Thursday, June 2, 2011

Pakistan

What's with Pakistan?  From the U.S. perspective Pakistan's actions make no sense.  But a people does not act irrational for long periods of time.  Pakistan's actions make sense from the Pakistani context.  You just need to understand the Pakistani context.

Fareed Zakaria is a smart guy.  One of the things, unfortunately, that makes him smart is the fact that he was not born in America.  America has become incredibly insular.  As a country we have become the complete embodiment of "not invented here".  We literally don't care what anyone else in the world thinks.  This is really stupid because the U.S. contains about 5% of the world population.  That means that the U.S. contains only about 5% of the really smart people in the world.  19 out of 20 really smart people live somewhere else in the world.  Now we actually do a little better than 5%.  Fareed is one example.  He grew up in India and moved to the U.S. when he was 18.  When he came here we were not as hostile to foreigners as we are now.  He was able to get an education here and stay on, eventually becoming a naturalized American citizen.  Thanks to the current War on Foreigners we can count on fewer and fewer people like Fareed coming here and then sticking around.  Back to Pakistan.

Fareed observed recently that "lots of countries have an army.  Pakistan is an army that has a country."  This is the key insight to understanding Pakistan.  There are a number of countries that are run by the military.  The nickname for a lot of them is "banana republic".  They are small countries that have a big army for their size but a small army compared to the rest of the world.  And this model works.  The country may be (actually always is) poor.  But an unusually large percentage of the GDP goes to the military.  This makes the military small beans on the world stage but a big cheese locally.  And this is enough for most tin pot generals.  But Pakistan has been able to take the game to another level.

To understand how they did this you have to look at Pakistan's history and its geography.  Pakistan as an independent country only dates back to 1947.  Before that it was part of Britain's greatest colony, India.  India was broken up into three pieces.  The bulk of it ended up in what is now India.  But a large chunk ended up as Pakistan and a smaller chunk ended up as Bangladesh.  As usual, these kinds of things are a lot more complicated than people think.  If you want a great book on the subject I recommend "Freedom at Midnight" by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.  For the rest of us, we can skip the details and cut to the chase.

Colonial India was a mishmash of thousands of religions.  But the two biggest were Hindu and Muslim.  Modern India is dominated by people subscribing to the Hindu faith.  Part of the reason for this is that the majority of the Muslims in colonial India ended up either in Pakistan or in Bangladesh.  There are still lots of Muslims in India but they are now far outnumbered by the Hindus.  And, in order to keep the story simple, I am ignoring the many other religions in India like the Sikhs.

So Pakistan split off from the rest of India so that the Muslims that dominated the land that is now Pakistan could free themselves from the religious domination of Hindus and other religions.  And the separation was not pretty.  Originally "Pakistan" consisted of what is now both Pakistan and Bangladesh.  Modern Pakistan was "West Pakistan" and modern Bangladesh was "East Pakistan".  That did not work out well and there was a lot of warfare.  Finally Bangladesh became its own country in 1971.  During this entire period from 1947 to 1971 the Indians meddled in Pakistani and later Bangladeshi politics.  And I'm leaving out the whole dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.  This whole mess resulted in a lot of resentment between India and Pakistan.  It also convinced Pakistanis that they needed a large powerful army.

During this same period India made a calculated decision to be an active member of a group that called themselves "non-aligned nations".  That is, they lined up not as supporters of the U.S. nor as supporters of Russia during the Cold War.  They considered themselves as part of "the third world".  This whole "non-aligned" strategy on the part of India annoyed the U.S.  As a result they turned to Pakistan, who was willing to sop up large quantities of U.S. money in exchange for declaring itself firmly in the U.S. camp.  This annoyed India, which then tilted toward the Russians, and got a bunch of Russian foreign aid.  And the cycle continued.

This whole business worked out well for the Pakistani military.  They got a bunch of U.S. money and toys.  Then they were able to work the geography trick.  China was weak during this period.  So they couldn't do much.  But one thing they could do was dole out nuclear goodies.  The Chinese gave the Pakistanis a bunch of nuclear help, especially after India got the Bomb.  This allowed Pakistan to get the Bomb too.  This allowed the Pakistani military to get even more money out of foreign countries like the U.S.  Then geography really kicked in.  The Russians invaded Afghanistan.

Afghanistan provided an opportunity for the U.S. to "Viet Nam" the Russians.  See "Charlie Wilson's War", the book not the movie, for details.  The movie is fun but the book, by George Crile, goes into things in a lot more detail and provides a more balanced and accurate picture of the situation.  The U.S. wisely chose to wage a proxy war.  Pakistan, in particular the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, ran the war.  All the U.S. (and Saudi Arabia, matching us dollar for dollar) provided was money and equipment.  On the ground Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan was a Pakistani show.  This was smart for two different reasons.  First, it provided "plausible deniability".  There was no U.S. personnel nor equipment on the ground in Afghanistan.  So the U.S. could say "what war?  That's not us."  Second. the Pakistanis understood Afghanistan from a cultural perspective.  They shared the religion.  The Pashtun tribe was the largest single tribe in Afghanistan.  There was a large Pashtun population in Pakistan that the ISI could use to connect to Pashtuns across the border in Afghanistan.

And, at the time (early '80s) the war was a big success.  There were no American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land.  The Ruskies were pushed out of Afghanistan at great cost in both blood and treasure to the Russians.  And it was relatively cheap.  The most the war ever cost the U.S. in one year was a billion dollars.  The U.S. is currently spending over a hundred billion a year on Afghanistan.  The Charlie Wilson Afghanistan war, start to finish, cost what we are now spending in a month, and that's adjusted for inflation.  But for the purposes of our story what is important is that the Charlie Wilson War pumped a great deal of money into the Pakistani military especially the ISI.  It also made them very powerful politically inside Pakistan.  The Charlie Wilson War was very popular in Pakistan.

So the Pakistani military, of which I consider the ISI a part, has been able over a long period of time to get its hands on a lot of money and a lot of military equipment.  And it has been able to do this outside of the usual Pakistani political structure.  Now it is important to have domestic political support, even if you have access to all this outside money and equipment.  The Pakistani military has been able to do this by using outside enemies, particularly India.

As I have indicated above, India has provided a lot of ammunition to support the argument that they are bad people, at least as viewed from Pakistan.  Therefore Pakistan must have a large military, and nuclear weapons, and rockets to deliver them with to defend itself from the big bad Indians.  This has justified a large Pakistani military establishment.  And Pakistan, for various reasons at various times, has had a weak political establishment.  So the military argues that it is important to have a large independent military to defend the country because you can't depend on the civilian side.  The weakness of Pakistani political institutions, which are weak in part because of the strong military, is used effectively by the military to continue their own political power.

Then there is an aspect that is little noted in the U.S.  It is not a secret but we are too busy navel gazing to notice.  That is the fact that the Saudi Arabians provide tremendous support for the most militant and reactionary components of the Islamic religion.  This component is usually referred to in the west as the Wahhabi sect.  Madrasahs hewing to Wahhabi doctrine have been built in large numbers in Pakistan.  The weak and frequently ineffectual civilian government in Pakistan has not been able to build a decent educational system.  The only thing most Pakistani parents can do, if they want their children to learn to read, is to send them (boys only, due to Wahhabi doctrine) to a Wahhabi Madrasah.  This has been going on now for a couple of generations.  So there are now lots of Pakistani adults that received their education at a Wahhabi Madrasah.  It should come as no surprise (but it does to many Americans) that there is a large contingent of the Pakistani population that is both radical and anti-American.

With this background it now make sense that Pakistan behaves as it does.  The military wants to perpetuate itself.  So they drum up fear of India thus foreclosing better relations with India.  They play the nuclear card in order to blackmail foreign countries to keep giving them large quantities of money.  They need Afghanistan stirred up, again to put the fear of God into domestic Pakistanis and to facilitate more and larger blackmail payments from the likes of the U.S. The civilian government lives in abject fear of the military.  Pakistan has a long and complicated history of military takeovers.  This leaves the civilian government incapable of serving as a counterbalance to the military.  The Wahhabi oriented Madrasahs keep churning out anti-American radicalized Pakistanis.

Pakistan plays a double game.  They play the U.S. ally on the one hand while supporting our enemies.  They are anti-terrorist because they have suffered at the hands of terrorism while supporting terrorists.  Why?  Because it has worked for them for a very long time.  The "we are your only best option" argument has worked well to get large quantities of money out of the U.S. while giving the U.S. limited leverage to force the Pakistanis to become more effective allies.  The "you think it's bad now?  Wait till we are gone and see" argument, a variation on the "only best" argument they use with the U.S., also works domestically on the anti-terrorism front.

So what should the U.S. do?  Step one is to stop being stupid.  There is a lot of expertise out there.  We need to tap into it instead of continuing to believe that we're smart and everyone else is stupid.  This should allow us to get out of our current "to a hammer everything looks like a nail" thinking.  In our case we only think of military options.  So every solution involves sending in more troops and equipment.  We have put a lot of troops and equipment into Afghanistan over the last 10 years.  How's it working so far?

A more careful analysis would tell us that Afghanistan is a problem primarily because Pakistan is a problem.  The Pakistanis are in a much better position to kick whoever they want to out of Afghanistan now than they were in the early '80s.  And with our help they were able to kick the Russians out then.  But instead of kicking the bad guys out and helping to straighten the country out they are supporting the bad guys.  If we can fix Pakistan, Afghanistan will fall into line quickly.

And the way to fix Pakistan is not do do what we have been doing for many years, namely giving the Pakistani military lots of money and equipment.  Elements of Pakistani society can fix Pakistan.  They understand the culture and are not viewed as foreigners because they are not foreigners.  We need to support the non-military (and non-ISI) components of Pakistani society.  A good first start would be to put serious money (e.g. the kind of money that is thrown around for the military) into a non-militant educational system in Pakistan.  Putting serious money into other things that would be seen as positive contributions by the Pakistani public like public health, roads and other infrastructure, etc. also make sense to me.

There are lots of people in lots of countries that can help us figure out how to do this in a culturally sensitive way.  For instance, the unemployment rate in Egypt is very high now.  Why not pay to send moderate Egyptians to Pakistan to teach (or build roads and hospitals or as doctors, etc).  If these positions are well paid by Egyptian standards then both the Egyptians and the Pakistanis will be happy and we can give Pakistani parents an education option that does not involve Wahhabi Madrasahs.