Author: Bret Stephens
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: May 12, 2009
URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124208442748008601.html
The trouble for a country defined mostly by
what it is not.
About Iran, Henry Kissinger once asked whether
the Islamic Republic was a country or a cause. About Pakistan, the question
is whether it's a country or merely a space.
Mr. Kissinger's point was that if Iran were
a country like France or India, its bid to acquire nuclear weapons wouldn't
pose an apocalyptic threat: It would merely be seeking the bomb in pursuit
of rational, and limited, national interests, like prestige and self-defense.
But if Iran is a cause -- the cause being world-wide radical Islamic revolution
-- then there's no telling where its ambitions end.
The world has a tough time dealing with cause
countries, no matter if the causes are bad (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia),
good (the U.S.), or somewhere in between (colonial Britain and France). Even
more difficult is knowing what to do about countries that are really just
spaces, wholly or partly ungoverned.
Today, Somalia is a space not even pretending
to be a country. The result is destitution, piracy and a sanctuary for Islamic
jihadists, but little by way of ideas for how to change things. Historically
Afghanistan has always been a space, defined mostly by its power to repel:
The Obama administration would be smart to take this into account by keeping
its expectations for nation-building low. Whether post-invasion Iraq is a
country or a space remains a question, though it seems to be leaning in the
former direction.
As for Pakistan, we're about to find out.
The world took note last month when a Taliban
advance brought it to within 60 miles of Islamabad. But that offensive was
less intrinsically distressing than the seeming nonchalance with which Pakistan's
rulers, current and former, surrendered sovereignty to Islamic extremists,
first in the tribal hinterlands and then in the Swat Valley.
What kind of state simply accepts that its
judicial and political writ doesn't actually run to its internationally recognized
boundaries? Three cases are typical.
One is a weak state that lacks the capacity
to enforce its law and ensure domestic tranquility -- think of Congo. Another
is an ethnic patchwork state that knows well enough not to bend restive or
potentially restive minorities to its will -- that would be present-day Lebanon.
A third is a canny state that seeks to advance strategic aims by feigning
powerlessness while deliberately ceding control to proxies -- the Palestinian
Authority under Yasser Arafat.
Pakistan's odd distinction is that it fits
all three descriptions at once. It is politically weak, ethnically riven,
and a master of plausible deniability -- an art it has practiced not only
toward India, Afghanistan and the U.S. with its support for various "freedom
fighting" groups but also, in the matter of the CIA drone attacks, toward
its own people.
The roots of Pakistan's problems go to its
nature as a state. What is Pakistan? Even now, nearly 62 years after its founding,
the best answer is "not India": As with the Palestinians, Pakistani
identity is defined negatively. What else is Pakistan? As with Iran, it is
an Islamic Republic: Punjabis, Pashtuns, Kashmiris, Balochis, Sindhis and
so on are only really knitted together in their state as Muslims.
No wonder the Pakistani army has been so reluctant
to redeploy the bulk of its forces to the western front: To do so betrays
Pakistan's entire reason for being. Tellingly, the army only went on the offensive
this month after the Taliban took aim at an army convoy. Odds are roughly
even that another "truce" will be agreed by the government just
as soon as the Taliban draws appropriate conclusions and reserves its violence
for clean-shaven men, independent-minded females and other enemies of God.
Of course the "Islamic" state that
Pakistani founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah foresaw wasn't quite what the Taliban
have in mind. "You will find," he said in 1947, "that in course
of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims,
not in the religious sense, because this is the personal faith of each individual,
but in the political sense as citizens of the State."
That vision still appeals to a majority of
Pakistanis, who have repeatedly defeated radical religious parties at the
polls. But rejecting clerical politics is not quite the same thing as accepting
secular ideals. It's also hard to sustain republican hopes when the practical
results -- in the persons of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and current
President Asif Ali Zardari -- have been so consistently dismaying.
We live in an age dominated by immodest ideas
of personal, national or ideological destiny, to which Pakistan has not been
immune. It might consider more modest aims, like simple countryhood. And since
the threat it now faces is existential, let's put the point existentially:
The alternative to that kind of being is nothingness.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
