December marks two anniversaries in Pakistan's history, one through which more than half of Pakistan's population seceded to form a separate country, and the other marking the most heinous attack on schoolchildren ever in that country. Both events had messages that unfortunately have not been understood by the military-intelligence establishment that runs foreign and security policy.
In 1971, East Pakistan, the province that most staunchly supported the demand for Pakistan in the 1946 elections, broke away to form an independent country of Bangladesh. Few know that the underlying reason lay not simply in geographic distance but reluctance of the West Pakistani primarily Punjabi-Muhajir elite -- civilian and military -- to share power with the other ethnicities, Bengali, Sindhi or Baluch.
, was conducted by of foreign and security policy.
Pakistan first deployed jihadi or non-state actors in 1947 in Kashmir against India. However, 1971 saw the start of a close nexus between Islamist organizations like the Jamaat e Islami and the Pakistani military with the
Pakistani strategists viewed these non-state actors as useful and by the early , initially solely supported by Pakistan, and after Soviet invasion with assistance from the United States and its allies for the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad.
Instead of simply using non state actors as a temporary tactical tool, , India and Afghanistan.
Right from 1947, Pakistan's foreign and security policy aimed at seeking parity with its larger neighbor India. Pakistan sought to keep India tied down to the region.
Pakistan's planners always viewed Afghanistan through the lens of India: Pakistan needed an anti-India pro-Pakistan government in Kabul. Kabul had close ties with India dating back to the January 1950 agreement between the two countries. and would listen to Islamabad -- Rawalpindi.
Right from independence, as pointed out by , Pakistan's leaders sought to use Islam to build a religion-based identity. In the words of leading Pakistani analyst During the 1950s, Pakistan's educational curriculum was revised to create Pakistan Studies that was compulsorily taught to everyone from primary school through university.
and relegates Pakistan's non-Muslim minorities (and even Shias and Ahmadis) to the status of second-class citizens. Just recently an excellent book on Pakistan's religious minorities by details how this has been a state policy from the 1950s.
This narrative has built an environment in Pakistan that condones the use of violence, glorifies jihadis as freedom fighters and depicts Pakistan as constantly under siege from the Hindu-Christian-Zionist (or RAW-CIA-Mossad) nexus. So even a former army chief like
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment also saw the usefulness of the narrative for domestic policy: for Pakistan's military rulers- Ayub, Yahya, Zia or Musharraf- suppressing civilian progressive (read secular) political forces was more important than worrying about the long-term legacy of the Islamist-Jihadi enterprise. This policy continues till this day with the than in finding the
For Pakistan the focus of its foreign and security policy is the region - South Asia - and the jihadi groups it trained and supported were primarily for levelling the playing field vis-Ã -vis India and Afghanistan. There were, however, those in the Pakistani establishment, especially under Zia, who believed that Pakistan should extend its jihadi network beyond the region.
, others trained and then left for their home countries and built new jihadi groups there.
From the 1990s terror plots around the world have increasingly been traced back to Pakistan. and involved in the Bojinka plot of 1995 that aimed to assassinate then Pope John Paul II and also bring down 11 airlines. with Pakistan.
Connections to Pakistan are also found in the case of terrorist incidents in other countries. The had studied in Pakistan in the 1990s and even fought in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Austrian authorities have arrested a attacks.
Pakistan's security establishment policy of using Islamist groups and jihadis for the impossible task of achieving parity with India or as Pakistan leaders call it, regional stability, has not succeeded. Pakistani citizens have been the victims of this policy.