BATTLES FOR PAKISTAN
By Bhabani Sen Gupta


Four battles are raging in Pakistan with increasing fury, borders of
the battles merging on wider levels and building up, steadily and inexorably,
to a ferocious countrywide encounter threatening the entire state. It happens
to be the second largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia, with a population
of 168 million growing at the annual rate of 1.8 percent. Its geographical location lends
it considerable geopolitical importance. It borders the Arabian Sea , between India on
the east, Iran and Afghanistan on the west. It has been, and continues to be, one of the
largest outposts of American and Western military and strategic power since the
1950s.
Pakistan was midwifed by the British as an intrinsic component of the historic agreement reached between the great imperial establishment in London and Indian nationalists bred and nursed in the political and intellectual hothousee of the Raj. The Raj had brought the entire
geographic area of India under its control It had helped the ancient Idea of India to
get flesh and blood as a single political entity. Before folding up the Empire,
the Raj, with willing collaboration of majority as well as minority nationalist forces
in India, succeeded in partitioning the subcontinental into two mutually hostile
neighbours. They fought three wars in a span of 55 years before settling down to an
uneasy and gingerly cooperative neighbourliness. But not before Pakistan itself fell
apart and lost its eastern wing which proclaimed itself a sovereign republic in 1971
with warm, passionate Indian approval and support. In the four wars raging in Pakistan, the army is fighting two. One with American troops against Islamic militants, the other with fleeting armies of a motley of tribal chiefs in two of its four provinces as well as the vast expanse of rugged mountain lands that lie between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The third battle is being waged by America’s worldwide military power: scores of drones dropping bombs on
Pakistan’s western borderlands and, on an increasing scale, American and British
troops fighting the Taleban in southern Afghanistan.
Taliban is not an organized army of Islam led by elusive Al Queda
Heroes like Osama Bin Laden and the one-armed Mullah Omar who are believed
to be living in the Pakistan-Afghanistan bprderlands. Taliban is a collective
name given to an amorphous number of soldiers of Islam, or Talibs, trained
in numerous madrassas located in the large expanse of upper Pakistan and
lower Afghanistan. Armed with Kalashnikovs and shoulder-firing missiles
and powerful bombs, they are martyrs of Islam ready to die for Allah.
The Taleban was created jointly by the CIA and General Zia-ul Haque
In the early 1980s to fight the Soviet forces after the Kramlin had committed
the fatal blunder of armed intervention in Afghanistan to defend the mortally
flawed Saur revolutuion of 1978 spearheaded by the foolinshly romantic
Afghan communist party. The Soviet force was drawn mostly from Central
Asians of the vast Red Army, themselves believing Muslims. The Soviets
pulled out. The Taliban stayed on to give Afghans a taste of militant Islam
delivered by a motley group of tribal chiefs. The chiefs turned Afghanistan
into th world’s largest poppyfield. A gun held in one hand and a cake of
opium in the other, the Taliban became the bizarre symbol of a socially
conservative, fundamentalist faith that falsely flew the flag of Islam in
Afghanistan.
The Taliban required the Christian fundamentalist George Bush to
Become president of the United States of America to turn Afghanistan into
a cataclysmic battleground of the world’s two evangelical faiths, Christianity
And Islam. Now, in the summer of 2009, the mother of all battles threaten to
engulf the state of Pakistan.
A tribal guerrilla force that called itself Taliban and was also called
By that name by New York Times reporter in Islamabad, Jane Perilez, crossed
the rubicon around the third week of April, 20099, apparently from Swat Valley
in the wake of the Presidernt of Pakistan, Asif Ali Dardari. Signing a deal with
the Islamic force that had taken over Swat Valley and proclaimed a Shariah
regime. This Taliban force leisurely took over, without shedding a single
drop of blood, a district of the North-West Frontier Province bordering the
Rawalpindi=Islamabad region . The district is known as Baner ( procounced
Ba-nair) which is located 70 miles from Islamabad.
Baner is home to a million Pakistanis. It bears no military outpost.
The police force that maintained law and order turned its face away and
Retreated to its barracks and Taliban soldiers rolled over the entire
District, proclaimed Sharia raj, and asked non-Pathans to leave the town.
Jane Perlez reported that the Taliban met with no resistance at Baner, and
that the Zardari regime in Islamabad just caved in..
It seems that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S.
Armed forces, Admiral Mike Mullen, was in Islamabad when the Taliban
“invaded” Bamer. This was his second visit to the Pakistani capital in
two weeks. Admiral Mullen met with top military officials of the armed
forces and intelligence agencies of Pakistan, apparently to prepare
the ground for President Obama’s Afghan strategy---to conduct the
“good war” in Afghanistan after closing the “bar war” in Iraq.
And secretary of state Hilary Clinton was to appear before the
Powerful Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives on
Capitol Hill on April 22, a day before the New York Times came out with
the ‘invasion’ report. She had known of it before she faced the committee.
Mrs Clinton accused the Pakistan government of cowing down before the
Taliban, mking too many concessions. “I think that the Pakistan government
is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists”. The new develop-
ment in Pakistan “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country
and the world.”
What now? Asked millions of Pakistan wqtchers all over the world,
Including in India. Has the Mother of Battles been joined in Pakistan?
Between the sprawling Jihadi warrorrs of Islam and the Pakistan army
that once created the Taliban? Will the Army and the American troops
stationed in Pakistan fight the Taliban together? Will the Americans get out
of Pakistan leaving it to it fate and to Islam?
Perhaps the best response to the latest developments in Pakistan
will be for the UN Secretary-Genera; to summon an emergency session
of the Security Council, expanded with the inclusion of India, Brazil,
South Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Kazakistan, to formulate a regional
resolution of the crises building up in Pakistan0Afghanistan region. Will
the U.S. take the lead?