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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Pakistan
Index
Internal threats to Pakistan come from several sources.
The
greatest danger to the democratic constitutional structure
is
posed by the recurrent intervention in the government of
the
Pakistani military and, since the Zia years, by the
president
who, under the controversial Eighth Amendment to the
constitution, is empowered to arbitrarily dismiss the
prime
minister and National Assembly as well as the provisional
governors. It could be argued that the military has only
intervened when the political situation has deteriorated
hopelessly and that the threat is in fact from much more
deepseated problems.
Another danger is the problem of ethnic unrest. Punjab,
with
almost 60 percent of the population, dominates almost all
aspects
of national life. This fact is resented by smaller ethnic
groups,
all of whom have at one time been actively dissident.
For the most part, with the exception of Sindh, the
situation
was quiet in the early 1990s. Sparsely settled Balochistan
required an extensive pacification campaign by the army
from 1973
to 1977, and both Afghan and Soviet involvement was
alleged.
After the war in Afghanistan, however, there was no source
of
outside support and no significant violence. The potential
for
unrest remains, however, because Baloch feel threatened by
the
growing numbers of non-Baloch moving into the province.
The
North-West Frontier Province has long been restive and
subject to
Kabul's blandishments on the basis of shared Pakhtun
identity,
but Afghanistan no longer offers a feasible alternative,
and the
Afghan Pakhtun tribal groups have participated rather well
in
Pakistan's modest prosperity. Some Kashmiris in
Pakistani-held
Azad (Free) Kashmir probably envision a future independent
of
Pakistan, but their attentions have been absorbed by the
problems
of Indian-held Kashmir.
In the early 1990s, the principal challenge in civil
unrest
came from Sindh, Pakistan's second most populous province,
where
the indigenous population was under increasing pressure
from
non-Sindhis who had migrated there. Based on their ethnic
identity, Sindhis have formed several political movements,
notably the Jaye Sindh, which the government perceived as
threatening to Pakistan's unity. Islamabad also claimed
that
these groups were receiving help from India in their quest
to
establish a "Sindhudesh," or independent homeland for
Sindhis.
The muhajir (immigrants from India and their
descendants)
minority in Sindh, which dominated Karachi and the other
cities,
have been in sharp conflict with the Sindhis and other
ethnic
groups. Further, large numbers of kidnapping and bombings
in
Sindh--the virtual breakdown of law and
order--necessitated the
imposition of army rule in 1992
(see Prospects for Social Cohesion
, ch. 2).
An additional source of unrest has been the rampant gun
culture and spread of narcotics-based corruption,
particularly
since the war in Afghanistan. Pakistanis have always been
well
armed, but the availability of cheap, modern weapons has
meant
that criminals and private citizens have significant
firepower at
their disposal. Because most violence is criminal or
anomic, it
does not pose a direct threat to the state, but should the
crisis
of governability in Sindh spread more broadly, it could
place
unbearable stress on the nation.
In the early 1990s, foreign-sponsored subversion in
Pakistan
appeared to be insignificant. The Afghans were too
preoccupied
with their own concerns to agitate along the frontier, and
the
Soviet Union, which had long had adversarial relations
with
Pakistan, had fragmented into a number of self-absorbed
states
occupied by the struggle for survival in a new
postcommunist
world. India had ties to dissident groups in Sindh and
perhaps
elsewhere; these, however, were probably maintained in
order to
remind Pakistan that its involvement with Punjabi Sikh and
Kashmiri Muslim insurgents in India was not cost-free. In
its
more youthfully exuberant days, the Islamic regime in Iran
was
involved in subversive support of Shia elements in
Pakistan, but
such activity was no longer a significant factor.
During the Zia period, a group called Al-Zulfiqar,
operating
from Damascus and Kabul and seeking to destabilize the
government
through terrorist actions hijacked, an aircraft in 1981.
Murtaza
Bhutto, a son of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was involved, and
AlZulfiqar claimed to have some relationship to the Pakistan
People's Party (PPP), which was totally denied by the PPP.
Although authorities have reported continued activity by
AlZulfiqar , its existence is shadowy at best, and with the
return
of democratic rule, its activities have been
insignificant. There
are no other known, organized subversive groups that
threaten the
government in any serious way.
Pakistan's attitude toward terrorism is somewhat more
ambivalent than that of most other countries. On the one
hand,
Al-Zulfiqar demonstrated to Pakistan the importance of
international cooperation in combatting international
terrorism
as manifested in airplane hijackings and bombings. On the
other
hand, however, Pakistan has had no qualms about supporting
insurgents in India, some of whom were engaged in
activities that
can only be described as terrorist.
In January 1993, the United States warned Pakistan that
it
was under "active continuing review" for possible
inclusion on
the Department of State list of terrorist countries for
its
alleged support of terrorist activities in the Indian
states of
Punjab and Kashmir. By July, however, the United States
had
withdrawn its threat, having determined that Pakistan had
implemented "a policy for ending official support for
terrorism
in India."
As Pakistan approached the end of its first
half-century of
existence, its security problems had changed yet were in
many
ways the same. The global setting had altered radically,
but the
enmity with India remained a constant, although it had
gained in
predictability and, probably, stability. Subversion was
still a
potential rather than an active threat. Problems of law
and order
were more acute, but the means of dealing with them had
not
changed greatly. Rather, Pakistan's security problems were
rooted
in its own polity and society. Repeated political
collapse,
corruption, inability to define its ethnic and religious
identities, and failure to meet the needs of the
people--these
are challenges that could eviscerate a state even with the
most
capable military machine and efficient security apparatus.
Pakistan, as it considers its continuing security dilemma
and the
international image it wishes to project, must
energetically
confront and deal with these harsh realities.
* * *
The government of Pakistan goes to considerable lengths
to
protect dissemination of information about its armed
forces,
making research on the military difficult. One of the few
officially sanctioned publications is Defenders of
Pakistan by Brian Tetley, essentially a coffee-table
book but
with useful information on the role, functions, and
organization
of the armed forces. For early history, Fazl Muqeem Khan's
The
Story of the Pakistan Army remains an indispensable
source.
Research by United States and Pakistani scholars during
the 1980s
has considerably enriched the understanding of the
military. The
historical picture is amplified by the two volumes of
Shaukat
Riza's The Pakistan Army and Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema's
Pakistan's Defence Policy, 1947-58. Hasan-Askari
Rizvi has
contributed two excellent studies--The Military and
Politics
in Pakistan and Pakistan and the Geostrategic
Environment, both of which cover the modern period, as
does
Robert G. Wirsing's Pakistan's Security under Zia,
1977-
1988. Foremost in the analytical field is Stephen P.
Cohen's
The Pakistan Army. The most current information is
available from the annual International Institute for
Strategic
Studies' The Military Balance and Jane's Defence
Weekly, as well as several publications authored by
Richard
P. Cronin and Barbara Leitch LePoer of the Congressional
Research
Service of the Library of Congress. Of these, South
Asia: U.S.
Interests and Policy Issues is particularly useful.
(For
further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of April 1994
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