Pakistan’s Choice

The ten-year defense pact between the US and India, which explicitly recognizes India as a nuclear power granting it access to acquire technologies available only to a handful of countries, has catapulted India to a level a few nations have achieved. While Europe and America raise champagne glasses welcoming India to their club, Pakistan has left biting its tongue in envy watching its nemesis and archrival get crowned on the international stage under the spotlight.

No intelligent person can quibble with the extraordinary cordial relationship that has developed between India and the West. India offers all that is most desired and cherished by the enlightened West: a functioning democracy, professed secularism, constitutional protection for minorities, science & technology, a large middle class, excellent institutes of higher learning, free press. While India is synonymous with Information Technology, Pakistan is associated with terror and nuclear proliferation. There could be no darker contrast between these two countries that were once the same and now share a thousand-mile border.

No intelligent person can blame India for Pakistan’s myopic and incompetent policies, both foreign and domestic, and for its miseries. That Pakistan today finds itself as an abode of terrorists is not India’s doing. Pakistan’s ill-conceived policy of “jehad” in Kashmir and Afghanistan supporting ruthless, illiterate and mindless warriors has come home to roost.

In light of rising Indian power blessed by the West, what policy options does Pakistan have? Pakistan’s impulse, in reaction to US-India pact, would be to run into China’s camp. China, the bogeyman of America’s conservatives, is Pakistan’s trump card against US-India alliance. While US and India get ready to play a perilous game against China, Pakistan is in a fortunate geographical position to milk the most out of it as it was positioned when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

There can hardly be any doubt that currently a Great Debate is taking place among China’s foreign policy makers as to how to respond to US-India alliance, so explicitly put together to counter, and possibly thwart, China’s rise. However, China is not the card that would most benefit Pakistan in the long run against the US-India alliance. Pakistan at best will be a pawn in China’s hand, just as it was in the hands of the US against the USSR. When Communist USSR was broken with Pakistan’s assistance and American purpose was served, Pakistan was left by America to lick its own wounds that have worsened with time. China may not behave any differently than America.

The Pakistan Government was worried about Mukhtar Mai “bad mouthing” Pakistan on her trip to the US, realizing little that her trip would have served exactly the opposite. One should ask Musharraf and his Government that if they were so worried about Mukhtar Mai “bad mouthing” Pakistan, then what do they make of the terrorists links found between the London and Sharm el-Sheikh bombers and Pakistan making headlines the world over. Today, one should be ashamed of calling himself a Pakistani, and that is not because of Mukhtar Mai.

Pakistan’s salvation lies not in weapon acquisition and becoming a pawn of China in the Great Game of Asia, but in its own rapid economic growth and development, in subduing its jehadi groups, in building strong political institution, in independent Judiciary, in merit-based education, in pursuing total peace with its neighbors and, most critically, in inculcating and nurturing a concept of “Secular Islam” in its population, a concept that if it does not exist then must be invented by Pakistan. It is a Islam that existed in Pakistan during Ayub Khan era.

Pakistan’s only choice is to bury forever the policies that have brought it nothing but contempt from the world outside and misery to its own people. The most difficult question, however, is this: Does Pakistan Army have the guts to stand up to the stone-age minded mullahs and their fellow jehadis and create a Pakistan envisaged by its great founder?