Pakistan can survive latest chaos: analysts
ISLAMABAD (December 31 2007): Born from chaos and bloodshed, and still steeped in turmoil 60 years on, Pakistan has repeatedly defied predictions that the centre of the world's only nuclear-armed Islamic nation cannot hold.
While Benazir Bhutto's assassination has renewed fears Pakistan will become another failed state with a destiny determined by bombs instead of ballots, analysts say it has been down this road before - and survived. Pakistan is accustomed to seeing its political leaders meet a violent end, to be followed by claims civil war is at hand, and a kind of internal war has been part of the national fabric since its birth in 1947, they say.
Carved out of the rump of the British empire to give Muslims their own homeland with the partition of India, even the nation's founding was soaked in blood, with one million killed during the largest migration in human history.
"Pakistan was constructed as a contradiction, a homeland for Muslims that called itself a secular state. That is something Pakistanis have not come to terms with," said Marie Lall, an expert at British think-tank Chatham House.
"But because there is a problem with the basis for the creation of Pakistan, that does not mean it is destined to be a failed state," she told AFP. Often seen now as little more than a breeding ground for militancy, Pakistan is a complex mass of tribes and peoples where even the all-powerful military has come to believe that setbacks today do not mean failure tomorrow.
The army, rulers of the country for more than half its existence, had to step in almost at the beginning, following a 1948 conflict with India over occupied Kashmir that set off decades of strife.
Since then, Pakistan has lived through war and assassination, turmoil and the "war on terror" - even the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, which is widely seen as the most traumatic moment in its history. "The geo-strategic circumstances, the Cold War, the Afghan jihad, nuclearisation and 9/11 kept feeding the army," said retired general and analyst Talat Masood.
Military dictator Zia-ul Haq's support for the war against the 1979 Soviet occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan emerged as the defining policy of this nation of 160 million people for the following three decades.
The devout Islamic fighters trained by intelligence agencies to battle the Red Army later became the holy warriors fighting for Taliban in Afghanistan, and the al Qaeda militants behind a global jihad. While the remote and lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border are now the focus of an international campaign against that jihad, Pakistan faces other divisions that are internal but no less intense, analysts say.
There is ethnic discord between Punjabis, Sindhis and Pashtuns. Slain opposition leader Benazir was a Sindhi, and her community was up in arms at her murder in the city of Rawalpindi, the heart of the Punjabi-dominated military establishment.
The slogans chanted by her angry supporters in her Sindhi heartland Saturday after her killing seemed to sum up those deep-rooted tensions. "Hate Musharraf!" they cried. "Hate Pakistan!" The country has also seen nationalist uprisings by the Baloch population in the south-west, which have twice been brutally suppressed by the army - the last time in 2006.
"A civil war happens when there are organised groups on two sides working against each other, and we don't see such groups," political analyst Shafqat Mahmood told AFP. "But a failed state is a crisis of governance, and we do have a crisis of governance," he said.
"We are not destined to fail. We are failing because we are not recognising the base of our new nationhood has to be democracy." Masood, the former general, said Pakistan was not close to coming apart, but warned that much would depend on how Musharraf's government investigates Benzir's death, and whether it conducts free and fair elections.
The international community wants answers to those questions, but Chatham House's Lall said foreign meddling - including US pressure to crack down on Islamic militants who are part and parcel of Pakistan - had hurt the country most of all. "Pakistan has never been given the chance to develop its own foreign policy," she said. "That is its biggest problem."
Business Recorder [Pakistan's First Financial Daily]
