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Jewish World Review May 30, 2011 / 26 Iyar, 5771 Pakistan is a mistake By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The world would be better off without Pakistan.
Its very name signals Pakistan's phoniness. The suffix -stan means "land of." Uzbekistan is land of the Uzbeks, Tajikistan is land of the Tajiks. But there are no "Paks." P-A-K is the English acronym for Punjab-Afghan-Kashmir.
Only the Punjab is part of Pakistan. Afghanistan is a separate country. That Kashmir is a part of India and not Pakistan has been a constant source of strife.
The British created "Pakistan" out of northwest India on their way out the door in 1947 because Muslims feared the Hindu majority in an independent India might do to them what Muslims had done to Hindus for 700 years before the British arrived in 1700. The Muslim conquest of India "probably was the bloodiest in history," wrote the historians Will and Ariel Durant.
The six major ethnic groups in Pakistan -- Punjabi (45 percent); Pashtun (15 percent); Sindhi (14 percent); Sariaki (8 percent); Muhajirs (8 percent), and Balochi (4 percent) -- speak eight different languages. (According to the CIA World Factbook, Urdu, the "official" language, is spoken by only 8 percent of Pakistanis.)
Islam was supposed to be the glue to hold these disparate peoples together. But the Sunnis (75 percent) hate the Shia (20 percent), and both hate the Ismailis (a mystical offshoot of Shia Islam). The Islamists hate moderates regardless of sect. The Pakistani military currently is conducting what some describe as "genocide" in Balochistan, in part because the Balochis, though fellow Muslims, are mostly secular.
What holds Pakistan shakily together is its oversized military, which owns a vast swath of businesses ranging from an airline to office buildings to bakeries to farms. Most countries have armies. Pakistan is often said to be an army that has a country.
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Two of those wars have been over Kashmir, a beautiful, thinly populated mountainous region that borders on China. About 75 percent of Kashmiris are Muslims, but at the time of partition in 1947, their rulers opted to affiliate with India. The Pakistanis fought to incorporate Kashmir into their state. Pakistan has occupied about 40 percent of Kashmir since a UN-sponsored cease fire in 1949.
Though most Kashmiris are Muslims, only 15 percent want to join Pakistan, according to a poll taken in 2009 for the British think tank Chatham House. All of Kashmir should be part of India, say 21 percent. The majority wants Kashmir to be independent, which it more or less was under the British raj.
Most Kashmiri Muslims are Sufis, a mystical, tolerant strain that has little use for the fundamentalism that prevails in Pakistan. And many Kashmiris have noticed Muslims in India are more prosperous and free than are the Pakistanis.
Pakistan today is a neocolonial empire in which a predominantly Punjabi military keeps restive minorities in line by force; an economic basket case, and the foremost state sponsor of terrorism.
Having failed to beat the Indians in straight up fighting, Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) strikes at its enemy through terrorist proxies such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which murdered 166 civilians in Mumbai in 2008. The ISI created and directs the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The discovery of Osama bin Laden in what appears to be an ISI safe house suggests the Pakistanis may control al Qaida, too. A report to the 9/11 Commission from a Pakistani source said ISI officers knew of the attack in advance. "The imprints of every major act of Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan," that report said.
The world has paid a terrible price for Britain's folly in creating a state based solely on Islam (thus guaranteeing a theocracy rather than a democracy), and for those artificial lines European colonialists drew on the maps of Africa and Asia.
It's past time to redraw those lines. Let the Balochis have again the independence they once enjoyed. Let the Pashtuns form their own state with their fellow tribesmen in southern Afghanistan. Let the Muhajirs return to India, from whence they came in 1947.
The old colonial borders never made political, economic or moral sense. But our government looks upon them as if they were carved in stone. G0d knows why.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
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