Pakistan Keeps Coming Up [Stanley Kurtz]
Over at Frontpage Magazine, Jamie Glazov holds a fascinating symposium on Pakistan. The danger of an unstable nuclear Pakistan falling into terrorist hands is easily on a par with the threat from Iran. Already, Musharraf has effectively ceded significant territory to elements sympathetic to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, and more may go that way soon. Commenting on the arrest of suspects in the London bombing case yesterday, the laconic Glenn Reynolds hit the nail on the head: "Pakistan. It just keeps coming up." The frontpage symposium helps explain why.
But there's another dimension of this, and it has a lot to do with the phenomenon of cousin marriage. The chain migration from Pakistan driven by cousin marriage (see "Assimilation Studies, Part II") has kept the Britain-Pakistan connection alive and well. When those suspects in the London bombings were picked up yesterday, they were waiting for planes to Pakistan. This is the most normal thing in the world. British Muslims constantly fly back to Pakistan for long visits, usually to take their kids to visit the cousins with whom they hope eventually to arrange a marriage. This ongoing connection between Britain and Pakistan, fueled by cousin-marriage-driven chain migration, creates the sea in which terrorists can swim. The young men who pulled off the London bombing got training and direction during what had seemed to be the sort of innocent long trips back to Pakistan that so many British Muslims take.
As the frontpage symposium notes, three of the last big terror plots in Britain were planned with direct help from Pakistan. So the Pakistan-Britain connection helps to create a sort of terrorist pipeline to the West. The conveyor belt from al-Qaeda to Britain via Pakistani immigrants is a sub-division of the larger cultural conveyer belt created by cousin-marriage-driven chain migration.
This only begins to get at the ways in which cousin marriage is significant. I'll have more to say about how the practice blocks assimilation, cuts against the development of a sense of British identity, and feeds Islamist radicalization. But at the most basic level, cousin marriage has kept alive a massive and ongoing connection between Britain and Pakistan, a small but dangerous portion of which involves terrorism.
Imagine that the great immigrations to the United States from Europe in the early twentieth century had been followed up by regular yearly visits of a month or two in length back to Italy, Poland, Ireland, by most American immigrants. Then imagine that a big part of the purpose of these visits was to arrange marriages between relatives in the home country and American immigrants. And imagine the whole system going on for decades. Obviously, under these circumstances, the entire project of American assimilation would have been cut off from the start.
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