by John Keay
Moreover, like New Delhi at the time of the birth of Bangladesh, Islamabad had reasons of its own for engaging in Afghanistan. The influx of refugees from the Afghan conflict, which by 1989 topped 3 million, placed an intolerable social burden on the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Baluchistan and, after some resettlement, Panjab. As well as the need for an internationally aided relief operation, the refugees brought to an already fiercely competitive labour market a contentious expertise in transport, opiates and firearms. A ‘Kalashnikov culture’ quickly overran cities like Peshawar and Karachi, further eroding the authority of the state. Clearly, enabling the refugees to return was in everyone’s best interests; and like Indira Gandhi in 1971, Zia was not above stressing this humanitarian consideration as reason to back the jihad against the Soviets.
But nor were he and his military colleagues innocent of wider designs. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had proposed that the security of a Bengal-less Pakistan would best be served by a strategic realignment aimed at ‘defence in depth’. What Bhutto seems to have had in mind was a bulking up of Pakistan’s slender northern neck through alliances with central Asian neighbours and through the exercise of influence or authority in Afghanistan; that country could then serve as a possible redoubt in the event of an Indian invasion of Pakistan as well as affording some compensation for the loss of Bangladesh. The Soviet occupation elevated this exciting prospect into a veritable imperative. Reclaiming Afghan Islam from its new communist rulers qualified for the sanction of a jihad, and it also offered the satisfaction of a proxy war against India. Mrs Gandhi had conspicuously declined to condemn the Soviet occupation and had been rewarded with increased diplomatic, economic and intelligence access in Kabul; briefly Pakistan’s ‘defence in depth’ had looked to have invited encirclement. But the Afghan jihad held out the promise of reversing this situation and so confounding New Delhi as much as Moscow. It would also demonstrate how, in the new religious climate, Sunni Muslim identity transcended national sovereignties and territorial boundaries. India would in future be dealing not with a peripheral sliver of the erstwhile raj but with a key component of the Islamic world. In effect ‘defence in depth’ was to be realised as ‘defence in Islam’.
An additional consideration was that the long-standing demand by the NWFP’s Pushtu-speaking Pathans for an independent Pushtunistan might be blunted by the Afghan adventure and even turned to good account. Pathans straddled the long north-west frontier whose demarcation (as per the British-drawn ‘Durand Line’) Afghanistan had generally declined to recognise. But the prospect of Pushtu/Pathan reunification in the name of a universalist Islam could be expected to turn old foes on both sides of the frontier into eager activists. In short, the ‘a’ in the ‘Pakistan’ acronym that had been meant for a somewhat vague ‘Afghania’ might finally be realised.
According to the most perceptive account of modern Pakistan, the great achievement of Zia’s decade lay not in its patchy record of corporate privatisation but in its ‘privatising the concept of jihad’.5 The twin tasks of Islamising society and providing motivated manpower for the Afghan jihad were seen as complementary, yet also as probably beyond the capacity of the state and possibly injurious to the efficiency of the army. It was convenient, therefore, ‘to sub-contract them out’ to the numerous Muslim ideologues and institutions already empowered by Zia’s Islamising policies and increasingly fronted by their own political parties and fielding their own privately trained militias. In cities like Karachi sectarian assaults by these vigilante enforcers, especially on the minority Shi’ah community, escalated in the late 1980s and added a further dimension to the mainly ethnic strife between Sindhis, mohajirs, Afghans and Pathans. The twice-elected but short-lived governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in the 1990s, no less than Zia’s regime itself, ended amid widespread bloodshed and a near breakdown of law and order. Herein lay a pretext not only for the dismissal of incumbent governments but for the reimposition of military rule. In 1999 General Pervez Musharraf duly availed himself of it.
From the maelstrom of jihadist fervour released by the combination of Zia’s Islamisation and Washington’s indiscriminate support for the struggle in Afghanistan, there also emerged the bewildering array of jihadist lashkar (‘levies’) and hisb (‘parties’) that actually fought in Afghanistan and that then, after the Soviet retreat in 1989, continued to fight among themselves while more notoriously extending their activities to Kashmir, Pakistan itself, India and the wider world. Encouraged and initially directed by Pakistan’s pro-Islamist intelligence services, they included mainstream groupings like Hisb-ul-Mujahidin of the Jamaat-i-Islami; state-sponsored mavericks like the Lashkar-i-Taiba of a religious foundation based near Lahore; and assorted recruitment and training centres attached to radical foundations like the Red Mosque in Islamabad. By 2000 the Hisb-ul-Mujahidin would be the most active of the many terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. In 2007 the Red Mosque would be a scene of carnage when the Musharraf regime stormed the premises in a bid to contain its vigilante activities. And a year later it would be the Lashkar-i-Taiba who stood accused of the carnage in Bombay when mujahidin rampaged through that city targeting prestige venues like the Taj Hotel.
Most of these groups attracted funds and fighters from outside South Asia, especially after 1989 when the role of the US and the Western powers came to be perceived in a new light. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, quickly followed by the collapse of the communist bloc, had ended US interest in the Afghan conflict. Six years of civil war ensued in which the Afghan contenders were left to their own devices, plus such logistical support as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) saw fit to render and such financial assistance as could be obtained from elsewhere in the Muslim world. Meanwhile the mujahidin’s former Western sponsors were exposed not as sympathetic onlookers but as rank traitors. The 1990–1 UN action over Kuwait and the ongoing sense of outrage over Israeli actions in Palestine and a US military presence in the Arabian peninsula brought to Muslim minds all the horrors of the crusades and the perfidy of the post-First World War carve-up of the Middle East. The West, as politically treacherous as it was morally corrupt, was revealed in its true colours as the inveterate enemy of Islam.
In Pakistan, those Afghan Pathans who had been raised in the sprawling refugee camps of the NWFP and schooled in their rough-and-ready madrassahs were encouraged to blame their plight on the US betrayal and a new world order that was one-sidedly Western. Responding to this perception, they stressed the redemptive powers of a puritanical Islam when launching a movement known simply as the Taliban. Taliban being Muslim ‘students’ (as opposed to the ulema of ‘scholars’), the movement had little time for the niceties of Quranic exegesis or the bickering of Muslim divines. Untainted by involvement in Washington’s proxy Afghan war in the 1980s, and committed to restoring an Islamic peace in that country, albeit of the harshest hue, the Taliban entered the Afghan fray apparently with the support of Pakistan’s alternating prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and of the ISI.
By 1996 the Taliban had surpassed all expectations, marginalising Afghanistan’s warring mullahs and chiefs and overrunning much of the country. Success bred confidence and attracted support from all quarters. Even US President Clinton warmed to the Taliban’s achievement.6 But others now saw jihad as something of a Taliban franchise, indeed a franchise that had served so well against one superpower that it might be the key to humbling the other. Radicalised Muslims from the repressive regimes of the Middle East and the ghettos of Europe and North America converged on the pious safe-haven of Afghanistan. From there, trained while guests of the Taliban, a network of terror-merchants fronted and funded by Usama bin Laden masterminded the series of sensational attacks across three continents that included the 11 September 2001 outrages in New York and Washington.
Suddenly, and for the third time in half a century, the West discovered an urgent new need to re-engage in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had to be hunted down and his Taliban
hosts acquainted with regime change. The US relationship with Pakistan was therefore reactivated and an arms embargo that had been imposed following Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests was lifted. This time Washington put its own troops on the ground as the NATO-led invaders took the major Afghan cities and rampaged through the countryside in search of bin Laden and his virtual al-Qaeda.
The Taliban and their guest-terrorists scattered but regrouped, overwhelmingly in the badlands along the frontier and within the adjacent Federally Administered – or mostly unadministered – Tribal Areas of Pakistan’s NWFP. NATO intrusions into the latter merely discredited Pakistan’s rulers, military and civilian, encouraged the mujahidin to strike deeper into Pakistan territory and won them some patriotic sympathy from otherwise fearful civilians. The effects became apparent from 2007 onwards as a so-called Pakistani Taliban occupied vast areas of Buner, Swat, Waziristan and other districts in the NWFP. Inevitably the Pakistani army was cajoled by its American allies into a reluctant engagement with these former friends. More sensationally the Taliban responded by attacking high-profile targets throughout Pakistan in one of the bloodiest and most sustained terrorist offensives ever mounted.
In sum, seldom can a policy aimed at influencing a neighbouring state have backfired so catastrophically. An early victim of the atrocities was Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in December 2007 while campaigning for the 2008 elections that ended Musharraf’s eight-year rule. Martyred Bhuttos being one of the PPP’s greatest electoral assets, the party won the poll and then chose her widowed husband, Azif Ali Zardari, as her replacement. Politically inexperienced and heavily implicated (even by Pakistani standards) in corruption, Zardari inherited less a country than an existential crisis. The succession of governments, the coming and going of the military and the chronic state of the economy – all now paled into insignificance as the bombers struck and the carnage soared. Nowhere in the country, from the bustees of Karachi to the headquarters of the military and ISI, was safe. Innocent lives, often a hundred a day, each of them worthy of history’s regard, lay spent among the cartridge cases or shredded by the shrapnel. A nation confronted its nemesis.
DEMOLITION WORK
Observing events from across the border, Indians could perhaps be excused for indulging in that malicious enjoyment of another’s misfortunes known as Schadenfreude. While Pakistan was being bombed and burned, ‘lethargic, underfed’ India, though itself beset by countless insurgencies and a major identity crisis, was somehow being reincarnated as a potential superpower. Pakistanis, of course, saw these developments as connected. They suspected all manner of unholy but well-funded alliances between RAW, the Indian intelligence service, and their own dissident elements – Sindhis, Baluchis and mohajirs as well the mainly Pathan mujahidin. They also noted New Delhi’s close relations with the NATO-backed Karzai government in Kabul. A 2005 Indo-US agreement to exchange civil nuclear technology heightened Pakistan’s sense of international isolation, while the growing presence in Afghanistan of Indian counsellors, technocrats and corporate investors revived the spectre of encirclement. Bhutto’s ‘defence in depth’ had become a sick joke, Zia’s ‘defence in Islam’ likewise.
Though little acknowledged in Delhi, there were, however, other grounds for supposing that developments in India had contributed to the crisis in Pakistan. For just as most Indians liked to imagine that Pakistan was finally paying for the presumption of Partition, most Pakistanis detected confirmation of the fear that had led to Partition in the first place – namely that an independent India would degenerate into a ‘Hindu raj’ with Muslims there becoming second-class citizens. This perception owed everything to the sensational rise in India’s political firmament of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), together with the outrages and atrocities that accompanied it and an Indian military offensive in Kashmir that was partly informed by it.
Back in 1988 the prospects for Indo-Pak bilateral relations had seldom looked brighter. In Rajiv Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and Dr Farooq Abdullah (son of Sheikh Abdullah, the ‘Lion of Kashmir’) a new generation of more photogenic leaders approached the Kashmir conundrum minus all the hardline baggage of their parents and at the head of comfortable majorities in their respective national and state assemblies. Their relations were cordial and their first exchanges promising. Only the timing was wrong. In Kashmir the recent victory of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference/Congress coalition in the state elections had benefited from outrageous vote-rigging and been hotly challenged by the opposition Muslim United Front. Failing to win redress, and so despairing of Indian democracy, some of the Front’s more militant supporters had then crossed into Pakistan in search of arms and support for the campaign of terror that began the following year.
Meanwhile in India, the nation was being held hostage by its television sets. In 1987 the state broadcaster had begun relaying a lavishly dramatised serialisation of the Ramayana. Broadcast of a Sunday, it ran to seventy-two episodes, lasted a year and a half and was watched by an unprecedented 80 million viewers. Cities fell silent, lunch went uncooked and markets were deserted as each screening took on the sanctity of an act of worship. Sets were garlanded for the occasion; sales and rentals rocketed. India was discovering not just the joys of family viewing but the excitement of a wider, more contentious identity. Muslims viewers were said to be equally entranced, but among those who thought of themselves as Hindus this TV rendering of an epic of uncertain provenance, many recensions and questionable historicity acquired near-canonical status. More scripture than catechism, it served to define Hindu values and instil a sense of India as one great Ram-worshipping Hindu congregation. Ram himself was elevated above other avatars of Lord Vishnu, and attention then turned to such snippets as tradition preserved of his possible place in history.
Ayodhya in UP is mentioned as the site of his capital; and there, according to a later local tradition, beneath a Mughal mosque built on the orders of Babur to celebrate the Muslim triumph over India’s idolators, lay the actual ground (the Ramjanmabhumi or ‘Ram’s-life-giving-earth’) where Lord Ram had been born. A small and suspiciously recent image of the baby Ram within the Baburi (or Babri) mosque marked the spot. But the mosque was locked and no longer in use, preventing access to this shrine. Then in 1986, at the behest of a World Hindu Council (VHP) demanding Lord Ram be liberated from his ‘Muslim gaol’, the locks had been opened. Coming hard on the heels of the Shah Bano decision placating Muslim orthodoxy, it looked as if Rajiv Gandhi’s government now sought to placate Hindu radicalism. Primed by this success and emboldened by the impact of the TV series, the VHP and its affiliates (including the paramilitary RSS and the vote-hungry BJP) scented a once-in-a-century opportunity.
The BJP, a reincarnation of the post-Independence Jan Sangh and the pre-Independence Mahasabha, had seldom won more than a handful of seats in a national election. But in 1989 its tally shot up to 86 with 11 per cent of the vote, in 1991 to 120 with 20 per cent of the vote, and by the late 1990s it had increased to 25 per cent of the vote and enough seats to head a coalition government in New Delhi. The agitation over the Babri mosque was the making of the party. For though the VHP led the cry for the mosque to be replaced with a gleaming new temple, it was the BJP’s leaders, especially L. K. Advani and A. B. Vajpayee, who capitalised on the issue.
In the run-up to the 1989 elections, BJP men were prominent in a campaign to fund and consecrate bricks from all over north India for the construction of the proposed temple. The ‘bring-a-brick’ ceremonies triggered serious Hindu – Muslim strife and massacres in Bihar, but they won the BJP support among TV-savvy middle-class voters thoughout the populous north. A year later, Advani upped the stakes by staging a rath yatra, a chariot procession, from Somnath in Gujarat (where a magnificent new temple had lately been built to replace that destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1025) to Delhi, Bihar and Ayodhya. The chariot, a Toyota utility van festooned in saffron and customised to resemble the prehistoric wagons seen on TV, wound its way amid massiv
e crowds to Delhi. When the new government, a coalition National Front, failed to stop it, it continued on, leaving in its wake more riots and massacres. Advani was eventually arrested by the anti-BJP government in Bihar and the cavalcade itself was halted by its counterpart in UP. But enough fanatical ancillaries reached the Ayodhya site to give the security forces a tough battle and provide the movement with its first martyrs.
In December 1992 the BJP leaders headed for the Babri mosque yet again, this time to attend a foundation-laying ceremony for the proposed new temple. By now the VHP had acquired some adjacent land and had poured a certain amount of concrete, all in contravention of a standstill court order that UP’s new BJP government declined to enforce. Emboldened by the state government’s apparent sympathy and unimpressed by Delhi’s efforts to have the matter referred to the Supreme Court, 100,000 saffron-clad zealots turned up for the ceremony on 6 December. According to the BJP, things then got out of hand; according to a later inquiry, the BJP leaders had ensured that they would.7 The flag-waving mob scaled the mosque’s protective railings and then the mosque itself. Picks, sledgehammers and grappling irons materialised. As the mosque’s three Mughal domes came crashing down in a tableau worthy of Goya, the foundation-laying ceremony degenerated into a demolition spectacle. The state police had fled; 20,000 troops stationed near by were not even summoned. The wreckers rounded off their day by torching Muslim homes in the vicinity.