With Us or Against Us
Page 31
equalizer and, thus, for its periodical frustration with the United States
for not matching its friendship with an equal and lasting commitment,
it is the Pan-Islamist profile of the state and society that often engen-
dered negative perceptions about Washington. The world of Islam
perspective is the key to understanding the frustration of Muslims in
Pakistan and elsewhere with the perceived American policies about
regional conflicts. The Islamic community is a unique phenomenon in
as much as it is a mini-world in the larger world. For comparison, one
can argue that there is no Hindu world. The state of India compre-
hensively represents the world of Hinduism, with Nepal being the
only other Hindu state and Bali being a remote Hindu enclave in
Muslim Indonesia. There is no Buddhist world either, unless one puts
together China, Campuchea, and Sri Lanka as building blocks of a
faith-based community of states. Nor indeed is there a Christian world
whereby countries ranging from Philippines to Kenya, Tanzania and
South Africa to England, France and Germany onward to the United
States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil would make a coherent bloc of
countries bound by religious ties.
The core of the world of Islam comprises 54 Muslim states. In
addition, it includes significantly large historical Muslim minorities
belonging to countries such as India, China, Russia, as well as the
Balkan states. The third major component of this world is the expatriate
Muslim community in Western countries. In the second half of the
twentieth century, various regional conflicts involving Muslim com-
munities provided what was generally defined as Islamic causes, which
increasingly welded the world of Islam together. The Palestinian issue
can be considered the oldest and the most consistently frustrating
Islamic cause in this regard. It has cost the United States a potential
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Anti-Americanism in Pakistan
181
loss of goodwill and political support among Muslims of Pakistan and
elsewhere. A series of Islamic causes followed: Kashmir, Afghanistan,
Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechynia. Muslim publics in various countries
got restive about Islamic causes whenever these emerged in any part
of the world of Islam. However, it would have been a U.S. foreign
policy disaster, in general, if the Muslim outrage had been accommo-
dated in the decision-making channels of Muslim states, thus pushing
them against Washington in a big way. In this context, authoritarian
state systems in the Muslim world are functional for the pursuit of cer-
tain policies by the United States, which are unpopular among
Muslims.
In Pakistan, the 1956 Suez Crisis put the state under a severe chal-
lenge from the public outrage. People demanded condemnation of
the joint British, French, and Israeli attack on Egypt, and sought to
mobilize both moral and material support for the Muslim brotherly
state. However, Prime Minister Sohrawardy brushed aside the idea of
cooperation between Muslim countries by publicly stating that zero
plus zero was equal to zero. Decades later, the Nawaz Sharif govern-
ment became part of the international coalition against Iraq during
the 1991 Gulf War, in the teeth of opposition from the larger public.
Finally, the Musharraf government’s decision to join hands with
President Bush in the latter’s war effort against Taliban and Osama
bin Laden in 2001–2002 led to a total reversal of Islamabad’s foreign
policy commitments in Afghanistan even as large sections of people
opposed the move vigorously. In all the three cases, that is, in 1956,
1991, and 2001–2002, the society at large reacted sharply against
what it considered Western (in the last two instances American)
encroachment on the sovereignty and integrity of a fellow Muslim
country. In every case, the government was placed under severe pres-
sure to stave off a moral crisis. Each time, it managed to deflect the
pressure and still survive in office.9 The clue lies in the kind of the
social and political milieu of Pakistan, which has been defined in
another context as an hour-glass society as opposed to the civil society.10
The Pakistan society comprises two half spheres of activity, which are
joined like an hour glass, where there is only one-way flow of authority
and value from top to bottom. There are very few links available to the
society at the bottom to influence and shape the policy on top. Thus,
it has been possible to have a pro-American state elite and anti-American
society at large at the same time.
We can argue that “official” anti-Americanism is periodical in
nature and limited in scope inasmuch as the idea is to win the United
States back to a fuller commitment than is forthcoming at any given
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M ohammad Waseem
time. From the early years after independence, Pakistan’s ruling elite
was committed to alliance with the United States and other Western
countries in the context of the Cold War between the capitalist and
communist blocs. The general public was far from mobilized in the
sense of joining an ongoing process of political participation. From
the 1970s onward, a vehement process of sharing the fate of other
Muslim communities in crisis started in earnest in Pakistan. First, in
the aftermath of the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, which resulted in the
emergence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh, Islamabad turned its back
to South Asia. There was an acute feeling that the region belonged to
India’s area of influence. Under these circumstances, Pakistan turned
to the Middle East in a big way.11 This move for turning away from its
eastern neighbor in the wake of a military defeat and embracing its
Western neighbors with prospects of entering the larger Muslim com-
munity could not come at a more opportune moment. The post-1973
War boom in oil prices made this increasingly more meaningful in
financial terms.
Therefore, we can argue that the second phase of Pakistan’s history
in terms of perceptions about America can be understood in the frame-
work of the world of Islam perspective. Two new dimensions were
added to the old phenomenon of the elite’s pro-American policies:
first, the Western perceptions about the role of Islam in the region
around Pakistan were now focused on the Afghan resistance move-
ment against the Soviet presence in Kabul. This opened up new chan-
nels of public activity, which was operationalized through the use of
Islamic identity in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. Second, the
focus of the new movement went beyond the anti-Indian sentiment
per se. By the 1990s, it was the fate of Islamic community in the larger
context of global politics that inspired the action and belief of the
enterprising sections of the population in Pakistan and other Muslim
countries.
In this process, the 1991 Gulf War seems to be the turning point
in the context of Pakistani perceptions about the United States. The
traditional pro–Saudi A
rabian Islamic parties, such as Jamat Islami,
as well as some officers in the army high command including COAS
General Aslam Beg condemned the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. The
transnational Islamic networks, which had operated against the Soviet
presence in and around Afghanistan in the 1980s, found a new adversary
in the United States in the 1990s as the latter made its presence in the
Gulf noticed all around in the Muslim world militarily, diplomatically,
and otherwise.12
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Anti-Americanism in Pakistan
183
The general public in Pakistan has become politically more indul-
gent in Islamic issues in recent years. The circuit of activity and com-
mitment to larger Islamic causes being pursued in territories outside
Pakistan—sometimes involving continental distances—has gradually
expanded during the last decade. A major contribution to this phe-
nomenon can be traced down to globalization, especially the commu-
nication and media explosion. Together, the internet and TV brought
about a revolution in the perception of both the Muslim and non-Muslim
worlds and their encounter in various conflict zones. Public opinion
in Pakistan, holding the United States responsible for the underdog
position of Muslims in different parts of the world—especially in the
heart of Islam in the Middle East—found a loud and thumping voice
in the 1990s. The ruling elite was no more dismissive about it as a
mere reflection of a lack of information and sensibility on the part of
an ignorant and gullible public. Instead, it sought to tackle it through
a dual policy of change at home and continuity abroad. Thus, it
opened the doors of the state to Islamic groups through elections and
sought to bring them in rather than leave them out. Second, it con-
tinued to follow a policy of maintaining or reviving the old pattern of
strategic alliance with the United States. It can be argued that the state
has all along felt obliged to continue to focus on India as its main
security concern, and, therefore, to seek to fill the perceived defence
gap with that country by cultivating American friendship. On the other
hand, the society at large moved on to focus on the world of Islam as
its main area of commitment, and felt alienated from the United
States at varying degrees according to its perceived role against one or
the other Islamic cause.
Anti-Imperialism
A permanent feature of the political attitude of Pakistanis toward
the United States is the current of opinion looking at the latter’s
role in terms of imperialism. Generally, this is the position of polit-
ical activists on the wrong side of the state establishment in
Pakistan. The more they felt squeezed by the federal government in
Karachi and later Islamabad, the more they were alienated from
Washington in its perceived role as an ally and patron of the estab-
lishment in Pakistan. The situation on the ground was crystallized
by the alienated sections of the public into a perception that the rul-
ing elite—with its core of military bureaucratic apparatuses—and
the American government together represent the ultimate power in
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M ohammad Waseem
Pakistan. The reverse position was clear too: farther from the
establishment, farther from America. Thus, the antiestablishment
attitude at home was largely expressed through anti-American
posturing and profiling.
There were two clearly identifiable sources of antiestablishment
politics and policy: leftist politics and ethnic revival. The left in
Pakistan represented a ramshackle movement. It inherited from a
relatively dynamic leftist movement in British India, (i) ex-members of
the Communist Party of India, led by urban-based intelligentsia, and
(ii) workers and professionals operating through various organiza-
tional networks, such as trade unions and peasant associations (Kissan
Sabhas). Various leftist groups, including Pakistan Communist Party,
Azad Pakistan Party, Mazdoor Kissan Party, and Pakistan Socialist
Party looked at successive governments as pawns in the hands of
America. They interpreted the power of the state in Pakistan in terms
of the U.S. super-ordinate role in shaping the framework of politics
and foreign policy in that country. The greater the perceived repres-
sion of a government, especially a military government, the more
severe was the criticism of what was understood to be the U.S. policy
of supporting military dictators in Pakistan. As critics of successive
authoritarian governments of Pakistan—often condemned as fascist—
leftists kept anti-Americanism alive in certain sections of the mobilized
public at the edges of the political community.
However, in the absence of party-based national elections on the
basis of adult franchise for a quarter of a century, the mass discontent
outgrew the ideological framework of Marxism–Leninism espoused
by the “old left.” Trade unionists, public activists, and progressive
students and teachers overtook the relatively sophisticated urban intel-
lectuals talking through the idiom of “scientific socialism” and Mao’s
peasant revolution. Ayub was ousted from power in 1969 through a
mass agitation, which clearly dubbed him and his colleagues in the
army as well as others—civil bureaucracy, industrialists, and ulema—as
American stooges. The “new” left in (W) Pakistan was represented by
the populist leadership of Z.A. Bhutto and a large army of enterpris-
ing youth in his party, Pakistan Peoples Party, struggling to enter the
state system through the ballot. The mass perception that American
intervention had worked against democracy in favor of the military
establishment was firmly rooted in the public psyche. Under Bhutto
(1971–1977), the leading idiom of politics—if not necessarily public
policy—remained “leftist” and anti-imperialist, largely couched in the
emerging context of Third Worldism.13
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Anti-Americanism in Pakistan
185
Under both Zia (1977–1988) and Musharraf (1999–), the
U.S. policy has been geared to the establishment of a strategic alliance
with Pakistan. This was against a backdrop of a continuing
Afghanistan war in the post-Soviet incursion in 1979 and the post-9/11
situation, respectively. In the public perception, the role of the United
States in Pakistan is identified with protection and support for military
rulers at the gross expense of democratic and liberal forces. The
process of government formation after the October 2002 elections
alienated large sections of the political community due to concen-
tration of major constitutional powers in the hands of President
Musharraf. However, the political class, in general, feared that
Musharraf was impregnable because of the U.S. support for his role in
the continuing war against terrorism. The general realization is that
democracy in Pakistan was never a part of the U.S. agenda for that
country. Not surprisingly, there is a
feeling that Americans are respon-
sible for creating and for increasing imbalance between the civil and
military wings of the state in favor of the latter. What was initially a
leftist position of anti-imperialism has gradually expanded its scope to
include the liberal position of a pro-democracy movement inasmuch
as the United States is understood to be an expansionist power seek-
ing to deal with power wielders in a society, irrespective of specific
patterns of authority operating there. The two positions seem to have
joined hands with the emerging ideological position of “Islam in
siege” in the context of the prevalent dichotomy between Islam and
the West, especially as expatriate Pakistanis seek to construct a Muslim
identity for themselves.14
At one end, the left–right dichotomy pushed activists pursuing
class-based models of political change toward an anti-American agenda.
At the other end, the Center–periphery dichotomy created ethnona-
tionalist movements in various federating units—East Bengal, Sindh,
NWFP, and Baluchistan—which conceived the American role in
Pakistan as antagonistic to their cause.15 Throughout the Cold War
era, the perspective of ethnonationalist activists pursuing their struggle
against Karachi–Islamabad was firmly couched in the larger East–West
dichotomy. Not surprisingly, the Pakhtun and Baluch nationalist elite
sought to cultivate links with Moscow against Washington. In this
scenario, Pakistan was criticized as an agent of American imperialism
out to crush movements for national self-determination. The two move-
ments belonged to the two provinces of NWFP and Baluchistan,
respectively, which were located on the borders of a traditionally pro-
Soviet country—Afghanistan. The fact that the latter was situated on
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M ohammad Waseem
the borders of the USSR helped the two nationalist groups approach
Moscow through Kabul.16
The Sindhi and Bengali movements relied on India because that was
the only outside country that was geographically adjacent and politi-
cally willing to support a potentially separatist cause against Pakistan. The
Sindhi nationalism never reached a level of mass mobilization, which