Integrity Score 240
No Records Found
No Records Found
Chapter 3 continues…
Noted Pakistani watcher Stephen Cohen opines that the officers reared in the Army in the Zia years have now reached high ranks, and more religiously conservative than their predecessors. He notes: Pakistani officers have come to believe that the West has targeted the Islamic world and Pakistan in particular. Like many Islamists they think Muslims are subjected to discrimination and army oppressions throughout the world—in Palestine, Bosnia, the Philippines, Iraq, and Chechnya—simply because they are Muslims and despite their favourable view of the United States as land of opportunity, many believe that Washington favours Hindu India and thus is no longer and ally, but a strategic threat to Pakistan.
That is, Islamization was promoted in the Army to provide the “glue” to keep an Army cohesive and a foster a compliant stable society. But it has changed the theological orientation as well, to a religious hatred of the US and Christian, Jew and Israel, and Hindu and India. Pakistan has been caught in a cleft stick contradiction: bodily a US client-state but mentally increasingly with the enemies of the US. The failure to resolve this implicit contradiction will mean the rupture of Pakistani society and disintegration of Pakistan itself. Such a development would pose a great danger to US, India and Israel. A joint strategy of US, India and Israel to deal with Pakistan’s potential instability has become an imperative for all three nations.
This contradiction will first tear apart the Pakistan Army itself. As Owen Bennett Jones pertinently observes: at present, the top there is only a tiny percentage of officers with strong religious views. However, he says that the Army may face a split and a spark an Islamic revolution. Jones thus states: “Those in the Army who favour Islamic revolution may be in the minority but that may not matter. If it were ever faced with mass Islam-inspired street protests in Pakistan, the Army leadership could find itself facing an awkward dilemma. An order to fire on such a crowd could well be disobeyed by some of the men.” Pakistan will then spin out of control.
To be continued…