http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Debate/Should_Pa k_developments_worry_India/articleshow/msid-2212140,curpg-1. cms
Regional peace depends on Pakistan's own future
| |
| Brahma Chellaney
Strategic Affairs Expert |
Barely 60 years after it was carved out of India, Pakistan's future is looking increasingly uncertain owing to serious internal challenges and contradictions. Pakistan has now approached a critical turning point, with a choice between recouping from the present troubles or risking a free fall. Without a transition to democratic rule, Pakistan will find it hard to pull back from the brink.
Hobbled by military rule, militant Islam, endemic corruption and dependency on foreign aid, Pakistan remains a main breeding ground of global terror. Having spent the past 17 years trying to bleed India through its 'war of a thousand cuts', Pakistan today is itself bleeding â due to the threat from within. By setting up state-run terrorist complexes, Pakistan became its own enemy. The Frankensteins it created have come to haunt its own security.
Today, the battlelines pit jehadist puppeteers in the establishment against their jehadist puppets outside. The puppeteers have become the targets of those whom they reared for long.
Against this background, the central issue that will determine regional peace is not the state of Indo-Pak relations but Pakistan's own future. Will Pakistan sink deeper in militarism, extremism and fundamentalism? Is it likely to fragment ethnically, given that it remains a state of five tribes in search of a national identity? Can it survive in its present shape?
The fight against international terrorism is very much tied to how the Pakistani state evolves in the coming years. Today, Pakistan is disparaged as "Problemistan", "Terroristan" and "Al Qaidastan", with Bush himself calling Pakistan "wilder than the Wild West".
Pakistan's fate has always been in the hands of three As â Allah, Army and America. Now Allah's wrath has wrought havoc on what has become the playground of terrorists, while the spreading pro-democracy movement has the Army on the defensive. But the third factor, America, is still seeking to buck the popular tide by propping up military rule. New Delhi, however, can never make peace with the Pakistan military, whose power and prerogative flow from foiling peace with India.
-------------
Why worry at all about its internal politics?
| |
| Ajai Sahni
Executive Director
ICM* |
A dominant fiction underlying India's foreign policy for all of six decades is that "Pakistan's integrity, stability and prosperity are in our national interest." This premise underpins India's limited quest for defensive parity with a country one eighth its size, and has encouraged Pakistani adventurism, eventually crystallising in its strategy of protracted terrorist war. (Bingo!)
In the face of the progressive decay of the Pakistani state over the past decades, the Indian perspective has translated into a curious sense of panic and misplaced responsibility, with the principal target of Pakistani state-sponsored terrorism believing it is required to provide some 'relief' to its relentless enemy.
But Pakistan's internal politics and the future of its current autocrat can no more be India's responsibility than was the fate of the succession of military despots who have plagued that country in the past, and who have contributed enormously to the cumulative detriment of peace and stability in the entire South Asian region.
India has also worked itself into a panic over a number of false dichotomies â 'Musharraf or the Taliban', the military or anarchy, etc., â and by imagining scenarios of collapse, chaos, and worse, an Islamist terrorist takeover and more dangerously of its nuclear assets.
These doomsday scenarios are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the processes of transition, which are generally conceived of as a one-time event, rather than the ongoing and gradual re-engineering of the structures of power within Pakistan and its constituent regions.
The processes of Pakistan's disintegration are rooted in her internal contradictions and appear increasingly inevitable. But the greatest danger of this process is to Pakistan itself, not to its neighbours. The militarised radical Islamist state of Pakistan today constitutes a far greater danger to its neighbours than a disintegrating Pakistan.
The destructive potential of an unstable and eventually fragmenting Pakistan would increasingly be turned against itself â and would provide substantial relief to its neighbours. This is already visible in J&K, where Pakistan is no longer able to sustain terrorism at levels that prevailed before 2001.
*Institute for Conflict Management
Members Lounge
Book Talk
Current Affairs
0