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By Danny Kemp, Agence France-Presse
ISLAMABAD: Born from chaos and
bloodshed, and still steeped in turmoil 60 years on, Pakistan has
repeatedly defied predictions that the center of the world’s only
nuclear-armed Islamic nation cannot hold.
While Benazir Bhutto’s
assassination has renewed fears Pakistan will become another failed
state with a destiny determined by bombs instead of ballots,
analysts say it has been down this road before—and survived.
Pakistan is accustomed to seeing
its political leaders meet a violent end. A kind of internal war has
been part of the national fabric since its birth in 1947, they say.
Created by the British give
Muslims their own homeland with the partition of India, even the
nation’s founding was soaked in blood, with one million killed
during the largest migration in human history.
“Pakistan was constructed as a
contradiction, a homeland for Muslims that called itself a secular
state. That is something Pakistanis have not come to terms with,”
said Marie Lall, an expert at British think-tank Chatham House.
“But because there is a problem
with the basis for the creation of Pakistan, that does not mean it
is destined to be a failed state,” she told AFP.
Pakistan is a complex mass of
tribes and peoples where even the all-powerful military has come to
believe that setbacks today do not mean failure tomorrow.
The army, rulers of the country
for more than half its existence, had to step in almost at the
beginning, following a 1948 conflict with India over the Himalayan
region of Kashmir that set off decades of strife.
Since then, Pakistan even lost
East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.
“The geo-strategic
circumstances, the Cold War, the Afghan jihad, nuclearisation and
9/11 kept feeding the army,” said retired Pakistani general and
analyst Talat Masood. Military dictator Zia-ul Haq’s support for
the war against the 1979 Soviet occupation of neighboring
Afghanistan emerged as the defining policy of this nation of 160
million people for the following three decades.
The devout Islamic fighters trained by Pakistani intelligence
agencies to battle the Red Army later became the holy warriors
fighting in Indian Kashmir, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the al-Qaeda
militants behind a global jihad.
The remote and lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border
are now the focus of an international campaign against that jihad.
There is ethnic discord between Punjabis, Sindhis and Pashtuns—all
of whom are also at odds with the Mohajirs, the Muslim refugees from
India after partition, whose most famous exemplar today is President
Pervez Musharraf.
Slain opposition leader Bhutto
was a Sindhi. The slogans chanted by her angry supporters in her
Sindhi heartland Saturday after her killing seemed to sum up
deep-rooted tensions.
“Hate Musharraf!” they cried.
“Hate Pakistan!” The country has also seen nationalist uprisings
by the ethnic Baluch population in the southwest which have twice
been brutally suppressed by the army—the last time in 2006.
“A civil war happens when there
are organised groups on two sides working against each other, and we
don’t see such groups,” political analyst Shafqat Mahmood told
AFP.
“But a failed state is a crisis
of governance, and we do have a crisis of goverance,” he said.
“We are not destined to fail. We are failing because we are not
recognising the base of our new nationhood has to be democracy.”
The international community wants
answers to those questions, but Chatham House’s Lall said foreign
meddling—including US pressure to crack down on Islamic militants
who are part and parcel of Pakistan—had hurt the country most of
all.
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