Pakistan has been in the limelight of the world's media since its very bloody yet infamous inception in 1947. Since then, it has been in the news mostly for reasons that would shame the citizen of most modern nations. Born in a unique way from a uniquely ruled British colony with unique ideals, morals and principles of "Unity, Discipline and Faith" it has been reduced to the exact opposite of what it set out to be. Unity is a pipe dream as all provinces constantly point fingers at other provinces for wresting them from their fair share. Discipline? Well, to be fair to Pakistan it has to be said that the entire South Asian region lacks discipline. So Pakistan and Pakistanis are not there alone. Indians and Bangladeshis are equally undisciplined. The biggest disappointment would have to be Faith. Because Pakistan was itself built on the foundations of a unified faith of Islam. That was the vision of Pakistan's founder Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Unfortunately, Mr. Jinnah forgot to account for the very toxic feelings that Muslims of Pakistan had for their ethnically diverse brothers of the same Islamic faith. The result is what we see today as the infighting between provincial governments (provinces in Pakistan are divided according to ethnicity) for a getting a stranglehold on resources from the federal level for "their people" continues.
Despite all this, the Punjab (Pakistan's richest province) controls most of the political scenario and also the much more influential armed forces with the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) coming in a distant second. The Sindh province does not have a voice in the army and its only political voice is the Bhutto dynasty's Pakistan's People Party (PPP). Balochistan, Pakistan's largest and least populated province gets the worst of all deals with practically no political voice and hardly any major representation in the army.
In spite of all the poverty, infighting and above all an absence of a national identity, Pakistan as a state has been able to survive on its one unifying strength - the hatred of India. India has been considered Pakistan's biggest enemy since its creation and that remains the status quo to this day. In fact many Pakistanis themselves say that the only time when the country has been unified as a whole was when they came at odds with India, especially on the issue of the troubled region of Jammu & Kashmir. Many analysts including myself believe that had it not been for the "Indian threat" the Pakistan would not have survived. Now before calling names to my Indian bias please consider the following points carefully.
1. Pakistan was created in 1947 in an extremely chaotic situation. It has hardly any state machinery at the time of its inception. The civil service was in shambles as most civil servants were Hindu and had opted to migrate to India. Same was the case with banks as most of the officers in banks were Hindus who ran away to India. A similar fate was shared by almost all public services barring a few. So practically the country's entire think tank, tanked overnight. The police was a very communally charged force which was busy with keeping rioting down in major cities which were the new commercial hubs of this infant nation. Trade and commerce could not be allowed to be hampered as the nation needed money to run its bread and butter expenses. It is common knowledge that Pakistan only had 20 crore rupeers (200 million rupees) before partition. The rest was controversially remited by India after quite some time of its creation. It looked like and was indeed a pretty dystopian picture except for one thing.
2. The armed forces were the only institution in Pakistan at the time of its inception that had any structure. Moreover, it had a order, an almost unbreakable chain of command and above all a professional knowhow of how to deal with crisis. And the birth of Pakistan was in many ways a crisis for Pakistan itself! Historical evidence points out to that the help of the armed forces of Pakistan to its people at the time of its inception was one of the major factors why it ever managed to survive and not end up as a still born nation.
3. In order to get some think tank started on how to deal with nation building the government of this newly formed country required to get help once again from this "pillar of strength". The army was well conditioned, well funded and well conditioned to take on such kind of nation building efforts as its top brass consisted of some of the most intelligent people in all of Pakistan at the time.
4. The army knew that barring a the ailing Mr. Jinnah, Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan and hardly any others, the government and the civil service lacked any teeth and didn't have the faintest idea of what to do with the future of this country. This was the perfect base from which to initiate a coup.
5. An early attempt for a coup (The Rawalpindi Conspiracy) by General Akbar Khan failed miserably but that did not weaken the resolve of others in the army to replicate a more successful version of what Akbar Khan had attempted. The civil administration made the work for the army easy as there was lack of any vision on the future of Pakistan. Nine Prime Ministers had taken office in Nine years since partition. Constant infighting within the civil administration made the army's work more easy as a coup would herald the army as saviours rather than evil dictators.
6. That is what eventually happened as Field Marshall Ayub Khan took power in 1957. Three other military rulers ruled Pakistan for more than half its history with spurts of sham democracies in between.
7. It is difficult to make certain that did more damage. Dictators like Zia-ul-Haq, the longest serving dictator in Pakistan history totally changed the landscape of Pakistani identity by almost completely repealing Anglo-Saxon law prevalant up till then and replacing it with a perverted version of Islam Sharia law which to this day lingers in Pakistan. On the other hand the sham democratic governments the Sharifs and the Bhuttos destroyed Pakistan's economy and nearly bankrupting it in the late 1990s up until when General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a coup.
Today, another sham democracy holds power in Pakistan. But the Pakistan of today is the centre stage of the world's attention as it is dangerously affected by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that threaten to take the whole of Pakistan in flames. Pakistan's importance increases more so as it is declared nuclear weapons state with an estimated 60 warheads. The danger of even a single warhead falling in the hands of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban would leave the entire world at ransom to a few mad men. Pakistan is struggling to fight the same terrorists it once funded (well actually Pakistan was funded by the Americans) to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. At the same time, the army is ready to de-tag India as its biggest enemy even when the country is being threatened to implode from within due to terrorism, poverty and health problems.
Pakistan needs to realize something that has been written in the holy Quran itself. "Jihad" is a war but not a war against people of other religions (non-believers) but an internal struggle to open one's own eyes (the non-believer within thyself) and when Pakistan as a nation performs this "Jihad" it will realize that the problems are seldom around but are within.
Mitul Choksi
