When the war in East Pakistain started, the world took notice of the mass movement behind the resistance to the Pakistain Army. A vast population started escaping into India - 9 million - but the numbers were denied by Pakistain in an obviously incredible 'military estimate'. Then West Pakistain drummed up nationalism and showed that the nation was 'united' against the uprising. Then it condemned the world for siding with India that had 'caused the uprising through a conspiracy'. Pak textbooks still say India was never reconciled to the creation of Pakistain and broke it up through an invasion in 1971.
| The first symptom appeared in 1970 when the uprising started in East Pakistain. The state reacted by manifesting the following pathology: 1) it went into denial; 2) it developed a 'national consensus' around this denial; 3) it isolated itself in the international community; and 4) it developed the self-damaging aetiology of externalising internal contradictions |
The Army is repeating the same mistakes: undermining democracy at home, favouring terrorism and ignoring the global suspicion of its complicity with its non state actors. At the level of strategy, it is worthwhile to remember what an army officer wrote after the East Pakistain debacle in a book titled The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier's Narrative (OUP 2002). The author, Major General (Retd) Hakeem Arshad Qureshi, commanded the SSG (Commandos) and commanded an infantry battalion in East Pakistain in 1970-71, was a POW in India after the war, and later commanded Pakistain Rangers as director-general, before retiring in 1990.
He points to the flawed doctrine that the defence of East Pakistain lay in West Pakistain. (Replace this with 'defence of the Western border lies in the defence of Eastern border', which neglects both the Tribal Areas and Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
where terrorism is embedded.) No effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistain to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistain.
Major General (Retd) Hakeem Arshad Qureshi's central argument was that internal issues cannot be brushed under the carpet and lack of resources ignored. He insists that all strategy should be based on an assessment of Pakistain's resource-base. Pakistain cannot secure itself unless it is economically strong. He recommends 'lying low' even if it takes us 50 years to develop as an economically independent and sovereign state. Today of course the only way we can do this is by linking up with two neighbours with high growth rates: India and China. Instead the Army - with full national consensus - is taking on the international community led by the US. Even those who hate the US as much we do are not on the same page with us.
Philip Bobbit in his book, The Shield Of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002), states: 'The strategic thinking of states accustomed to war does not fit them for peace, which requires harmony and trust, nor can such thinking be abandoned without risking a collapse of legitimacy altogether because the State's role in guaranteeing security is the one responsibility that is not being challenged domestically and thus the one to which it clings'.
A nation's self-portrayal is its nationalism. As early as 1980, the United Nations
...an international organization whose stated aims of facilitating interational security involves making sure that nobody with live ammo is offended unless it's a civilized country...
held a conference on the purely subjective nature of nationalism and its function of internal exclusion and external aggression. In Europe, nationalism has been exposed as a myth-making function of the state that leads to epochal wars. As a touchstone of legitimacy, however, it permanently endangers the security of the state, either by a similar nationalism in the neighbourhood or by reason of the neighbour's response to the aggressive nationalism of the state. Strategy is nothing when not coupled to the resource base and internal cohesion.
Al Qaeda in Pakistain is sensitive to its resource base and constantly kidnaps rich people for ransom and robs banks through its
Punjabi Taliban proxies. But Pakistain's strategy is wedded to an unrealistic mission statement because the kind of material support it needs is not there. The 'epochal' war with India, begun in 1947 and still going on, adds to the pressures that the state has to bear to merely survive. If the state is relatively small it must carefully determine who the enemy is and how 'conquerable' it is, given the resources of the state. If the status quo is not to the liking of the state with a limited resource-base, then anti-status quo policies have to be politically framed, not militarily.The Army has based its strategy on ghairat which it conflates with illusory sovereignty. The nation follows the Army's lead - which reminds us of East Pakistain. The Army put the world at risk through jihad and its consequence: international terrorism. Jihad has virtually destroyed Pakistain's internal illusory sovereignty by conceding con-dominion to the jihadi militias fighting India and its new ally the US in Afghanistan. Pakistain's external illusory sovereignty has also been destroyed by the tendency of jihad to farm out the formulation of strategy to its commanders in the field. Pakistain's strategy towards Iran, Central Asia and Russia was effectively formulated after 1996 by the Taliban capos. It is happening once again.
Today Pakistain's internal illusory sovereignty is under challenge by Al Qaeda. Its external illusory sovereignty is at risk from the isolationism embraced by the Army and the 'national consensus'. As outlined in Mark Duffield'sGlobal Governance and the new War, the 'liberal' world dominion today links development to security and finds in the process of exclusion - (through language policy in East Pakistain and Blasphemy Law in Pakistain) - under nationalism a cause of internal chaos and external war.
What happened in East Pakistain was caused by this process of 'exclusion', which first produced internal chaos, then triggered war with India. One must keep in mind that General Yahya's action in East Pakistain was 'propelled', if not 'forced', by nationalism in West Pakistain. That nationalism is still alive and has become complicated by jihad and its global outreach in total negation of the nation-state. The state has become dysfunctional and, once again unmindful of the narrowing resource-base, Pakistain is faced with wars it cannot win.
Pakistain has taken on America today because of its flawed view of India as an eternal enemy. Without a strategy that could be understood and supported by the world, Pakistain wants Afghanistan left open to a repetition of what it did there after the exit of Soviet Union in 1991. The world could not understand the strategy of the Pakistain Army in 1971 and abandoned it. It is today worried about Pakistain's path-dependent syndrome of plunging into wars but is compelled to focus on the global threat of Al Qaeda embedded in Pakistain with its variety of affiliates whom Pakistain says it will not fight 'because they are our brothers'.