The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad - Softcover

Schmidt, John R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250013917 ISBN 13: 9781250013910

Publisher: Picador, 2012

Synopsis

"This is a book filled with useful information, objectively presented, and offered at precisely the right time."---Madeleine K. Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1997--2001

How did a nation founded as a homeland for South Asian Muslims become a haven for Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups? In this groundbreaking work, former U.S. diplomat John R. Schmidt, who served in Pakistan in the years leading up to 9/11, takes a detailed look at the country's relationship with radical Islam. The Unraveling is the clearest account yet of the complex, dangerous relationship between the leaders of Pakistan and jihadist groups---and how the rulers' decisions have led their nation to the brink of disaster and put the world at great risk.

About this title

About the Author:

John R. Schmidt teaches at the Elliott School for International Affairs at George Washington University. He served in the State Department during a thirty-year service career, including as Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad in the years leading up to 9/11.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE UNRAVELING (Chapter One)1. An Improbable State

Pakistan is an improbable country. The forefathers of the people who now dominate it politically and militarily were bystanders in the movement to create the Pakistani state. The people actually responsible for its creation were outsiders. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and founder of the nation, was a Bombay lawyer who wanted a separate homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims because he feared they would become a political underclass in a unified India dominated by Hindus. His vision was secular, not religious, similar to the one that drove the founding of Israel as a place where Jews could live free from persecution. It had not always been this way. Early in his political career, Jinnah had been a member of the Congress Party of Gandhi and Nehru, and had worked with them in pursuing Indian independence from Britain. But he had moved on to join the Muslim League and parted final company with his former colleagues because of their conflicting views on the status of Muslims in an independent India. Jinnah believed that Muslims constituted a distinctive community--he used the term nation--entitled to parallel status with the Hindu majority, while Congress insisted on a unitary state with no special status accorded on religious grounds. These differences proved unbridgeable, and at a mass meeting of the Muslim League in Lahore in 1940, Jinnah appeared to take matters one step further, calling not simply for special status for Muslims in an independent India but also for some sort of division along communal lines.

Here matters stood until the end of World War II. At that time, a Britain vastly weakened by the war began moving the subcontinent rapidly toward independence. In the negotiations that ensued, Jinnah played his cards very close to the vest. Some historians have argued that he did not really favor a separate Muslim state at all but preferred a form of confederation in which a Muslim component composed of the Muslim majority provinces of the British Raj would share power at the center as an equal partner with a similarly constituted Hindu entity. Central to his conception was the status of Punjab and Bengal. These were far and away the most populous and politically important of the Muslim-majority provinces, although the majority in each case was a slender one. Jinnah wanted them included in the Muslim entity, not simply because of their Muslim majorities but also because, unlike the other Muslim-majority provinces, they had substantial Hindu populations. This Hindu presence in the Muslim entity would help ensure fair treatment for the significant Muslim minority destined to remain behind in the Hindu-majority provinces. Jinnah adamantly opposed any suggestions that Punjab and Bengal, due to their balanced populations, themselves be partitioned along communal lines, arguing that this would result in "a mutilated and moth-eaten" Muslim entity whose very viability would be in question.

Congress, for its part, would have none of this. It was unprepared to grant equal status to a Muslim population that was outnumbered by the Hindu community four to one, and it insisted that an independent India have a strong central government representing all Indians regardless of religious affiliation. If push came to shove and the British decided to inflict a separate Muslim entity on them, they demanded that Punjab and Bengal also be partitioned. Forced to choose between these incompatible demands, the British tried to steer a middle course. Rather than give Congress the undivided unitary state it wanted, they decided to partition the Raj along communal lines. Jinnah ended up with his Muslim entity, but as a completely independent state, not the equal pillar of a confederated India that would have given him a platform to speak on behalf of all Indian Muslims. Equally troubling for Jinnah, the British acquiesced in Congress's insistence that Punjab and Bengal themselves be partitioned, leaving Jinnah with his "mutilated and moth-eaten" state. It would consist of what was left of these two partitioned provinces, along with three other indisputably Muslim majority provinces, all of which were located on the western periphery of the Raj: Sindh, the Northwest Frontier Province, and Baluchistan. Pakistan, such as it was, had been born.

Contrary to most expectations, which proved to be naive, partition turned out to be a bloody affair. This was particularly true in the Punjab, where Hindus and Sikhs living in the Pakistani west fled eastward, while Muslims living in the Indian east fled west. Along the way each group was set upon by the other in thousands of separate encounters that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The Pakistani state that resulted from the division of British India consisted of western and eastern halves separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. As Jinnah both knew and lamented, both halves had existed on the extreme periphery of the Raj and were relative backwaters. The area that became West Pakistan and was to later morph into the Pakistan of today following the breakaway of Bangladesh was a latecomer to British India. The Punjab, which despite having been cut in two formed the heart of West Pakistan and was by far its most populous province, had been an integral part of the Moghul empire. Its capital, Lahore, is the site of some of the greatest monuments of Moghul architecture. When the empire began to crumble in the early part of the eighteenth century, the Punjab fell under a succession of lesser rulers, eventually becoming the centerpiece of a Sikh empire formed in the early nineteenth century. The other areas that constituted West Pakistan--Sindh, Baluchistan, and the Northwest Frontier Province--suffered similar fates, significant portions of the latter also falling under Sikh control.

The British move into the region took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, many decades, and in some cases more than a century, after they had brought the heartland areas of the subcontinent under their control. Their motive for coming was not strictly territorial gain but rather to use these territories as a barrier against Russian penetration into the region, as part of what became known as the Great Game. Sindh was taken over in 1843. Punjab and large parts of what came to be known as the Northwest Frontier Province were wrested from the Sikhs in 1849. Most of Baluchistan was incorporated during the following decade. British passage into the region was not always easy. The British fought two bloody wars with the Sikhs. Attempts to conquer Afghanistan failed utterly, and the entire British garrison of Kabul suffered annihilation at the hands of Pashtun tribal warriors during a horrific retreat from the Afghan capital in 1842.

Britain's desire to use these territories primarily as a buffer against Russian expansion was reflected in the way they were governed. Although the region was heavily garrisoned as a hedge against Russian penetration, the British footprint was considerably lighter here than elsewhere in the Raj. In the Punjab, the British left the landed Muslim feudal aristocracy, which had managed to weather the era of Sikh rule relatively intact, essentially in charge of their own affairs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, its western border areas, populated largely by Pashtuns, along with additional territory extracted from Afghanistan, were consolidated into the Northwest Frontier Province, adding yet another layer of buffer. As a final buffer, the British had established the frontier tribal areas to the west of the NWFP between the Raj and Afghan territory, whose ruler was obliged to agree to a border between the two that became known as the Durand Line. The Baluch lands were similarly left to manage their own affairs, while for the better part of a century Sindh, as something of an exception, was governed from neighboring Bombay.

This heavily garrisoned, largely self-governing buffer on the western extremity of the Raj was far from the political ferment in the center of British rule that would lead in time to independence and partition. Unlike Bengal, where the Muslim League of Mohammed Ali Jinnah had a substantial following, the areas that were destined to become West Pakistan were dominated by local notables. In Punjab and Sindh, the Muslim leadership was drawn from the rural agricultural elites popularly known as "feudals." Their politics, based on patron-client relationships that had long dominated the region, were alien to the urban-centered Muslim League, with its own single-minded fixation on promoting Muslim civil and political rights. In Punjab, feudal landlords running under the banner of the local Unionist Party drubbed Muslim League candidates in the 1937 provincial elections held by the British under the recently enacted Government of India Act. The results were similar in Sindh. The leaders of the Muslim League had no idea how to play at feudal politics and would never learn. Nonetheless, with independence looming at the end of World War II, they managed to co-opt these local worthies, who swept into office in the 1946 provincial elections under a Muslim League banner, while campaigning in the same old feudal way.

The men who would actually govern the new nation were not from there. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was born in Karachi but had been educated at the Inns of Court in London and made his career in Bombay. Most of the Muslim League leadership came from similar backgrounds, hailing from the great population centers of northern and western India, such as New Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay. This was where their natural political constituency and potential vote banks lay. But relatively few of their political supporters chose to follow them into the new country. Most were either too poor to afford the long journey or unwilling to risk starting over in a new and foreign land. Fully one-third of the Muslim population of British India, numbering thirty-five million people, remained behind. The great majority of the more than six million Muslims who did move west made the much shorter journey from eastern to western Punjab in the bloody population exchange that occurred at the time of partition. Only a relatively small number, comprising only 3 percent of the population of the new state, migrated from the urban heartland of British India into the nascent state, most of them settling in the new capital of Karachi.

These mohajirs (Arabic for "emigrant"), as they came to be called, were outsiders from the start. The one advantage they possessed, and it was considerable, was their predominance in the upper reaches of the Muslim League and in the civil service. So long as Mohammed Ali Jinnah dominated the political landscape, their sparse numbers and outsider status made little difference. But Jinnah was already wasting away from tuberculosis when independence came, looking the part of a cadaver long before he became one. His death barely a year after partition left a vacuum that his political heirs, none of whom enjoyed anything approaching his stature, found increasingly difficult to fill. The assassination of his trusted deputy and anointed successor, Liaquat Ali Khan, three years later, left relative nonentities in charge of the government of Pakistan. Names such as Khawaja Nazimuddin, Ghulam Mohammed, and Iskander Mirza do not echo down the corridors of history, even within Pakistan itself. Overwhelmed by the difficulties inherent in building a new nation from scratch, and with no experience in managing the affairs of state, the surviving Muslim Leaguers turned increasingly to senior civil servants, many of them also mohajirs, who had opted for Pakistan at independence after serving in the British colonial administration. With no natural political constituency on Pakistani soil, neither group had any real interest in putting their hold on power to the vote.

A constituent assembly, tasked with promulgating a constitution, did exist, peopled in West Pakistan by many of the same feudal landlords who had flocked to the Muslim League banner during the 1946 provincial elections. But it was largely ignored and in 1954 summarily dismissed. In fact, no constitution would emerge until 1956, almost a decade after independence, when a reconstituted assembly finally managed the deed. The closest the first parliamentary Pakistanis had come previously to agreeing on one was in the Objectives Resolution passed in 1949, which takes up less than half a page. This suited the mohajir politicians and civil servants who dominated the executive branch of government, since it enabled them to run the country more or less as they saw fit. But whether they realized it at the time or not, their command of the highest offices of government was a rapidly wasting asset, since they had neither the personal stature nor the political base to maintain it. The mohajirs were already doomed to devolve into a purely regional political force centered on Karachi, led by former student radicals with a penchant for street fighting. But the instrument of their demise would not be the disputatious feudal landlords who had filled the West Pakistan seats in the original constituent assembly. Their rise to political power would have to await the ascent of the Sindhi landlord Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the aftermath of the breakaway of Bangladesh. But that event still lay more than a decade in the future.

The instrument that ended the mohajir grip on power and hastened the final disintegration of the original Muslim League was the Pakistan army. Unlike the mohajirs, the army was largely an indigenous force. Punjabi soldiers from the so-called army triangle of Rawalpindi, Attock, and Jhelum in northern Punjab had dominated the ranks of the Indian army under British rule. At the time of partition, however, the newly constituted Pakistan army was sufficiently bereft of senior officers that Jinnah asked British officers to stay on to fill out the senior ranks. The first two army chiefs were British; the third was Ayub Khan, who would become the first military dictator of Pakistan. It was Ayub, educated in the British way at Sandhurst and dismayed at the squabbling of the politicians and government officials around him, who moved in to fill the gap left by the mohajir decline. But he might never have had the chance had it not been for the dispute with India over control of Kashmir that broke out at the time of partition.

Jammu and Kashmir, to give it its full name, was a princely state with an overwhelmingly Muslim population ruled over by a Hindu maharaja. There were hundreds of such entities under the Raj, each nominally sovereign but in fact fully subordinate to British rule. At the time of independence, the British preserved this fiction of special status by giving each princely sovereign the right to opt for either India or Pakistan. In almost every instance this posed no threat to the basic principle guiding partition that Muslim majority areas would pass to Pakistan and majority Hindu areas to India. But there were three exceptions. Two princely states, those of Hyderabad and Junagadh, had heavily Hindu majority populations but were ruled by Muslims. The third was Kashmir. The Muslim ruler of Junagadh opted for Pakistan but was forced to flee under Indian pressure. His Hyderabad counterpart temporized for a year before an Indian invasion obliged him to accede to India, thus bringing this largest of princely states under Indian control. But events in Kashmir were to play out somewhat differently.

The ruler of Kashmir was a Hindu by the name of Hari Singh. The Muslim heartland of the princely state, centered on the beautiful Vale of Kashmir, had been in Hindu hands for only a century. Singh's enterprising great-grandfather Gulab, who was ruler of the much smal...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1250013917
• ISBN 13: 9781250013910
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288