In the comments to my previous post, skdadl mentions an article by Luciana Bohne on the situation in Baluchistan (a Pakistani province) and its connection to US designs on Iran. I googled it and found it. Essentially, the accusation as I read it is that the US is attempting to destabilize parts of Pakistan to force Pakistan to arrange it's military strategy in a manner convenient for a US invasion of Iran.
Of particular note is this:
An article by the Carnegie Endowment entertains the same thought, albeit to deny it: "The Baluch and the Pakistani think that Washington would like to use Baluchistan as a rear-guard base for an attack on Iran, and Iran is suspected of supporting Baluch [independence] activists in order to counter such a Pakistani-US plot. . . . Some Pakistanis perceive the US using its Greater Middle East initiative to dismantle the major Muslim states and redefine the borders of the region. Some Baluch nationalists charge the US with conspiring with the Pakistani government to put an end to Baluch claims. So far nobody has been able to prove any of these accusations."
This must be understood in light of the original state ideology of Pakistan and its founders. The founders built their ideology around the experience of the Muslim intellectual classes in the subcontinent that had recently emerged from the long period in which the Muslim elite refused to participate in the institutions and education of the Kuffar who now ruled them.
The basic idea is thus: in effect, given the collapse of the large Muslim empires and the longstanding fact, in particular, of British domination of South Asia, the Muslim principalities were weak and ethnically divided and would emerge as such as the British empire was dismantled. The Indian independence movement was blind to the specific history and needs of the Muslim population, and its success, laudable as it were, would threaten an entire cultural and historical perspective that had at least managed to survive the British. At the same time, continuing British domination as well as educational and administrative backwardness were an unacceptable situation.
The answer: Pakistan, the unity of the Muslim-majority principalities of India. It was to be founded as a secular republic under principles that are, incidentally, uncomfortably similar to aspects of Zionism---a Western-style nation-state whose purpose is to preserve the history and primacy of South Asian Muslim culture in a socially, economically, and technologically modernizing framework.
And after its founding, for a surprising length of time that most Westerners do not realize, things kinda sorta looked up for this particular nation-state, at least the urban part of what was then West Pakistan, the part that I am most familiar with.
Then the Cold War intervened, General Zia got into power, and the rest is history...
So what does this have to do with Bohne's report? Well. As she says, "Some Pakistanis perceive the US using its Greater Middle East initiative to dismantle the major Muslim states and redefine the borders of the region." This is intensely significant to the region. Because one of the most important implications of the Pakistani founding ideology, to some extent still held by the Pakistani ruling classes, is the historical necessity of pan-Islamic secular unity, political unity that is to supercede the ephemeral claims of tribe and culture. Thus, a threat to Pakistan's territorial integrity, according to this ideology, is an attack on this very idea.
So if the US is attempting to destabilize a part of Pakistan, it's next to impossible for the Pakistani government to avoid acting. Not only is the ideology at stake, but the practical reality is that the dismantlement of any part of Pakistan is destabilizing for the whole region. And it's impossible to give willingly into local autonomy demands, no matter how merited, because to do so, would be to concede the ideological point of Pakistan's fundamental divisibility to India, and that is the real elephant in the room. Bangladesh was one thing: but the ideology cannot accomodate India's claim to Kashmir, not to mention the vital strategic ramifications.
And that means that Pakistan can't afford multiple hostile fronts---in particular, a stable Northern Alliance government in Afghanistan. Not only will the Pathans in Pakistan reject that as an oppression of their Afghan brethren, but the Pakistani ruling class cannot abide that very destabilizing threat as long as it has the Kashmir issue to deal with. An Indian-friendly government in Afghanistan would be a strategic disaster.
This is what the US is playing with if it is playing with Pakistan. And anyone who wants to circumvent it has to understand that the road leads through Delhi and through Kashmir. What the Pakistani elite can afford in terms of supporting global stability is inversely related to what it can afford in terms of local stability. It's paradoxical, but there it is. If a stable solution to the Kashmir matter can be found, Pakistan would be more willing to support local autonomy, and thus less susceptible to act as the US intends it to act.
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