Wirsing examines the nature of the challenges to Pakistan's security in the last years of the 20th century. Pakistan's ties to major power wielders in the international community have grown perilously thin, and the arms gap between Pakistan and India is as wide as ever.
This essay focuses on the nature of the challenges to Pakistan's security in the last years of the twentieth century. Pakistan's post-Cold War security environment, in both its internal and external dimensions, bristles with developments that are every bit as ominous as any that came Pakistan's way in previous decades. Among the most important of them are:
Pakistan's ties to major power wielders in the international community have grown perilously thin, and no major power seems likely to come to its rescue in the event of crisis. The arms gap (conventional and nuclear) between Pakistan and India is as wide as ever, and chances are it will grow wider yet.Pakistan's internal stability and political unity are being seriously eroded by intensifying ethnic and sectarian strife, such as that which is turning Karachi, the country's principal port and industrial hub, into a global emblem of uncontrolled violence and lawlessness.
Pakistan's deepening involvement in (direct or proxy) military hostilities with its neighbors-India and Afghanistan-threatens to spiral into still more serious armed conflict, thwarting all efforts to promote regional cooperation and increasing doubts even about the integrity of the contested stretches of its lengthy international borders.
In recent decades, Pakistan's leaders have displayed considerable prudence in managing Pakistan's security policy. They deserve commendation not oly for having kept Pakistan out of major war with its neighbors, especially India, during the quarter century since defeat at India's hands in the Bangladesh war of 1971, but also for having resisted lately the temptation to move further up the ladder of nuclear weaponization. Pakistan, however, has experienced both stunning recent reversals in its geostrategic fortunes and fundamental restructurings in its regional and global security environments (most important, the abrupt and nearly complete rupture, upon the collapse of Soviet Communism, in Pakistan's Cold War-motivated alliance with the United States). Furthermore, the swift, severe, and parallel deterioration in the country's relations with India and Afghanistan in the first half of the 1990s seems bound to produce continued, excessive preoccupation with national security and, potentially, heightened risk of war.
In regard to this last point, I want to make it clear that it is not the purpose of this essay to sound yet another alarm about the subcontinent's nuclear peril. The peril obviously exists. In neither Pakistan nor India, however, does one find in ruling circles much interest in fighting (even less in funding!) an all-out war, certainly not one fought with nuclear weapons. Indian and Pakistani leaders have already gotten the message, in other words, even if they do not accept all of its implications. Neither is it the purpose of this essay to understate the constraints on Pakistan's security planners. These, as we shall take note of later, are formidable. Nevertheless, as Pakistan approaches the fiftieth anniversary of its founding in 1947, its security predicament seems to me to have grown no less severe and may be worse than ever before. The costs of this for Pakistanis-in almost any way that one might reckon them-have been great in this century, and we should expect that they will be just as great or greater in the next, whether or not there is war. Hence, even if we grant that Pakistan's security policies have been relatively successful hus far, we should not hesitate to consider at least some modification of them to meet the challenges of the next century.
A review of Pakistan's options in this regard-identified broadly here as the pan-Islamic (transnational religious identity) option, the domestic liberalization (demilitarizing, democratizing, or "decentering") option, and the South Asian regional cooperation option-reveals no simple answers. Each entails considerable risk, and certainty of payoff in terms of Pakistan's future security is self-evident in none of them. A quick, self-directed escape from Pakistan's costly and perilous circumstances, for the moment at least, seems unlikely. I will argue, however, that time seems not to be on Pakistan's side, and however unpalatable the policy alternatives may seem, its leaders' willingness to risk applying them cannot be put off indefinitely. The most promising immediate policies, I suggest, converge upon the third option-South Asian regional cooperation. They stop well short of the politically impractical, India-centered, and, not infrequently, utopian regionalist projects that have, understandably, been dismissed by Pakistanis in the past. The measures that I recommend, however, could set in motion a process of accommodation with Pakistan's archrival India, in particular in relation to Kashmir.
Pakistan's Security Situation, 1996
In an article published in October 1995, Sandy Gordon argued that at the end of the Cold War, India had emerged as the winner and Pakistan the loser in South Asia. "Far from having lost out as a result of the end of the Cold War," he wrote,
India is poised to emerge in the early 21 st century as a far more important and influential power in the Indian Ocean region, and even globally, than it was in the latter part of the 20th. Some of the constraining factors in India's rise to power, particularly domestic and regional South Asian instability, are still present and will continue to snap at India's heels for some years to come. But the end ofthe Cold War has also enabled India to jettison some of the more burdensome foreign and economic policies that had constrained it in the past.
In sharp contrast, he concluded, "Pakistan, which has long been India's only serious competitor in South Asia, has lost out seriously as a result of the end of the Cold War. While India suffers from internal instability, Pakistan's problems are potentially far more serious."1
Gordon may be overstating here India's ability to take advantage of the potential benefits to it of the Cold War's end. The insurgencies in its politically disturbed periphery-Kashmir, the Punjab, Assam, and the tribal areas of the northeast-are proving extremely expensive and difficult to eradicate. Enormous problems of rural poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and overpopulation remain largely unaddressed; and most authoritative studies of contemporary India's political institutions speak more of their frailty and decline than of their durability and promise.2 Nevertheless, Gordon's placement of Pakistan on the losing side in South Asia undoubtedly hits close to the mark. My own fourfold definition of what it means to be "on the losing side" in the post-Cold War world follows.
Loss of International Support
Surely the most obvious and unambiguous (and least unexpected) sign of Pakistan's post-Cold War slippage in standing was Washington's apparent decision, made very quickly following the Soviet Union's unilateral and unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, to shed its costly and politically burdensome role as Pakistan's military and diplomatic backer. This decision took its most material form in October 1990, when President George Bush, after a year's warning, declared that he could no longer give the annual presidential certification that Pakistan "does not possess" a nuclear explosive device, as required by the 1985 Pressler nonproliferation amendment. Bush's declaration cut off the economic and military assistance that had flowed to Pakista for a decade. That step resulted in Pakistan's sudden free fall from near the top among a hundred or so recipients of U.S. security assistance for much of the 1980s, to full-fledged nuclear pariahhood in the 1990s. Foreshadowing the declaration was the entirely symbolic, but for Pakistan equally shattering, revelation by the Bush administration in March 1985 that it no longer considered India and Pakistan bound by the provisions of the late-1940s UN resolutions stipulating that a plebiscite be held to settle the matter of Kashmir's territorial affiliation.3
The nearly complete cut off of aid, as mandated by the Pressler amendment, has now entered its sixth year. Joint efforts by the Clinton White House and Pakistan's (mainly Republican) sympathizers in the Republican-controlled 104th Congress finally resulted, on 24 October 1995, in agreement between both houses of Congress on a tightly worded amendment (the Brown amendment) to Section 620E of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, authorizing a one-time delivery to Pakistan of $368 million in U.S. military equipment contracted for prior to 1 October 1990. The Brown amendment explicitly excluded from the exemption the 28 F-16 combat aircraft that Pakistan had also ordered and for which it had already paid $658 million, though it authorized the government to reimburse Pakistan as much as it could from sale of the aircraft to third parties.4
These moves by Washington to put U.S.-Pakistan relations on more normal footing are certainly to be welcomed. They pave the way for increased bilateral cooperation on a great many matters of mutual interest; perhaps equally important, they imply America's recognition that its interests in South Asia do not begin and end with nuclear nonproliferation. The Pressler amendment's passage may have made some sense in the middle of the last decade; it was a compromise that at least kept at bay Washington's army of energetic antiproliferation gadflies, who might otherwise have obstructed congressional support of the executiv branch's Afghanistan-driven security assistance program for Pakistan. But it obviously did very little to ease the threat of nuclear proliferation in the subcontinent while having a positively devastating impact on Pakistan's military capabilities relative to India. Congress was mistaken in thinking that Pakistan could be starved into nuclear abstention by conditioning U.S. aid on termination of its nuclear weapons program. Overlooked, apparently, were India's much older, more advanced, and larger nuclear program-relatively immune from Washington's pressure due to India's greater size and military power-and above all Pakistan's natural dread of an Indian nuclear monopoly.
Washington's decision to unclog the aid pipeline to Pakistan, however, scarcely begins to address Pakistan's security dilemma. After all, the Brown amendment, in authorizing a one-time lifting of the ban on weapons sales, did not repeal the Pressler amendment or sanction reopening of major military sales. Neither did it reverse Washington's earlier decision to force Pakistan to return eight leased U.S. frigates and destroyers, replacement of which will be extremely costly for the Pakistan navy. No one can reasonably contend, moreover, that delivery of $368 million worth of arms, including 24 M198 howitzers, 135 antitank TOW launchers, 28 Harpoon antiship missiles, 3 Orion P-3C reconnaisance aircraft, and assorted other spare parts and items, will by itself seriously rattle the IndiaPakistan arms balance, when annual combined arms spending by these two countries in recent years runs in the vicinity of $12 billion.5 No persuasive case, finally, can be made that there is a "hidden agenda" of renewed alliance with Pakistan in the U.S. Department of Defense's current plans for joint military exercises, military education exchanges, or expanded "cooperation with Pakistani military forces in counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and peacekeeping activities."6 In the face of the remarkable recent upgrading by Washington officialdom of India's glbal importance, and the still more impressive growth in U.S. economic ties with India, the existence of any such Pakistan-led agenda strains credulity.
Beyond the immediate arms sale issue, in any event, lies the greater security problem for Pakistan: the gradual drying up of any promising alliance prospects to serve Pakistan's requirement for great-power insurance against Indian military might.7 An "Islamic bloc" solidly aligned behind Pakistan, as we will observe below, has failed utterly to materialize; and there are signs of etiolation as well in the fidelity to Pakistan even of China, the consistency of whose support for Pakistan over the past thirty-odd years has been, at least by American standards, quite remarkable. In China's case, at least, the signs are not all negative. Fairly credible reports surfaced last summer that Beijing had exported to Pakistan in late 1992 over thirty nuclear-capable M- I ballistic missiles;8 and China continues to maintain a very close working relationship with Pakistan's avionics and other defense industries.9 But Beijing has retreated in recent years to a conspicuously neutral position on Kashmir, unquestionably an important litmus test of friendship from Islamabad's point of view, and China's steadily expanding rapprochement with India, as Sandy Gordon has observed, "has provided India with a significant peace dividend in the context of its competition with Pakistan"10
Permanent Arms Gap
A second ominous feature for Pakistan is the arms gap that exists between it and India. What is particularly ominous about this gap, of course, is not that it exists; after all, a large disparity in both the size and equipment of their armed forces has been a constant from the moment these forces were parceled out to the two sides at the time of Partition. Nor does my use of the term "ominous" imply in any way that Pakistan's armed forces deserve to be described as puny-a mere David pitted against the Indian Goliath. India and Pakistan are both unquestionably formidabl military powers. Among the so-called developing countries, there are very few militaries, in fact, that deserve to stand in the same column with either of them. India possesses the capability on fairly short order literally to devastate Pakistan-or at least a fair portion of it. But Pakistan, even if fighting were held to conventional weapons, just as surely has the capability to inflict terrible, and unacceptable, damage on India. The ominous part of the gap, from the Pakistani point of view, stems rather from India's greater ability to widen it, at least over the long haul, and to do so more autonomously of external constraints than has ever been true for Pakistan. India, in other words, with its vastly greater size, resources, population, economy, technically trained workforce, and defense industrial infrastructure, can set a harsher pace, if and when it chooses, with regard to the acquisition of both conventional and nuclear arms.
What I mean here can be broadly ascertained from multi-source data compiled recently by Remy Herrera for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The six tables below, adapted from his compilations, indicate that in comparisons of military expenditure, number of troops, arms imports, arms production, defense industry employment, and size of defense sector enterprises, India has generally ranked first or second among developing countries in most categories, and never less than third. Pakistan does not appear in all the tables, but when it does it ranks between seventh and twelfth among developing countries.' 11 When it comes to indigenization of arms production, an indicator as much of security decision-making autonomy as of military capability, the gap between India and Pakistan is unmistakably-and irremediably-huge.
Lest unnecessary confusion arise here, let me hasten to concede that there is nothing in the tables' comparative figures to challenge the contention (made most recently by Amit Gupta) that in its attempts to build military capability, Idia encounters the same kinds of structural constraints, economic and otherwise, as Pakistan and other Third World states; and that it will be no small matter for India to overcome these constraints and "make the jump to major power status."12 Substantial cutbacks in the rate of growth of defense expenditures during the past decade by India and Pakistan testify to the difficulties both sides were having in sustaining major defense outlays in the face of chronic weaknesses in their economies and depressing social indicators, such as poor health conditions and low rates of literacy. 13 Moreover, should India and Pakistan not succeed with present economic reform efforts, their budgetary difficulties will surely deepen. Pakistan, at least, could take comfort from the fact that over the past three decades it registered the region's fastest average annual growth in Gross Domestic Product-7 percent-while India's growth rate, with the exception of last year's, which reached a remarkable 6.2 percent, generally hovered at less than 5 percent. In contrast with India's recent performance, Pakistan's most recent growth rates are less favorable-3.9 percent in fiscal year 1993-94, and 4.7 percent in fiscal year 1994-95 (and in the face of Pakistan's annual growth in population, seemingly fixed at 3.1 percent).14
[Table]Caption: Table 1.None of this alters the fact that in the South Asian regional context, Indian military supremacy is a permanent fixture.l5 Although in comparison with the great military powers of the advanced industrial world India's military achievements may seem rather puny, in relation to Pakistan, in which any aspiration to major power status would have to be judged purely fanciful, India's achievements in the military realm stand out very sharply indeed. Only time will tell, of course; but Pakistani security planners have little choice but to take seriously the forecasts of two Australian defense experts, one of whom, Paul Dibbs, writing in Jane's Intelligence Review, predicted in May last year that the military capabilities of Asia's three major indigenous powers, China, Japan, and India, provided they managed to sustain economic growth, would all be "substantially greater" by the year 2010.16 The other, Sandy Gordon, in one of the most solid studies of Indian defense capabilities yet done, offered the even more menacing opinion that Pakistan's ability to act as a check on Indian power seemed to have eroded and that its "military competition with India may well become unsustainable by the end of the century."17
Ethnic and Sectarian Hostilities
Pakistan is a multiethnic, overwhelmingly (97 percent) Muslim society with a fairly weakly developed sense of national (Pakistani) identity. This weakness contributed to the loss of its heavily populated eastern province (East Bengal) in 1971, and it has contributed to separatist sentiments and violent secessionist activities, both before and since then, in all of the three "minority" provincesSindh, Baluchistan, and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Pakistan today contains five major ethnic groups: Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis, Mohajirs (refugees or refugee-descendents from India), and Baluch. The Punjabis, representing about 58 percent of the total (48 percent if speakers of the Siraiki dialect are excluded), hold a clear numerical edge. Internal migraion has resulted in considerable mixing of these groups; however, as a rule Punjabi-speakers are centered in Punjab, Sindhi-speakers in Sindh (especially rural Sindh), Pashtu-speakers in the NWFP, the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs in urban areas of Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur); and Baluchi-speakers (and related Brahuispeakers) in Baluchistan.
Ethnic Punjabi numerical dominance, the country's overwhelmingly Muslim character, plus the fact that Urdu (by world standards an exceptionally successful lingua franca) is now spoken by perhaps 90 percent of Pakistan's population, together give Pakistan a degree of ethnic, linguistic, and religious homogeneity and "natural" unity enjoyed by very few countries of the Afro-Asian world. On the other hand, the Punjabis' numerical weight has been matched by their domination of the government, armed forces, and the economy. They are to an extent feared and resented by Pakistan's minority communities, a structural impediment to the country's unity that defies easy solution. Adding to the problem is the fact that Pakistan's overwhelming Muslim majority is itself subdivided into numerous competing sects; and while the country's Muslims are predominantly Sunni (80 percent or so of the total), the large Shia minority is highly mobilized politically.
Contributing further to the disunity problem is the fact that practically all of Pakistan's ethnic groups share ethnic identity with groups across the country's borders in Iran (the Baluch), Afghanistan (the Pashtuns, the Baluch), and India (the Mohajirs, Sindhis, and Punjabis, albeit in these cases their Indian co-ethnics are more likely than not to be non-Muslims). This ethnic overhang or "trans-border ethnicity" is a serious problem that complicates Pakistan's problem of national integration; the problem also vastly complicates Pakistan's national security by throwing into doubt the durability of at least some of its international borders, while rendering its ethnic unrest more vulnerable than it might otherwise be to incitment from abroad.
At the moment, ethnic separatism is not a significant threat in the NWFP, where the Pashtunistan movement (the quest for a separate Pashtun-led entity) is mostly moribund and, beyond that, tends to be seen less as a product of grievances of indigenous Pakistani Pashtuns than as a device exploited and fostered at times by hostile governments in Afghanistan.18 Furthermore, Pakistani Pushtuns' integration into the country's military, bureaucratic, political, and business elites has in fact been quite remarkable. Pashtun nationalism is by no means a thing of the past, however, and seems bound to become more troublesome for Pakistan in the next several years.
Afghanistan, whose population is generally estimated to be about 50-55 percent Pashtun, has experienced almost unceasing and extremely disruptive civil strife ever since the Soviets vacated the land in 1989.19 The warring factions have very complex motivations and ethnic identities; but underlying the present struggle is a profoundly important, larger conflict between the majority Pashtuns and non-Pashtun minorities for control of the country's central governmental apparatus. The eventual outcome of this struggle, which at least one author believes may spell the end of Pashtun dominance in Afghanistan,20 will undoubtedly also seriously affect, and perhaps in violent ways, the Pashtun population in Pakistan. The revolt of Islamic extremists that broke out in the Malakand Division of the NWFP in late 1994, and the spectacular car bombing that took over forty lives in Peshawar late in December last year may well be early indications of this.21
Currently the focal point of the worst ethnic violence in Pakistan is the southern province of Sindh, especially its industrial center and port city of Karachi, where a lethal mix of interethnic (primarily but by no means exclusively Mohajir vs. Sindhi), sectarian, and political animosities resulted in twenty-five economically ruinous citywide strikes and a reported 1,950 killings in the ear just ended.22 The Sindhis, who number fewer than 10 percent of Karachi's population, and at most only a bare majority of the provincial population, resent domination by outsiders and point to their own conspicuous place at the bottom of Pakistan's socioeconomic hierarchy. The Mohajirs, on the other hand, recall earlier decades when Pakistan was new and they shared with the Punjabis domination of the country's fledgling political and economic institutions. Having lost some of their original importance, in part due to deliberate government ethnic preference programs aimed at boosting the indigenous Sindhis, the Mohajirs, who still represent as much as 70 percent of Karachi's population, have been attracted in recent decades to the radical and often violent agendas of the Mohajir Quami Mahaz/MQM (Refugee National Movement). Her own major political base being in the Sindh and among Sindhis, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto faces extraordinary political risks in attempting to resolve the problems of this province.23 Responsibility for the Sindh's agony has been fixed in various places, including the cynical, divide-and-rule strategies of Pakistan's own state authorities-not least among them the military authorities.24 Inevitably, as in Pakistan Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar's recent hint to the parliament in Islamabad of Indian and Afghanistan involvement in the recent spate of terrorist bombings in the country, the government has responded by alleging the sinister presence of a foreign hand in Pakistan's internal ethnic crises.25 Whether or not the allegations were true, they demonstrated the close and unavoidable link between Pakistan's security and its ethnicity.
Of great importance in any consideration of Pakistan's vulnerability to foreign interference is the fact that Pakistan's ethnic transnationalism is overlapped byand in some respects dwarfed by-the religious (in South Asian parlance, communal) transnationalism arising from the broad geographic distribution of Islamic identity in the region. Soth Asia's three largest countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) together contain over 350 million Muslims-by far the largest concentration of Muslims in the world. Hindu-dominant India, with a Muslim minority of about 110 million (12 percent of the country's population), also happens to be the fourth largest Muslim country in the world (after Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh).26 The spread of religious nationalism throughout South Asia in recent decades, among both Muslims and Hindus, obviously poses a considerable threat not only to the survival of secular statehood in the region but to the future well-being and security of its minority religious groups as well.27 Any real, perceived, or contrived impairment of their individual- or group-level security, given the potency of religious nationalism and its political exploitability, will be difficult to contain within one country, and may easily spill over to affect regional security.
From its start, for example, the India-Pakistan rivalry over Kashmir has been complicated by each side's implied threat to the legitimacy not merely of the other's territorial claims but of its national identity as well. Possession of Kashmir represented, for each side, vindication of the basic principle of identity-the one (India) secular, the other (Pakistan) religious-upon which each had been formally based. The increasing merger of religious with national identity that has gone on in both countries in more recent decades has considerably magnified and complicated this problem. It has, for one thing, placed India's huge Muslim minority under greater suspicion than ever of divided loyalties and potential for "fifth column" activity in the event of renewed war with Pakistan, raising serious doubt, to quote the words of a former Indian diplomat in correspondence with me, whether "any government in Delhi could safeguard Muslims against displacement and worse." For another, it has lent to the struggle over Kashmir the aura of a religious crusade, complete with foreign mercenaris, dogmatic intolerance, and merciless reprisal killings-the savage beheading in August 1995 of a Norwegian tourist by Kashmiri abductors being one of countless such episodes. It has also, we should note, placed the government of Pakistan's own policies in regard to Kashmir under attack from radicalized Islamic groups within Pakistan. The government's vulnerability to extremist elements was highlighted by the report of the secret arrest in Pakistan, in September 1995, of forty army officers, who apparently had links to Islamic fundamentalist groups, for plotting a coup against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's government.28
Military Confrontation with India and Afghanistan
No other major state in the world has a lengthier stretch of contested international border than Pakistan. The approximately 750-mile-long, British-drawn Durand Line, separating Pakistan's NWFP from Afghanistan, has never been formally recognized as an international boundary by any Afghan government; and the Line of Control (LOC), running nearly 500 miles in a rough arc from north to south through the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, was negotiated explicitly as a temporary boundary between the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled sectors of that territory in the Simla Accord of 1972.29 The passage of time has not transformed either of these two lines fully into de facto international borders. The failure of the Durand Line to have much impact either on the gun and drug smuggling traffic of border tribals or on the fixing of their national loyalties, has acquired nearly legendary proportions over the past century. The history of the LOC over the past fifty years or so is one of similar failure. Nor have these lines, and least of all the one in Kashmir (ironically, initially crafted as a "cease-fire line"), served in the slightest to stabilize relations between Pakistan and these two neighbors. On the contrary, rather than any pacifying effects, both lines are noted as transit areas for the passage of guerrilla forces and their ams, as staging areas for cross-border terrorist attacks, and--on the LOC in Kashmir, at least-for the frequent exchange of small arms, mortar, and artillery fire between the regular armed forces on either side.
Pakistan claims that its current involvement on the Indian side of the LOC in Kashmir is limited to diplomatic and moral support for the cause of Kashmiri self-determination-a cause for which, Pakistan claims, there is more than ample justification in international law. As for Afghanistan, Pakistan avers that it has no favorites among the Afghan factions currently contending for power, that it is not materially involved at all in Afghanistan's internal strife, and that it wishes only that the government of Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, which it claims has outlived its legitimacy, should step down. Both of these countries reject Pakistani claims to innocence, insisting, in both cases that Pakistan's covert interference is actually at the root of their troubles. While the latter half of this claimthat Pakistan bears sole or at least most of the responsibility for those countries' present troubles-has yet to be convincingly demonstrated, I believe they are justified in rejecting Pakistan's claims to innocence. Echoing what I had written in late 1991, I observed in a 1994 publication that Pakistan's involvement on the Indian side of the LOC
was far from insignificant; that Pakistan supplied substantial political, diplomatic, and material support to the Kashmiri uprising; that the material support took various forms, including the training, indoctrination, arming, and cross-border movement of the infiltrating forces; that the exfiltration of Kashmiri Muslims across the LOC into Pakistan or Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and their covert reinfiltration, following training in light arms and guerrilla tactics, played a very important role in maintaining the tempo of the insurgency; that the support was planned and coordinated in large part by Pakistan's ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence Directorae]; and that all this was carried out with the full knowledge and under the auspices of the Pakistan army.30
In general, that characterization of Pakistan's involvement in Kashmir still seems reasonably fair. Determining the actual scale and intensity of Pakistan's current cross-border activities in Kashmir is, of course, another matter. The report in a November 1995 issue of India's premier newsmagazine that "1995 has seen the highest number of trained militants coming into the [Kashmir] Valley from across the border, and even conservative estimates put the figure at 1,000 a month," seems to me probably to inflate the rate of influx.31 Unfortunately, verification of such reports is flatly impossible.
My purpose here, in any event, is not to fix blame for the tragic circumstances in which Kashmir presently finds itself (an exercise that I strongly suspect would lead to an indictment not just of Pakistan but of all parties to the conflict). Nor am I implying that Pakistani actions on the Indian side of the LOC do not have their counterparts in Indian actions on the Pakistani side of the line.32 My purpose is simply to point out that the pattern of conflict sustained today by Pakistan and India in Kashmir, whatever the justification for it or lack thereof, is extremely provocative, and so far as Pakistan is concerned, presents an enormous challenge to the country's security. Not very many weeks ago, to give one concrete example, there was a wire service report that Pakistani forces, reacting against the Indian forces' year-long blockade of a strategic road, had flattened with artillery fire an Indian bunker located on the LOC at a point from which Indian forces could, and allegedly frequently did, direct heavy machine-gun fire at military and civilian vehicles using the Neelam Valley road on the Pakistani side of the line.33 Whether or not the facts in this instance were reported fully or accurately, the evidence is now overwhelming that armed conflict-and not just minor skirmishing-has become a routie feature of India-Pakistan relations in the contested area of Kashmir. Although these two countries have displayed considerable prudence over the years-on only a few occasions permitting their deep hostility to get out of control and to develop into full-scale fighting-one cannot be entirely confident, in the face of present developments, that their hostility can be permanently contained.34
Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan's internal affairs has been continuous from about 1974, when, under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, it began supplying surreptitious military support, including sanctuary within Pakistan, training, and arms, to groups of Afghan dissidents fighting the regime of Mohammad Daoud Khan. This aid continued when the Daoud Khan regime was replaced by that of Nur Mohammad Taraki at the time of the Marxist takeover in 1978; and it was given major impetus when that regime fell to a Soviet-backed puppet government installed by Moscow at the end of 1979. Quite unlike its involvement in Kashmir, however, Pakistan's prolonged activity in Afghanistan had considerable international sanction and ultimately won it the gratitude of much of the world. During the Afghanistan war, of course, it acted as the main conduit for Western aid to the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance. By the late 1980s, the level of this aid had reached staggering dimensions: combined II.S. and Saudi assistance alone climbed to about $1 billion per year.35
The level and exact nature of Pakistan's involvement in the civil strife that has gone on unabated in Afghanistan since the Soviet pullout can only be guessed. Many observers claim that Islamabad continued after the withdrawal to funnel military support to its favorites among the mujahideen, especially to its long-time ally, Hizb-i-Islami chieftan Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 1993, it seems, with the change of government in Pakistan that brought Benazir Bhutto to power, Pakistan's support to Hekmatyar, perhaps with the encouragement of Washington, dried up. The sudden appearnce on the Afghan scene in October 1994 of the socalled Taleban ("student") militia has prompted numerous reports that Pakistan is behind that group's striking military success-including an at least momentary victory over the forces of Hekmatyar.36
The geopolitical situation in Afghanistan at the moment is, by any standard, extremely confusing. Russia, the newly independent states of Central Asia (especially Uzbekistan), Iran, India, and Pakistan all have a very large stake in the outcome of the free-for-all struggle for power and influence that was unleashed with the collapse of the USSR.37 Pakistan, at least as much as any of the other external contenders, considers Afghanistan's pacification and the political orientation of its leaders (factors bearing heavily not only on Pakistan's own political stability and international political status, but also on its acute concern for the opening of trade routes to Muslim Central Asia) to be matters of the most vital state interest.38 Magnus and Naby observe that "increasingly, the keys to the resolution of the [Afghanistan] situation lie in Tashkent and Islamabad."39 While that may very well be true, no one at the moment can be sure that that ultimate resolution will come soon, that it will favor Pakistan's interests, or that it will bring a century or more of conflict over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border finally to a peaceful end.
Pakistan's Post-Cold War Options
The discussion turns now to consider Pakistan's post-Cold War optionspotential alternatives to the Cold War policy choices that led it to seek alliance with the United States and a major role in Washington's anticommunist containment strategy. We examine first the pan-Islamic option.
Pan-Islamic Option
For a very long time the idea has gestated in Pakistani minds that both its vulnerable political geography and its military-demographic-economic weakness relative to India could be compensated for, at least to an extent, by expanding and deepening its ties to the many coreliginist states of the Islamic world. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's hosting of an Islamic summit in Lahore in 1974, in the aftermath of Pakistan's loss of East Bengal in the 1971 war, and his daughter's proposal early in 1996 for convening an extraordinary summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Islamabad in March 1997 to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Pakistan's birth testify equally to the persistence and strength of this idea. 40 Giving it some reinforcement, in material terms, has been Pakistan's stature as the Islamic world's sole nuclear power and the main political voice of the South Asian region's huge Muslim population. Giving it symbolic reinforcement, at least, was the thesis, voiced a few years ago in Foreign Affairs by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, that a fundamental realignment of strategic forces was underway in the post-Cold War world, that this realignment would turn the international relations of the twenty-first century in its most basic respects into a "clash of civilizations" (most conspicuously setting the West versus the rest), and that Islamic civilization would be involved in the bloodiest clashes of all.41 Central to Huntington's thesis was the argument that "kin-country rallying"-the mobilizing of interstate support systems or alliances on religious or civilizational grounds-was already significantly underway and that the thesis was, therefore, empirically demonstrable.
Huntington's thesis was bold and provocative. However, in part because it seemed to depend upon a more thorough and rapid decline of the nation-state structure and the ideology of nationalism than most political theorists were willing to concede, it has received surprisingly little support from fellow academics. Most of them, including Fouad Ajami, Olivier Roy, Graham Fuller, and Ian Lesser, have argued that Islam's "bloody borders," as Huntington had expressed it, were much more likely to be found on the borders of neighboring Muslim states, or between these states and the nascently ntionalistic ethnic communities or sects within them, than on those separating Muslim from non-Muslim states and, moreover, that Huntington had read far more significance into the "kin-country rallying" that he found among the world's Muslims than its actual magnitude warranted.42
Now Pakistan is unquestionably involved in a variety of pan-Islamic projects such as the OIC. Pakistan is also an important and the most populous member of the largest economic bloc in the world-the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), a regional Muslim organization formed in early 1992 that includes all of the five Muslim Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Turkmenistan) plus Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, in addition to Pakistan. Then, too, there is plenty of evidence that the rallying of Muslims to pan-Islamic causes is a matter of some significance in Pakistan's South Asian environment. Citing intelligence sources, the Indian news magazine India Today reported in September 1995, for instance, that at least 1,600 foreign Islamic militants had crossed the border into Kashmir during the summer of 1995 to fight on the side of the Kashmiri Muslim insurgents. Although this figure may not represent the actual foreign hijacking of the insurgency, it certainly indicates a major external influence.43
Enough has been said here, however, about other developments, both in Pakistan's past (the secession of Muslim East Bengal) and in its present (in regard to Afghanistan, for instance), to suggest that the trans-state Islamic bond has very definite limits. In Afghanistan's case alone, Pakistan finds itself presently at odds not only with numerous groups of Muslim Afghans (the regime of President Rabbani, and the Hekmatyar forces, for instance), but also with those Muslim states with which it is allied in the ECO (Shia-dominant Iran, for instance, or secular Uzbekistan), with which, for a variety of reasons, it does not see eye-to-eye in regard to Afghanistan's political future.44 To thoe instances, we could easily add others: the seeming preference of Muslim Kashmiris for independence of both India and Pakistan rather than for union with Pakistan; Pakistan's continuing refusal to take back the roughly 240,000 stranded (Urdu-speaking) Muslim Pakistanis, called "Biharis," who have been living in sixty-odd squalid camps in Dhaka and elsewhere in the Muslim state of Bangladesh (in what used to be East Pakistan) since 1971; and Pakistan's parallel plan, reportedly announced by its Interior Minister last November, for the compulsory deportation or "push-back" to Bangladesh of up to 1.6 million "illegal" Bangladeshi migrants claimed currently to be in Pakistan-a gesture that oddly mimics the anti-Bengali Muslim stance of the fiercely Hindu nationalist leader of India's Shiv Sena party, Bal Thackeray.45 It is certainly debatable, but I suspect that even India's 110 millionstrong Muslim minority is today far more a hostage to Pakistan's foreign policy than a willing ally of it. Tragic it may be, but the Islamic world that surrounds Pakistan is a world of bloody feuds and clashing factions-not one that seems ready to launch "the clash of civilizations," much less to take on the West.
In sum, Pakistan, under present circumstances in the Islamic world, is very likely to come up short of reliable Islamic allies. The pan-Islamic option, for all its bluster and for all its promise, is for most practical purposes (and certainly for Pakistan's basic security requirements) a fiction.
Domestic Liberalization Option
A theme common to most studies of Pakistan's post-independence political development, especially the more recent ones, is that the very early subordination of Pakistan's fledgling political institutions to the control, and the insatiable "corporate needs," of the Pakistan army crippled Pakistan politically while it perverted the mission (that of providing for Pakistan's security against real or potential external threats) of the military. Although the best of those studies allow tht the "military variable" is only one of several that set Pakistan on its early praetorian course, and that the military's almost immediate post-independence intervention in civil government was precipitated, at least in part, by the real threat to Pakistan's security that arose from Partition (and, in particular, from India's resentment of Partition's territorial and other consequences), the judgment is pervasive that Pakistan's insecurity today is far more the product of its past internal political failures than of any threatening force in its external security environment.46 A natural byproduct of this line of reasoning, obviously, is that determined and farreaching reform of Pakistan's domestic politics-what I call the domestic liberalization option-can have a remarkably positive impact on its international relations.47 This is simply to echo the claim, of course, of those Kantianinclined international relations theorists who believe that the surest way to international peace is via the spread domestically of liberal political institutions.48
One should question, of course, whether Pakistan's internal governance enjoys the positive causal connection with external relations that the theorists claim. And one should also question, given inevitable inertia in Pakistan's present internal political structure, ethno-cultural configuration, and demographic and socioeconomic circumstances, whether the redistributive policies implicit in the domestic liberalization option would soon produce the predicted enhancement in human well-being or simply sharpen the regional, ethnic, sectarian, and class polarizations that are already tearing at Pakistan's solidarity. Nevertheless, in principle at least, it would be hard to deny that Pakistan could profit from a redefinition of its security requirements that entailed endorsement of a shift in public expenditure from the military to social and economic welfare. Measured against most standard indices of human well-being, Pakistan does not fare very well, often not even in omparison with other low-income countries (including the other states of South Asia). According to a World Bank assessment of Pakistan completed last September, Pakistan's "total fertility rate"49 stands at 65 percent, and its infant mortality rate is 30 percent above the average for all low-income countries.50 As can be seen in table 7, Pakistan ranks in the cellar, too, in primary and secondary schooling. Especially marked is its poor standing in the category of female enrollment in school: of the 132 countries in the World Bank survey from which the sample here was selected, only 5 had a lower percentage than Pakistan of females in primary school in 1992; and only 18 showed a lower percentage than Pakistan of females in secondary school.51 In other standard categories of human development, such as literacy, life expectancy, and per capita share of GNP (table 8), Pakistan's ranking is similarly unenviable.
Indeed Pakistan has few other places to go than the military budget (barring the appearance of unusually generous foreign donors) to secure the resources to manage any such shift in public expenditure. Realistic alternatives to the military budget simply do not exist. Pakistan's Minister of Finance reportedly admitted in May 1991, for instance, that in fiscal year 1991-1992, debt servicing (53 percent) and defense expenditures (47 percent) would between them consume virtually 100 percent of central revenue receipts, and that "expenditures on development programs, public administration, and social sectors such as health and education would have to be met from external sources."52
[Table]Caption: Table 7.The elasticity of defense budgets is, of course, the focus of great controversy, and not only in Pakistan. In the United States, a larger end-of-Cold War "peace dividend" has yet to appear in spite of the fact that no truly credible adversary remains. Pakistan's principal adversary remains, of course, very much on the battlefield-at issue is whether it can be induced to withdraw.
Regional Cooperation Option
The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which formally associates all seven of the South Asian states (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives) in a large number of common projects aimed primarily at stimulating regional economic cooperation, has recorded a number of significant achievements since its founding in 1985. One of the most recent-and possibly the most momentous-was the signing by all seven countries in November 1995 of the South Asian Preferential Trading Arrangement (SAPTA), a plan for immediate mutual cutting of tariff barriers and eventual creation of a free trade zone.53 Symptomatic of the distance that regional cooperation has yet to go in South Asia, however, was the almost immediate decision by the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to refuse Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status to India, a status routinely granted to virtually all of a nation's regular trading partners.54The government allegedly was reacting to criticism that SAPTA threatened to compromise Pakistan's stand on Kashmir. Countless similar decisions affect virtually every dimension of India-Pakistan relations, even including sports, and account for the gloom in most discussions of South Asian prospects for heightened cooperation.55 In brief, the SAPTA accord and other occasional moves in the direction of cooperation are not reliable harbingers of a rising tide of regionalism in South Asia. India-Pakistan relations, in the face of persuasive arguments that the security of both states would be substantially enhanced were they to cooperate in such reas as energy and the environment,56 remain predominantly and stubbornly hostile. Significant improvement in their bilateral relations, even in their willingness or ability to conduct serious talks on the matters that divide them, faces stiff barriers. Each continues to view the other as a major threat and to engage relentlessly in acts of sabotage, espionage, diplomatic one-upmanship, and sabre-rattling, and not as potential regional partners.
Added to existing counter-regionalist influences-ranging from incommensurably huge differences in the prospective partners' relative size to deeply rooted religio-cultural differences57-are current, regional political trends. The trends represent a drift, it seems, in the direction of cultural militancy and nationalist extremism that threatens to wash away the political center. We noted earlier the Pakistan government's proclivity for trumpeting its Islamic identity and its inevitable role in the region as "guardian of the faith." While this identity has not paid off well electorally for the country's right-wing Islamist political parties, such as the strongly organized Jama'at-i-Islami, their mass-mobilizing talents and ability to apply pressure effectively at strategic points of the governmental apparatus make them a political factor to be reckoned with. As for the Indian side, I have noted the noticeably rightward drift in its politics-and of some of the worrisome consequences of that. Recent statements reportedly made by leaders of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) calling, for instance, for the "liberation" of (Pakistan-held) Azad Kashmir and for the building of nuclear weapons should not be written off as campaign rhetoric.58 I do not believe that a BJP victory in India's eleventh general elections, scheduled for April-May 1996, would spell much substantive change in India's foreign policies, including its policies toward Pakistan; nor do I think that it would usher in a new era in regional cooperation. There are far too many anti-Muslim and nti-Pakistan items on the Hindu right-wing's current political agenda to offer much hope for that.
Pakistani leaders are well advised to place this third option-regional cooperation-ahead of the others in spite of the relatively heavy odds against its rapid achievement. In fact, Pakistan's leaders should pursue this option much more energetically than in the past. For all of its shortcomings, and unlike the other two, this option addresses the problem of Pakistan's external security head-on by focusing directly on the regional military threat. In Pakistan's present circumstances, that threat, in both its conventional and nuclear forms, is simply too great to dismiss. The regional cooperation option does not dismiss it; on the contrary, it encourages the search for ways to reduce it. It may eventuate in enhanced regional cooperation; but it will have accomplished its mission if it does no more than lessen the menace of war.
Numerous proposals for implementing this option have been advanced, among them the so-called conflict-avoidance and confidence-building measures (CAMs/ CBMs), the breadth of whose definitions is limited only by the human imagination. The Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., has been a particularly fertile source of these.59 As Michael Krepon, the president of the Stimson Center, has recently acknowledged, they have unfortunately not taken root in South Asia. In fact, according to him,
the prospects for small steps to minimize tensions, let alone to promote political reconciliation, are modest at best over the near-term. Indeed, the greater likelihood in the near-term is that Indo-Pakistani relations will continue to worsen, . . .60
My own hunch is that at present CAMs/CBMs cannot on their own inspire at the present time anything like confidence between India and Pakistan. That, I believe, can only follow their successful negotiation of a mutual stand-down from the military brinkmanship that both are now practicing in Kashmir, an aim that only the most determied and persistent diplomacy, convinced of the utter futility of present behavior, can possibly achieve. Diplomacy of that kind, unfortunately, is nowhere in sight in South Asia.
Conclusion
Pakistan faces major challenges to its security. For some of these challenges, Pakistan's own political failings are unquestionably to blame. For others, however, blame has to be allocated more widely-elsewhere in the region, for instance, and at the level of global politics. Fashionable "postmodernist" arguments, maintaining that the Indian threat is largely contrived, "socially constructed" by Pakistan's corrupt and self-serving ruling elite, and that the task of liberating Pakistan from the bondage of insecurity can be accomplished mainly by reform from within, by overturning the "meta-narrative" of permanent IndiaPakistan enmity while at the same time liberating the captive masses, are mere caricatures of Pakistan's actual circumstances. These circumstances, in fact, do not leave Pakistan much room for maneuver: its options for overcoming or at least coping with the challenges are severely limited. For Pakistan to turn its back on South Asia (at least the Hindu core of it), a major implication of choosing the pan-Islamic option, is too dangerous, too self-defeating, and simply too unlikely of successful realization to make it attractive for Pakistan's security managers. The domestic liberalization option, in spite of its immense ideological appeal and seeming potential for materially improving the lot of Pakistanis, tackles the tenacious problem of Pakistan's external security mainly by trying to forget it.
Pressing in upon Pakistani decision makers are the unsettling possibilities that time may be running out for Pakistan, that its backwardness relative to other countries will severely damage its prospects in the twenty-first century, and that however unpalatable the choices before it may be, running the risk of applying them cannot be put off indefinitely. I have suggested that the regional cooperatio option is the only viable one for Pakistanis to pursue. We should entertain no illusions, however, that they will be quick to take it.
I have elsewhere described in some detail a number of initial steps that India and Pakistan might take in regard to the pivotal issue of Kashmir.61 Although I do not think that Kashmir is the only, or even the most important, obstacle to normalized India-Pakistan relations, I remain convinced that without some sign of progress in regard to Kashmir-which now symbolizes their enmity more than anything else-progress elsewhere in their relationship will be stifled. Unfortunately, however, the problem in South Asia is not really one of imagining steps that India and Pakistan might take toward peace. There is no doubt that Pakistanis and Indians, properly motivated, can be as fertile as we in recommending such steps.
The problem, more likely, is that the two governments are not yet convinced that the situation is urgent enough to warrant the prolonged and heavy expenditure of political capital that would certainly be required to bring both sides, seriously, to the negotiating table. Indians, for their part, face vast problems of political unrest, religious nationalism, and economic backwardness. They feel compelled, moreover, to maintain a powerful armed force against a still more powerful neighbor, China. At the same time, Indians display little interest in making concessions to Pakistan, which Indians believe, not unnaturally, labors to undermine India's international prestige while contributing significantly to its political unrest. Pakistanis, in turn, are understandably disturbed by the scale of economic, cultural, and military power growing beyond their eastern border, by the standing threat to their country's fragile Islamic identity represented by Indian secularism, and, not least, by India's mounting attractiveness to the world's great powers. Their leaders see little to be gained from negotiations, and they are terribly vulnerable, should they enter into them, t charges of betraying their nation's interests.
Redefining Pakistan's security in terms that we in the West might find more acceptable will certainly be difficult, and it may, for the time being at least, prove impossible. Until this changes, the rest of the world can help both with constant encouragement of dialogue between Indians and Pakistanis and, most important, with concrete and evenhanded political, military, and economic gestures toward the region that discourage fighting. But it will be well for us to keep in mind that making South Asia more secure is mainly a task that South Asians must perform. If this is so, perhaps it is our own patience and perseverance, oddly enough, that are most in need of cultivation.