Pakistan: A Hard Country Read Free Page A

When it blows up ordinary people in bazaars and mosques, it merely looks foul.
    Pakistan is thus probably stil far from the situation of Iran in the late 1970s or Russia in 1917. Apart from anything else, the army is a united and disciplined institution, and as long as that remains the case, it wil be strong enough to defeat open revolt – as it proved by defeating the Taleban in Swat and south Waziristan in 2009. Unlike in Africa and elsewhere, military coups in Pakistan have always been carried out by the army as a whole, on the orders of its chief of staff and commanding generals – never by junior officers. As my chapter on the military wil describe, there are very deep reasons for this in terms of material advantage as wel as military culture.
    The only thing that can destroy this discipline and unity is if enough Pakistani soldiers are faced with moral and emotional pressures powerful enough to crack their discipline, and that would mean very powerful pressures indeed. In fact, they would have to be put in a position where their duty to defend Pakistan and their conscience and honour as Muslims clashed directly with their obedience to their commanders.
    As far as I can see, the only thing that could bring that about as far as the army as a whole is concerned (rather than just some of its Pathan elements) is if the US were to invade part of Pakistan, and the army command failed to give orders to resist this. Already, the perceived subservience of the Pakistani state to Washington’s demands has caused severe problems of morale in the armed forces.
    I have been told by soldiers of al ranks that faced with open incursions on the ground by US troops, parts of the Pakistani army would mutiny in order to fight the invaders. With the army splintered and radicalized, Islamist upheaval and the col apse of the state would indeed be al too likely – but even then, the result would be rebel ions leading to civil war, not, as in Iran, to a national revolution that would be successful in taking over the whole country.
    I hope through this book to strengthen the argument that however great the provocation, the US must not contribute to the destruction of Pakistan – even though, as this book wil make clear, neither the Pakistani army, nor the Pakistani state, nor the great majority of Pakistanis wil ever give more than very qualified help to the US
    campaign against the Afghan Taleban, since Pakistanis of every rank and class see these in a quite different light from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taleban.
    PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN AND THE TALEBAN
    Pakistan is quite simply far more important to the region, the West and the world than is Afghanistan: a statement which is a matter not of sentiment but of mathematics. With more than 180 mil ion people, Pakistan has nearly six times the population of Afghanistan (or Iraq), twice the population of Iran, and almost two-thirds the population of the entire Arab world put together. Pakistan has a large diaspora in Britain (and therefore in the EU), some of whom have joined the Islamist extremists and carried out terrorist attacks against Britain.
    The help of the Pakistani intel igence services to Britain has been absolutely vital to identifying the links of these potential terrorists to groups in Pakistan, and to preventing more attacks on Britain, the USA and Europe. Pakistan therefore has been only a partial al y in the ‘war on terror’ – but stil a vital and irreplaceable one. For we need to remember that in the end it is only legitimate Muslim governments and security services that can control terrorist plots on their soil. Western pressure may be necessary to push them in the right direction, but we need to be careful that this pressure does not become so overwhelming that it undermines or even destroys those governments, by humiliating them in the eyes of their own people.
    Final y, Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons and one of the most powerful armies in Asia. This means that the