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Why Cameron should thank Pakistan
No nation has paid a higher price fighting terrorism than Pakistan. The west's criticism is unfair and dangerously divisive
Kapil Komireddi guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 August 2010
How about some gratitude? That is the question Pakistanis can be forgiven for asking.
Last week, as David Cameron was speaking with searing candour about Pakistan's dual role in the war against terror in Bangalore, having just concluded a lucrative sale of a fleet of jets to India, Pakistanis were busy mourning the dead in the worst air disaster in their country's history: 152 passengers aboard an Airblue passenger jet had been killed on the day David Cameron arrived in India.
A put-down, however legitimate, from a foreign prime minister touring arch-rival India must have stung. But even before Pakistan could regain its composure, floods were ravaging vast swathes of north-western Pakistan, killing more than 1,000 people and affecting as many as 2.5 million.
Peace has always been a stranger to the people of Pakistan. Even before the scars from the fratricidal bloodshed that accompanied its birth could heal, Pakistan was conscripted by the US in its war against the Soviet Union. A vulnerable nation that had barely begun negotiating a complex social contract that sought to honour the diversity of its people found itself being funded, at a time when it had no other viable source of revenue, to resist Soviet communism in the name of faith. In its fight against the evil empire, the west was prepared to brook minor tyrants whom Pakistan produced with alarming rapidity.
After 9/11, the Islamic ally of the west against the godless soviets was being once again conscripted in the west's defence but, this time, it was to fight the very forces it had been paid to bolster in the previous war. The west expected this monumental shift in Pakistani policy to take place instantly. As General Pervez Musharraf revealed, Pakistan had no choice: the US was willing to bomb it back to the stone age.
We did not need WikiLeaks to confirm the fact that, in the war that followed, Pakistan has pursued, for reasons both of ideology and realpolitik, a dual policy. That Islamabad aided some of the forces it was being paid by the west to help destroy is hardly surprising. What is surprising and often overlooked in the west is the extent to which Pakistan has actually taken on the monsters it once bred.
As Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner to the UK wrote, in spite of all the accusations of double-play, the facts are plain: no other nation has lost more troops in the fight against terrorism than Pakistan. The figure now stands at nearly 3,000. There was a time when suicide bombing was an unknown phenomenon in Pakistan. Today, there is hardly a city untouched by suicide bombers. Even mosques are now considered legitimate targets by the Taliban. More than 10,000 Pakistani civilians have lost their lives to terrorism since 9/11.
To a nation defined by religion, repudiating religious warriors was never going to be easy. Yet in this decade alone, ordinary Pakistanis, particularly those in urban Pakistan, have gone further than ever before. Living in a state of permanent siege, they are seeking simultaneously to resist radicalisation and redefine their national purpose. The recently concluded Coke Studios programme is one of the numerous examples. But what Pakistanis can do without, as they strive to create conditions which outsiders take for granted, is the contumely of visiting leaders of foreign states.
David Cameron's candour may be admirable, but his remarks against Pakistan have the capacity to disempower liberal Pakistanis who are immediately attacked by their hidebound compatriots for being pro-western rather than compel the state to rethink its policy. Ordinary Pakistanis are hankering after some gratitude from the west for what they see as their nation's sacrifices against terrorism. Yet each utterance of gratitude by the west sounds perfunctory, as though delivered only for rhetorical reasons a preliminary to criticism and condescension.
This is not to say that the west should accept Islamabad's stance on every issue, or attempt to attain an appearance of "equilibrium" by criticising India, or even bring up Kashmir to appease Pakistan. All it means is that when David Cameron meets Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari today, he should say thank you, loudly and publicly.
No nation has paid a higher price fighting terrorism than Pakistan. The west's criticism is unfair and dangerously divisive
Kapil Komireddi guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 August 2010
How about some gratitude? That is the question Pakistanis can be forgiven for asking.
Last week, as David Cameron was speaking with searing candour about Pakistan's dual role in the war against terror in Bangalore, having just concluded a lucrative sale of a fleet of jets to India, Pakistanis were busy mourning the dead in the worst air disaster in their country's history: 152 passengers aboard an Airblue passenger jet had been killed on the day David Cameron arrived in India.
A put-down, however legitimate, from a foreign prime minister touring arch-rival India must have stung. But even before Pakistan could regain its composure, floods were ravaging vast swathes of north-western Pakistan, killing more than 1,000 people and affecting as many as 2.5 million.
Peace has always been a stranger to the people of Pakistan. Even before the scars from the fratricidal bloodshed that accompanied its birth could heal, Pakistan was conscripted by the US in its war against the Soviet Union. A vulnerable nation that had barely begun negotiating a complex social contract that sought to honour the diversity of its people found itself being funded, at a time when it had no other viable source of revenue, to resist Soviet communism in the name of faith. In its fight against the evil empire, the west was prepared to brook minor tyrants whom Pakistan produced with alarming rapidity.
After 9/11, the Islamic ally of the west against the godless soviets was being once again conscripted in the west's defence but, this time, it was to fight the very forces it had been paid to bolster in the previous war. The west expected this monumental shift in Pakistani policy to take place instantly. As General Pervez Musharraf revealed, Pakistan had no choice: the US was willing to bomb it back to the stone age.
We did not need WikiLeaks to confirm the fact that, in the war that followed, Pakistan has pursued, for reasons both of ideology and realpolitik, a dual policy. That Islamabad aided some of the forces it was being paid by the west to help destroy is hardly surprising. What is surprising and often overlooked in the west is the extent to which Pakistan has actually taken on the monsters it once bred.
As Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner to the UK wrote, in spite of all the accusations of double-play, the facts are plain: no other nation has lost more troops in the fight against terrorism than Pakistan. The figure now stands at nearly 3,000. There was a time when suicide bombing was an unknown phenomenon in Pakistan. Today, there is hardly a city untouched by suicide bombers. Even mosques are now considered legitimate targets by the Taliban. More than 10,000 Pakistani civilians have lost their lives to terrorism since 9/11.
To a nation defined by religion, repudiating religious warriors was never going to be easy. Yet in this decade alone, ordinary Pakistanis, particularly those in urban Pakistan, have gone further than ever before. Living in a state of permanent siege, they are seeking simultaneously to resist radicalisation and redefine their national purpose. The recently concluded Coke Studios programme is one of the numerous examples. But what Pakistanis can do without, as they strive to create conditions which outsiders take for granted, is the contumely of visiting leaders of foreign states.
David Cameron's candour may be admirable, but his remarks against Pakistan have the capacity to disempower liberal Pakistanis who are immediately attacked by their hidebound compatriots for being pro-western rather than compel the state to rethink its policy. Ordinary Pakistanis are hankering after some gratitude from the west for what they see as their nation's sacrifices against terrorism. Yet each utterance of gratitude by the west sounds perfunctory, as though delivered only for rhetorical reasons a preliminary to criticism and condescension.
This is not to say that the west should accept Islamabad's stance on every issue, or attempt to attain an appearance of "equilibrium" by criticising India, or even bring up Kashmir to appease Pakistan. All it means is that when David Cameron meets Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari today, he should say thank you, loudly and publicly.
