HUNTINGTON’S ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is a calculated projection of the views of the diehards in western countries in general and in the US in particular. To dismiss this study as a rush of emotionalism or a theoretical research effort by an academic will be a grave disservice to the learned author. Huntington’s theory — painstakingly weaved and expertly projected — is the part of western realpolitik to put the Islamic states on notice and to keep them under pressure.

It is noteworthy that the ruling elites in the West distanced themselves from the projected ‘theory of clash’ for the undeclared reasons of tactical necessity. The political needs of governments are not necessarily met by the conclusions drawn by academia. The Islamic bloc, despite its imperfections, is too large (54 countries) to be ignored by the world.

Notwithstanding the visible attempts of western countries to eulogize Islam, their reservations about this religion in general and Jihad in particular, reveal a deeply ingrained prejudice against it. Their policies reveal their real intentions. It is not a coincidence that the Muslim countries — from Morocco to Indonesia — face pressure and criticism by the western countries on religious, economic and political grounds. The western bias against Islam exists in varying degrees in the developed world.

Way back in 1990 US Vice-President Dan Quayle stated that Nazism, Communism and Islam posed challenges to the western civilization. With Nazism dead and Communism subdued, the present-day targets of the West are China and the Islamic countries. The western governments and their ‘free’ media aggressively target both. India’s strategic relationship with the US and Israel provide it an umbrella of external support to enable it to implement its own political agenda in South Asia, particularly against Pakistan, and against China. It uses China-card for earning western sympathy and indulges in Pakistan-bashing for reasons well known.

The rise and fall of civilizations and nations is a natural phenomenon through which the US has emerged as the leader in the new world order. It has reached the pinnacle of power with hard work done during the last two centuries. It deserves credit for becoming the most pre-eminent power of this age, a position it is expected to hold for a long while. It is an honour for the US to reach the top of the world’s ladder of power. However, this privilege is not without responsibilities. Logically, only large industrial powers can pose a challenge to the US supremacy in the future — a race in which no Muslim country has a chance to compete. Despite this the political pundits in the West fear that at some point of time the fifty odd Islamic countries might collectively pose a threat to the western civilization. This unfounded and mythical fear is unsubstantiated with reason or logic. It ignores the fact that the Islamic world is so deeply divided from within that it can pose a threat to none else but to itself. Its insensitivity shows rather prominently at the present time when Palestine and Kashmir bleed with acts of state terrorism by Israel and India respectively. With the Islamic Ummah facing crises, the OIC and Arab League are in states of hibernation and shameful limbo.

During his last visit to this continent the Pope said that the twenty-first century would be the century of religion in Asia, meaning that Christianity would be spread here. No eyebrows were raised in the West on the intolerance inherent in this statement where it was well known that the followers of many religions inhabited this region. More recently Henry Kissinger proposed a joint Russian-US attempt to check‘expanding Islam.’ How fair is a civilization that promotes the growth of one religion at the expense of another?

The US policies in South Asia are uneven, be they about the nuclear strategies of India and Pakistan or the Kashmir dispute, or the war against terrorism or indeed the present tense border situation created by an arrogant India. ‘BJP Hindu nationalism has made the conflict more dangerous’ says The Guardian adding, ‘This is the party that, enjoying the direct support of only a fifth of the voters, tested and deployed nuclear weapons, provoking Pakistan into acquiring nuclear weapons too.’

With Advani, Jaswant and Fernandes regularly spitting venom against Pakistan, the Indian Army chief has joined the war-wagon hurling threats of imposing a conventional and nuclear war on this country. These words echo his master’s voice because in democratic dispensations military commanders do not take decisions on issues of peace and war.

The US adopts a multiple track approach in Indo-Pakistan disputes. It soft-paddles a crisis when India starts hurling threats at Pakistan in an attempt to blackmail this country. As the crisis deepens America advises caution and restraint to both India and Pakistan and asks them to settle their differences through negotiations. Now, it voices concern on the horrors of war between the two regional antagonists equipped with nuclear weapons. It strongly applauds the ‘courageous’ role played by President Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan in joining the war against terrorism. Pakistan has also received some economic assistance for the financial losses incurred by it during Afghanistan crisis. The US impartiality ends here. Once upon a time the US had the reputation of supporting subjugated people struggling for freedom against their oppressors. The US has now put the Kashmir dispute on the backburner and projects New Delhi’s line that India and Pakistan should settle their differences, Kashmir included, through bilateral negotiations. The US gives a vague response when asked to draw a firm distinction between freedom struggle and terrorism in Kashmir. It injures its own reputation by looking the other way at the state-sponsored acts of terrorism committed by Indian military and para-military forces that have killed 70,000 freedom fighters in Kashmir. Its silence or meek criticism of human rights violations in Kashmir and elsewhere in India does not bring it respect. The US policy on Kashmir dispute is perceived in Pakistan as pro-India and partisan.

Pakistan condemned in strong words attacks on September 11 in America and on December 13 in India. India blacked-out details about the perpetrators of the crime at the Indian parliament. It remains unclear if this attack was an act of terror or a self-inflicted injury to cash in on international sympathy created in the wake of September 11 incidents.

India exploited it to create a war-like situation against Pakistan. Political and military pressure was exerted on Pakistan. After meeting President Bush in Washington, Advani claimed that the US president endorsed India’s point of view on the current stand-off. However, the US spokesman used a different language while describing this meeting. By its words and deeds the US tilted towards India. This policy puts unequal international pressure on India and Pakistan; keeps Pakistan guessing; encourages India to blackmail Pakistan and creates instability in South Asia.

President Pervez Musharraf’s action plan included banning the extremist groups; cleansing the society of terrorism and sectarian violence; regulating the administration of Deeni Madaris; condemning acts of terrorism throughout the world; prescribing ground rules for maintaining the sanctity of mosques; rejecting India’s demand of handing over to it 20 alleged terrorists; pledging moral, political and diplomatic support to the people of Kashmir in their just struggle to get the right of self-determination; cautioning India against any misadventure against Pakistan or Azad Kashmir; and advising Prime Minister Vajpayee to help create peace and harmony for resolving all disputes through peaceful means and through dialogue.

The president expected the US to compel India to stop state terrorism in occupied Kashmir and gross human rights violations as being voiced and reported by international institutions and the NGOs. Secretary of State Colin Powell ‘applauded’ the measures announced by the president and said that the speech, ‘confirms Pakistan’s role as a frontline state in the war against global terrorism.’ A US official said that the speech ‘reflects good vision.’

The ball is now in the court of India. The world will judge the fairness of the US policies in South Asia by what it does or fails to do. If India’s arrogance of power leads to an armed conflict in South Asia, despite the patience, good vision and maturity shown by Pakistan, America would not be an innocent spectator in this horrible game.

The writer is a retired general of the Pakistan Army.

THE decision that the coming general election will be held on the basis of joint electorates has come as a welcome surprise for the Christians, our only substantial religious minority.

There are voices of dissent of course which say that no Christian can hope to be elected on a general seat. This is true, but then, under separate electorates, the majority never had to woo Christian votes, and now the Christians, wherever they are in numbers, will be an electoral force and form part of the national mainstream.

The recent massacre of Christians praying in a Bahawalpur church left everyone aghast. By everyone I mean the Muslims of Pakistan, for obviously it was a couple of misguided Muslims who committed the fell deed. I wish I could make the assassins read the accounts of events as they unfolded just before Partition when the Christians of Punjab, refusing to be enticed by the Hindus and Sikhs, expressed themselves wholeheartedly for Pakistan. Their leaders told the Boundary Commission in clear words that every Christian in the province may be considered a Muslim so far as his vote for the new country was concerned.

But the trouble is that although a fact of history, this unselfish concern for Muslims on the part of Punjabi Christians finds no mention in history books taught in schools. There are exaggerated accounts of the sacrifices made by this Muslim leader and that Muslim leader of Punjab, but there is no mention of this unprecedented brotherly act of the Christians.

Though the Christian leaders assured Quaid-e-Azam that they did not expect to be compensated for this support, they did get something in return. This was in the form of suspicion and mistrust, and even insult, with which the majority community has treated its Christian brothers since then. For example, Christians were hounded during the two wars with India as Quislings (although they gave more than their share of sacrifice in battle), and the way they are persecuted under the blasphemy laws promulgated by General Zia makes my head as a Muslim hang down in shame.

Some weeks ago I had occasion to read in manuscript form a coming book which sets out for the first time in 54 years the services rendered by the Christians, and other minorities, for their country in the social, political and educational fields. It also recounts their problems and their sufferings at the hands of the state and their Muslim compatriots which have turned them into second class citizens without bringing any glory to Islam. Pakistan and its minorities has been authored by Ahmed Salim, that indefatigable research scholar, and contains the social and political history of the Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsees, Ahmedis and Bahais of the lands constituting Pakistan, both before Partition and since August 1947. It will make painful reading for those Muslims who believe in justice, equality and tolerance, but then what can one do?

The story of how the Christians and Parsees gave positive help to refugees migrating from India to Punjab and Karachi and played a prominent role in their rehabilitation and in providing them medical and educational facilities, would itself make a small book. The nucleus of Christian help in Punjab became the United Christian Hospital of Lahore because of the countless maimed and wounded coming from East Punjab. Since the number of refugees went into hundreds of thousands, the services rendered by Christian doctors, nurses and para-medical staff were immeasurable.

If on the one hand notable Christians like S.P. Singha, C.E. Gibbon, B.L. Rallia Ram, Fazal Illahi, Joshua Fazluddin, Ch. Chandu Lal and others were busy making necessary arrangements in the refugee camps, their ladies did not lag behind, and, in true Christian spirit, assisted by workers from the Young Women’s Christian Association, spent long hours in providing succour of every kind to the suffering inmates of these camps.

I shall devote the rest of my space to some excerpts from a speech made by S.P. Singha as a member of the Punjab Assembly on 20 January 1948 since it graphically dilates on Christian issues of the time. (Incidentally my matric certificate bears his signature as Registrar of the Punjab University nine years earlier). He began by deploring the decision of the Sikhs to leave Pakistan, rendering some 60,000 of their poor Christian tenants homeless and unemployed.

These tenants were given nothing and had nothing to live upon. On his persuasion the Punjab government had issued orders to give them their share of the crops they had helped to grow, but how long would that last? So if nothing can be done for them, he asked, should they be transported to the camps for Muslim refugees as displaced persons?

Then Singha made a truly stirring statement. He said some religious elements among the Muslims wanted the Christians to be forcibly turned out of Islamic Pakistan. “But”, he said, “they will never succeed in their vile intentions. We are Pakistanis, we opted for this country, and will never leave it. We are not the sons of Banias to get frightened by such threats. We are Punjabis, but not the type who run away.” Brave words indeed!

Both India and Pakistan, said Singha, had promised to be fair towards the minorities. He regretted however that while one saw Christians in high offices in India, they had only Christian members in this House. The Christians of Pakistan were not greedy for offices, but the situation showed that there was more lip service by the government than real favours.

During a recent tour of Punjab, he continued, he had clearly told his co-religionists that only those Christians were worthy of respect as Pakistani citizens who were willing to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with their Muslim brothers. “All of us know and realise that Pakistan is an Islamic state”, he added, “and that is why we expect the generosity of treatment that Islam lays down for non-Muslim subjects of the state. I warn Muslims that the only way for them to strengthen this country is to strictly follow the traditions of their faith”.

There were many more wise words that Mr. Singha spoke that day, but I do not have space for them. Before I conclude, let me remind my readers that on 17 August 1947, the Quaid-e-Azam, along with Miss Fatima Jinnah, attended a thanksgiving service held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Karachi to pray for Pakistan’s strength and welfare. That was the spirit in Pakistan’s first year. We know what it is today.

EVERSINCE September 11, though, more recently, as of December 13, with a hint of more than merely chronological sequentiality about the two dates palpably coming through, history does not seem to have been going quite Pakistan’s way. The war in our neighbourhood is barely over.

Yet a fresh war, involving us directly, could, even after President Musharraf’s historic speech, be in the offing. Troops, warplanes, missile systems in place, India has been threatening us from across the border.

The Lok Sabha incident was both the excuse and trigger for this. While Pakistan’s leadership has judiciously and, as displayed by the conciliatory Saarc summit handshake, all too graciously been suing for peace, India has remained adamant as to Pakistan’s complicity in the December 13 affair. At the end of the day, India would also appear to have won out since we have, at the very highest level, conceded general, if not specific, wrongdoing.

The question is: have we been framed? President Musharraf has himself answered the question in all honesty. He has, in so many words, admitted that we have only ourselves to blame. It would be rank hypocrisy, on our part, to pretend to have forgotten that certain ‘jihadi’ outfits that have lately been blacklisted by America were not so long ago our pride and joy, our rain-check to a supposedly formidable national future. One wonders whether this might not perhaps bespeak a lapse of some kind on the part of, or lacuna within, civil society itself just as much as within the state.

Such are the doubts and misgivings, which we are all surely, in one degree or another, nursing as we face the stand-off with India along with the sundry consequences of over fifty years of bad governance, bad human resource management and bad faith. This encounter of the nation with itself, the current crisis of conscience,touched upon obliquely by President Musharraf in his TV broadcast, is one which ought rightly to have taken place a considerable while ago. That it did not only suggest that we had hitherto not, morally, come of age and so were devoid of foresight and historically and strategically disadvantaged.

It is an interesting measure of our complacency as well as lack of awareness that many of us thought, at least when it began, of the portentous military build-up on the other side of our borders as merely traditional ‘sabre-rattling’. The present situation would, however,not seem to constitute quite so dutiful a repetition of history. There may well seem to have been a subtle and indeed insidious variation at play here.

Of course, the whole exercise would seem to have had the blessings of America. Bipartisan though they may appear to have been, the White House briefings of the last few weeks have, for instance, betrayed a relatively clear, high-minded bias in favour of India. The pointed interest displayed by President Bush himself in the ‘jihadi’ outfits, Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, along with the inclusion of the two, by Secretary Powell, in America’s international terrorists’ list, can likewise be taken, by the new global logic, as patent indicators of American empathy with India’s security concerns.

Under the circumstances, it barely makes sense to treat the current tensions on the subcontinent as stereotypical. They are not. We are dealing with a novel scenario which has more to do with cryptic kaleidoscopic permutations than known historical patterns. The question to ask is thus not whether or not we will go to war with India, or whether, in the wake of President Musharraf’s speech, India will gradually back off, but where we are to locate ourselves in relation to today’s rapidly shifting historical perspective.

Not, one sincerely hopes, in the old ‘ideological’ groove, the country’s ideology having, over a period of time, grown to be, at some level, synonymous — with disastrous results — with the concepts of theocracy and what is current among us, precisely, as ‘jihad.’ As acknowledged in the recent presidential address,the mushrooming of ‘jihadi’ outfits, and of the ‘jihadi’ kind, has, if anything, hurt the cause of Islam both at home and abroad. And it has brought ruin in its wake.

So, in the aftermath of the Afghanistan war, we can only, like President Musharraf, concur that these quaint though really rather vicious beings are historical baggage we could well do without. Moreover, it can reasonably be supposed that their shamanistic promoters will, if not made much of, if not allowed again to play havoc with the nation’s destiny, if never again given a free rein in the framing of domestic and foreign policy, of their own, pass into history.

However, this is easier said than done. ‘Jihadi’ fervour or what was formerly termed ‘Talibanization’ had already peaked in Pakistan much before September 11 happened. That is to say, extremist religious sentiment was and is not confined to a merely limited number of identifiable militant organizations but, unfortunately for us, represents, at least among our rank and file, the norm.

It is, thus, secularism or liberalism, peculiar by and large to the westernized elite, which may be said to be aberrant. This is the legacy of Zia, Reagan, the CIA and certain equivalent, faceless personnel of our own. That we assumed we were, when the bonafide Afghan-Soviet jihad took place, on to a good thing is excusable. But that we presumed that ‘jihad’ as a kind of calling was a panacea for all our ills and, consequently, tried to make it last is a little less so. It possibly never occurred to us that one man’s ‘jihad’ might prove another man’s crusade. These are the wages of solipsism.

It is, though, equally extravagant to imagine that formally denouncing a given sort of mindset can make a difference or that, if, as he unequivocally has, President musharraf disowns terrorism publicly, the miracle will come about automatically: terrorism in Pakistan will stand contained. To say, to voice intent formally is not necessarily to make happen. President Musharraf has his limitations. He would be the first to concede as much.

Needless to say, it is absolutely right that we should have agreed to go the way of normality and sanity or the way of the regenerate West. It is another matter altogether whether or how far we will be able to practically deliver on our commitments. It may be, providing it holds and unless they reappear in some other form, that the ban on five extremist religious organizations will prevent any further ‘cross-border’ terrorism to the satisfaction of India.

However, from our own point of view, such a ban may also simply drive them underground where they may prove, locally, as, if not more, lethal than before. Then, how sure can we be that the deeni madaris will, in the long term, as of the coming into effect of the Madressah Ordinance, begin to produce decent and useful citizens rather than votaries of violence?

In any case, do we really feel that we can effectively contain a mindset endemically prone to violence in pursuit of its ends by presidential decree? Or that we can, by means of what comes across as something of a push-button programme or a few hundred flamboyant arrests, meaningfully after the general climate of violence in the country? There are questions we could be mulling over while our government goes the extra mile to prove to the international community that it is ready to match rhetoric with deeds.

We could also be considering whether the government has, in fact, addressed the problem of terrorism at source. Here, one might say, lies the rub. It would, to some extent, appear that we have side-stepped the issue, that, possibly for reasons of expediency, we have, for the time being, chosen to ignore the true face of terrorism. Granted that it is powerful, ugly, ubiquitous, since the president has taken up the gauntlet in this regard, it is up to him too to stalk the monster to its lair.