Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [7]
As soon as the Pakistani Taleban were seen by the establishment to be a really serious threat to the central Pakistani state, in the spring of 2009, the army, with the backing of the PPP-led government and much of the establishment in general, took strong action to drive them back. The army’s victories over the Pakistani Taleban in Swat and South Waziristan have settled the question of whether Pakistan will survive the Pakistani Taleban’s assault (barring once again an attack by the US or full-scale war with India). They have, however, settled nothing when it comes to the question of the army’s willingness to fight hard against the Afghan Taleban for the sake of a Western victory in Afghanistan.
TOUGHER THAN IT LOOKS
Failing a catastrophic overspill of the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan will therefore probably survive as a state. The destruction of united Pakistan and the separation of Bangladesh in 1971 are often cited as possible precedents for the future disintegration of today’s Pakistan; but this is quite wrong. No freak of history like united Pakistan, its two ethnically and culturally very different wings separated by 1,000 miles of hostile India, could possibly have lasted for long, quite apart from the immense cultural and linguistic differences between the two halves. The tragedy is not that it failed, but that a situation made for a civilized divorce should instead have ended in horrible bloodshed.
West Pakistan by contrast is far more of a natural unity in every way, with a degree of common history and ethnic intertwining stretching back long before British rule. Pakistan in its present shape has already survived considerably longer without Bangladesh (thirty-eight years) than the original united Pakistan managed (twenty-four years).
It is true that ‘Pakistan’ as a name is a wholly artificial construct, invented by Rehmat Ali, an Indian Muslim student in Britain in 1933, to describe a future Muslim state in the north-west of the then British empire of India embracing Punjabis, Pathans, Kashmiris, Sindhis and the peoples of Balochistan, different parts of which names make up the word Pakistan. ‘Pak’ in turn means ‘pure’ in Urdu, and so Pakistan was to be ‘The Land of the Pure’.
In the imagination of the coiners of this name, there was no thought of including Muslim East Bengal in this state, so Bengalis had no part in the name; another sign of how completely improbable and impractical was the attempt in 1947 to create a viable state out of two pieces 1,000 miles apart. Certainly most of the Punjabis and Pathans who dominate West Pakistan never really thought of the East Bengalis as fellow countrymen or even true Muslims, shared much British racial contempt for them, and contrasted their alleged passivity with the supposedly virile qualities of the ethnicities dubbed by the British as ‘martial’, the Punjabis and Pathans.
The official language of Pakistan is native to neither of its old halves. Urdu – related to ‘Horde’, from the Turkic-Persian word for a military camp – started as the military dialect of the Muslim armies of the Indian subcontinent in the Middle Ages, a mixture of local Hindustani with Persian and Turkic words. It was never spoken by Muslims in Bengal – but then it has never been spoken by most of the people of what is now Pakistan either. It was the language of Muslims in the