ِImtiaz Gul
The year 2019 concludes with tumultuous events across the globe. Connor Martin, an American policy analyst in Washington DC, takes a historical perspective in The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org/), stating:
“2019 marks the 40th anniversary of 1979 – which, aside from being just another anniversary, was a landmark year for American foreign and national security policy regarding the Greater Middle East. In fact, 1979 may be said to mark the year when multiple developments fundamentally changed our approach to security policy across the Islamic world.”
Some of the key developments from that year include the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in November and the start of the Iran hostage crisis, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of that year turned out to be a watershed event for Pakistan as well. It changed Pakistan’s security approach, national DNA, and gave birth to a Kashmir policy that it has paid for heavily ever since. The Khomeni revolution in Iran in January, and the execution of the first elected Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in April also contributed to the post-1979 socio-political shift in Pakistan.
The Soviet invasion and the ensuing partnership with the US that catalysed the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan birthed a painful and disastrous journey for Pakistan that culminated in a reverse socio-political revolution on two counts.
First, instead of reaping rich socio-economic dividends from this collaboration focused on funding and training anti-Kabul proxies, Pakistan itself slipped in to a jihad-focused security-centric foreign policy. This approach inflicted deep cuts to the soul of Pakistan, further accentuated by the post 9/11 war on terror.
The Soviets left Afghanistan nearly a decade later in February 1989 but the damage had been done: Pakistan had created the launching pad for the mujahideen resistance.
Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan had a handy fighting force in the form of the mujahideen (Afghans and locals). Much before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, General Zia-ul-Haq and his commanders conspired to hire services of these mujahideen to engineer Kashmir’s separation from India, either through a militant struggle or a UN-led plebiscite. The ensuing nexus between Kashmiri Muslims, who wanted independence from New Delhi, and Pakistan’s intelligence outfits proved to be calamitous.
From mid-1988 onward, relations with India deteriorated worse than they had ever before. During the mid and late 1990s, Pakistani military institutions supported Kashmiri separatist groups, using Afghanistan, which was ruled by the obscurantist Taliban regime, as a training ground. For the Pakistani establishment this represented a cost-effective tactical manoeuvre for solving the Kashmir problem but the strategic consequences of this policy were devastating.
Unwittingly, the jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir, had given birth to a new generation of anti-Western warriors — jihadists inspired by Al-Qaeda founders Usama bin Ladin and his deputy Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.
As many fateful events after 9/11 proved, some of the militant outfits went on to even denounce Pakistan as a US collaborator, and used this euphemism to justify their “jihad” against organs of the Pakistani state (government and armed forces) and even civilians.
Earlier, the reverse socio-political revolution was said to occur on two counts. The second of these was the post-revolutionary Iran’s expanding cultural presence and influence, which in turn engendered a Saudi Salafist counter-reaction. This turned Pakistan into a battle-ground for a Saudi-Iranian proxy war beginning early 1980s. It sowed the seeds of sectarian acrimony and violence between the country’s minority Shia and majority Sunni segments.
Thus, much of the turmoil in the country is rooted in the seismic events of 1979 and the subsequent reactionary policies. Compounding the problem is general incompetence, corruption, a dated governance regime, and skewed/self-serving policies by Pakistan’s civilian and military rulers. We owe much of the current extreme polarisation and tug of war among various organs of the state to the aforementioned factors, to a year that marked the beginning of 40 years of conflict in the region.
