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Part 1: Using Islamism to Protect the Core
[Teaser:] In this first installment of a series on Pakistan, Stratfor examines the
geographic and demographic conundrums that pushed the Pakistani state towards
the problematic policy of using the country’s Islamic identity to undercut ethnic
centrifugal tendencies, especially employing radical Islamism to assimilate Pashtuns in
the country's mountainous frontier.
Summary
The fundamental challenge to Pakistan’s survival is twofold: The one route of expansion
that makes any sense at all is along the Indus River valley, the country’s fertile heartland,
but that path takes Pakistan into India’s front yard. Pakistan also has an insurmountable
internal problem. In its efforts to secure buffers, it is forced to include ethnic groups that,
because of mountainous terrain, are impossible to assimilate. When the government used
radical Islamism as a tool to unify the buffer regions with the Indus valley core, it did not
anticipate that the strategy would threaten the state's survival.
Analysis
While Pakistan’s boundaries encompass a large swath of land stretching from the peaks
of the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, the writ of the Pakistani state stops short of the
country’s mountainous northwestern frontier. The strip of arable land that hugs the Indus
River in Punjab province is the Pakistani heartland, where the bulk of the country’s
population, industry and resources are concentrated. For Pakistan to survive as a modern
nation-state, it must protect this core at all costs.
Even in the best of circumstances, defending the Pakistani core and maintaining the
integrity of the state are extraordinarily difficult, mainly because of geography.
The headwaters of the Indus River system are not even in Pakistan. The rivers begins in
Indian-administered Kashmir. While Kashmir has been the focus of Indo-Pakistani
military action in modern times, the real point of contention -- and area where Pakistan
faces its most severe security challenge -- is the saddle of land between the Indus and the
broader, more fertile and more populace Ganges basin. The one direction in which it
makes sense to extend Pakistani civilization as geography would allow takes it into direct
and daily conflict with a much larger civilization: India. Put simply, geography dictates
that Pakistan either be absorbed into India or fight a losing battle against Indian
influence.
Pakistan must protect its core by imposing some semblance of control over its
hinterlands, mainly in the north and west, where the landscape is more conducive to
fragmenting the population than defending the country. The arid, broken highlands of the
Baluchistan plateau eventually leak into Iran to the southwest. To the north, in the North-
West Frontier Province (NWFP), the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the
Federally Administered Northern Areas (FANA) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK),
the terrain becomes more and more mountainous. But terrain in these regions still does
not create a firm enough barrier to completely block invasion. To the south[?] southwest,
the Baluchi route to Iran parallels the Arabian Sea coast, while the Pashtun-populated
mountains are not so rugged that armies cannot march through them, as Alexander the
Great, the Aryans and the Turks historically proved.
To control all these buffer regions, the Pakistani state must absorb masses of other
peoples who do not conform to the norms of the Indus core. Russia faces a similar
challenge -- its lack of geographic insulation from its neighbors forces it to expand to
establish a buffer -- but in Pakistan the complications are far worse. Russia’s buffers are
primarily flat, which facilitates the assimilation of conquered peoples. Pakistan’s buffers
are broken and mountainous, which reinforces ethnic divisions among the regions’
inhabitants -- core Punjabis and Sindhis in the Indus valley, Baluchis to the west and
Pashtuns to the north. And the Baluchis and Pashtuns are spread out over far more
territory than what comprises the Punjab-Sindh core.
Thus, while Pakistan has relatively definable boundaries, it lacks the ethnic and social
cohesion of a strong nation-state. Three of the four major Pakistani ethnic groups -Punjabis, Pashtuns and Baluchis -- are not entirely in Pakistan. India has an entire state
called Punjab, 42 percent of Afghanistan is Pashtun, and Iran has a significant Baluchi
minority in its own Sistan-Baluchistan province.
So the challenge to the survival of Pakistan is twofold: First, the one route of expansion
that makes any sense at all is along the fertile Indus River valley, but that takes Pakistan
into India’s front yard. The converse is true as well: India’s logical route of expansion
through Punjab takes it directly into Pakistan’s core. Second, Pakistan faces an
insurmountable internal problem. In its efforts to secure buffers, it is forced to include
groups that, because of mountainous terrain, are impossible to assimilate.
The first challenge is one that has received little media attention of late but remains the
issue for long-term Pakistani survival. The second challenge is the core of Pakistan’s
“current” problems: The central government in Islamabad simply cannot extend impose
its writ into the outer regions, particularly in the Pashtun northwest, as good as it can in
its core.
The Indus core could be ruled by a democracy -- it is geographically, economically and
culturally cohesive -- but Pakistan as a whole cannot be democratically ruled from the
Indus core and remain a stable nation-state. The only type of government that can
realistically attempt to subjugate the minorities in the outer regions -- who make up over
40 percent of Paksitan’s population -- is a harsh one (i.e., a military government). It is no
wonder, then, that the parliamentary system inherited from the days of British rule broke
down within four years of independence, which was gained in 1947, when Great Britain
split British India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. After the
death in 1948 of Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, British-trained civilian
bureaucrats ran the country with the help of the army until 1958, when the army booted
out the bureaucrats and took over. Since then there have been four military coups and the
army has ruled the country for 33 of its 61-year existence.
While Pakistani politics is rarely -- if ever -- discussed in this context, its military
leadership implicitly understands the dilemma of holding onto the buffer regions to the
north and west. Long before Former military leader Muhammad Zia al Haq (1977-88)
embarked upon Islamizing the state, the military actually sought to turn this
geographic problem into an advantage.[?] Zia The army’s central command implemented
a policy that had long been in the making -- to countered the secular, left-wing, ethnonationalist tendencies of the minority provinces with an Islamic identity, particularly in
the Pashtun belt. At first, the idea was to augment the religious underpinning of the
republic in an effort to instill a new identity that might meld the outlands more tightly to
the center. Later, in the wake of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, the army
began using radical Islamism as an arm of foreign policy. Islamist militant groups,
trained or otherwise aided by the government, were formed to push Islamabad’s influence
into both Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir.
As Pakistan would soon discover, however, a state policy promoting an Islamistc identity
to maintain domestic cohesion and using radical Islamism as an instrument of
foreign policy outside the core was bound to backfire.