“These violent delights have violent ends.”
William Shakespeare
“Romeo and Juliet”
The killing of Osama bin Laden within just a two-hour drive from Islamabad is probably the last nail in the cultural, religious and political basket-case that is Pakistan. The epitaph of the prodigal Saudi royal could well be: “Osama bin Laden: Adopted son of Pakistan.”
The confirmation that it had hidden the world’s most notorious terrorist so close to its bosom will ensure that Pakistan will forever be associated with bin Laden. Considering that the most infamous fugitive in history could live in relative luxury for five years, if not a decade, at just a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s seat of government precludes the credibility of any disclaimer from the Pakistani establishment. Pakistan President Asif Zardari’s claim in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Monday that bin Laden “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be,” is either supremely ludicrous or an admission of supreme incompetence.
While the number of people in the establishment who were complicit in sheltering bin Laden may be debatable, there can be little doubt that even those who were not directly in the know must have had at least an inkling of his existence in the country. Remember former President Pervez Musharraf’s emphatic claims that bin Laden was not hiding in Pakistan but in Afghanistan?
If there is any contrary argument to be made, it could be only that bin Laden and al-Qaida exercised considerable control even over influential factions of the Pakistani establishment, both anti-American Islamists and pro-Western liberals who are vulnerable or beholden to American perks and/or pressure.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the rise of Pakistani Taliban, deepening of sectarian violence across the country and the continued orchestration of terror against India could constitute the evidence of al-Qaida’s stratagems to keep the Pakistani establishment under control. In other words, top leaders – from Musharraf and the current Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to political figureheads like Zardari and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif – could have been compromised by al-Qaida in some measure or another.
Whatever be the case, Pakistan, it appears, has realized the “destiny” that it had actively sought since its inception in 1947 – to become a part of the Islamic Middle East in its desperate bid to contrive a civilizational identity distinct from India’s. But it is ironic that this comes at a time when the Middle East itself is tearing away from the kind of religious bigotry that caused its people to chafe under oligarchs for over half a century.
It is telling that bin Laden was entirely absent from the Arab Spring during which hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand, not the caliphate that al-Qaida has been propagating, but a secular liberal democracy. That leaves Pakistan as possibly the only country where posters, propaganda and pupils of bin Laden survive.
It would not be far-fetched to assume that successors to bin Laden’s al-Qaidaism will emerge from Pakistan more than from any other part of the Islamic world. It is, after all, the main source of extremely radicalized men who are educated, professionally trained and viscerally committed to an Islamic variant of nihilism. And they are spread across the world, particularly in Europe and America, with access to both the means and targets.
With a subhuman standard of living, sub-Saharan level of literacy and not even subsistence level of health care, Pakistan, with a nationalized absence of self-esteem, is a pristine catchment area for young people with indiscriminate rage that can only be abetted by the religious self-righteousness.
What makes irreversible Pakistan’s drift toward perdition is its nearly 70-year-old obsession with making religion the cornerstone of the state in an effort to unite disparate and fiercely independent ethnicities and minorities, unlike India, which, too, is cut from the same multiethnic fabric, and which, notwithstanding its ancient cultural and religious heritage, understood the state to be a modern concept made viable only by modernization – a combination of pluralism, secularism, socialism and capitalism.
Pakistanis, like many of their counterparts in other Islamic countries, don’t realize that their alienation is not from anti-Islamic America or anti-Islamic India, but from secular modernity.
The only Muslim leader to realize this fact of political evolution and helped save Turkey – once a proud civilization, a powerful empire and the seat of political Islam – from historical ignominy was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who said, “Before the impetuous torrent of modernization resistance is futile.”
Or a failure, he could have added, looking at bin Laden’s Pakistan.