The significance of the visit of Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state, to Islamabad has been lost in the dust of convulsions on the home front. This is most unfortunate. Such an opportunity to explain our position forcefully to the Clinton administration is not likely to come our way for a long time.
The Americans have shown some understanding of the plight of prime minister Nawaz Sharif after the killing of the four Americans in Karachi recently. We must also expect the US Congress to register the fact that a lot of Americans have lost their lives at the hands of Pakistani nationals. Ramzi Yusuf bombed the World Trade Centre, Aimal Kansi killed two CIA officers in Virginia and seven Americans have so far been murdered in Karachi by unknown terrorists over the last five years.
But Washington must accept the fact that two Islamabad governments have successively helped catch or expel most of the terrorists and drug barons on top of the American hit list. In the aftermath, however, both governments suffered the vengeful fury of militants in Pakistan. Some American sensitivity is therefore required to understand the fact that Pakistan is reaping the whirlwind of the Afghan war it fought on behalf of Washington.
It is true, of course, that Pakistan received ample reward in dollars for being a frontline state against the Soviets. But if one weighs that reward in the scale of what America achieved at the global level by discomfiting its rival superpower via Pakistan, some moral responsibility is still left over with the US. A troubled Pakistan should not be dismissed out of hand by the US as a basket case. Indeed, it should be helped to come out of the mess simply because governments that come to power in Islamabad are not equal to the task of coping with the fallout of the Afghan war.
Washington made a big mistake by pulling out of Pakistan in unholy haste. The US transformed Pakistan into a warrior state by pumping over $ 6 billion into it. But Pakistan’s state institutions broke down under the weight of so much American attention. In consequence, governance has suffered and people hooked on to easy money have forgotten how to engage in legitimate economic activity. Myopic military dictatorships ruined the polity, and an American-supported dictator queered the pitch for normal social and civil development through savage amendments in the Constitution.
America pulled out of Pakistan in unseemly haste without weaning the state away from the disorder it had brought about during a decade of war. It started to apply tough laws to block aid, forgetting that Pakistan was allowed to acquire a nuclear weapons capability during the Afghan honeymoon. Consequently, no government in Pakistan is able to convince Pakistanis that America’s punitive anti-proliferation measures are evenhanded as Washington leans heavily in favour of India.
Now Washington is advising Pakistan to forget the wars and engage in economic activity. But as Islamabad struggles with the new global economic order, its efforts are being scuttled by terrorism which is directly related to the fallout of America’s Afghan war. Ramzi Yusuf’s diffuse identity of an Arab-Baloch-Iraqi-Irani terrorist was formed by a war in which everyone from Pakistan to Algeria took part and the Islamic militias now challenging the democratic order in Pakistan were spawned by the CIA’s largesse. Under the circumstances, would it not be more effective to help Pakistan out of this crisis rather than to abandon it and rely on US courts to punish individual terrorists?
Pakistan is in a terminal economic and social crisis. It is locked in a bloody dispute with India, and come Americans see the threat of armed conflict in this low-intensity confrontation. They are justified in thinking that if there is an Indo-Pak war it will immediately escalate into a nuclear one because the two countries don’t have a reliable capability of assessing each other’s military intentions. Therefore, isn’t it time for the US to come back from its policy of benign neglect and one-sided negative assessment of Pakistan and preempt disaster through meaningful engagement?
Such engagement would require lifting the discriminating sanctions on Pakistan. The resumption of trade and aid would gradually wean away Pakistan from its frontline mode and allow governments in Islamabad to shore up the country’s military preparedness and cope with terrorism A more activist policy on Kashmir would not only de-escalate the Indo-Pak confrontation but also kickstart Indo-Pak trade.
If the present drift in American policy continues, the consequences may be perilous. Pakistan is fast losing its institutional hold on the situation. The religious parties, sensing that governments in Pakistan have no international support, have adopted a clearly anarchist agenda based on anti-Americanism. The “ugly American” has arrived in Pakistan with a bang.
If Pakistan was used in the 1980s by the US to influence the situation in Afghanistan, the trend in the 1990s is in the opposite direction. The Afghan paradigm is fast overtaking Pakistan which is tilting into civil war and anarchy. This is not a situation in which the Americans can afford to sit it out on the sidelines.