As the Pakistani Taliban steps up its retaliation against its erstwhile benefactor, the Pakistani state, Wednesday's suicide bombing in Lahore and Thursday's in Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan in the embattled Northwest, are harbingers of what promises to be a long and bloody summer.
Under the circumstances--an increasingly violent insurgency in a nuclear-armed nation--it's natural to fret about a weapon falling into fundamentalist hands. But Pakistan's significance goes beyond its (admittedly scary) status as a safe haven for al-Qaida and potential exporter of Armageddon. The world's second most populous Muslim nation is also a symbolic battleground in the broader war of ideas against radical Islam, the ideology that seeks to impose the medieval precepts of sharia law on every aspect of modern life. Weaning Pakistan from the radical cause would be the equivalent of flipping East Germany toward democracy at the height of the Cold War.
reprint
newsletter
comments
share
del.icio.us
Digg It!
yahoo
rss
Needless to say, achieving this will not be easy. In the short term, it requires backing President Zardari's government--the first in the country's history to show serious purpose against radicalism--in its fight against the Taliban and its allies. In the long term, it means prodding Pakistan to become more like Indonesia or Morocco, a land at peace with itself and its neighbors, and concerned more with improving the lives of its people than with fulfilling a messianic role as a champion of transnational Islam.
For this to happen, Islamabad will have to scale back its ambitions in Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir, tame its double-dealing Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and reform an educational system that inculcates hostility toward non-Muslims. Unless it can do so, the ongoing bloodshed in the Northwest Frontier Province--1,200 people killed, 2 million displaced--will be of little long-term consequence.
Along with the revolutionary regime in Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is one of three countries whose significance to radical Islam can scarcely be overstated. Though they differ in important ways--Iran is Shia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia Sunni--all three derive their identity and purpose almost exclusively from their faith. Not surprisingly, Tehran, Riyadh and Islamabad have done more to spread terrorism as a tactic and radical Islam as an ideology than the rest of the Muslim world combined. Iran backs Hamas and Hezbollah in their perpetual jihad against Israel. Saudi Arabian charities bankroll intolerance in every corner of the planet. As often as not, radicals from Bradford to Borneo in search of safe harbor, bootleg weapons training and street cred head to Pakistan.
Few places offer as warm a welcome. Though Pakistan's secular elites and fundamentalist mullahs may squabble over flogging women in public, or gyrating to Bollywood songs in private, they have usually united on a policy of using religious zealots to tame Afghanistan and destabilize India. Pakistan's unusual genesis--carved out of British India in 1947 as the world's first nation created exclusively on the basis of religion--makes much of its leadership and many of its people sympathetic to transnational Islamic causes.
It's no coincidence then that A.Q. Khan set up his nuclear Wal-Mart at the heart of government power. Or that over the past 25 years Pakistan has acted as a magnet for the likes of the jihadist theorist Abdullah Azzam, Daniel Pearl's murderer Omar Sheikh Saeed, Mullah Omar of the Taliban and, most famously, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The ISI's fingerprints have been found on conflicts as far afield as Chechnya and Mindanao in the Philippines. The Pakistani ideologue Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), who viewed combat as an exalted form of piety and called for Islam to blanket the world, is widely regarded (along with the Egyptians Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna) as the father of modern Sunni radical Islam.
For the past 35 years, the Pakistani state's disposition toward radicalism--both homegrown and export variety--has oscillated between passive acquiescence and active abatement. But this time, the proverbial worm appears to have turned. The international outcry raised by the Taliban's advance within 60 miles of Islamabad--as well as alarm among elites not quite ready to embrace a culture of floggings and public executions--has forced the government, and especially the usually recalcitrant army, to act with uncommon resolve. The alternative: losing the last shreds of Pakistan's international credibility and, potentially, the billions of dollars in aid that keep the economy afloat and the generals in clover.
For the U.S., in particular for President Obama's indefatigable special representative to the region, Richard Holbrooke, the bloodshed in the Northwest Frontier will be a pointless tragedy unless it is the first painful step in the transformation of Pakistan itself. A Pakistan that abandons support for radicalism will help convince militant Muslims around the world that they are on the wrong side of history. It will give breathing room to moderate regimes in countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh, struggling in their own way to reconcile Islam with modernity. It will allow democracy to take root in Afghanistan, and India to fulfill its natural role as an engine of prosperity for the entire subcontinent. It will vastly simplify the equally pressing task of keeping nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands and nudging Saudi Arabia toward reform.
Nobody familiar with Pakistan's checkered history can believe that optimism is in order. But the alternative--nuclear-armed Taliban in Islamabad and a psychological boost for radicals from Somalia to Sumatra--leaves us no option but to try.
Sadanand Dhume, a Washington-based writer, is a fellow at the Asia Society and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).
Jean-Noel Kapferer and Vincent Bastien's ''The Luxury Strategy.''
Read Full Article »