A GRAIN OF SALT
Published 5:00 am Friday, October 26, 2001
Strange irony that our jumping off place in the hot war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is the land of the religiously pure, for that is a translation of Pakistan. But the history of Pakistan is replete with irony.
Almost a thousand years before India became the most precious jewel in Britain’s colonial crown, the Islamic ancestors of present-day Pakistanis were its none too gentle rulers. To avoid bloodshed when the British left in 1947, Pakistan was cobbled together from Indian territories with Moslem majorities.
From the outset, Pakistan was a nation besieged. To the south, Pakistan and India face one another, nuclear swords half drawn from their scabbards. Kashmir, the one Moslem-majority territory not ceded to Pakistan, is still ruled by its Indian Hindu minority. The armies of both nations and free-lance terrorists have bloodied its soil for half a century. Kashmir remains a lighted fuse to this day.
To the west, the Shiite Moslems of Iran did not take kindly to a Sunni Moslem state on their border. They still don’t. If and when the hot war against terrorism turns to the Ayatollahs of Iran, it may actually become easier for Sunni Pakistanis to continue their coalition partnership with us, than it is for them to oppose their erstwhile friends, the Taliban.
To the north, Afghanistan claimed its Pathan tribes were entitled to an independent state carved out of newly created Pakistan. The Soviets backed their claim. Sporadic border violence and attacks on the Pakistani embassy in Kabul punctuated the 1950s.
Faced with danger to the north, south and west, Pakistan turned for support to its eastern neighbor, the People’s Republic of China. The two have had a cordial relationship ever since. So cordial, in fact, that Pakistan became Richard Nixon’s diplomatic key to reopen US-Sino relations in the early 1970s. Ironically, a generation later, the People’s Republic has quietly played its own key role, helping open Pakistan to the difficult decision of joining the U.S. against the Taliban.
More irony: the Taliban was put into play by Pakistan itself, to make certain Afghanistan did not return to its adversarial posture when the Soviets were finally defeated. With Pakistan’s support and blessing, the Taliban took over after the United States helped bring about that Soviet defeat by arming Afghanistan’s holy warriors. Still more irony?
Perhaps the ultimate irony, from an American standpoint, is that the military leaders who have ruled Pakistan for exactly half of its 54 years, have been the instruments of better government, far more often than the democratically elected leaders they’ve ousted. Consequently, when General Prevez Musharraf took over in 1999, the London Economist’s summary demonstrated that Pakistan had been through all this before.
“The instinct to support democrats and condemn military coups is correct, yet it is worth remembering that not all elected leaders are democrats and not all generals are villains. It is regrettable that the army should be the instrument of change in Pakistan, but the departure of [ex-prime minister] Nawaz Sharif may well bring an improvement to the country’s fortunes.”
Improvement indeed! Under democratically elected Nawaz Sharif and his predecessor Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan became a prime example of the 3 Gs in action: greed, graft and globalization.
In 1999 Pakistan suffered the world’s lowest Standard & Poor’s credit rating. Small wonder. Pakistan had just defaulted on $4 billion in loans that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international lenders had made to Pakistan’s own national banks.
By an amazing coincidence, Pakistan’s national banks had loaned just about $4 billion to Nawaz Sharif (who has fled to Saudi Arabia), Benazir Bhutto and her husband (also living in exile) and hundreds of other politicians and their favorite fat cats. By the time Musharraf was able to freeze the assets of Sharif, Bhutto and 500 other defaulters, it was estimated that most of the $4 billion was beyond recovery.
And so, when Prevez Musharraf gave Pakistani democracy the bum’s rush, he controlled a nation with only $1.4 billion in foreign reserves (money owed them for goods and services). In Pakistan, that was enough to buy just three weeks of imports. Musharraf managed to convince IMF and others to extend Pakistan’s loans, but at the cost of using 75 percent of those loans to pay back previous debts. Precious little left over for economic growth and social investment.
However, just three months before our Sept. 11 terrorist wake up call, Musharraf made a religious investment almost frightening in its synchronicity. He spoke publicly to Pakistan’s mullahs, avowing his faith that Islam was not a religion that preached terrorism. Musharraf pronounced that it was time to stop preaching jihad by violence and start Islamic action to bring Pakistan’s people to peace and economic stability.
Toward that end, Pakistan now operates under another Musharraf pronouncement, entitled the National Accountability Bureau Ordinance. Henceforth, politicians convicted of defaulting on loans or, indeed, corruption of any kind, face heavy fines and 14 year jail terms.
Corrupt politicians face one more penalty to which we might pay close attention in the good old U.S. of A. They are banned from holding any public office for a period of 21 years. Hmmm? Perhaps Masharraf has locked Pakistan’s barn door after the horses have been stolen, but don’t we still have a few horses of our own to protect?
