paloalto90 on 27/12/2007 at 16:41

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Whats been going on for a long time.The only thing is who the trigger man is this time.The suicide bombing aspect might be a cover to blame it on a radical Islamic faction.Or it could be a misguided Cheney Bush faction hoping to preserve Musharoff ? style government thinking it would be more stable.

demagogue on 27/12/2007 at 20:21

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What's going on is that Western media & education have advanced to the point that a few people in Western countries are finally able to take some notice of and actually care about the internal practices of certain countries that have long gone on unquestioned.

That's both a good thing and not-good-enough ... It's good in that team-Musharraf in Pakistan (like Myanmar) won't be able to totally squash the protesters like they might have been able to in the recent past. But it's not-good-enough in that (again like Myanmar) if we check back in 2 months we may find many of the protesters quietly ending up in permanent detention anyway, after the news cycle on it slows down and we stop caring.

Also, I can't help but notice some irony in Bush saying "We stand with the people of Pakistan in that struggle against the forces of terror and extremism." It is precisely Bush's war on terror that has propped up and given a yellow-light to team-Musharraf's strong-man tactics in the first place, and more generally military types and strong-man political tactics in a number of countries ... so it sounds a little funny to hear the slogan switching sides in the "struggle" to suddenly side against the "good guys"; now they're the "terrorists". So much for "you're either with us or against us". What kind of struggle is it when your slogans keep switching sides on who it's supporting and who is the terrorist? (My point is: I think the "war on terror" absolute good-guy/bad-guy idea is an absurd way to capture the real-world tensions in most countries, and can do as much to inflate than ease them).

Myoldnamebroke on 27/12/2007 at 23:03

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Pakistan has only existed since 1947.

Myoldnamebroke on 27/12/2007 at 23:48

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But the problems facing Pakistan are done poor justice by dismissing them as 'the same tribal problems faced for thousands of years'. For one thing, these areas haven't been artificially grouped together and governed as one nation before. Pakistan's problems are of a nation-state kind, problems that don't exist for small autonomous tribal areas.

The current problems have roots in several things.

Firstly, at Partition. Pakistan was simply not a viable nation in terms of resources or common identity and was in reality probably only a bargaining tool used by Jinnah, useful for leveraging more rights for Muslims in a new independent India.

This was compounded by the unequal division of military hardware and infrastructure at Partition, leaving Pakistan without any of the British Indian Army and its apolitical traditions.

Further double-whammy - Pakistan has spent an absurd amount of its resources on military spending out of fear of being crushed by India. Few other resources have been available to spend on other vital infrastructure necessary for a functioning state, particularly in education. We'll come back to this one, it has repercussions when religion takes over in the absence of state provision, just as it did in the West before universal education.

Pakistan was largely desired by Muslims living in Hindu-majority areas - those in the Muslim-dominated areas that eventually became Pakistan didn't need it, for obvious reasons. Thus the political activists that drove the creation of Pakistan and ended up running it after Partition where alien to the areas they flooded into, creating further resentment.

India had Nehru, who lived for decades afterwards and lead the nation to stability and in a secular, idealistic democratic way. Jinnah died shortly after Partition and Liaquat Ali Khan shortly after him.

More recently, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and US encouragement of Pakistani involvement have a lot to answer for in the increased presence of hard-line Islam in Pakistani politics. It was turned into a fight for Islam rather than a fight against a demonstration of Soviet control over the more far-flung areas of their empire to prevent breakups and claims at independence. After the war was over, these militants entered Pakistan and began to change its politics. You now see previously secular politicians - Musharraf among them - co-opting religious language and symbols in an attempt partially to flank and partially to appeal to the Islamic presence now in Pakistani politics, leading to a spiral into extremism. The earlier point about state failure returns here, with the usual liberal driving-force of the middle classes is blunted by the fact that they are forced to or leave the country or turn to religious schools to educate their children.

None of this has much to do with the tribal areas of Pakistan and is far-removed with the problems of governing a frontier province. Regional identity of course plays a part in this, but it plays a part in nearly every aspect of politics on the subcontinent, and it doesn't mean this are not new problems with identifiable causes.

Gingerbread Man on 28/12/2007 at 16:35

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One of these days we're going to jettison all this hopeless rhetoric about "cultural differences" and "ancient tribal conflicts" and just tell all these people to shape up or get the fuck off the planet. Srsly. How hard is it to be respectful enough of other people that you don't shoot them in the neck or cut off their hands or throw rocks on them until they die? Or rob their convenience store at gunpoint, for that matter... It's not 100% about foreign lands and their savage customs -- we've got our own pockets of idiocy as well.

I'm a very tolerant and compassionate person, but at some point I just want to shake people until the stupid ideas they have fall right out of their tiny heads.