By Rahul Bedi, IANS
Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination could not have come at a worse time for turbulent Pakistan and threatens to conflagrate a highly volatile security situation in a largely lawless country armed with nuclear weapons.
Other than the prevailing political chaos ahead of next month’s proposed general elections – exacerbated by Bhutto’s killing – Pakistan is under siege by Islamists and suicide bombers who have the army in retreat.
The country is awash with drugs and easily available weapons, reportedly under the ‘management’ of renegade but powerful elements within the army and the omnipotent Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) that together have ruled Pakistan – directly or indirectly – for most if its 60 years since independence.
Alongside, a secessionist movement is raging in western Balochistan Province while jehadis (holy Islamic warriors) along with Taliban and Al Qaeda cadres are on the ascendant in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal region (FATA) bordering Afghanistan and in the Swat region adjoining the capital Islamabad.
Nearly 1,000 Pakistani soldiers have died fighting Islamic insurgents over the past year and the army, under pressure from the US and other Western powers, appears increasingly unwilling to engage the well armed, battle-hardened and cunning insurgents waging civil war against the state.
The series of strikes on Pakistan’s military battling Al Qaeda fighters and tribesmen aligned to the Taliban and the recurring operational setbacks it has suffered point to the forces’ declining morale and overall will to fight.
An increasing number of retired Pakistani military officers and analysts also question the army’s motivation to fight what many locals believe to be “someone else’s war”.
Insiders attribute the military’s irresolution in countering their Muslim brethren to its increasing Islamisation resulting, in turn, in disenchantment over fighting for a ‘ladeen’, or faithless army, allied too closely with the US that remains Islamabad’s close ally in the global war against terrorism.
In addition, the war-like Pashtuns from the restive North West Frontier Province (NWFP), ethnically aligned to FATA insurgents, are agitating for separatism while widespread violence has erupted in Bhutto’s southern home province of Sindh of which Karachi is the capital, where she enjoyed widespread support.
On her return home in October, after eight years of self-imposed exile, Bhutto’s cavalcade was similarly attacked by a suicide bomber in which 139 people died. She barely escaped.
Trouble in Sindh, which has seen periodic violence over the past two decades, would leave Pakistan with only Punjab, its largest and most prosperous province in a region where geographical boundaries have often been redrawn through conquests and political agitation, almost always with disastrous consequences.
The division of the subcontinent into predominantly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan by the colonial government in 1947 led to the largest migration in history and sectarian rioting in which nearly a million people died.
“Vast areas of Pakistan have simply fallen off their map of governance,” says Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management in New Delhi.
This vacuum of authority has largely been filled by radical and disruptive forces impinging on regional peace and Bhutto’s murder augurs greater unrest and lawlessness in a nuclear-armed country, he added.
Ironically, the task of containing this widespread and apocalyptic turbulence will inevitably fall to the beleaguered and discredited Pakistani army, the only state instrument capable of imposing order across Pakistan.
This, in turn, will impose tremendous pressure on the army also under attack by senior Pakistani politicians and civil society for if not ‘masterminding’ the strike on Bhutto then at least conniving with it by providing inadequate security in the well protected garrison town of Rawalpindi.
What now remains to be seen is whether the Pakistani army can stay resilient in the face of the tremendous pulls and counter-pulls it has to face in a largely regressive state. The chances are that it would be an extremely difficult task, made all the more stark by the fact that it is nuclear-armed.
(Rahul Bedi is a commentator on strategic and military affairs. He can be contacted at [email protected])