Biting The Hand of Comfort
Pakistan represents as a confused melange of interests; political, religious, legal and social. All countries are faced with managing those intersecting and inter-related conflicts, and in nations where the heads of state are elected by the people in the peoples' interests, their governing bodies must work toward settling conflicts for the good of the country as a whole.Pakistan, which likes to think of itself as a moderately religious country with an avowed ambition to provide secular democratic governance, is mired in its history of mistrust of its neighbours and hatred toward other religions. Not the kind of neighbour one would knowingly choose to exist next door to. But then, nations inherit geographies, they do not go shopping for empty spaces in which to settle.
The country flirts with militant Islam, while maintaining its judiciary and legal system to be outside of religion. Yet its sizeable population of fundamentalist Muslims will continue to insist that their nation filter its justice through Sharia law; they indeed have much in common with the fanatical Taliban struggling to return to governing Afghanistan.
The country is on the verge of financial collapse, yet never does it ask itself whether it must continue to allocate funding to the nuclear dimension of armaments. India, after all, a true democracy, has the nuclear bomb. Pakistan's former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power promising the masses bread, then directed the treasury toward succeeding in nuclear technology and the people went hungry.
Yet the media and the country's mullahs continue to propagate hatred against the myth of Zionist conspiracies to beggar the country. Their parlous economic state is alternately, a product of malign Indian intrigue. Or a combination of a deadly triad; where the United States, India and Israel together plot its downfall.
It's not a product of lack of education but one of deliberate delusion, ignorance, a national collective paranoia of a people incapable of focusing introspectively to determine why it is that their national agenda is so bitterly toxic for them. They wish to believe that the U.S. plans to invade Pakistan and hand it over to India.
And it's not only 'Zionists', Americans and Hindus whom they target, but also Ahmadiyya Muslims whom Pakistanis feel justified in feeling they should murder, as an affront to Islam, sham Muslims. That very Muslim sect that goes out of its way to live in peace with others, to denounce hatred and war-mongering.
Anyone speaking publicly in a moderate, Muslim voice is immediately suspect, considered to have been corrupted by the West. And here is a country eager for financial hand-outs anywhere it comes from. It's not flooding in from other Muslim countries, however. Where it does come from is the West, and particularly the United States.
But support of that kind doesn't come without obligations. Financial support for political accommodation. A billion dollars should buy at the very least a modicum of co-operation in assisting the United States in particular, and Western countries in general, to battle the very same scourge of Islamist jihad that Pakistan itself is being victimized by.
Funding for assistance in providing support for counter-terrorism. Not a bad bargain. But it will create even more tension, ensure a new wave of national hysteria, induce more Pakistanis to launch their own personal jihads wherever they can, whenever those countries of the West aligned with the U.S. in its terrorist battles, let down their guard.
Pity the people of Pakistan. Surely they deserve better. But do they, in supporting the polarized agenda of a political elite that hardly knows itself what it wishes to accomplish?
Labels: Religion, Troublespots, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 17, 2008
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