Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [27]
Underpinning intellectual and political responses by Muslim elites has been a diffuse but widespread sense among the Muslim masses of ‘Islam in danger’. This has contributed to episodes both of mass mobilization and of savage local violence against non-Muslims (or other Muslims portrayed as non-Muslims). These combined in the developments leading to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
This sense of an endangered Islam has long been fuelled not only by local or even regional events but by developments in the wider Muslim world (for example, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fall of the Ottoman empire in the face of attack from Christian powers). The role of the Ummah in the minds of most South Asians therefore might be seen as vaguely analogous to that of ‘Christendom’ in the European Middle Ages: not something that could ever trump local powers and allegiances and lead to a universal state, but nonetheless a potent idea with important cultural, intellectual, emotional, political and international consequences – not least in the form of the Crusades.
With the disappearance of France and Britain as ruling powers in the Muslim world, the focus of Muslim fears concerning Western threats to the wider Muslim world naturally shifted to the new state of Israel (in occupation of Islam’s third holiest shrine, as Pakistanis are continually reminded by both their mosques and their media) and Israel’s sponsor, the United States.
In Pakistan, however, hostility to the US was for a long time damped down by the fact that Pakistan was facing far more pressing dangers, against which the US provided at least a measure of security: India and the Soviet Union. Thus, in the 1980s, President Zia’s Islamization programme contained no hint of anti-Americanism, for the obvious reason that the US was both an essential ally in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and an essential financial sponsor of Pakistan and Zia’s administration. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made considerable play with anti-American sentiment and with the idea of Pakistan as a leader of the Muslim world (including his rhetoric of a Pakistani ‘Islamic bomb’), but his own anti-Americanism owed more to the fashionable left-wing thought of the time. The collapse of left-wing nationalism in the Muslim world in the last quarter of the twentieth century has left the Islamists as the last political homeland of anti-American (and anti-colonial) sentiment.
After 1989, a series of developments shattered the previous obstacles to anti-Americanism in Pakistan. First, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself removed Pakistan’s value to the US as an ally. Instead, free rein was given to groups in Washington that feared Pakistan’s nuclear programme to press for sanctions on the country. The prominent role of the Israel lobby and pro-Israeli politicians such as Congressman Stephen Solarz in these moves helped increase existing anti-Israeli feeling in Pakistan, and focus attention on the US – Israel alliance. The anger this caused in Pakistan was exacerbated by the way in which the US abandoned all responsibility for the consequences of a war in Afghanistan which it had done so much to fuel, leaving Pakistan facing a civil war on its borders and a continuing refugee problem.
Of even greater importance has been Washington’s increasing ‘tilt to India’, replacing the mutual hostility that characterized most of the period from 1947 to 1991. Seen from Pakistan, this was reflected first in Washington’s willingness to punish Pakistan as well as India for the nuclear race in South Asia, despite the fact that in both 1974 and 1998 it was actually India which first exploded nuclear devices. Moreover, because of its far smaller economy and