DISSENT INTO CHAOS
By Ahmed Rashid
Penguin Books
Pages 484, Price Rs. 495
Some four years back, journalist M.V.Kamath described the book under review as a superb work of deep study and professional analysis, and said it was a damning indictment of policies pursued by Pakistan and the United States. There can be no disagreement with the verdict of one Indian veteran on the work a Pakistani veteran.
The theme of the book is the failure of nation building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. It examined the issue in depth in the context of multiple factors – namely the threat posed by Islamic extremism, the US war on terrorism, the unending conflict in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s long search for its soul, the odds between Afghanistan and Pakistan, resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the grim situation in Central Asia besides the India factor in the Pakistan equation – India’s huge aid programme in Afghanistan adds to Pakistan’s paranoia, according to Rashid – are a part of the canvas.
And it concludes, ‘Rather than diminishing, the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates has grown engulfing new regions of Africa, Asia and Europe and creating fear among people and government from Australia to Zanzibar’.
The comment propels the reader to agree with Rashid that ‘incompetence, incoherence, and conflicting strategies’ contributed to the chaos and the blame squarely rests on the US and to an extent on Pakistan.
The latest US–Pak spat featuring the ISI and its cronies and lackeys is a clear manifestation of the failure to put in place effective plans that could have addressed issues beyond the immediate. As the author says, Pakistan’s main aim was (and is) accumulating US weapons to confront India. Washington couldn’t care less if India was hurt in the process. So it went out of its way to build up the inter-Service intelligence (ISI) into a formidable intelligence agency deliberately forgetting that for Pakistan, India was the sole priority and everything else is secondary.
There is no gainsaying that each of the three – the other player being Saudi Arabia -exploited the other for their agenda – India for Pakistan, Soviet Union for the US and holy jihad for the Saudis. Between 1982 and 1990, the CIA, working with the ISI and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, funded, trained, and armed 35000 Islamic militants from 43 Muslim countries in Pakistan madrassas. Who amongst the three is more selfish? The jury is still out.
Rashid’s narrative takes the reader through Pakistani operation of arming and financing the Taliban. It throws light on how the CIA pays Pakistan to arrest al-Qaeda operatives, but Pakistan uses the money to fund the Taliban resurgence in northwest Pakistan; and how the US and NATO’s failure to deal with Afghan civil society has led directly to the huge rise of the opium trade that funds the Taliban.
In his critique, Rashid says, Pakistan army backed the Taliban and encouraged thousands of young Pakistanis for not only to die for Taliban, but also to fight in the Kashmir insurgencies. The state sponsoring of terrorism is a fall-out of an ‘acute sense of insecurity in the midst of a continuing identity crisis’. As one of the ‘three As’ that presides over the destiny of the country, the United States should have concerned with the root-causes of Pakistani adventure. It didn’t. In Rashid’s view, that in no way mattered to the US and as a consequence the Americans may have to pay the price – their foreign policy descending into a chaos.
Unfortunately, the Americans appear to refuse to learn from history – both the past and the present and as long as the corrective appear as distant thunder billions of dollars in aid will go down the Kabul and the Ravi rivers.
Also as long as Pakistan’s nuclear armed military and its intelligence service that has sponsored Islamic terrorism to further dubious foreign policy goals refuses to roll back what Rashid aptly calls ‘self-destructive’ and ‘double’ dealing. Till Pakistan persists with such policies, it will continue to pay dearly and its agony will remind students of Indian mythology of the plight of demon king Mahishasura. Statistics don’t always tell the full story but they do help in appreciating the gravity of the situation to some extent.
Consider this. Before 2007 Pakistan saw six suicide bombings on an average and in the year 2007, the number shot up to 56 and the toll to 640. These days one has lost the count of suicide blasts. Quite often, the targets picked up by the terrorists are soft- the faithful visiting Sufi shrines. Sufism in the sub-continent is what may be termed as folk Islam and attracts people from all walks of life and all religions.
Nowhere in the Islamic world, does one come across Dargas like in India and Pakistan that are venerated by people from two different religious streams whose followers are compared to a volcano ready to explode. This is the beauty and strength of the sub-continent. Unfolding events in Pakistan show the Islamist militants are determined to destroy these symbols of pluralism. The Deobandi and Wahhabi extremists are in synch with the establishment in Rawalpindi and are eager to achieve through their jihad what the GHQ could not – namely defeat India and Islamise Kashmir.
