This
question has gathered even greater force over the past two years; and
for two reasons. After being stalled for a while by the ferocity of the
Iraqi resistance, US plans for war against Iran are once again
gathering steam. In the past few weeks, Israelis, Neocons, Christian
Zionists and assorted hawks have again been baying for Iranian blood.
Now, the US Senate too has joined the chorus. On September 26, with an
overwhelming vote, it virtually handed President Bush the license to
wage war against Iran.
At the same time, there is little doubt
now that Pakistan is “hosting” both al-Qaida and the Taliban. Now
rejuvenated, both organizations are operating from “liberated”
territories in Pakistan’s Waziristan. More ominously, last July,
Pakistani allies of the Taliban dared to challenge the authority of the
state in Pakistan’s capital. And since their rout there, they have
continued to mount deadly attacks on the Pakistan army.
Yet,
even today there is no talk of adding Pakistan to the “axis of evil.”
Why is there no clamor in the United States or Israel to invade
Waziristan, to attack Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, to punish her for
nuclear proliferation, or to launch covert operations to seize
Pakistan’s nuclear assets before they fall into the hands of Pakistani
nationalists, the Taliban or al-Qaida? This is the Pakistani paradox.
This
paradox has a simple explanation: simple but also indicative of the
malaise that afflicts nearly all the Islamicate world. In Pakistan, the
US effected regime change without a change of regime. There was no need
for an invasion, no need to fire a shot, no need for covert operations.
At the first American touch, almost overnight, a terrible beauty was
born. Instantly, the US had drafted the Pakistani military, nay the
Pakistani state, to wage war against Islamic “extremists.” The US had
gained an army: and Pakistan’s military dictators had gained longevity.
The
ease with which Pakistan’s sovereignty was terminated, the speed of
this transaction, and no less the completeness of the foreign
take-over, speaks volumes about Pakistan’s history, the nature of her
ruling elites, the timbre of her “national” institutions, and the
alienation, degradation and dereliction of Pakistan’s middle classes.
Within a few years of her birth, the state was privatized by landlords,
generals and bureaucrats: three factions created, nurtured and guided
into positions of leadership by the British.
Instead of
mobilizing the people, instead of educating them in the values of
citizenship, instead of enriching Islamic traditions, instead of
building a national economy, instead of developing indigenous
technologies, Pakistan’s ruling elites built bridges to the United
States, to the US military, to foreign corporations, and to
US-dominated multilateral institutions to create a technologically
weak, a debt-ridden, and financially dependent economy controlled from
outside through local elites.
Pakistan today is the fruit, the
logical culmination of the agenda of accommodation launched in the
nineteenth century by the two Ahmads of India — one founded a college
to produce clerks who would be loyal to the British, another fashioned
a whole new religion to instill servitude. The glorious hope of the two
Ahmads was to serve the Empire. They were Muslims for the Empire. More
than a hundred years later, their spiritual progeny serve a different
Empire. If they are still around fifty years from now, they will be
serving new Empires risen from the east.
For sixty years,
Pakistan has been managed by different factions of its ruling elites —
the military, bureaucracy, landlords — taking turns to plunder the
people, competing against each other to serve foreign masters, at first
covertly, but of late more openly, more blatantly, more treasonously.
So complete now is the alienation of the domestic elites from their own
society that their bidding against each other, the domestic competition
to sell the institutions of the “state” is now conducted in open view.
In
order to stifle resistance, this dependent state methodically creates a
weak, alienated, demoralized, and corrupt society. By failing to
provide education, skills, and jobs, the state forces people to look
outward, to turn to foreign shores for education, for jobs, and
cultural inspiration. For every person who leaves for foreign shores,
there are ten who are forced to stay at home, and whose education,
careers, and very lives are organized around the chance of leaving the
country. Pakistani society increasingly consists of would-be migrants
waiting for their chance to dash out of the country’s airports, ports
and border-crossings.
It is the middle classes now who ape the
elites, who in turn have been aping their foreign masters for more than
a century. As English increasingly becomes the passport to success,
they are forsaking their native languages. In the colonial era, the
elites sent their children to the grammar schools, the missionary
schools, and then they were packed off to Cambridge and Oxford. On
succeeding their white masters, these “whitened” natives brandished
their command of English as the visible symbol of their new elevation
to power. It marked them off from the “natives” over whom they now
ruled. A new caste had emerged, the native “whites” segregated from
their “backward” cousins by their alien language, their affluence,
their Western loyalties and dress, their moral turpitude, and their
Western vacations and honeymoons.
The most damaging product of
this alienation has been a deepening intellectual sterility. Despite
the proliferation of degrees, every new generation of Pakistanis is
intellectually more sterile than its predecessor. Each new generation
has eagerly surrendered the traditional virtues of its predecessor
without acquiring the virtues of its masters, their scholarship, their
energy, and the humanity which they practice among their own kind. The
aping and mimicking of the diseases of foreign masters is far easier
than the cultivation of the virtues that distinguish them, that are the
sources of their power over their dark subjects.
Yet, resistance
revives in some troubled hearts. At some point, this wholesale
degradation of a society, this prostitution of national institutions,
this miscegenation of foreign and native elites, produces revulsion in
a few sensitive hearts. It gives birth to anger, art, struggle, new
theories, and hopes for regenerating society.
But this
regeneration is arduous. The mongrel elites have raised many barriers,
they have strung barbed-wire fences with watch-towers across the
country’s landscape. They have trained a mercenary military and
perfidious police, led by officers schooled in the arts of repressing
dissent. However, it is not these overt forces of repression alone that
weaken and deflect the resistance.
The resistance can stand up
to repression if it resonates with the people, if it can engage, stir,
and mobilize them behind the cause of justice. But the alienation in
society is so deep, the demoralization and apathy so complete that the
few sensitive souls who choose to resist are left to twist in the wind,
unsupported, unshielded, to be singled out and decapitated by the
mercenary military and police.
Yet, Pakistan is not without
hope. In one corner of Pakistan, that hope comes from the sons and
daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by “civilization”, firm
in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and
ready to fight for their dignity. Though unschooled, they are
clear-eyed as the eagle of the mountains. Their poverty steels their
determination. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated
them. Today, they are standing up again to reclaim their dignity and
their lands from foreigners and native mercenaries.
In Pakistan
now, as in much of the Islamic world, the alienation of the
institutions of the state has reached its climax. In Iraq, the United
States could not have restored colonialism without planting her boots
on the ground. In Iran too, they dare not dream of capturing the state
without boots on the ground. In Pakistan, however, the task of regime
change has been truly a cake walk: it was achieved with Pakistani boots
on the ground.
A US weekly, Newsweek, has written that the
Pentagon “wants [Musharraf] to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a
counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al-Qaeda and
its extremist supporters along the Afghan border.” There, you have it,
dear Pakistanis, in clear, bold print. What is this if not a plan for
plunging your country into civil war, into a carnage far worse than
what the Algerians have gone through?
How is it that the
Pentagon dares to make such outlandish demands on the Pakistani army?
The answer is simple. They do it because they know for a certainty that
Pakistan’s elites are eager to deliver; they know that Pakistan’s
mercenary-generals compete for American patronage; and Pakistan’s
scavenger-politicians crawl to Washington begging not to be left out of
the deals to sell the Pakistani state. Worse, until recently,
Pakistanis have watched from the sidelines, or turned away, and let it
happen.
For the first time now, a tiny segment of Pakistan’s
middle classes, the lawyers — though still outfitted in the ridiculous
black attire given them by their erstwhile English masters — have stuck
out their necks against the mercenary-generals, against the mercenary
military, against the commodification of their state. It is an
auspicious turning point for Pakistan.
It is a sign that the
Iqbalian spirit stirs a few Pakistanis. And observe what it has already
accomplished. A few hundred Iqbalians have put the mercenary-generals
on notice. The mercenary-generals postured, they scowled, they
threatened, in desperation they turned to their masters for advice,
they called up the scavenger-politicians to provide civilian cover. In
short, for a brief moment, there was panic in the top ranks of the
mercenary military.
For a brief moment only. The mercenary
generals will not surrender so soon, or so easily. Indeed, it does not
matter if one batch of mercenary-generals departs the scene: many more
wait in the wings to take their place. If Pakistanis wish to avert
civil war — and a bloody civil war it will be — then they must steel
their hearts, they must gather courage, they must plan, they must
organize, they must mobilize to take back their country, their state,
and their military: to take it back definitively and with a clear
understanding of how to make this nationalist appropriation
irrevocable.
The lawyers alone cannot do it for them; when
they become too troublesome, the mercenary state will start
disappearing the lawyers. Nevertheless, change will come to Pakistan:
for those who can read the signs, the writing is on the wall.
Pakistan’s mercenary elites have hitched their wagon to the US “global
war on terror.” The United States will direct this war, and it will be
a dirty war. As in Iraq, American experts in counterinsurgency will not
hesitate to turn Pakistan into a Guatemala or worse.
Will
Pakistanis dare to exert to make a stand for the change they want? If
they choose to stay unconcerned, unthinking, disengaged, impassive,
change will be imposed on them by the mercenary state. They will find
themselves being dragged through a dirty war: many will loose their
lives. Disappearances, executions, arbitrary arrests, in short, state
terror will become common: the order of the day.
If Pakistanis
dare to change themselves, they can choose the change they want: to
make the state work for them not against them, to reclaim history, to
become the historical force that produces change. However, this change
demands a price, a price in will, values and sacrifice. Pakistanis must
search their hearts to revive the fire they have smothered for too
long: the will to struggle, to resist, to live in dignity, connected to
their history, drawing on their best traditions to forge a future that
they will control. If they fail now, the game is lost. It may be lost
forever.
Pakistanis can learn from Latin America, whose
oppressed peoples — in particular, their indigenous people — after five
centuries of oppression are raising their heads everywhere. Together,
they are throwing off the shackles of the predatory state, the
mercenary state that collaborated with a succession of Empires to
destroy their lives, their hopes, their struggles. Today, they are
reclaiming the state in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in
Nicaragua, and they are getting ever closer to victory across the
entire continent.
The United States today is powerless to roll
back these revolutions. It is powerless because the struggles of
oppressed peoples are interconnected, interwoven. When the dispossessed
resist in Palestine, when Iraqis battle behemoths in their country,
when underdogs make a stand in Lebanon, when Afghan peasants run
circles around armies of occupation: in short, when the wretched of the
earth tie down the Empire in West Asia, they raise hopes of liberation
in every quarter of the world, even amongst the oppressed classes in
the very centers of power.
The struggles of the past six years
in West Asia have quickened the pace of history: they have opened a
window for the liberation of the oppressed peoples everywhere. Just
when the Empire was hatching its Project for the New American Century,
history decided otherwise. It will be a new century alright, but there
is scarce a doubt six years later that it will not be an American
century, a reality that Americans should have the courage to accept
graciously. Instead, it will be multipolar century, with many centers
of power, scattered across all the continents of the world. Once again,
power is being decentralized, and we can hope that this new round of
decentralization will produce more enduring results than the last one.
The men and women leading the new decentralization are a new breed:
they have not been chosen by their erstwhile masters.
It is for
Pakistanis now to seize this historical moment, to join the forward
march of history. The historic changes underway in Latin America, and
the new forms of resistance being forged in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan
and Palestine are delivering new hope, new ideas, and new inspiration
to oppressed peoples everywhere. Global empires are too costly to be
sustained anymore: that is the singular message that Iraqis and Afghans
are delivering to the world.
Will Pakistanis dare to join this
universal struggle, harness its power, and seize the scales of justice?
Will they follow the lead of the brave lawyers so that the streets of
every city, every town, every village in Pakistan reverberate with
their cries for honor and justice? Or will they choose to lengthen
their vegetative seance, embrace ignominious death, and become the
litter in the graveyard of history, their epitaph written by the
foreign masters they have served for so long and so well?
These
questions are historical: they are also urgent. The choices before
Pakistanis are clear: it is life or death. If they fail to act now,
they will concede the stage to the Taliban and the mercenary elites.
May the Pakistanis ponder deeply for an answer: may they choose to walk
in the paths of justice: and may their difficult journey be victorious.
Writings 
In Pakistan today we encounter a paradox crying for an explanation; it is a paradox, moreover, whose exploration can bring some clarity to the predicament of the Islamicate today.
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