Political Awakenings by Harry Kreisler

Author:Harry Kreisler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

At one point you quote the famous expression, “All countries have an army but in Pakistan the army has a country.”

That’s what many Pakistanis think because everything is dictated by the army, and no civilian leader can afford to rub the army the wrong way.

You’ve also discussed the relationship of the state to Islam, and you’ve made the point in Descent into Chaos that the military has used Islam as an instrument. Talk about that.

The political parties view the founding fathers as being modernist, democratic, and having intended to set up a democratic system where all the non-Muslim minorities have the same rights, and religion is part of the culture and tradition of the country, but it does not dictate the political process. Now, the problem with the military is that in order to further their foreign policy aims in Kashmir, towards India, and towards Afghanistan, they fueled Islamic extremist groups.

Since the 1980s, when the Americans came and trained the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan—since then the military has used these militants for their favorite proxy force to fight in Kashmir and in Afghanistan. And that, of course, has created a blowback in the country. I mean, you can’t create militant groups and then expect them to just stay outside the country and fight foreigners. They will want to do the same thing internally, they will want to set up an Islamic state at home, and this blowback is what we have really suffered from very badly.

After 9/11, for the first time we have developed what we call now the Pakistani Taliban. And these are fighters who are militant groups; they are mostly from the Pashtun ethnic belt in the northwest part of the country, but they’re linked to other groups, the Kashmiri groups, the Punjabi extremist groups, and they all want to carve out a sharia state, that is, a state for Islamic extremism in the northwest part of the country. The blowback from the post-9/11 period has been deeply affecting the whole fabric of society because we gave refuge to the Afghan Taliban; we allowed them sanctuary in Pakistan, and we allowed them to recruit and rearm in Pakistan. You know, I was warning, in 2002 and 2003, that if we continue this, we are going to Talibanize Pakistan. There’s no way you can keep these guys separate or put them out in the mountains and expect them to go and attack the Americans in Afghanistan without them influencing Pakistanis, and that’s precisely what’s happened.

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