It’s rare that I single out a post from another blogger as an excellent news source. However, this particular one from Richard Fernandez (aka “Wretchard”) of Belmont Club presents one of the best end to end views of where the fractures in Pakistan came from, the shape they’ve taken now, and what might need to be done to clean things up.

I’ll put up a few excerpts here to give you a taste but, I recommend reading the whole thing -

The degree to which the Pakistan has been patched together is expressed in its very name. “The name was coined by Cambridge student and Muslim nationalist Choudhary Rahmat Ali … he saw it as an acronym formed from the names of the ‘homelands’ of Muslims in northwest India — P for Punjab, A for the Afghan areas of the region, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh and tan for Balochistan, thus forming “Pakstan”.

…Unable to compete in conventional war with India, even with the acquisition of nuclear weapons, Islamabad began to use proxies to advance its foreign policy objectives. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan engaged in two conflicts with nuclear armed powers largely using proxy terrorist organizations and infantry under the cover of plausible deniability. The first was its war against India in the Kargil district, fought at a time when both nations already had nukes. The second of course, was the ISI’s participation in ousting the Soviet bear from Afghanistan.

With 9/11, the Pakistani’s were forced to choose between the West and the Taliban. While heretofore Pakistan had a de facto “export the problem” approach like the Saudi’s, American involvement in Afghanistan brought the state of affairs to an end. And thus, Fernandez argues, the real dynamic is how blowback from the fall of the Taliban exposed the weak seams of Pakistan’s patchwork…

Just how radically the Taliban’s defeat in Afghanistan affected Pakistan can be gathered from the fact that when in July, 2002 “Pakistani troops entered the Tirah Valley in the Khyber Agency” it was the first deployment into the area since independence in 1947. The Pakistani troop movement was in some respects like the invasion of a foreign country.

…In 2007 three ominous developments took place. The first was the open clash between the political representatives of the Islamic militants in the capital and President Musharraf as represented by the siege of the Lal Masjid or “Red” mosque. ..The second event was the Islamic militant offensive in the Swat Valley. “The fighting in Swat is the first serious insurgent threat from pro-Taliban forces in what is known as a settled area of Pakistan…The third and most serious development was the emergence of a campaign of suicide bombings and attacks in the cities of Pakistan itself, the most famous being the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

And a key point for mutineers commenting from across the seas on the latest troubles in Pakistan -

…From the viewpoint of the Western public, Pakistan is seen as a “safe haven” for Taliban threatening to take back Afghanistan. In the Western view, Afghanistan is being invaded by al-Qaeda stationed in Pakistan. But from the Pakistani point of view, as shown in al-Jazeera video below, it is the reverse: Pakistan is now being “invaded” from Afghanistan.

Question for Mutineers (particularly Pakistani ones) — how accurate is Fernandez’s view of the state of Pakistani civil society throughout the country?

We’ve always known that the NWFP was like a “a whole other country” more akin to Taliban Afghanistan than Karachi / Lahore but the degree painted by Fernandez is quite interesting. Most of the Pakistani’s I’ve known over the years came from the relatively urbane, affluent Punjabi / Sindh portions of the country… consequently, the window into country there doesn’t quite apply to the tale told here….