The Islamic world continues to break apart – Pakistan
Brian M Downing
Rand-McNally must be a busy place. Europe has seen the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia break apart; the Ukraine is being broken apart. The Islamic world has been even more tumultuous. The Sudan broke in two; Iraq is breaking into three regions; most of Syria may be a patchwork of a dozen or more statelets for years to come.
Other Islamic states are headed that way. National myths no longer bind people together, if they ever did. Rentier states can no longer rely on vast export revenue to placate publics. And the capacity to repress insurgencies and uprisings is unclear at best.
Future fragmentations should not come as surprises, especially in Pakistan where national myths are weak and repressive force is fearsome but weakening.
Official ideology
The Islamic part of British India has already broken in two. The 1971 uprising in the former East Pakistan led to brutal repression, followed by Indian intervention, and eventually to the creation of Bangladesh. Pakistani generals saw this a humiliating calamity. They responded with the propagation of a warped fusion of nationalism and Islam that has formed a national ideology of sort.
Two Pakistani people oppose the central government. One sees the government as unfaithful to its own official ideology, the other is repelled by official ideology and the government’s disregard for the periphery.
Pashtunistan
The Pashtuns of the old North-West Frontier Provinces, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, were never well integrated into Pakistan or British India. The Pashtun tribes had won autonomy from the British Raj which was codified into formal treaties – treaties that the new Pakistani state chose to honor, more or less.
Though fiercely imbued with the state’s nationalist-Islam ideology, the Pashtun are in near revolt against Islamabad for its cooperation with the US in the Afghan war. Government efforts to put down Pashtun unrest are half-hearted; the generals know a heartier effort will be costly and likely fruitless.
To the north, in Afghanistan, the Taliban insurgency is also a Pashtun movement, and, paradoxically, it is supported by the Pakistani military. The wars of Pashtun fighters on both sides of the frontier, may bring the creation of a Pashtun region that is independent of both Kabul and Islamabad.
Baluchistan
The Baluchs of western Pakistan have been waging an intermittent, low-level insurgency for decades. Unlike the Islamist Pashtuns, the Baluchs are more secular. They feel that political and military elites have misruled the country and taken resources from Baluchistan without fairly redistributing the wealth. In that Baluchistan constitutes some 41% of the Pakistani land mass, independence would be a calamity akin to that of the loss of East Pakistan in 1971.
In an antagonistic state system, disgruntled people will often find support from abroad. Long ago a restive people opposed British rule and found help from France and the Netherlands. The Baluch insurgency is supported, to some extent, by India. The Pakistani military, however, greatly exaggerates Indian efforts and sees the insurgency as a treasonous movement that must be crushed. This of course leads to harsher oppression and greater resistance.
Implications for the US
The US is in difficult position vis-a-vis Pakistan’s secessionist movements. As a status quo power, the US is unlikely to favor fragmentation of Pakistan – vexing and treacherous though its generals have been. Loss of Pashtunistan and Baluchistan would greatly anger the generals and their volatile faithful in the public. Backlash against the US would be quick, unreasoning, and violent – regardless of any actual US role.
The Taliban have won a great deal of territory in Afghanistan, mostly in the south, and they are launching a new fighting season which may see more of the south fall into their hands. It has long been held here that much of the south and east are untenable and that the US should retrench in the north, where the Pashtun are sparse and the Taliban are weak. A Pashtunistan comprising southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan may, belatedly, force the US’s hand.
Copyright 2016 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who has written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.
Given that Islam’s internal wars divert there focus from attacking the west, is it likely that giving Iran their money, to fight the sumni’s, may have been a factor in the nuclear deal?