Pakistan Lurches from Crisis to Crisis

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Pakistan has been called “the most dangerous place in the world” by Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul, the executive director of the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies.

It was an artificial state right from the start, the product of the territorial partition, based on religious criteria, of the Indian subcontinent, with Muslim majority areas in the west and east forming the new country, and the rest, mainly Hindu and Sikh, remaining in India. Both countries achieved independence in mid-August of 1947.

The Hindu ruler of the disputed princely state of Kashmir, though majority Muslim, joined India, resulting in a war that divided it between the two new countries; it has been a source of conflict ever since.

Sind, Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province (now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the “area of Pashtuns”), and part of the Punjab, along with some princely states, became West Pakistan. Some 1,600 kilometres to the east, Bengal was also partitioned, with Muslim areas becoming East Pakistan. This didn’t last and in 1971 the east became Bangladesh, after a bloody war.

Even the name Pakistan was invented, agreed upon at a meeting of the Muslim League in Lahore in 1940. It means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, the Muslim language similar to Hindi.  As well, the name Pakistan is also an acronym, referring to the names of the five northwestern regions of British India: the initials of Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, and Sind, with the ending the last four letters of Baluchistan. (It was not a good omen for the future that Bengal didn’t get a place in the name.)

The country got off to an inauspicious start, as hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died in the in the bloodletting that followed the partition – nor have things improved much in the succeeding 66 years. For most of its history, Pakistan has been run by the military, which has had little compunction deposing civilian presidents and prime ministers.

The current president is Asif Ali Zardari of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party. He is the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who served two terms as prime minister and was assassinated in 2007. He was called “Mr. Ten Per Cent” over accusations of widespread kickbacks and other corruption. His term ends in September. The presidential election for his replacement will be held Aug. 6 and official nominees will be announced on July 29.

A former general, Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999 and ran the country until 2008, now sits in jail, charged with treason over the emergency rule he imposed in 2007 which saw the suspension of the country’s constitution, the firing of senior judges and the arrest of thousands of people. He is also accused of having been involved in the conspiracy to kill Bhutto.

In the most recent parliamentary election, the winner was the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz. Ironically, its leader, Nawaz Sharif, now the prime minister, was the one deposed in the army coup mounted by Musharraf in 1999.

Sharif, whose stronghold is in the Punjab, faces major challenges, as have all his predecessors. The country suffers from a homegrown Taliban-led insurgency in the Pashtun-inhabited federally administered tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan and mounting anger over the retaliatory CIA drone strikes, especially in North Waziristan. Other parts of the country also suffer from terrorism: President Zardari’s own security chief was killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi earlier in July.

Figures provided by the Edhi emergency services organization show that between April and the end of June, 247 people were killed in bombings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. And these figures do not include Waziristan, a militant hotspot.

There has also been deadly violence against Shi’ites, who comprise about 10-15 per cent of the population, by Sunni extremists. In the last five years, more than 1,000 Shiites, belonging to the Hazara community, have been targeted and killed in the Baluchi city of Quetta by, among others, the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

In Baluchistan, whose people are poor and feel neglected, the separatist Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) is also responsible for numerous attacks.

And in the large port city of Karachi, ethnic and political divisions fan the violence. There is considerable animosity between the native Sindis, Pashtuns from the war-torn region along the Afghan border, and Muhajirs, the term for Muslims from elsewhere in India who moved into what became Pakistan after the partition. More than 2,400 Karachi residents were shot in the street or kidnapped and tortured to death in 2012.

And, of course, there’s the continued tension with India, over Kashmir. Both countries have nuclear arsenals. Maybe Imtiaz Gul is right.