Existential Pakistan/Threatened Afstan

Fouad Ajami tries to get to the heart of the matter:

Pakistan's Struggle for Modernity

The country's voters have never endorsed religious extremism.

The drama of the Swat Valley -- its cynical abandonment to the mercy of the Taliban, the terror unleashed on it by the militants, then the recognition that the concession to the forces of darkness had not worked -- is of a piece with the larger history of religious extremism in the world of Islam. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was the latest in a long line of secularists who cut deals with the zealots, only to discover that for the believers in political Islam these deals are at best a breathing spell before the fight for their utopia is taken up again.

David Klein

The decision by Pakistan to retrieve the ground it had ceded to the Taliban was long overdue. We should not underestimate the strength of the Pakistani state, and of the consensus that underpins it. The army is a huge institution, and its mandate is like that of the Turkish army, which sees itself as a defender of secular politics.

The place of Islam in Pakistani political culture has never been a simple matter. It was not religious piety that gave birth to Pakistan. The leaders who opted for separation from India were a worldly, modern breed who could not reconcile themselves to political subservience in a Hindu-ruled India. The Muslims had fallen behind in the race to modernity, and Pakistan was their consolation and their shelter.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was secular through and through. The pillars of his political life had been British law and Indian nationalism. Both had given way, and he set out for his new state, in 1947, an ailing old man, only to die a year later. He was sincere in his belief that Pakistan could keep religion at bay.

Jinnah's vision held sway for three decades. It was only in the late 1970s that political Islam began its assault against the secular edifice. A military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, had seized power in 1977; he was to send his predecessor, the flamboyant populist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to the gallows. Zia was to recast Pakistan's political culture. It was during his decade in power that the madrassas, the religious schools, proliferated. (There had been no more than 250 madrassas in 1947. There would be a dozen times as many by 1988, and at least 12,000 by latest count.)

Zia had been brutally effective in manipulating the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. His country was awash with guns and Saudi and American money. He draped his despotism in Islamic garb. He made room for the mullahs and the mullahs brought the gunmen with them.

Say what you will about the ways of Pakistan, its people have never voted for the darkness that descended on Swat and its surroundings. In the national elections of 2008 the secular and regional parties had carried the day; the fundamentalists were trounced at the polls. The concessions in Swat were a gift the militants had not earned...

...candidate Barack Obama had maintained that he would begin with active diplomacy over the long-standing Pakistani-Indian dispute over Kashmir. But by any reckoning, India's weight and power preclude taking up that question. No government in New Delhi would countenance any change in the status in Kashmir [more here].

In truth, the U.S. can't alter the balance of power between India and Pakistan. For six decades now, Pakistan has lived in the shadow of India's success. This has tormented Pakistanis and helped radicalize their politics. The obsession with the unfinished business of partition (Kashmir) has been no small factor in the descent of Pakistan into religious and political extremism. The choice for Pakistan can be starkly put: the primacy of Kashmir in political life or the repair of the country, the renewal of its institutions, and the urgent task of putting in place an educational system that would undercut the power of the religious reactionaries...

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies and an adjunct senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

By the way, can you imagine the outcry from our usual suspects if actions by NATO troops in Afstan led to headlines like this:

Pakistani Refugee Crisis Poses Peril

Amid Army Offensive, Extremists Are Filling Needs That the Government Can't

Meanwhile, a stark warning from US secretary of defense Gates:

American public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves "a perceptible shift in momentum," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview.

Mr. Gates said the momentum in Afghanistan is with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country...

With the Obama administration recently unveiling a new Afghanistan strategy, Mr. Gates said it made sense to put new commanders in place there as well. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a veteran of the military's secretive special-operations community, will assume overall command in Kabul. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, one of the Army's top experts on counterinsurgency, will run day-to-day operations [emphasis added]...

Yet:

...Lt-Gen. Rodriguez...has been nominated as Deputy Commander for US Forces in Afghanistan with the COMISAF being double-hatted also is commander of US Forces Afghanistan. This is a three-star position. It is, as you know, in line with the increase in the number of US Forces. Gen. Rodriguez will wear a US hat; he will not be part of a NATO command structure [emphasis added].

So who's going to be in charge of ISAF, er, operations? After all, the majority of US forces are formally assigned to ISAF--and that number will only grow as US strength increases in RC South [more here]. Unity of command, where art thou?

Update: A lengthy story from Helmand province relevant to what Mr Gates said:

Stalemate
A single company of U.S. Marines is slugging it out with the Taliban in Afghanistan’s toughest ghost town. The battle shows how limited troop numbers have hurt the war—and why the U.S. is changing its strategy.