The Pakistan Mirage

Abstract

THE PAKISTAN MIRAGE Charles Maechling, Jr. An international crisis now envelops the region surrounding the Persian Gulf. With the transformation of Iran from ally to hostile neutral, the paralysis enfolding Turkey, and the Russian intervention in Afghanistan, the "northern tier" alliance that used to shelter this area and complement NATO has ceased to exist. Pakistan, at one time locked into the system by the Mutual Defense Agreement of 1959 and the now defunct Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), is again being eyed as its eastern anchor. However, during the Carter administration, Pakistan's relations with the United States, never too solid beneath a facade ofsurface amity, were allowed to deteriorate . In April 1979, U.S. economic assistance amounting to $85 million was cut off under the Symington Amendment to the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act which prohibits aid to countries that appear to be developing nuclear weapons. One month later, Pakistan formally withdrew from CENTO, and began to make increasingly anti-Western pronouncements within the Group of77 and the Islamic Conference. In November of 1979 an enraged mob, whipped into frenzy by rumors ofU.S. complicity in the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, sacked the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, killing two Americans, while the authorities dawdled for hours before sending for help. For a few months, the shock ofthe Soviet invasion ofAfghanistan in December of 1979 seemed to arrest the decline, but any hope for immediate improvement sustained another setback as a result of the ill-timed U.S. aid offer and the Brzezinski mission of January-February 1980. There is now every indication that the new administration will try to resurrect the old dream of turning Pakistan into a "bastion of freedom " in Asia. It is the thesis of this article that this quest has been Charles Maechling, Jr., a Washington lawyer, is a formerprofessor of international law at the University of Virginia. He was a special assistant to Averell Harriman during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and has dealt extensively with Third World political-military problems. 93 94 SAIS REVIEW founded on illusion—that, from the beginning, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship has been so riddled with anomalies and wishful thinking that disappointment was inevitable. Without denying that the Carter policy toward Pakistan was more than a little inept, the progressive deterioration in U.S.-Pakistan relations is the logical consequence ofU.S. failure to recognize the calculus of power in South Asia, Pakistan's internal weakness, and a conception of strategic priorities in Islamabad that is totally at variance from that in Washington. Pakistan occupies a unique geopolitical situation in South Asia. Bordered on the east by India with a population of 650 million, on the west by Iran, on the northwest by Afghanistan, and on the north by China, with the Soviet Union only 25 miles away across a strip of Afghan territory, Pakistan sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf athwart the supply line of two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. If geographical location alone were the test, it would be the key to Southwest Asia. However, the crucial fact about Pakistan—one more difficult for the United States than for any other nation to accept—is its wholly arbitrary and artificial composition. Born in bloodshed in 1947 out of the traumatic partition ofthe Britishraj, Pakistan is less a nation than an aggregation of diverse and latently hostile ethnic and tribal groups bound together by one common element, the religion of Islam. Pakistan's population of 78 million breaks down into four major nationalities and three principal language groups, of which the latter spill across ethnic lines. The Punjab is the economic and political core ofthe country; the Punjabi majority of 57 percent provides the bulk of the manpower for the armed forces and staffs the most important parts of the government bureaucracy. The rest of the population is apportioned largely among Sindhis from Sind (22 percent), Pushtuns from the North-West Frontier Province (13 percent), and Baluchis from Baluchistan (3 percent). These percentages in no way reflect the territorial size of the provinces they represent. In two important respects ethnic minorities transcend national boundaries. The relatively small percentage of Pushtuns...