The Daily Observer

As in life, national and international events are heavily influenced by past actions, past

events, and decisions. Benazir Bhutto’s tragic assassination a few days ago underlines this. Pakistan’s history of feudalism and coups, lack of strong institutions and a personality dependent polity have led it on the path of self-destruction and chaos. A country founded solely on the basis of religious preference will have great difficulty in practicing pluralism which is almost necessary for a liberal mindset, the absence of which leads to violent solutions to conflicts. This is becoming more evident day by day inspite  of  the fact that many, at least a good minority of Pakistanis are not fundamentalist Islamists and come from a liberal,  British-inspired educational background. Compared to some countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan at a distance can seem very open, even allowing a Hindu (Rana Bhagwan Das) to become acting Chief Justice.

It is indeed a true tragedy that Pakistan’s society is in such shambles and is getting more and more fundamentalist despite some seeds of non-fundamentalism within the country. Pakistan has, in this writer’s  opinion, three major causes of its present state-the military’s  obsession with running the country, the country’s former obsession with ‘liberating’ Kashmir,  and the ISI, an intelligence agency that seems to be answerable to no one. Take the military. Besides taking over Pakistan several times in the past, damaging institutions that are necessary for a civil society, the military has produced very bad leaders for the country, like Musharraf, who consistently makes a fool of himself. His policy of compromising with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban while taking aid from the US to fight terrorism, running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, so to speak, has brought his country closer to an Al-Qaeda takeover, which I am pretty sure even he does not want. Turning a blind eye to the Taliban and compromising with it in the northwest  has strengthened the terrorists there, and the support (unwarranted in this writer’s opinion) he gets from the US increases rage against him (despite the probable allegation that a lot  of the anti-terrorism aid he gets is  not used to fight terrorists but used for military equipment in case of a war with India).

Pakistan’s obsession with Kashmir led it to fund Islamic terrorists there and turn a blind eye to madrassas within the country that spew hate and have a very narrow vision of the world. Today Pakistan itself is suffering terrorist attacks, probably by the very people it once supported. Fundamentalist Wahabbi Salafism is gaining more and more popularity there.

And we have the ISI, allegedly responsible for the growth of the Taliban in Afghanistan and for violent terrorist attacks against India, full of Islamist sympathizers, generally uncontrollable by civilian rulers.

Large scale chaos in Pakistan will be devastating for the world community. The first countries to be affected will be India and Afghanistan. A civil war in Pakistan could result in a wave of refugees to India, and many terrorists will sneak in. India may be forced to get involved for the sake of its own stability, both demographic and from a national security point of view. If Pakistan’s nuclear weapons get in the wrong hands, there could be an attack on India which would be economically devastating for India, but would trigger an appropriate counter-attack by India and be almost fatal for Pakistan. Still, India will end up suffering economically and physically. Nuclear weapons in the hands of crazy trigger happy jihadists could trigger a massive world war, and the post-World War II international stability could come down falling like a pack of cards.