Unravelling Pakistan - The Jihadi State that Refuses to Learn

A DEFINITIVE ADVERTISEMENT of Pakistan’s humiliation cum complicity in its Jihad against innocent Hindus in Pahalgam is the photograph that shows its senior military personnel and political leaders mourning the death of Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Abdul Rauf who was decimated in Operation Sindoor. The mourning was also a celebration of Rauf’s martyrdom.   

The spectacle hearkens back to the 11^th century when Mahmud of Ghazni’s nephew Salar Masud was similarly pulverised by Raja Suhel Dev. Masud’s band of Islamic warriors and his biographer Abdur Rahman Chishti bewailed his martyrdom and hailed him as a true Ghazi —  a holy warrior — who had inflicted untold horrors upon the infidel Hindus in the service of Islam before “drinking from the cup” of Shahadat. They spun divine explanations meant to erase the taint of his defeat just as how Pakistan’s shoddy disinformation machinery is now claiming victory over India. Just as it has always done each time India has battered it. The posthumous body of eulogistic mythology created around Salar Masud forms staple reading in the abundant syllabus of Islam’s conquests in Hindustan. It is also a representative precedent that created Pakistan’s modern mythology which traces Jinnah’s ancestry to Prophet Muhammad; to the indoctrinated minds of the True Believers, nothing else explains how Jinnah managed to “create” Pakistan in 1947.   

Pakistan embodies the four stages that unravel in a typical Shakespearean tragedy: how evil first destroys the good and finally consumes itself. Today, Pakistan appears to be in the last stage. This artificial nation is an unlikely creation of a Faustian farce in the person of Jinnah who, like Satan, preferred to be the Sultan of the Nether World than to remain as the second in command to God. Any number of such literary and Biblical allusions can be applied to it and they will ring true in various measures.  

Then there’s the worn out cliche — that the Pakistani army owns the country.  While true, the appalling humiliation it has received from India in the latest bout shows that it is an army which doesn’t know what to do with itself. It is difficult to see through the tornado of rumours emanating from Pakistan itself — whether Asim Munir will depose Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif or whether Munir’s own head will be taken. Either possibility is not only unsurprising but normal in that blighted excuse for a democracy. 

Perhaps at no point in its existence has the Pakistani military been so thoroughly boxed in from all sides. Exactly two years ago, thousands of inflamed supporters of Imran Khan had vandalised and torched the ISI building and Pakistan Army Headquarters itself in the wake of his arrest. This incident demonstrated exactly how fragile and vulnerable Pakistan is from within — that a determined mob of its own citizens could lay seige to its government and military HQ if the right trigger is activated.  

It also doesn’t help that Pakistan’s army finds itself increasingly powerless to combat the Great Encirclement of its own scripting. 

The Baloch rebellion that erupts at random intervals, has proven thoroughly devastating to the extent that on May 10, the Baloch Liberation Army literally conquered Mangochar and declared independence from Pakistan. 

On the other end in Afghanistan, the Taliban “government” was among the first to condemn Pakistan’s Jihad in Pahalgam, another clear indication of its escalated hostilities against its former patron. 

The less said about the frequent outbursts of sectarian bloodletting on the streets of Pakistan — some requiring military intervention — the better. The examples abound.       

INDIA’S OVERWHELMING retaliation to avenge Pahalgam has also clearly unravelled the facade behind Pakistan’s decadal bullying, bravado and bluster, which were kept oxygenated by the passivity of successive Congress Governments. The deathly lull in the interval between the Pahalgam misadventure and India’s retribution on May 7 was filled with ominous expressions and statements by Pakistan’s panicked leadership. 

Narendra Modi is perhaps the first Prime Minister to give absolute freedom to our Armed Forces to deal with Pakistan in the manner they deemed fit. The results were writ all over the faces of a distraught Shahbaz Sharif and the Pakistani military establishment. 

To grasp the enormity of Modi’s decisiveness as well as Pakistan’s unravelling, we need to recall that during the two successive UPA Governments, there was a Jihadi terror attack every six weeks on average — including 26/11, perhaps the worst indictment of the Congress.  

But now, India’s reprisal has bombed Pakistan’s military infrastructure back by at least ten years. The selection of strategic targets and the scale of the devastation inflicted on our rogue neighbour is telling — Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Gujranwala, Lahore, Muzaffarabad, Sialkot and Muridke.  

Our no-holds-barred punishment of Pakistan — among other things — is one of the brilliant triumphs of Modi’s foreign policy. A substantial portion of the first term of his Prime Ministership was dedicated to a whirlwind tour of the world, building trust and friendships and clear alliances. This pretty much set the tone for what followed, and the last decade is proof of India’s diplomacy working towards a clear plan. India got every major — and minor — nation on its side and isolated and enervated Pakistan on the global stage to the extent that even Saudi Arabia, its steadfast, former benefactor, has shunned it. Which is why, today, Pakistan has zero sympathy even from its cyncial and fairweather supporters. The primal law of nature as of international relations is that the world respects strength; even Bhagavan Buddha counselled an injured snake to bare its hood and hiss and not accept passive nonviolence as a method of deterrence.   

PAKISTAN’S UNRAVELLING couldn’t have happened otherwise. Its past successes at blackmailing India owed to two major factors: support from America and the pusillanimity of Congress Governments. Operation Sindoor wrote the epitaph for both. The late Christopher Hitchens was especially scathing in his analysis of American policy towards Pakistan. 

In a sense, America’s Pakistan “policy” has come a full circle. Its capacity to issue imprimaturs to India, directing us to swallow Pakistan’s serial roguery has vastly dwindled. Thus, despite agreeing to a ceasefire, Narendra Modi has made it clear that India will not accept America’s mediation in an issue that concerns India’s sovereign integrity. However, it is always better to err on the side of caution; one hopes that this ceasefire will not eventually remind us of the fatal blunder committed by Prithviraj Chahamana who repeatedly forgave Muhammad Ghori thereby paving the way for India’s seminal loss of freedom. 

The ceasefire has understandably evoked outrage against the Modi Government even from hardcore supporters who view it as a climbdown from a position of strength. The anticipation that India would irreparably devastate Pakistan has culminated in an anticlimax no one saw coming. While this argument holds merit, it is equally true that India continues to operate on its own terms. But the revelations in the aftermath too, deserve our attention. 

The apparent ease with which India pummelled almost all of Pakistan’s key airbases, shattered its communications and dared its nuclear bluff is what spooked its military echelons. This among others is the clearest and visible demonstration that Pakistan has been in free fall over the last half-century. The present, short-lived war merely showed the full extent of its free fall. 

PAKISTAN’S SELF-INFLICTED descent into self-destruction roughly began in the mid-1960s, more so after the 1965 war, in which it was routed.

Since its founding years, the country has been in the oppressive thrall of generations of Muslim feudal lords who were in bed with the landed gentry of Punjab and the Ashraf class of the United Provinces of undivided India. Add to this mix the bevy of bigoted barristers, British-educated Islamic demagogues and wealthy clerics, you get the perfect recipe for a putrid feast that the current generation of Pakistan is consuming. This elite has shown an incredible and insatiable apetite for plundering its own country and has escaped unpunished. 

It is instructive to study travelogue literature and onground reportage of Pakistan from the 1960s up to the emergence of the Taliban. These are first-hand testimonies recording the full trajectory of the self-scripted implosion of a deluded Islamic republic which sculpted a reprobate nation state. Perhaps the most erudite and insightful work on the subject is V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers. Analysing the sheer folly and impossibility of Paksitan’s belief that only Islam and Allah would save it, this is what Naipaul says:  

Naipaul’s book was published in 1981; the Taliban hadn’t even been conceived nor had anyone heard of Osama Bin Laden. 

In less than 20 years, the Taliban, indoctrinated by fanatical Mullahs from the Deobandi school and Saudi, and patronised, fed and trained by the Pakistani army, had established a “government” in Afghanistan. Post 9/11, Osama became Pakistan’s state protectee and its worst kept secret. It was also the time when the most favoured name given to newborn male infants in both Pakistan and Afghanistan was “Osama.”     

So, what exactly flourishes in Pakistan — the land of the Pure — 75 years after its founding? Political corruption, military coups, Jihadi terror factories, arms smuggling, drug trade, human trafficking, sectarian combustion, illiteracy, philistinism, poverty, medieval tribalism…None of these are secret. 

Robert D Kaplan who toured Afghanistan and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 predicted the mess that Pakistan finds itself in today. 

In spite of all this, it takes some feat of fantasy for Pakistan’s leadership to boast that its greatest achievement is its nuclear bomb — an Islamic bomb, in the eyes of the faithful. Pakistan’s obsession with the nuclear bomb is the direct outcome of its obsession with destroying infidel India. The ludicrous levels of its nuclear mania is laid bare in a detailed ground report (June 25, 2000) done for the New York Times by Jeffery Goldberg. 

But there’s more and it only gets more outlandish. 

And now, Pakistan has learned painfully, the true limits of the power of God’s own nuclear bomb. Operation Sindoor has neutralised two major Jihadi training camps — Shawai Nalla and Syedna Bilal — precisely in Muzaffarabad.

THE MAGNITUDE of Pakistan’s descent into anarchy becomes starker when we consider what all Pakistan has lost in its unachievable quest of an unsullied and perfect Islamic state, which supposedly existed in the seventh century. 

By the 1970s, every vestige of art and culture that Pakistan had inherited from undivided India was hurtling towards extinction. The extermination of Hindustani classical music is perhaps the most representative of this wilful embrace of medieval tribalism based on bigotry. For centuries, large parts of what would become Pakistan were hubs of flourishing Gharanas; today, you scarcely find a Pakistani Muslim musician who sings or plays Hindustani classical music.  

One of the biggest blockbusters of Pakistani cinema was a 1990 movie bizarrely titled International Gorillay. It was a celluloid revenge against Salman Rushdie who, in the climax scene, is shown to be charred to ashes by three massive Qurans appearing in the sky. The film depicts Pakistan as a fortress guarding Islam in the modern world, protecting the faith from the sins of American materialism, vice and immorality. Its stupdenous success is a grim commentary on how its political and religious class has shaped the mindset of the average Pakistani. 

Both Pakistan and especially India, must remember the fact that Islamabad did not exist before 1960, and Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Hyderabad were all thriving hubs of the Indian freedom movement — the very cities that India has now bombed.

There’s a rather bizarre lesson of history in all this. All great empires fell due to an excess of prosperity but Pakistan’s doom had accompanied its insemination.