Pakistan is...part two
Before leaving Islamabad for Peshawar -- one center of religious extremism -- I discussed this hypothesis with a crafty political operator named Mushahid Hussain. He had been minister of information under Nawaz Sharif and endured 440 days of house arrest after the coup. But Hussain has a very agile mind, capable of elaborate spin moves. Once freed, he joined Musharraf's party and was now serving in Parliament's upper house. By his reckoning, the M.M.A.'s strong showing owed more to the other parties' disarray and the mullahs' savvy use of anti-Americanism. ''India-bashing has been replaced by America-bashing,'' he said. We chatted for about an hour, but what I recall most was a friendly warning as I left his house. ''Let me know if you want to talk anything over, but not on the phone,'' the former information minister told me. ''Remember, all the phones are bugged.''
Peshawar, capital of the Northwest Frontier, is just east of the winding canyons of the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan. The province is largely Pashtun. By custom, women are kept hidden away. When outdoors, they are usually secreted beneath the billowy cloth of a burka. Among most Pashtuns, sympathy remains high for the Taliban, if not as models of Islamic behavior, then at least as ethnic brethren. Religious bullying was nothing unusual in the city, and it was easy to find new instances. Musicians were no longer able to find work. ''Now, even at weddings, some mullahs come up and say this is not allowed, this is against Islam,'' Sher Muhammad, an old man who plays the harmonium and drums, said with despair. ''If I play my music to feed my family, does that mean I am not a Muslim?''
Such complaints aside, what seemed most remarkable to me was how little of any religious agenda the M.M.A. had put in effect. Inexperienced at government, the coalition partners were a disparate bunch. A few powerful mullahs wanted to flip the calendar back 1,400 years to the days of the Holy Prophet, but others were content enough with the present. Mufti Ghulam-ur-Rehman, the white-bearded man in charge of the Council for the Enforcement of Shariah, entertained visitors while sitting cross-legged on the floor, but there was a fax machine on the cabinet behind him. ''It is a modern world,'' he said cheerily. ''TV has become a necessity of life.''
Malik Zafar Azam, the M.M.A.'s minister of law, is a green-card holder who owns an Italian restaurant in Arlington, Va. ''I'm a good chef of spaghetti and pizza,'' he claimed. He still goes back and forth to America, though not so often since the bank foreclosed on his Virginia townhouse. He recalled appearing on a Pakistani TV show: ''They said to me, 'Oh, my God, you are the law minister; you're making all men wear beards and do all these things.' I said what the hell are you talking. I have no beard, and I wear short pants.''
There are Talibanizers at work, no doubt -- and more all the time. But the Taliban in Afghanistan was originally welcomed more as sheriffs than mullahs, their stern theocracy considered an antidote to plundering warlords and social chaos. Pakistan does not have the predicate of such pervasive lawlessness. Indeed, the M.M.A. may well have its hands full simply staying in power. As always, I heard rumor upon rumor, hard to fully believe, hard to fully discount. In one story, the I.S.I. was buying the nine votes needed to topple the religious coalition in the provincial assembly. This would provide a heavy hammer over the M.M.A., which has been stubbornly opposing Musharraf on the Legal Framework Order. The cost per politician was said to go as high as 10 million rupees, about $160,000.
Talibanizers have other resistance to overcome. Fundamentalism provides a powerful pull, offering purpose to the otherwise ignored. But it is not the only magnetic force. Even in largely Pashtun Peshawar, the masses are being tugged in multiple directions, including toward modernity and the West. Internet cafes, which the Taliban would never have tolerated, are opening one after the other. Training in English is a chief selling point of private academies. Music and movies are sold openly. Pinups of Indian actresses are marketed side by side with those glorifying Osama bin Laden. More than 200 cable-TV operators are collecting a $4 monthly fee from tens of thousands of subscribers; even more people are stealing the service.
Other cleavages divide Pakistan. Water itself sunders the provinces as each one vies for the precious flow of the Indus. Human rights activists struggle against death sentences in blasphemy cases and laws that sometimes make a woman the guilty party in her own rape. In the chaotic megalopolis of Karachi, thousands of terrorist murders have taken place during the past decade, the mayhem caused by two warring political factions. While this feud is presently at an ebb, sectarian killings keep the quotient of disquietude high with a particularly senseless touch, the targeting of doctors. An estimated 70 are dead. ''I was tipped off that I was No. 2 on a five-person list set for execution,'' Dr. Shafqat Hussain Abbassi told me. He is a Sunni, but the Hussain part of his name had caused him to be mistaken for a Shiite. For days, he desperately tried to get word to the proper terrorists. Finally, he reached a maulana with jurisdiction. ''He apologized that they were mistaken.''
Internal nationalisms have troubled the country from its first days. Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri is head of the Marris, one of the largest of the Baluchi tribes. His loyalty is to a greater Baluchi nation, not some British mapmaker's creation called Pakistan. Befitting his status as a nawab, or ruler, he lives in Quetta in a large compound with armed guards stationed at the gate. His hair is white, his beard neatly clipped. He gave his age as ''well over 70,'' and he spoke the fine English of a well-educated man. His feelings about Islam were hardly reverent. ''In our part of the world, a mullah is someone who washed the dead, not a job you'd much admire,'' he said with wry contempt. Neither has he much use for America, the ''leading shareholder'' in world imperialism, and wondered how a nation great enough to produce Noam Chomsky could also deliver George W. Bush.
His worst scorn, however, was reserved for Punjabis, the largest ethnic group in Pakistan and the dominant one in the army. He recalled fighting them over the years. In 1974, some 80,000 troops were deployed against a Baluchi insurgency. Even today, government forces are ambushed in the mountainous Marri lands east of Quetta. ''Why must Punjab be in my destiny?'' he asked. Destitute tribesmen would benefit from a road the government wants to build. But the purpose of development is merely to exploit his people's mineral resources, the nawab said disdainfully. ''So we fight on with the pen, the mouth and the gun.'' He paused to scoff at the sad irony of the storied Baluchis being part of an artificial nation. ''Religion is only one aspect of life. It's not enough for a country.''
"You People Are Offensive"
uetta, the capital of Baluchistan, is just 50 miles from the Afghanistan border. This city may once have been Baluchi, but now it is also very much Pashtun. One poor neighborhood of high walls and narrow lanes is even called Pashtunabad. Most of its residents are Afghan refugees, including many easily identifiable as Taliban by their turbans. Some are merely students. But others are soldiers, going back and forth to their homeland to fight against American troops and the Karzai government. Their favored means of transportation is the motorcycle. One rumor is that the bikes are furnished by the I.S.I. If true, this raises one of the more popular sets of questions. Has Musharraf approved it? Or do rogues in the intelligence services have their own foreign policy?
While wandering through Pashtunabad, I asked to enter a small, dark room where young Taliban men lived. They were suspicious of an American, but with customary Pashtun hospitality, a cushioned seat was offered and tea was poured into clear glasses half full with sugar. ''We study in the madrasa,'' said Abdul Baqi, a 27-year-old who seemed the leader. I wanted to know if he was learning any subjects beyond Islamic teachings, and when he said yes, I asked him if he could name any planet besides earth or multiply five times seven. He could not, but he had a question of his own: ''When will America be satisfied? When it kills every Muslim in the world?''
This question might just as well have come from a Pakistani. As I have fears about an unhinged Pakistan, Pakistanis have fears about a wanton America. The parallel apprehensions have much the same vocabulary: a nuclear power, prone to irrational behavior, too eager to go to war, a penchant toward duplicity.
Sometimes, there is even the part about religious extremism. ''George Bush is a mullah; he is a fundamentalist, too,'' Abdul Hakim Baloch, a writer in Quetta, told me. ''I don't know how history will treat the Americans, but you are committing one of the greatest crimes of all time. Bush thinks he must destroy Babylon as the verses of his Scripture tell him. But you cannot conquer the world based on superstitions.''
As an American in Pakistan, I was on a lecture tour where I was the one being lectured. Some decisive juncture had been passed, and people were erupting with accusations. Whomever I saw, extremist or not, educated or not, they told me they had finally lost patience with America, which in their eyes had grown hateful toward Islam and hypocritical about democracy.
Aitzaz Ahsan, a prom-inent politician and lawyer, opposes Musharraf. ''Here again is another dictator the Americans are willing to sit in their laps as if they have run into a long-lost loved one,'' he said in exasperation. ''We are back to Square 1, except this time, while attempting to demolish the demonic mullahs that we created ourselves, we are actually fueling their responses on a much wider theater.'' That theater is Iraq -- and perhaps beyond. A common suspicion is that an unquenchable America is after territory, after oil, after blood.
The sympathy that poured forth after 9/11 is spent. For many, the winning of two wars has turned American sorrow into vulgar triumphalism. ''You people are offensive,'' I was told sternly by Salima Hashmi, one of Pakistan's leading artists. ''I don't care who your enemy is. You don't kill two of his sons and then show them off on TV.''
These were feelings I could understand. They were reasoned criticisms. I might disagree with some of the thinking, but it all fell within the arena of legitimate debate.
Much of what I heard, however, seemed to come from an inverted world, the axis spinning backward, all the essential story lines turned inside out. There is no polling data to cite, but it seems that most Pakistanis, including a great many of the college-educated, continue to believe that the World Trade Center was attacked as part of a Jewish conspiracy -- and perhaps one that involved high-level cooperation from the United States government.
''Who gained from these happenings?'' I was asked by a 35-year-old man named Haroon. ''Not Islam, not America, only the Jewish people.'' He demanded an investigation: Why had no Jews come to work at the World Trade Center that day? Why had Jewish businessmen withdrawn all their money from banks ?
There were multiple variations to this conspiracy theory, including a few that had Osama bin Laden acting as an Israeli hireling. When I responded with incredulity, I was pitied as a naif. Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the well-traveled, highly educated leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest religious party, even patted my hand. ''This required a very sophisticated infrastructure,'' he said of the trade center attacks. Hadn't I read the analyses on the Internet, he wanted to know: the Arabs involved lacked ''the capabilities to do all the planning'' for such a complicated operation. He suspected Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. He thought they might have been assisted by the United States military.
Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of the I.S.I., tendered a similar theory. ''The longest it would take for a U.S. Air Force aircraft to be on the tail of a hijacked plane is seven minutes,'' he told me, blaming collusion between the White House and ''Zionist intellectuals'' for the attack. He easily connected the dots. The same Zionists had recruited Monica Lewinsky, he said. ''She keeps the dress for two years and doesn't talk about it?'' He threw his head back in laughter. ''The American people are so gullible!''
The Feudals and the Ghost Schools
ost every village has a mosque. It is easy to happen upon the austere music of Muslim prayers. Harder to find are the chalkboard scratchings of an everyday school.
Pakistan's education system is a mess even by the sorry standards of South Asia. According to the World Bank, more than a third of the nation's 10-year-olds have never attended class. According to the United States Agency for International Development, Pakistani boys average less than two years of attendance, girls less than one. ''Ghost schools'' are a strange aspect of the problem. There are perhaps 10,000 of them: solid buildings, missing only the bodies and souls of teachers and students. Villagers often use the vacant classrooms to store grain and the courtyards to pen livestock.
Parents want their kids in school. If there were teachers, there would be students. But Pakistan's education budget as a percentage of gross domestic product is puny, according to a Unesco estimate, smaller than most of the Muslim world, smaller even than most of sub-Saharan Africa. And of those teachers who are paid, many simply fail to show up, relying on an inept bureaucracy to ignore their truancy. In a place called Masterano Kallai, I witnessed the reanimation of a ghost school. Some of the village's few literate men had volunteered to teach. Rooms were swept free of fodder and dung. A small blackboard was hung from a nail to the cement wall. More than 100 children arrived in the afternoon, some of them barefoot, many coming after a morning of hard lifting at a nearby brick kiln.
Families with enough money send their children to private schools while many of the poor take advantage of the free education offered by the madrasas, some of which provide a reasonably full curriculum, and some of which provide only rote memorization of the Koran, and some of which provide the combatants for jihad. General Musharraf has repeatedly promised to reform the madrasas, requiring them to teach from an approved syllabus. But to do so would be an expensive, meddlesome task, and despite some boasts to the contrary, the government has yet to make even an approximate count of the madrasas, let alone change their lesson plans.
The want of schools reflects the want of democracy. However many ruptures there are in Pakistani society, the greatest gulf is that between the rich and poor, and the poor are easy to ignore in a nation controlled by generals and landlords.
Kaiser Bengali, a noted economist, told me that 4 percent of Pakistan's rural households own 50 percent of the land. ''It is something like 16th-century feudalism,'' he said. In many farming areas, the biggest landowners are actually called ''the feudals,'' and some are powerful enough to make their own laws and operate their own jails. In the cities, a feudal is more likely to be a thug who runs a land mafia, falsely staking claim to property and forcing people to pay rent. Karachi, one of the world's 10 biggest cities, has sprawling squatter settlements that far outstrip every electrical line, every sewer pipe, every water tap. I spent a morning in Ibrahim Hydri, a fishing village outside the city. Boats were returning from three days at sea, and the crew was shoveling out the storage bins of fast-aging shrimp and pomfret. A grim fisherman named Saleh Muhammed said sale of the catch would barely cover fuel costs and dock fees. His family lived in a hut of scrap wood and thatch. A ''feudal'' was threatening to burn him out unless he could come up with 3,000 rupees (about $50).
These were despairing days for small fishermen. Prices had plunged after the sea itself became tainted. On July 27, an oil tanker ran aground just outside Karachi's harbor and, after bewildered authorities allowed the cracked vessel to languish for 18 days, a massive rupture opened, disgorging 30,000 tons of crude. The fish kill was immense.
This oil spill was nearly as big as the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989 off the coast of Alaska. But with no terrorism angle, the event was mostly ignored by the foreign news media. As the oil washed onto Karachi's best-known beach, it sullied the marvelous vista of an affluent neighborhood's high-rise apartments. Three months later, when I stood on the shore, the hapless ship was still marooned, its bow at an odd angle like a broken bone. A top layer of oily sand had been scooped from the beach itself, but some of the spill had seeped a full 20 inches down. Waves were dumping more dirty water on the dirty beach.
Patches of foamy brown stained the sand where the sea rolled in. ''Is that oil?'' I asked Brian Dicks, a British expert, who was standing beside a backhoe.
''Oh, no,'' he answered, ''That's raw sewage. Comes in streams from the big apartment buildings. Some people take care of their waste, some don't.''
In this case, the sea's use as a latrine was actually an advantage, he explained. Nitrogen and phosphates from the sewage were helping break down the oil.
America's Great Ally
akistan is tough on prognosticators. Each time I am there, people tell me the place is about to spin apart. And yet for all the gyrations, it remains in one piece. Some would argue that despite its mischief, the military is the tie that binds. But the generals are also to blame for so much of what has set the country reeling in the first place.
Cynicism is a contagion in Pakistan. Musharraf is not only criticized for selling out to the Americans; he is also excoriated for selling out too cheaply. After all, this may be a limited window. Historically, the United States is all too forgiving when it needs Pakistan and then smugly reproachful when it does not.
Nevertheless, for now Pakistan is on the payroll. In June, George W. Bush proposed a $3 billion aid package to be dispensed over the next five years, half for military use, half for economic aid. He and Musharraf presented the news together in Camp David. The two presidents appeared pals that day, looking relaxed as they walked shoulder to shoulder. Bush said America has ''had no better partner in our fight on terror than President Musharraf.'' Still, it is hard to imagine that these men altogether trust each other. Bush surely remembers that the general had befriended the Taliban until the day he was drafted into the war on terrorism. And Musharraf undoubtedly recalls that Pakistan's last military ruler, General Zia, met an untimely end in a plane crash. A good many Pakistanis again see a conspiring hand, supposing that the C.I.A. did away with an ally after his usefulness had run its course.
Shaping American policy toward Pakistan requires a prolonged balancing act on a particularly high wire. Nuclear misbehavior must be discouraged, but economic sanctions would only push a volatile country toward bankruptcy and disintegration. Human rights should be stressed, but perhaps not if it keeps Al Qaeda suspects from being immediately handed over. Big infusions of economic aid are vital for development, but how can the money be kept from religious radicals and the hopelessly corrupt? A full return to democracy ought to be demanded, but past civilian governments have been kleptocracies. Sadly, no oasis is visible ahead. There is no obvious Mandela figure, no Walesa, no Havel waiting in the wings. There can be no Velvet Revolution to inspire the Pakistani masses. Between the Koran and the Kalashnikovs, too many people covet too many incompatible things.
But if elected governments have been disappointing, military ones have been disastrous. And the eventual bridge to cross is more than Musharraf. It is the army itself -- and its dominance, whether onstage or behind the scenes. Some way or another, Musharraf's time will pass. The great fear in the West has been that the next general will be much harder to deal with, someone with a long beard and no taste for whisky. But the greater likelihood is that after Musharraf simply comes another Musharraf, a slightly different model but still a man with the same loyalty to military pre-eminence.
Idealists in the world believe there is no substitute for democracy. It may be hard work, but it must be tried, and if it fails, it must be tried again. The will of the people should not be forsaken for expedience, the body politic not sacrificed for Realpolitik.
Such sentiments have rarely been better expressed than in an eloquent address last month at the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. The main topic was democracy and Islam, and President Bush said, ''The daily work of democracy itself is the path to progress.'' For emphasis, he repeated the thought with new phrasing. ''It is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy.''
Bush singled out two recalcitrant Muslim allies: Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Pakistan went unmentioned.
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