religious base; at one and the same time, however, these societies open up new spaces and sectors that only religion can fill.”

Postcolonial societies aren’t generally receptive to the liberal tools of mediation, elections and so on, to settle what they see as existential issues: foreign domination, preservation of religious and cultural values, and basic communal interests. Many Western societies have no qualms about waging war over lesser questions.

Liberalism, is a uniquely Western ideology; it cannot be planted holistically in most non-Western societies.  The liberal concepts of church-state separation, individualism and freedom without responsibility emerged largely as reactions to anomalies in European traditions. Those include the long and bloody religious conflicts, the church-state power struggle and the sanctity of individual property rights in the Germanic tribal cultures. Societies that were unaffected by these historical trends and experiences have mostly been inhospitable to most of the liberal values that are germane to Eurocentric civilization.

Hence most of Europe’s former colonies are modernizing, while cherishing the basic aspects of their religious and other traditions.  Peoples outside the West can, of course, profitably cultivate many of the useful institutions that have evolved from Western ideas, experience and endeavors. Indeed they have been enriching their lives and societies by embracing many of those ideas and institutions — democracy, the rule of law, scientific inquiry and so forth. But they’re doing so to the extent these pursuits can be adapted to their core religious and cultural norms.

The view that liberalism is a specifically Western ideology and that aspects of it will not work in many non-Western societies, is shared, to different degrees, by a growing number of sociologists, philosophers and historians. Among them are Peter Berger, David Martin, Grace Davie, Karen Armstrong, Amy Goodman, Steve Bruce, Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor. They also include many non-Western intellectuals who are committed to liberal and leftist causes and worldview.

Susnata Das is professor of history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. The leftist Hindu intellectual complained that Hindu-Muslim tensions had increased in India since the BJP had come to power in New Delhi seven months earlier. Asked about his take on the Gujarat “riots,” the professor took exception to my use of the word. We were talking in our native Bengali language. Getting excited about his viewpoint, he switched to English: “It was NOT a riot. It was pogrom.” With portraits of Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and India’s socialist icons watching us from his office walls, Das described some of the horrifying details of the Gujarat carnage. He blasted Modi and his BJP for their anti-Muslim “bigotry, pure bigotry, and hate,” which he said had unleashed recurrent Hindu violence against Muslims.

Then, scratching the back of his head, indicating a sense of resignation, my interviewee lamented that India’s once-powerful leftist and secularist movements had been “losing ground” to Hindu nationalism. That was because, he added, many Indians are “turning back to their religious and cultural traditions.” The same can be said of people in many other non-Western countries. They are forswearing many features of liberalism with which they began their journeys as citizens of independent states and substituting them for their own religious institutions and idiom.

The “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan was founded by a thoroughly secular and Anglicized Muslim statesman. He did not practice the Islamic faith, and he drank gin in the afternoon and whiskey in the evening, though drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden by Islam. In August 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly (parliament) that his new nation would guarantee complete freedom to practice any religion, but that religion would have no role in the affairs of the Pakistani state.

The father of the nation assured Pakistanis,

You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.

Yet the Islamization of Pakistani society and laws began less than a decade after Jinnah’s death in 1948. It reached a peak under the government of another staunchly secular Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. That left-leaning populist came to power as president when grassroots Islamization campaigns had spread to large swaths of Pakistan and threatened his government. In September 1972, he said to me in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, “You can’t be a democrat and secular [in Pakistan] at the same time.” I had asked him about the pressure from the Islamist political parties Jamiatul Ulama-i-Islam and Jamaat-i-Islami to enshrine the Sharia, Islamic canon law, in a constitution that was being drafted in parliament.  “The National Assembly has been elected by the people,” he reminded me. “Most of our people are devout Muslims.”

I was prompted to ask for the interview with the non-practicing Muslim politician after he had made a clarion call to Pakistanis “to make this beautiful country an Islamic state, the bravest Islamic state and the most solid Islamic state.” The U.S.-educated “socialist” Zulfikar Bhutto’s new constitution declared Pakistan an “Islamic state.” It proclaimed that “all existing laws shall be brought in to conformity with the injunctions of Islam,” and that no new laws would be enacted that would be “repugnant to the injunctions of Islam.” Later, as prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto endorsed other measures, excluding the Ahmadiya sect from the traditional Islamic mainstream; changing the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, the Islamic Sabbath; and taking other measures, all of which turned Jinnah’s secular Pakistan into an Islamic state.

Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia and most other postcolonial Muslim states also founded their political structures on liberal — sometimes socialist — models. Today most of them have reworked those models to accommodate Islamic tenets and code of conduct. Some Muslim states continue to maintain formally secular political systems, mostly for Western consumption. But Islam pulsates in the life of their Muslim citizens. This category of Muslim states includes Indonesia, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mali, Senegal, Djibouti and Gambia.

Hindu or Muslim societies aren’t the only ones facing a religious upsurge in their once-secular public space. The world’s only Jewish state was founded as a fiercely secular polity.  In its declaration of independence in 1948, Israel announced that it “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights” and “guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture to all citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” These principles formed the bedrock of Israel’s Basic Law.

Beginning in the late 1970s, however, the ultra-orthodox and orthodox branches of Judaism began to Judaize Israeli politics and culture, gradually reducing Palestinians and other non-Jews to second-class citizens. The racial and religious apartheid that became pronounced under Prime Minister Menachem Begin has culminated in the policies of the  Benjamin Netanyahu government.

Despite the state-sponsored discrimination and suppression of Israeli Palestinians, however, the state’s Basic Law still recognizes the equality of all Israeli citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity. In a widely cited ruling, former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak articulated the state’s doctrine of equality. “It is true,” he wrote, “members of the Jewish nation were granted a special key to enter, but once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.”

That could soon change. The “Jewish nation-state” bill, which the Netanyahu government has approved and will be pushing through the Knesset (parliament), would confer national and group rights only to Israel’s Jewish citizens. It would override the “individual rights” to be conceded to Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens. If passed, it would institutionalize anti-Palestinian apartheid, undermine democracy and turn Israel into a Jewish Pakistan. Netanyahu has fired two of his Cabinet members who opposed the bill (and disagreed with him on some other issues), paving the way for new elections.  Public-opinion polls show that religious and right-wing Jewish parties are more popular in Israel than ever; the bill could sail through the new parliament.

These “religious” tides aren’t specific to religions. Secular ideological and nationalist ferment has also fueled intergroup militancy. And it has often been as malevolent and bloody as movements carried out under religious banner. Karen Armstrong points out that the liberal French revolutionaries enacted some of history’s most savage massacres among the opponents and victims of the Revolution:

Early in 1794, four revolutionary armies were dispatched from Paris to quell an uprising in the Vendée against the anti-Catholic policies of the regime. Their instructions were to spare no one. At the end of the campaign, General François-Joseph Westermann reportedly wrote to his superiors, ‘The Vendée no longer exists. I have crushed children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred the women.… The roads are littered with corpses.

Ironically, no sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion than they invented another. Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they worshiped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis David. The same year that the goddess of reason was enthroned on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral, the reign of terror plunged the new nation into an irrational bloodbath, in which some 17,000 men, women and children were executed by the state.

Europe’s bloodiest religious and ideological cataclysms occurred during its transitions from one ideational paradigm to another: from Roman to Germanic to Christian, from Christian to liberal, from liberal to socialist and communist, and from nationalist to imperialist and colonialist.

The religious and ideological movements in today’s postcolonial societies indicate similar processes of transition. They mark the transition from colonial-era liberal political paradigms to postcolonial indigenous ones. For many Muslim societies, it also represents the struggle to transform Western hegemonic political and security structures foisted on them into native Islam-oriented ones. Foreign tutelage in these Muslim states is sustaining repressive despotism, while native Islamic movements reflect the priorities and aspirations of the public.

The challenge before most of the former European colonies is two-pronged. One is to douse the extremist and violent impulses of the activists struggling for social renewal. They would abate in the course of time, as have previous episodes of Muslim extremism and violence. The other, which is more complex and long-term, is to build bridges between clashing religious, sectarian and ethnic communities: Hindus and Muslims in India; Sunnis and Shiites in Pakistan; and Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and Assyrian Christians in Iraq.

These communal tensions and conflicts have been touched off partly by the unraveling of the political institutions introduced during colonial rule. European powers and Westernized native elites carved out these states overnight, splitting sectarian and ethnic communities among different states without consideration of their inhabitants’ cultural affiliations or economic interests. Yet the citizens of these artificial entities were expected to identify primarily with state institutions and laws. Those citizens have mostly proved unable to foot that bill. They feel strong communal bonds with their religious and ethnic communities that often span more than one of these states.

There are not many true Lebanese in Lebanon. Lebanese citizens are primarily Maronites, Shiites, Sunnis and Druze. There are almost no real Iraqis in Iraq, only Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and members of other religious, ethnic and tribal communities.

When people identify strongly with their nations or states, they view citizens of other states as the rival Other and compete and sometimes fight with them. When religion or ethnicity claims their deeper allegiance, they are prone to rivalry and hostility toward other ethnic or religious communities.

As the older nations and states matured, they learned, often the hard way, the perils of interstate hostility. Europe, once the most violent continent, has all but jettisoned conflicts between states.  Similarly, as religious and ethnic communities in postcolonial states would begin to mature, they would also learn the grief and misfortune caused by communal hostility. They would then be more disposed to living peaceably with one another.

Gaza, Pakistan and ignoble US legacy

The anti-government protests now raging in Pakistan and the travails of Hamas in Palestine remind me of Nurul Amin, my mentor. He served, at different times, as prime minister of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan.

In February 1972, in Rawalpindi, Amin was telling me about the political intrigues that had led to several military-bureaucratic coups against democratic governments in Pakistan. “Did you notice,” he asked, “that all of those who threw out democratic governments kept promising to give us ‘true democracy’?”

Nevertheless, the elder statesman was hopeful of the eventual triumph of democracy in Pakistan and elsewhere. Like the proverbial cat, he said, “democracy has nine lives.” Pakistanis would take time to cultivate “the art of democracy and guard it” against usurpers, as did most Western countries. Until then “you will see our generals and politicians giving lip service to democracy,” while scrambling to “grab power by any means.”

In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party won the 2013 parliamentary elections, which it probably rigged. Opposition leaders Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri, instead of working to insure that the next elections are free and fair, have paralyzed parts of Islamabad, the capital, with crowds agitating for Sharif’s resignation as prime minister. I wonder if they’re playing into the hands of Pakistan’s notoriously power-hungry army generals. In the past, Pakistani generals have used most of the country’s major political crises as excuses for military coups against civilian governments.  I’m especially disappointed by Imran Khan’s role in this anti-democratic drama. I admire his progressive social and political agenda.

Egypt is another stark example of the betrayal of democracy. In 2012 Egyptians had their first-ever free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections. Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood won and formed the government. But the Egyptian military and “liberal” groups didn’t like it. They called in the army and got President Mohammed Mursi’s democratic government overthrown, returning to the military-led pseudo-dictatorship with which they’re more familiar.

More ironic is the assaults on Palestinian democracy by the world’s most eloquent advocate of democracy and human rights: the United States. In 2006 the Palestinians, prodded by Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials, held their first-ever free and fair elections. Hamas won the parliamentary vote by a landslide and formed the government. The Americans and Israelis didn’t like it. Instead of congratulating the Palestinians for ushering in democracy in hostile environment, they instigated the losers in those elections, the Fatah, to stage a coup against the Hamas-led government. President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, held on to power in the West Bank, now in the ninth year into his four-year term! Hamas continued to rule the Gaza Strip, as it carried on its armed struggle to liberate Palestinians from the Israeli colonial rule.

That wasn’t the end of the punishment Hamas has suffered for winning the Palestinian elections. With American blessings, Israel collaborated with pro-Israeli Egyptian dictatorships to place the 1.8 million people of Gaza under a most gruesome economic blockade. Americans and Israelis had hoped that the extreme hardships caused by the blockade would turn Gazans against their Hamas regime. They haven’t.

Israel remains undaunted by these setbacks. Early last month the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel into its third war against Hamas, vowing to disarm it and other Islamist groups in Gaza. The war ended with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad standing and valiantly fighting the invading forces. In a charade of truce talks held in Cairo, Israel and Egypt pressured the Islamists relentlessly to achieve what the powerful Israeli armed forces couldn’t: Disarm Hamas. They couldn’t. Hamas and Jihad have resumed their armed struggle for freedom, while Israel rains its U.S.-supplied bombs on the already devastated Gaza.

Sadly, America has set the precedents for the assaults on democracy in non-Western societies. Successive U.S. administrations coddled all five Pakistani dictatorships that had supplanted democratic governments. Besides, America used the CIA to overthrow nearly a dozen democratic governments in South and Central America, the Middle East and Asia, and replaced them with repressive pro-American dictatorships.

All the same, I see the masses in Pakistan and around the world pulsating with democratic fervor. I remember Nurul Amin’s prediction about the eventual success of democratic movements. Britain went through seven turbulent centuries – marked by regicide, religious pogroms, and bloody ethnic and trans-national warfare – to mature as a full-blown democracy.

America needed two centuries to settle down as a real democracy. American women didn’t win their voting rights until 1920 and African Americans didn’t achieve theirs until 1965. As I wrote elsewhere, developing countries should be able to build enduring democratic institutions much faster than did Westerners. Among other things, the dramatic spread of education and modernization will help them to do so.

As an American citizen, however, I’m troubled by the United States’ legacy in man’s epic march toward freedom and fulfillment. When future historians would be recounting democratic movements in non-Western societies, they wouldn’t, I’m afraid, condone America’s continual hostility to those the edifying and heroic human endeavors.

The United States can’t expect to regain its moral stature in the world until it realigns itself with forces of freedom and democracy. A good place to start would be Palestine. The Obama administration should dissociate America from the scandalous anachronism of Israeli colonialism. It should stop shielding Israel against charges of war crimes in Gaza, brought by the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Nothing could have been more shameful for Americans than seeing their government casting the solitary vote against opening the U.N. investigation.

This Gaza war is a watershed in Palestinians’ 66-year struggle for freedom and independence from Israeli subjugation. It has shown that Israel, the superpower in the Middle East, could slaughter more than 2,000 Gazans and destroy their homes, economy and infrastructure, but couldn’t dent their resolve to rid themselves of Israeli suppression and oppression. It has shown, too, that the world, with the deplorable exception of the United States, has little patience for Israeli colonialism.

I know that Palestine will jettison, sooner than later, Israel’s colonial tutelage. I don’t know how long it will take America to jettison its ignoble role as the lone defender of the world’s lone colonial power.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Beyond Freedom,’ https://beyond-freedom.com.
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Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.
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