Pakistan is routinely quoted in the American media as ‘the world’s most dangerous country.’ You can turn to Newsweek, USA Today, Business Week and other magazines and newspapers and it is always described in those dire terms. How it became that way is never explained. It just happened. It may be something in the genes of Pakistanis, that they are naturally inclined to be dangerous. But I think it’s important, at least from my perspective, to talk about the US involvement in Pakistan. Because that explains a lot of why Pakistan is the way it is today.

According to the Human Rights Commission of that country which just issued its annual report with Benazir Bhutto on the cover, it calls Pakistan a nation that is “half alive.” And 2007 is called “one of the worst years in Pakistan’s history, if not the worst.”

So, I think it’s crucial to know a little bit about the background of the country. And it’s interesting how India factors in this and the US as well. When Pakistan is created out of British India in 1947, the US was at that time kind of dividing the world into different regions that it would seek to dominate. South Asia was part of that focus, the major focus was West Asia for obvious reasons: oil and natural gas. But South Asia of course was also of great value to Washington.

Countering NAM

In the post-colonial era of newly independent states, an alternative between the US and the USSR was trying to establish itself. It was the non-aligned movement. It was led by India’s Nehru as well as Kenyatta in Kenya, Nhkruma in Ghana, Nasser in Egypt, and Sukarno in Indonesia. Bandung (the site in Indonesia where the non-aligned movement met) was the third way in politics and was viewed by Washington with great apprehension. It is interesting. Instead of, perhaps, embracing the non-aligned Third World movement, Washington saw it as a threat. Even then, the idea was: You’re either with us or you’re against us. You can’t be in the middle. There is no grey area. You’re either with Washington or Moscow.

So Washington felt threatened by the non-aligned movement and immediately started to create a series of military alliances around the world to counter it. Pakistan would be used as a counter to India. It was quickly recruited into US-run military alliances, specifically CENTO, also known as the Baghdad Pact, as well as SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organisation). Although how Pakistan geographically comes into South East Asia is, of course, a bit of a leap as they say. What Washington was doing was globalising its Latin American model, which it had developed over decades. That is to say, to create strong alliances with military and security services in client states. The military and security services were always seen as natural allies of the United States that could be relied upon, they were dependable. If you pick up the phone someone answered. They were hierarchal, top down organizations, which did not brook dissent. Many of the states were in fact dictatorships such as the Shah’s Iran.

So the Latin American model now is globalised. And Pakistan is brought into this military alliance. And the Pakistanis, fearing rival India, were quite willing to come under the US umbrella. Pakistani officers are brought to the United States for training. There are mutual exchanges and military exercises and billions of dollars of weapons are flowing to Pakistan. The US supports a string of military dictatorships beginning with Ayub Khan in 1958, continuing through Yahya Khan and then the notorious Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88).

Darkest Zia Regime

It was the Great Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s that saw the US-Pakistan relationship bloom into full flower. Zia-ul Haq’s 1977 US-backed coup ousting Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto effectively ended a democratic interlude in Pakistan. Bhutto, father of Benazir, with all his flaws, was a civilian ruler and had promulgated a constitution for the country. Zia had him executed in 1979. Zia was an all too willing satrap and instrument to promote Washington’s goal of giving the Soviets a “Vietnam” in Afghanistan, billions of dollars flowed into Pakistan from Saudi Arabia and the US to arm and train jihadis from all over the Islamic world who were brought to Pakistan and then sent into Afghanistan to fight.

All the money was funneled through the Pakistani military. Much of it simply disappeared. Enormous amounts of weapons came into Pakistan from Europe and the US. It is in this period when Zia institutes his fundamentalist Islamic programme. Highly restrictive laws directed against women are implemented. Many are still in place. It is during the 80s that many of the extremist madarssas, seminaries, are established and funded.

Zia’s reign is without question the darkest era in Pakistan’s 60-plus year history. The country has not yet fully recovered from the excesses of his rule. He was killed in a plane crash in 1988. The cause of the crash, which also killed the American ambassador to Islamabad and several other Pakistani military officers, remains a mystery. The US, hell-bent on its agenda of bloodying the Soviets, played a central role in turning parts of Pakistan into a centre for jihad. The consequences have been huge both for America and Pakistan. Some of the jihadis, who President Reagan called “freedom fighters,” later morphed into the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Benazir’s Bargain

And finally, Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in 1999. He is still sitting on his throne. But I have to tell you that throne is very shaky right now, because he has become a major liability for Washington. He has become an albatross around their necks. That was one of the reasons they had negotiated this deal with Benazir Bhutto to come back to Pakistan. She was going to be the eloquent, articulate, and sophisticated, Harvard and Oxford-educated face of Pakistan. With Musharraf kind of in the background as President, this was the deal Benazir agreed to. And that is to allow American troops to openly operate in the country in exchange for a complete nullification of all of the criminal charges facing not only Benazir but also her husband Asif Ali Zardari and members of the Pakistan People’s Party. She exacted a high price for her cooperation.

There were two other components of the deal. The clause in the Pakistani Constitution that would only allow for a Prime Minister to serve for two terms was to be eliminated. Recall that Benazir served as twice as PM from 1988 to 1990, then again from 1993 to 1996. So that was going off the books. And the last, not so well known, condition was the removal of the clause in the Pakistani Constitution, which allows a President to dismiss a Prime Minister for corruption or incompetence or for violating the Constitution of Pakistan. Twice, presidents dismissed Benazir. So those were the conditions that she negotiated for her return to Pakistan on 18 October 2007. Many Pakistanis were aghast by the bargain she struck. Her detractors sarcastically referred to her as “Bezamir, “ (Urdu for no conscience).

Glory in Martyrdom

Benazir is a topic of great interest in the United States particularly since her shahadat, martyrdom. She has been glorified in death. Her actual historical record has been distorted and reinvented. It’s not surprising because I’m old enough to remember John F Kennedy. And when he was killed, all of a sudden he became a saint. Everyone forgot about his invading Cuba, his using chemical weapons in Indo-China, his bombing Vietnam, counter insurgency in Laos, and the coup in Brazil. Once he was killed he was transformed into an angel.

It is not surprising that a similar pattern occurs in Pakistan. It may have even happened in India when different political leaders have died. History is engineered. It’s an interesting concept almost like a building you can reconstruct it. So history is reworked in order to glorify and sanitize the one who has died.

Pampered Military

But other things about Pakistan and why and how its relationship with United States became so military dominated. The US had a particular strategy for West Asia, the Middle East as it is referred to in the US. The region was to be controlled by “local cops on the beat” as Nixon’s defense secretary Melvin Laird called it. And that’s to say that Israel, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, all non-Arab states, were all recruited by the US to kind of police the Arabs. And of course if there were a big problem, then Washington would intervene directly. But the preference was to delegate the smaller tasks to surrogates. So Pakistan proved to be valuable asset. In 1970, the Pakistani army under Zia-ul-Haq was responsible for attacks on Palestinians in Jordan during the Black September period. Pakistani air force pilots were basically the Saudi air force. The Saudis had no pilots, they had used Pakistani pilots to fly their planes. And the US established an important spy base in Pakistan outside Peshawar. It was from that base that the infamous Gary Powers and his U-2 plane took off from to spy on the USSR in 1960. Powers’ capture created a huge incident between the two superpowers. Today, in fact, it is suspected that very same base has been resurrected by the US and is being used to launch missile strikes in the frontier areas as well as in what is called FATA, the Federally Administrate Tribal Areas. This is not exactly a province of Pakistan. Pakistan has four official provinces, and then it has what are called the tribal areas.

Many Americans when they hear the terms tribes and tribal leaders, immediately lapse into the cliches of wild Indians, the indigenous population, attacking innocent white settlers who are trying to bring civilization to the savages. The vocabulary has been repeated in Iraq in exactly the same way. Sunni tribes led by sheikhs, have been hired by the Americans to do their bidding. In a classic colonial technique, this is how they win hearts and minds of people in Iraq or Pakistan. Let me demonstrate another technique of power and control. (A large wad of Rupees is shown to the audience) This is money. The people are bought to perform certain services for the paymaster.

Harm to Civil Society

The primacy of the military in Pakistan has seriously diminished and hindered the development of civil society. And the US is greatly responsible for that kind of maldevelopment. Pakistan has been prevented from, let’s say, evolving along the line of its neighbour India in terms of civil society. It’s always been the military that has been in the foreground in the country. The Americans privileged it over all other groups.

Do you know the great American philosopher Yogi Berra? He’s a kind of a character people make jokes about. He’s not very gifted with English. He’s a kind like Mullah Nasruddin. He seems to be foolish but he says incredibly intelligent things. Yogi Berra is not a yogi by the way. An American asked him once, “How would you explain how Pakistan is ruled?” And he said, “Well, first of all, 22 feudal families control 40 percent of the country’s wealth.” Then he said, “The other 90 percent is controlled by the military.”

Yogi has a problem with math. But he doesn’t have problem with analysis of a situation. The dominance and intervention of the Pakistani military in that country’s economic life is stunning, You may not be aware of the kinds of things controlled by the Pakistani military. For example, they are the largest realtors in the country. They have housing developments, banks, strip malls, cement factories, they make tissue paper and, last but not least, breakfast cereal!

There is a very good book on this topic, by Pakistani scholar Ayesha Saddiqa, it’s called Military Inc. It’s the first book to document in detail the role and degree of interference of the military in the Pakistani economy.

Chief Justice Revolts

Well, a lot is happened in the last one year. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan calls 2007 “perhaps the worst” in Pakistan’s history. It started on March 9, 2007 when Musharraf dismissed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary. Musharraf is the American favorite in Pakistan. They have been supporting him since he overthrew Nawaz Sharif in 1999. As recently as early April 2008, George Bush said he still supports Musharraf and called him a real friend of the United States. He also received some ten billion dollars from the Americans to carry out their various projects in the war against terrorism. Most of that money is unaccounted for and very little of it went to the needs of the Pakistani people.

Terrible Murder

The terrible year ends with the murder of Benazir in Rawalpindi on 27 December. It was a seminal moment in contemporary Pakistani history. Few believed the Musharraf story blaming the Taliban. Most Pakistanis believe the intelligence agencies must have been involved. They point to the quick cleansing of the murder site and the destruction of all forensic evidence. The Scotland Yard investigation, reluctantly agreed to by Musharraf, was thus very limited and many government officials were not available for questioning by the detectives. Political assassinations in Pakistan have a long history of never being solved. Benazir’s death set off a series of events.

Fragile Coalition

The 8 January elections were postponed until 18 February. When they were held Musharraf and his allies were given a stinging defeat. A coalition of the PPP now led by Zardari and the PML-N led by Nawaz Sharif formed a coalition to rule the country. Their alliance must be seen as temporary as there are deep differences dividing them. Nevertheless there is a honeymoon period for the time being. The new PM, a PPP stalwart, Yusuf Gillani, endeared himself to many by lifting the dreaded bans on student unions and trade unions. The government has announced it is seeking some kind of truce with militants. The Americans are very nervous about this and are putting pressure on Islamabad not to go forward with any kind of peace deal. Musharraf continues as president of the country. How long he will last is uncertain. It can’t be for long. He is even more unpopular than the despised American monarch and his patron and payroll master, George W. Bush.