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Ray · 09-16-2007, 12:35 PM

Another one on Talibanisation:

Quote:

"Talibinization of Pakistan's Transitional Democracy"

World Affairs, Sept/Oct 1999
Maya Chadda

Meant to fulfill certain political goals, Pakistan's regional strategies, particularly those in Afghanistan have now returned to haunt that country and to jeopardize its transition to a stable democracy in the 1990s. It is argued here that Pakistani leaders have used the same tactics in domestic politics that they have used to gain control over politics in Afghanistan. Its internal ramifications are identified here as Talibinization phenomenon. Strictly speaking, the Talibans, (from whom the word Talibinization originates), the Islamic fundamentalist rebels who eventually captured Afghanistan, did not make an appearance until mid 1990s. The political mainsprings that spawned the Talibans were however long present in Pakistan politics.

Talibinization is used in this article as a metaphor to describe a set of maneuvers that have been used on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border and not simply as an explanation of events in Afghanistan. It consists of three core perceptions among Pakistani elite: 1. that hegemony of a specific ethnic community - Punjabis and Pathans - is the key to political unity and control in a multi-ethnic nation; 2. that Islam, particularly its fundamentalist version is the basis of legitimacy in a nation that is overwhelmingly Muslim; 3. that use of coercion and force is justified to eliminate dissent where Islam and ethnic dominance have failed to do so. Many Pakistani leaders have drawn on these beliefs to consolidate the Pakistani state and justify denial of democracy to its people. In the mid 1980s however, these arguments graduated to the status of core beliefs in Pakistan's quest for regional dominance. These beliefs not only survived but strengthened past the events that had in fact, created them, i.e., the great power rivalry in the 1980s in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the rise of General Zia's military dictatorship in Pakistan. In the 1990s, these maneuvers have acquired special significance because of their far reaching impact on Pakistan's future. The following examines the antecedents of Talibinization and why it is a threat to democracy in Pakistan.

Who are the Talibans? : The Pakistan Connection
Who are these men of the Taliban? And where have they come from? Members of the Taliban claim that they are students of Islam, and that all they want to do is to bring Afghanistan under Islamic rule.1 They claim that their movement began in September of 1994, in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. At that time, they say Kandahar was plagued by groups that robbed, killed, and raped the populace. As the narrative goes, one man, Mullah Mohammad Omar, wanted to end these reprehensible acts, and so he started a reform movement and formed a party called the Taliban. As wonderful as this story sounds, the evidence points in the opposite direction. In reality, the Taliban is the military and political force trained and built by Pakistan. While it is true that the Talib foot soldiers are young Afghans who have studied in religious schools ( Madrassas) in Pakistan during the Soviet war, the higher officials of the Taliban are made up of former communist government officials and puppets controlled by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. There are significant number of Pakistanis amongst them. The Taliban militia was trained by the Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary force of the Interior Ministry of Pakistan and later by the Inter-service Intelligence Agency (ISI) of Pakistan. They are radical Muslim Pushtun-speaking Afghans and Pakistanis, who seek to establish control over Afghanistan, banish all Western influences and turn the country into a puritanical Islamic state with strict laws on moral behavior and appearance. The Talibans have banned women from public life, outlawed alcohol, smoking, music or cinema and introduced corporal punishment to be dealt out upon the slightest evidence of wrong doing by its moral police. These laws apply across the board in schools or government jobs, even hospitals. By the end of 1998 they militarily controlled close to 90 percent of Afghanistan. How did this come about and what role did Pakistan play in these events?

Historic Antecedents of Talibinization: External Dimensions
Pakistan's Afghan involvement can be divided into three broad phases. The first can be called the Mujahideen phase in which Pakistan provided safe sanctuaries to the Afghan refugees and fielded the Mujahideen fighters who were waging a war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. During this phase nearly three million Afghan refugees trekked across the border into Pakistan and set up camps to wage a war against the Soviet occupation forces. The second phase can be regarded as the Pushtun/Mujahideen phase which occurred after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet supported Najibullah regime in Afghanistan subsequently. After the fall of Najibullah in 1992, control of Afghanistan passed to the Commanders who had fought the Soviets in the ' 80s under the umbrella of a seven-party alliance. Subsequently, the bitter fighting for control of Kabul set off a vicious civil war, causing some 300,000 residents to flee into neighboring Pakistan. In this phase, Pakistan's civilian leaders began to lose control over the inter-ethnic wars in Afghanistan and over the ethnic fall out of these conflicts within Pakistan. In the third phase, internal conflicts - those that can be traced to the presence of the Afghan 'refugee' community - worsened. The Talibanization axioms permeated Pakistani politics. Pakistani leaders began to use these as a weapon against political opponents in their quest for power and office. Chronologically, the third phase occurred after the establishment of Rabanni government in Kabul in 1992. Pakistan recruited, trained and armed fundamentalist, ethnic Pushtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan to oust the Rabbani regime and take over control in Afghanistan. This is the Taliban phase. The first phase began in early 1980s, the second was launched by Zia before his death and continued until 1994. The Taliban phase began in 1994 and continues to this day. Talibinization's external dimension involves covert Pakistani interventions in Afghanistan and India and attempt to alter by force the regional balance of power; the internal dimension involves response to domestic ethnic conflicts (i.e., the Sindhi and Muhajirs in Sindh, The Baloch in Balochistan), Islamization of society and law, and, use of force and intimidation against domestic dissent. Let us turn to the international dimensions first.

The First Phase: General Zia and Afghanistan
In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of young men joined the jihad, or holy war, against the occupying force, with the backing from Pakistan, Iran, Arab countries and the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans had fled from war to the relative safety across the border in Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan assumed a key role, acting as the conduit of arms and assistance to the Afghan Mujahideens.

Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Pakistan's both western and eastern borders were in dispute. The disagreement over the Durand line, the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan had frequently resulted in tensions. At the core of this tension was Kabul's claim to all the Pushtun speaking people who straddled the Durand line. Similar overlap had confounded Pakistan's relations with neighboring India, over Kashmir. While Afghanistan had supported the Pushtun demand against Pakistan, Pakistan had supported the Kashmiri demand for the Indian half of Kashmir. The Soviet invasion altered the strategic contexts of all these disputed boundaries. First, displacement of millions from Afghanistan into neighboring countries blurred the regional borders. Second, massive amounts of American arms and economic aid buttressed Pakistan military in relation to other states in the region. At its peak, Between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan had received more than $1billion in arms and money annually to fight the Afghan war.2

The U.S. had forged a powerful strategic alliance with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan was declared not only a 'frontline state' as General Zia-ul-Haq was fond of pointing out, but also a "safe heaven" to more than three million Afghan refugees. The fleeing refugees were both a danger and an opportunity. They strained Pakistan's fragile social fabric and burdened its economy but their presence offered Zia an opportunity to recast the regional map in Pakistan's favor. On Zia's wish list were two objectives: establishing control over Kabul and taking back the Indian portion of Kashmir. Since open confrontation would put Pakistan at a disadvantage, subversion and cross border intervention became the preferred avenue of action.

Zia's first objective was then strategic, to make the Durand line a firm and mutually recognized boundary between the two states. This meant Afghan leaders had to be persuaded to abandon their traditional claims to the Pushtun-speaking territories of the northwestern and western parts of Pakistan. The flight of huge number of Pushtun-speaking Afghans across the border into Peshawar was then a godsend for Zia. To preempt future Afghan demands, he sought to bring all Pushtuns on both sides of the border under Pakistan's control. Zia hoped to use the trans-border Pushtun enclave to not only end the Afghan claims across the Durand line but also to create a formidable buffer, buttressed by the Hindu-Kush mountain (on the other side of this enclave), between it and the Soviet imperial domain to the north. This was now possible since the fight for Afghanistan was being waged from the refugee camps in Peshawar and Zia controlled the money and the weapons to the Afghan Mujahideens. The Pushtun strategy was also meant to give Pakistan a leverage over the struggle for Afghanistan both during the Soviet occupation and then later on once the Soviet troops had pulled out. There were other advantages to Zia's strategy. Agreeing to act as a conduit brought American arms and economic assistance pouring into Pakistan, gave Pakistan the wherewithal to strengthen and modernize its military and provided it with a 'strategic depth' (as Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, General Baig described it) against its traditional enemy, India. Zia's second objective was to ensure the return of the Afghan refugees back to that country. That could not be achieved unless Pakistan gained leverage over post-Soviet Afghanistan. The third objective was domestic, to neutralize all internal challenges to his government. Many Pakistan scholars acknowledge that the Afghan crisis prolonged and strengthened Zia's military dictatorship in Pakistan and made it relatively invulnerable to domestic dissent. The Afghan crisis had made Pakistan's intelligence services all powerful.

Zia's objectives happily converged with the anti-Soviet containment objectives of the other partners in the strategic alliance, the United states and Saudi Arabia. In its desire to be seen as the defender of Islam, Saudi Arabia provided funds to support the Afghan struggle. The Saudi interest was to promote Sunni Wahabi Islam in Afghanistan and weaken Shia groups that were sympathetic to Iran. The Reagan administration was willing to overlook all manner of transgressions by Pakistan including Pakistan's clandestine efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, as long as Zia's was willing to stage a rearguard action against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. And like Saudi Arabia, Washington was loathe to see Iran make gains from the Afghan situation. Neither the United States, Iran nor Pakistan considered how their policies might affect the post- Soviet Afghanistan. Had they done so, they might have structured their support in ways that could have contained ethnic fragmentation of post-Soviet Afghanistan.

The Second Phase of Afghan strategy: A Pushtun-Mujahideen Government for Kabul
The Second phase began after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. Pakistan was in a quandary to decide how to protect its political investments in Afghanistan. The Pakistan intelligence agencies had identified the Hizbi Islami group of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and channeled large amounts of arms and money to it. Hekmatyar, a Pushtun by ethnic origin, had fled to Pakistan in early 1970s following charges of murdering a fellow student at Kabul University. Under the careful eye of the ISI, Hekmatyar emerged as the rallying point for the Mujahideens in their fight against the pro-Soviet regime of Najibullah. There were other ethnic factions, the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazaras, also fighting to oust Najibullah. The Tajik faction led by Ahmed Shah Masoud and Uzbek faction led by General Rashid Dostum (who had joined the Najibullah government initially in 1992 had defected from it) were the most prominent among them. But neither leaders could be trusted to advance Pakistan's interests nor serve as the proxy for it, in the way Hekmatyar could be depended on to do. To ensure his loyalty, Pakistan strengthened and armed Hekmatyar against rival Afghan leaders. This stratagems lead to even more fragmentation of post-Soviet Afghanistan. The Soviet pacification strategies had already destroyed the previous patterns of ethnic sharing that had existed in Afghanistan, promoting one faction (the Pushtuns) against another with arms and money, destroyed what little chance Afghanistan had of rebuilding ethnic peace after the Soviets withdrew.

After the Soviet troops left Afghanistan and the Soviet supported Najibullah government collapsed in 1992, Pakistan stepped up efforts on behalf of the Pushtuns. The Soviet collapse had created several resource rich, predominantly Islamic Central Asian republics bordering Afghanistan. In the new post-Cold War world, economic expansion, trade and competitive strength were the touchstones of international power. Pakistan could hardly ignore the vast opportunities, the rich markets and raw material of Central Asia. But the passage to the riches of Central Asia wound its way through Afghanistan. Pakistan's pro-Pushtun policy acquired a new urgency. The fortunes of war however produced unexpected results. Najibullah's collapse did not create expected political space in Kabul for Hekmatyar. Instead, Ahmed Shah Masoud, a Tajik leader (and not Hekmatyar), emerged as the new force. Masoud ignored Hekmatyar and invited instead Burhanuddin Rabbani, an Afghan resistence leader of Tajik descent, to form a government in Kabul. Pakistan was temporarily thwarted in its purpose but was determined not to permit its large investments go to waste. Initially, Pakistan extended support for the April 1992 Peshawar agreement which promised a semblance of order to Afghanistan. But soon it backed away from the pact with Pushtun Afghan Mujahideens in tow. Pakistan could not see itself playing a second fiddle to Masoud and Rabbani in Afghanistan.

The contours of security policies that the authoritarian regime of Zia had established were not abandoned although Pakistan had embarked on a momentous journey toward a new era of democratic rule. By the time Najibullah collapsed, Pakistan was already under a second elected government in Islamabad. However slowly, democracy was making its way in Pakistan. The military had withdrawn from its overt role in Pakistani politics. These changes had not diminished the centrality of security calculations in domestic politics or the regional goals from which they had originated. The ISI "continued to build up logistical and armed support for Hekmatyar, Within a few months . . . Hekmatyar commenced a sustained rocket and artillery bombardment of Kabul. The ferocity and intensity of this campaign, resulting in more than 25,000 dead and half the city destroyed over the next two years, could not have been sustained without extensive Pakistani aid."3 Having failed to dislodge the Rabbani government from Kabul, Pakistan and its intelligence agencies faced a difficult choice: they could either abandon the Pushtun strategy, or, pursue it with even greater intensity by raising the ante. Pakistan chose the second option.

The Third Phase: Taliban in the Forefront
"Pakistani Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar, who was a retired army general with links to the ISI and experience in dealing with the Pushtuns in the region," writes Saikal, "decided to abandon Hekmatyar. He set out to craft a fresh Pushtun force, the ultra-fundamentalist Taleban militia." The Taliban fighters were "mostly raised from Afghan and Pakistani Pushtuns who were studying in religious schools in Pakistan, knew little of Afghan or wider world and were urged to fight for the cause of highly eccentric and discriminatory Sunni Islam."4 And to this end, Pakistan created the militia "purely as a fighting force, with a decentralized and faceless leadership." Pakistan wanted to first forestall the kind of personal warfare that had been the bane of Afghan guerilla struggle over the previous ten years, and second, to be able to make changes in Taleban leadership when necessary."5 In the two years between 1994 and 1996, Taleban rapidly expanded its control over Afghanistan with Pakistani support. They took Kandahar in 1994 and the non-Pushtun city of Herat in September 1995. In September 1996, the Rabbani government fled to the Tajik region in the north and the Taliban entered Kabul as the victorious Pushtuns. In the three years since then, with the use of brutal force and puritanical strain of Islam, the Taliban government has established political control over most of Afghanistan. Espousal of the most stringent interpretation of Islam is meant to provide them with greater legitimacy than the ethnic Tajik, Uzbeks and Shia Hazaras enjoy in Afghanistan. Islam is a counterpoise to ethnic identity in the struggle for Afghanistan. As we will see later, Pakistani elites have used this same ploy against their political opponents in Pakistan.

Pakistan planned and mapped Taliban victories. Amin Jan, an IPA (International Peace Academy)senior associate, writes that "after the withdrawal of Soviet forces, the ISI budget for Afghan operations declined because of reduced U.S. support. But Benazir Bhutto government's strong support for the Taliban and their military advances rejuvenated ISI backing for this newest united Pushtun front."6 Under pressure from the United states, Bhutto had tried in her first term to moderate Pakistan's stance in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Angered by this interference, the intelligence agencies conspired to get her dismissed in 1990. In the second term ( 1993 1996), Benazir Bhutto did not make that mistake. She refrained from interfering in ISI's Kashmir and Afghan policies. Benazir Bhutto in her second and Nawaz Sharif governments in both terms supported the Taliban.

Edward Barnes reported in the Time magazine in 4 November 1996 that there was hard "proof that Pakistan, a U.S. ally has arrogated for itself a more extensive role in Afghanistan's war than has ever been acknowledged." The Taliban victory in Kandahar, Herat and Kabul had come during Bhutto's second term in office ( 1993-1996) and which according to most observers would not have been possible without massive Pakistani support for the Taliban. Throughout the tenure of Bhutto and Sharif, Islamic paramilitary units were set up in Pakistan's Punjab province under the control of the ISI. These were transported across the border by Pakistani military vehicles and once in Kabul, received orders and money from the senior Pakistani officials in Kabul. The favored recruiting grounds for the Taliban were the Jamaat type fundamentalist parties and Islamic schools known as the Madrassas in Pakistan."7 The Afghan analysts are in little doubt that ISI had links with Pakistani religious parties that provide volunteers for Jihad in both Kashmir and Afghanistan. The connection between the two cross-border subversions was not a secret. Based on report of a captured POW in the Panjshir valley, Barnes notes that both covert operations were under the supervision of the ISI so that "when [Afghan Mujahideen] groups finished training for Kashmir, the ISI officers would issue them with weapons, ammunition and 2000 rupees a man."8 The ISI had established a comprehensive network for recruitment and training the Mujahideens for operation across both borders. There was however a domestic price to pay for fielding covert operations and engineering Taliban victory. It is to this we turn next.

Talibinization of Pakistan: Domestic Dimensions
Since Zia's accidental death in an air-crash in August 1988, the military had pulled back from overt exercise of power. Between 1988 and 1997, Pakistan had held four general elections. Government by the ballot box had become the preferred form of politics in Pakistan. It is true that elected governments were dismissed before completing their term in office but Pakistan had opened up to electoral contests, the press was freer and civil society had come alive with thousands of voluntary organization ready to do what the state and economy had failed to do, i.e., make life a little more tolerable for the common man. Pakistan had made a break with the past. But these nascent stirring of democracy had been blighted by ethnic warfare, endemic violence, criminal activities such as arms smuggling and trade in narcotics. Public anger at government failures made the insecure civilian leaders to turn to the most readily available solutions at hand, the methods that had made General Zia, their authoritarian predecessor invincible. Internal Talibinization thus survived Zia's demise although Pakistan had begun to elect its political leaders. Three conditions have defined the process of internal Talibinization as stated earlier: rule by ethnic dominance rather than multi-ethnic compact, legitimacy based on stringent interpretations of Islam and use of force and intimidation to eliminate dissent.

1. Rule by Ethnic Dominance
Three characteristics of Pakistan's ethnic demography are critical to its democratic transition. First although Pakistan is a multi-ethnic, multi linguistic9nation, Punjabis (48.2 percent of the population), and Pushtun (13.1 percent of the population) communities are not only numerically larger but command disproportionately large number of positions in the army, government and higher echelons of civil service. The Urdu-speaking Pakistanis enjoy some representations in these institutions but there are hardly any Baloch or Sindhi high-ranking officers in the armed forces. Second, particular ethnic communities dominate particular region, i.e., Punjabis in Punjab, Sindhis is Sindh, Pathans in NWFP and Baloch in Balochistan and before the creation of Bangladesh, Bengalis in East Pakistan. This ethnic distribution has spawned history of prior claims and narratives of homelands. Third, agendas of ethnic and religious groups frequently clash. The majority in Pakistan are Muslims but Islam does not play the same role ethnic identity does in articulating community demands. Ethnicity and religion act as the alternate axis of the Pakistani State, the first seeks to disperse power to regional centers, the second seeks to create a centralized Islamic Pakistan against a federalized nation-state. Nowhere was this conflict between ethnicity and Islam more vividly evident than in the war and separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. But even those events of early 1970s were not a historical accident. Its roots went down deep within Pakistan's history and politics. The rise of the military to dominance in the early 1950s had prevented evolution of institutionalized mechanisms to solve the contradictions between ethnic and religious identities.

Ethnic Conflict in Zia Years
Pakistan 's ruling oligarchy had however learnt little from the war and dismemberment of 1971, or so it seemed looking at the military coup d'etat and martial Law government that followed. Two lessons were however carefully imbibed: that ethnic nationalism among other communities was a threat to the power and dominance of Pakistan's Punjabi/Pathan ruling circles; and, that the notional commitment to Islam the ruling circles had thus far maintained, was not sufficient to defuse that challenge. To legitimize the oligarchy's rule, a more stringent versions of Islamic ideology had to be created. The first led to all manner of stratagems to weaken ethnic communities and their organizations, i.e., use of force and intimidation, efforts to set up militant counter movements, buying off ethnic leaders through bribery and dividing the community to foment internal dissensions. The second led to progressive Islamization of law and politics.

Both these strategies were initially fleshed out by general Zia in the 1980s. He espoused orthodox Islam and proposed an extensive restructuring of the country's key institutions and political processes in accordance with Islamic values.10 The Islam he championed was the more legalistic and orthodox version of textual Islam, which resonated with the Jamaat-e-islami and other religious parties in Pakistan but ironically these parties had never secured more than three percent vote in any popular elections. The legal strictures against women, the evidentiary laws in cases of violence and rape or in the cases of adulatory, the insistence on wearing of veil and withdrawal from public life, echoed the kind of puritanical practice Talibans were to impose in Afghanistan only a few years later.

Zia also employed a divide and rule strategy toward ethnic communities. He encouraged the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs militants to form the Muhajir Quomi Movement (MQM) as a counter force to the militant Sindhi nationalists. The setting up of the MQM was meant to counteract Sindhi assertiveness and countervail the Pakistan People's Party which was gaining in popularity under Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Sindh's slain leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The PPP had gained powerful support in the cities where the MQM had gathered loyal adherents among the Muhajirs. The purpose behind this entire Machiavellian exercise by Zia was to protect the privileged position of the military/bureaucratic establishment which almost exclusively hailed from the ethnic Punjabi and Pathan communities. Similarly, preemption of Islam as the supreme symbol of identity and legitimacy for the Zia's state automatically rendered all opposition to it unIslamic. Zia's MQM strategy was then an extension of his Pushtunist, pro-fundamentalist strategy in Afghanistan. Zia had armed the Afghan Mujahideens just as he had armed the MQM. Each fit nicely into the scheme of a strong and strategically pivotal Pakistan able to wield influence on the developments in neighboring states of South, Central and Southwest Asia.

India and Kashmir were an important part of this scheme and just as Afghanistan did, turmoil in Kashmir served Zia's domestic and security objectives. Zia had provided arms, training, and safe sanctuaries to the Pushtun proxy forces in Afghans, he also provided similar support to the other overlapping ethnic community on the second front, i.e., in Kashmir. Support for Kashmir was popular in Pakistan. Pakistani public thought it was their duty to help Kashmiri Mujahideens win their battles against India, even if it meant covert cross border operations in contravention of international law. On his part, Zia felt secure in the knowledge that Pakistan was needed to contain both the Soviet Union and fundamentalist Iran. He did not expect strong objections from Washington. Available evidence suggests that Zia laid out the plans to subvert already weakening Indian control over the state of Jammu and Kashmir in mid 1980s. The three components of the Afghan strategy had now converged: ethnic polarization, Islamic legitimation and use of force.

Ethnic Conflicts in the Post-Zia Years
The post-Zia elites in Pakistan have been far too weak to resist the temptation to profit from internal Talibinization. Besides, vast amounts of vested interest (money, personal careers and institutional power) have come to depend on its continuation, particularly within the armed forces and intelligence agencies who have regarded Afghanistan and Kashmir as their exclusive prerogatives. There was however a peculiarly Pakistani paradox in this situation. Whereas Zia's authoritarian regime could override all domestic dissent including that directed towards its Talibinization strategy; the post-Zia democratic regimes were too weak to withdraw from the course Zia had set for Pakistan.

This is clearly evident in the way post-Zia governments have dealt with ethnic conflicts among Pakistan's Sindhis, Muhajirs, Afghan Pathans and Shias. In the 1990s, the conflict intensified between Muhajirs, the Urdu-speaking migrants from India and Sindhis who speak Sindhi and resent the disproportionate importance demanded by their ethnic rivals. The arrival of large number of Afghan refugees to Karachi in search of livelihood further aggravated the conflict over office and power. To make matters worse, the eruption of Sunni- Shia violence in Sindh and Punjab and in Malakand in North West frontier Province (NFWP) in the late 1990s, suggested a complicated pattern of antagonisms over ethnicity, religion and political office.11

The 1988 election, the first democratic contest after eleven years of military rule, brought a weak coalition led by the PPP and Benazir Bhutto to power. Bhutto had sought out the Muhajirs and made the MQM, its representative political party, a partner in the ruling coalition. This partnership had been forged on the basis of Muhajir support as a quid pro quo for inclusion.12 The Benazir Bhutto government was aware that its own survival depended on accommodation of ethnic and regional parties but it was too weak to deliver on its promises. Within months of the signing of the agreement, differences surfaced. In May 1989, the MQM ministers in the Sindh cabinet resigned in protest and in October, the MQM formally joined the alliance of parties led by Nawaz Sharif to oust Bhutto. These events were accompanied by armed clashes between the MQM and the PPP (Pakistan People's party)in Karachi. As violence escalated, other ethnic groups also acquired arms. The state of lawlessness and inability of the Bhutto government to maintain law and order gave President Ghulam Ishaq Khan the reason to evoke the eighth amendment to the Constitution and dismiss the Bhutto government in 1990. Talibinization had unwittingly led to first dismissal in 1990 of a democratically elected government in Pakistan and that to violence.

The pattern of electoral compact and breakdown continued throughout the 1990s as did the violence that accompanied each collapse.13 The MQM supported the Nawaz Sharif government initially in early 1990s but its relationship through most of Sharif's tenure (1990-1993) remained strained. Within the ruling alliance were Islamic parties such as the Jamaat-e-islami that resented the MQM's inclusion in the alliance. The Jamaat had lost much of its urban constituency to the MQM in Sindh. That was the cause of animosity between the two. Armed with small weapons and able to call in its shock troops anytime situation demanded, the MQM had plunged Pakistan in ethnic warfare. By June 1992, the Pakistani army intervened, to ostensibly rid the city of Karachi of criminal and ant-social elements. It was soon evident however that the MQM was the real target. The army employed the age old tactics of divide and rule reminiscent of its policies across the border in Afghanistan. It encouraged a split in the MQM and provided arms to one MQM faction against a rival MQM faction. There could be no lasting peace under these circumstances. Had the armed operations been impartial and directed only towards the criminal elements, its intervention would have advanced conciliation and compromise. Instead it did the opposite. The seeds of ethnic divisions sown by Zia had yielded a poisonous harvest.

The 1997 elections, the Pakistan's Muslim League, PML (Nawaz Sharif) and the MQM again entered into a partnership to prevent the PPP from forming a provincial government in Sindh. Neither parties could however overcome mutual suspicions. Every attempt to patch up alliance broke down, partly because the Sharif government was unable to deliver on the promises it had made and partly because the violence made all negotiations useless. "parts of the city faced virtual anarchy as the feuding MQM factions fought running battles against each other, activists of different sectarian parties clashed with law enforcement personnel, and unidentified gunmen engaged in killing sprees both random and targeted that resulted in the deaths of several government functionaries, including the former provincial governor."14 Nawaz Sharif dissolved the provincial government of Sindh and imposed governor's rule on October 30, 1998.

But this was a reflection of weakness and desperation, not strength. Ethnic compacts were merely expedient measures which Pakistan's elected leaders had no intention of institutionalizing as permanent mechanisms for negotiated settlement. In fact, ethnic communities were easy target for intimidation, exclusion and were frequently accused of unpatriotic associations. Both Sharif and Bhutto had charged that the MQM militants in Karachi had covert links with India.

2. Islam, The Instrument of Legitimacy
The second component of internal Talibinization is the rise in sectarian violence in Pakistan, particularly in Punjab. While sectarian divisions have existed for many years, they have become militarized and violent in ways not previously seen in Pakistan. To fully understand this new role of Islam in the 1990s Pakistan we must appreciate the delicate distinction between sectarian and Islamic commitment Pakistan has historically maintained. Its founding Father, M.A. Jinnah, had justified the creation of Pakistan on the basis of Islam but had not envisaged a Pakistani state based on orthodox Islam. For most of Pakistan's political journey until Zia, its ruling circles had retained broadly the distinctions Jinnah had enunciated. But the years of Zia rule saw these differences between Pakistan's Islamic professions and secular politics collapse.

The political connections between the ISI and Jamaat elements as recruiting grounds for Kashmir and Afghanistan have been mentioned. The Saudi support for the Afghan struggle had flowed through radical Islamic organizations in Pakistan. Amin Jani of the International Peace Academy (a U. N. affiliated body) explains that considerable support for the Taliban was "generated through private funding and informal networks of religious schools that were supported by Saudi Arabia and private transportation and drug trafficking networks. These networks . . . developed through tribal affiliations that facilitate commercial activity as well as strong tribal pro-Sunni ideology that is propagated by certain Islamic political parties, particularly the Jamiat-e-Ulemas-i-Islam (JUI) in Pakistan." Most of these Sunni extremist parties are located in the Pushtun areas of Pakistan such as Malakand but their battles have spilled over into Punjab, for instance in Jhang where significant pockets of Shia population resides.

Both the authoritarian and elected regime in Pakistan have frequently championed the cause of fundamentalist Islam. They have introduced Islamic slogans in campaigns, justified policies in Islamic terms, made expedient alliances with Islamic groups and championed the cause of Sharia (Islamic law and Islamic courts) in Pakistan. These gestures are hardly a measure of their piety or moral rectitude. Instead, the purpose has been to prolong their stay in power and undermine secular opponents. A year after assuming office in 1997, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called for introduction of an Islamic law in Pakistan and proposed the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution to implement Islamic judicial system. The amendment has little to do with Sharia or Islam. The Bill's main objective is to concentrate all power in the hands of the federal government at the expense of the parliament and an independent Judiciary. If passed, the bill will greatly reduce if not entirely eliminate the role of the provinces in decision making. Pakistan's ruling elites were again using Islam to countervail ethnic assertions for autonomy. Nawaz Sharif had used Islam in the closing years of the 1990s in the same way General Zia had used it almost two decades before him.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the campaign of terror and intimidation against the voluntary organization protesting the Sharia Bill throughout the later half of 1998 and early 1999. Many editors and press reporters critical of the Bill were arrested and terrorized. In May 1999, Sharif government banned close to 2000 NGOs and arrested several well-known columnist. Nawaz Sharif had wittingly or otherwise proceeded from espousal of fundamentalist Islam to campaign against ethnic assertions, banning of civic activities and free press. At each stage Pakistan was a step closer to the tyranny of majority, hardly a triumph of democracy. And each step forced Pakistan deeper and deeper into the quagmire of internal Talibinization. Its leaders, seemed unable climb out of the trap.

3. Force to Eliminate Dissent
The third component of Talibinization - use of force - has been discussed throughout the above analysis. In the 1990s, a new dimensions was added - the trade in narcotics and small arms - to the saga of social disarray. The golden triangle of opium trade had shifted from Indo-China to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1990s. Use of ethnic groups for cross border subversion brought arms and drugs flooding into Pakistan. According to one report, "the narcotic trade from Afghanistan-Pakistan Central Asia region exploded in 1997." The U.S. State Department and the UN 's Drug Control Program confirmed this finding. The UNDCP claims that in 1997, Afghanistan alone produced 2,800 tonnes of opium, half of it in Helmand, the seat of the Taliban. "The Taliban needs hard cash to maintain its army. Unlike the volunteers that fought the former Soviet Union, many Taliban soldiers are paid mercenaries. Since Afghanistan boasts virtually no economic activity, the drugs industry is the only way to raise cash."15 The lucrative trade in narcotics and Taliban's hunger for arms have brought many criminal elements- the Russian mafia, Asian drug lords - into the region. The opium trade is not only routed through Pakistan but finds ready market in Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan's main cities. In 1980, Pakistan had virtually no drug addicts. In the 1990s, the official figure is between 3 to 5 million addicts.

The ten years of Afghan war have played havoc with Pakistan's social fabric. Its impact on the law and order situation in Karachi, Pakistan's main commercial center and port has been devastating. According to Omar Noman, a leading Pakistani economist with the United Nations, the lawlessness has scared off foreign direct investment in Pakistan. It declined by nearly 65 percent from the peak period in early 1990s. International capital has passed over Karachi to the safer and more stable markets in South east Asia. Arms, drugs and weakening economy were hardly the foundations on which to build a stable democratic system, more likely they were the harbinger of things to come.

Conclusion
Pakistan's Taliban strategy for regional influence had boomeranged. It had not only polarized Pakistan and jeopardized its nascent democracy, Taliban militias are likely to destabilize the entire region without giving Pakistan what it has wanted most, i.e., strategic depth and regional influence. Taleban might defy their Pakistan patrons and extend their version of Islam beyond the Afghan borders, into Pakistan itself, a dangerous instance of tail wagging the Dog. The Taliban has reportedly provided some support to extreme Sunni groups against their Shia counterparts in Pakistan leading to a serious military clash in March 1998 between the Taliban and Pakistan border guards. Taliban's success also risks galvanizing the Muslim militants in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Several Taliban leaders have already embraced the Kashmir cause as their own. Talibans were reported to have joined the separatist struggles against Moscow in chechnya and Dagestan. But above all, Pakistan's Pushtun/ Islamic strategy has destroyed the potential for compacts and accommodations necessary to build a stable and possibly democratic Pakistan. Given the deep ethnic and social divisions, economic difficulties and law and order problems, Pakistan is most immediately vulnerable to Taliban's future ambitions. For that predicament, Pakistan has no one to blame but itself. The road from Taliban's success can lead to tribalization and ethnic fragmentation of the entire region from Kashmir to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Notes

1. Times Magazine, December 25, 1996. return

2. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995), p. 179. return

3. Amin Saikal, Survival, Summer 1998. return

4. Ibid. return

5. Ibid. return

6. International Peace Academy, "Prospects of Peace in Afghanistan" written after the December /January 1999 visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Based on extensive interviews with all parties in both countries. return

7. Time, vol 148, no 21, November 4, 1996. return

8. Anthony Davis, "The not so hidden Hand", Asia Week, November 1996. return

9. Feroz Ahmed, "Ethnicity, Class and State in Pakistan " Economic and Political Weekly, November 23, 1996, pp. 3052-53. return

10. Kavita Khory, "National Integration and Politics of Identity in Pakistan", Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 1 (4), winter 1995, p. 31. return

11. Robert LaPorte Jr. "Pakistan in 1995: The Continuing crises" Asian Survey 36(2), February 1996, P. 181. return

12. The agreement contained a large number of statements about commitment to democracy and political rights and the rights of oppressed people; other provisions demanded application of objective criteria for entry into educational institutions and access to jobs. return

13. For an account of ethnic conflicts and rise of the MQM see Farhat Haq, "The Rise of the MQM in Pakistan: Politics of ethnic Mobilization," Asian Survey, 35(11), November 1995; Mehtab Ali shah, "The Emergence of the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM) in Pakistan and its Implications for Regional Security," Round Table, October 1998. return

14. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, "Pakistan in 1998, The Policy Under pressure", Asian Survey, 39(1), Jan/Feb 1999. p. 179. return

15. The Far Eastern Economic Review, Ahmed Rashid, " Dangerous Liaisons", April 16, 1998. return

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Talibanization of Pakistan