19 January 2012
The Risk of Islamist Coups
By Gwynne Dyer
The eastern half of what used to be Pakistan narrowly escaped a military coup last month. Brigadier Masud Razzak, the spokesman of the Bangladeshi army, announced on Thursday (19 January) that “A band of fanatic officers has been trying to oust the politically established government. Their attempt has been foiled.”
They had “extreme religious views,” he said, and revealed that some of the sixteen conspirators, all of them current or former military officers, will soon appear before a military court. For a country with a dismal history of military coups, some of them very violent, it was a heartening outcome. But it was also a reminder of where the real danger lies in the subcontinent.
If the country called Pakistan that got its independence from Britain in 1947 were still a single state, it would be the fourth biggest nation on the planet, with over 300 million people. However, its two halves were separated by 1,500 km (1,000 mi.) of Indian territory, and had little in common apart from having Muslim majorities. That Pakistan only lasted 24 years, and broke apart amid much bloodshed in 1971.
Since then, the two successor states have taken different paths. Bangladesh has no major disputes with its giant Indian neighbour, and spends relatively little on its military. The part that is still called Pakistan, on the other side of India, has a huge territorial dispute with India over Kashmir, a history of wars with its neighbour, and very serious armed forces. It also has a history of coups. And Islamist fanatics in the officer corps. And nuclear weapons.
There are reasons to hope that the worst days are past in both countries. The military relinquished supreme power in Bangladesh twenty years ago, and the country is a functioning (but very turbulent) democracy. Pakistan also has a democratic government now – the army officially left power in 2001, although a general went on running the government until 2008 – but the army still overshadows it.
But it is not generals seizing power in Pakistan that worries foreign governments. It is the fear that middle-ranking Islamist fanatics in the army might stage a successful coup and get their hands on those nuclear weapons. They would be people quite similar in their beliefs to the officers whose coup has just been foiled in Bangladesh – but Bangladesh doesn’t have nuclear weapons.
A coup by Islamist officers in Bangladesh would be seen by most foreigners as deeply regrettable but mostly of only local interest. A coup by Islamist officers in Pakistan would unleash the Mother of All Panics.
An Indian strategist once told me, off the record, what he thought would happen about six hours after news of an Islamist coup in Pakistan reached the rest of the world. There would be a huge “traffic jam” over Kahuta and other major Pakistani nuclear weapons facilities as the Indian, Iranian, American and Israeli air forces all tried to keep the nuclear weapons out of the hands of the fanatics by destroying them.
It wouldn’t succeed, because Pakistan already has more than fifty nuclear weapons, and it keeps them dispersed precisely to thwart that kind of attack. The Israeli air force couldn’t really reach Pakistan (although Pakistan has missiles that could reach Israel). A few other details in the strategist’s scenario also ring false – but it is basically credible.
So how likely is an Islamist military coup in Pakistan? About as likely as it is in Bangladesh, which is to say unlikely, but not unimaginable. In this one thing, the two armies are alike – and quite different from those of most other Muslim countries.
In almost all other Muslim countries, the armies take great care to ensure that Islamist officers do not rise very high in rank: they may make captain, but they won’t make colonel. This is because the generals know that they can’t be trusted. The generals themselves are mostly faithful Muslims, but they must protect the integrity of the military institution they serve, and that means no Islamists in positions of real power.
Islamists, by definition, cannot give their full loyalty to the army or the state. Ultimately, they serve an imagined Islamic caliphate that would sweep away even the country they are supposed to serve. Their lesser loyalties are purely tactical and transitory. So the armies have never let them near real power – except in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In both cases, this anomaly was created by military dictators who made pragmatic alliances with religious extremists as part of their strategy for holding on to power. General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan and General Ziaur Rahman in Bangladesh allowed Islamists to be promoted into the higher ranks in their respective armies, and although they are now long gone that policy continues, especially in Pakistan.
All previous military interventions in politics in Pakistan have been done by the army as an institution, acting in obedience to its lawful commanders. That kind of thing would not radically change Pakistan’s policies towards the rest of the world. But if middle-ranking Islamist officers were to break the chain of command and seize power, like their comrades in Bangladesh intended to do, then all bets would be off.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9 and 13. (“It wouldn’t…credible”); and (“In both…Pakistan”)
28 August 2011
Nigeria and Boko Haram
by Gwynne Dyer
On Sunday Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, visited the scene of last week’s bombing at the United Nations office in Abuja, the capital, and said the sort of things that presidents must say on such occasions. Since the UN was involved, he said that it had been not just an attack on Nigeria, but on the whole international community. But then he said that the group behind the blast, Boko Haram, was a “local problem” that would be dealt with.
So which is it? An attack on the whole international community, or just a local problem? The answer is important, especially for Nigeria itself. “Attacks on the international community” are basically meaningless. What is the international community going to do? Surrender? But attacks on Nigeria’s unity, though just a “local problem”, are a very serious threat to Africa’s biggest country.
The miracle is that the 150 million Nigerians still live in the same country at all. Nigeria fought a bloody civil war to stop the secession of the south-east region, the main source of the country’s oil riches, only seven years after getting its independence in 1960.
That war was triggered by a military coup by military officers from the Muslim north of the country which inaugurated a period of three decades during Nigeria’s rulers were mostly Muslim generals from the north. The north is much poorer than the Christian south, but the generals ended up very rich.
Democracy returned to Nigeria only in the past decade, and the unwritten deal was that the presidency would alternate between Muslim leaders from the north and Christian politicians from the south. It made sense for a country split almost exactly between Christians and Muslims, but the deal depended on the traditional feudal rulers of the north retaining their influence over the Muslim community. However, that has been eroding for decades.
The sheikhs’ main strategy for stopping the rot was to emphasise their religious role, and religion in general: around 2000, twelve Muslim-majority states of Nigeria adopted Sharia law, even though some contain large Christian minorities. The strategy did not halt the decline of the sheikhs’ power, but it certainly created an environment in which Islamist extremists could prosper.
Boko Haram was founded in Maiduguri in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf, a radical local cleric. He preached that Muslims should shun all aspects of “Western” society, including secular education and democracy, and live in strict conformity with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.
The sect that he created advocated jihad against Nigeria’s rulers, and by 2009 Boko Haram had grown so popular that the Maiduguri state government sent the police to attack Mohammed Yusuf’s mosque and compound. His followers fought back, and hundreds were killed in street battles. Mohammed Yusuf himself was captured by the Nigerian army, and subsequently murdered by the police.
That did not put an end to Boko Haram (the name roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden”). New leaders emerged, and its local support soared. The terrorist attacks began shortly afterwards, at first in Maiduguri and neighbouring states, but by last December they reached the national capital.
Since then the violence has escalated rapidly, with a bomb at national police headquarters in Abuja in May and now on the UN headquarters in the same city. The last attack killed 23 people and injured more than 80; it’s getting serious. And what makes it so much more dangerous than similar attacks by Islamist extremists in countries like Pakistan and Iraq is the fact that half of Nigeria’s population is Christian.
Boko Haram kills Muslims who speak out against it, too. In Maiduguri, it’s now almost impossible to find any official who will discuss the problem on the record. But if its attacks sow enough mistrust between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria – which is probably its intention, and certainly the result of its actions – then the miracle of Nigerian unity may finally falter and fail.
It’s the north that would lose the most if Nigeria fell apart, for the oil is all in the south. But everybody would pay a lot, for the division of the country would imply massive movements of the minorities: Christians fleeing the north, and Muslims fleeing the south. It would be a catastrophe comparable to the division of India and Pakistan in 1947.
The situation in Nigeria has not reached that point yet. It may never do so. But Boko Haram has more support across the north than is publicly admitted, and there are politicians on both sides of the religious divide who are willing to exploit the fear and the hatred that its actions create. Such people exist in every country: they only need the right set of circumstances to come out into the light.
Nigeria’s problem is “local” in the sense that Boko Haram is a homegrown movement, not a branch office of al-Qaeda. But that actually makes it much harder for the Nigerian government to isolate and suppress it. It is a very big problem, and Goodluck Jonathan’s government shows no sign of knowing what to do about it.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 13. (“Boko…fail”; and “The situation…light”)
4 March 2011
Pakistan: A Deathly Silence
By Gwynne Dyer
At least with a dictatorship, you know where you are – and if you know where you are, you may be able to find your way out. In Pakistan, it is not so simple.
While brave Arab protesters are overthrowing deeply entrenched autocratic regimes, often without even resorting to violence, Pakistan, a democratic country, is sinking into a sea of violence, intolerance and extremism. The world’s second-biggest Muslim country (185 million people) has effectively been silenced by ruthless Islamist fanatics who murder anyone who dares to defy them.
What the fanatics want, of course, is power, but the issue on which they have chosen to fight is Pakistan’s laws against blasphemy. They not only hunt down and kill people who fall afoul of these laws, should the courts see fit to free them. They have also begun killing anybody who publicly advocates changing the laws.
Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, Pakistan’s richest and most populous province, was murdered by his own bodyguard in January because he criticised the blasphemy laws and wanted to change them. He said that he would go on fighting them even if he was the last man standing – and in a very short time he was no longer standing. But one man still was: Shahbaz Bhatti.
Bhatti was shot down last Wednesday. The four men who ambushed his car and filled him with bullets left a note saying: “In your fight against Allah, you have become so bold that you act in favour of and support those who insult the Prophet….And now, with the grace of Allah, the warriors of Islam will pick you out one by one and send you to Hell.”
Shahbaz Bhatti was not a rich and powerful man like Salman Taseer, nor even a major power in the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) that they both belonged to. He was the only Christian member of the cabinet, mainly as a token representative of the country’s 3 million Christians, but he had hardly any influence outside that community. Nevertheless, he refused to stop criticising the blasphemy laws even after Taseer’s murder, so they killed him too.
That leaves only Sherry Rehman, the last woman standing. A flamboyant member of parliament whose mere appearance enrages the beards, she has been a bold and relentless critic of the blasphemy laws – and since Taseer’s murder she has lived in hiding, moving every few days. But she will not shut up until they shut her up.
And that’s it. The rest of the country’s political and cultural elite have gone silent, or pander openly to the fanatics and the bigots. The PPP was committed to changing the blasphemy laws only six months ago, but after Taseer was killed President Asif Ali Zardari assured a gathering of Islamic dignitaries that he had no intention of reviewing the blasphemy laws. Although they are very bad laws.
In 1984 General Zia ul-Haq, the dictator who ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, made it a criminal offence for members of the Ahmadi sect, now some 5 million strong, to claim that they were Muslims. In 1986 he instituted the death penalty for blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. No subsequent government has dared to repeal these laws, which are widely used to victimise the Ahmadi and Christian religious minorities.
Ahmadis and Christians account for at most 5 percent of Pakistan’s population, but almost half of the thousand people charged under this law since 1986 belonged to those communities. Most accusations were false, arising from disputes over land, but once made they could be a death sentence.
Higher courts generally dismissed blasphemy charges, recognising that they were a tactic commonly used against Christians and Ahmadis in local disputes over land, but 32 people who were freed by the courts were subsequently killed by Islamist vigilantes – as were two of the judges who freed them.
The current crisis arose when a Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, was sentenced to death last November, allegedly for blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad. Pakistan’s liberals mobilised against the blasphemy law – and discovered that they were an endangered species.
The murders of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti were bad, but even worse was the way that the political class and the bulk of the mass media responded. A majority of the population fully supports the blasphemy law, making it very costly for politicians to act against it even if the fanatics don’t kill them. Political cowardice reigns supreme, and so Pakistan falls slowly under the thrall of the extremists.
Being a democracy is no help, it turns out, because democracy requires people to have the courage of their convictions. Very few educated Pakistanis believe that people should be executed because of a blasphemy charge arising out of some trivial village dispute, but they no longer dare to say so. Including the president.
”We will not be intimidated nor will we retreat,” said Zardari on 3 March, but he has already promised the beards that the blasphemy law will not be touched. Nor is it very likely that the murderers of Taseer or Bhatti will be tracked down and punished. You could get killed trying to do that.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 11. (“That leaves…up”; and “Higher…them”)
Gwynne Dyer’s new book, “Climate Wars”, is distributed in most of the world by Oneworld.
20 August 2010
Pakistan: A Question of Water
By Gwynne Dyer
This may not be the most tactful time to bring it up, with much of Pakistan underwater and many millions homeless, but Pakistan’s real problem is not too much water. It is too little water – and one day it could cause a war.
The current disastrous floods (to which the response of both the Pakistan government and the international community has been far too slow) are due to this year’s monsoon being much stronger than usual. But that is just bad weather, in the end: every fifty or one hundred years you can expect the weather to do something really extreme. It comes in various forms – blizzards, floods, hurricanes – but it happens everywhere.
The long-term threat to Pakistan’s well-being is that the country is gradually drying out. The Indus river system is the main year-round source of water for both Pakistan and north-western India, but the glaciers up on the Tibetan plateau that feed the system’s various tributaries are melting.
While they are melting, of course, the amount of water in the system will not fall steeply – but according the Chinese Academy of Sciences, some of the glaciers will be gone in as little as twenty years. Then the river levels will drop permanently, and the real problems will begin.
When India and Pakistan got their independence from Britain in 1947, there was plenty of waters in the Indus system for everyone. In fact, almost half the water was still flowing into the Arabian Sea unused. But the population has grown fast over the years, especially on the Pakistani side of the border – from 34 million in 1947 to 175 million now – and the amount of water in the rivers has not.
The per capita supply of water in Pakistan has fallen from over 5,000 cubic metres (175,000 cu.ft.) annually in 1947 to only about 1,000 cubic metres (35,000 cu.ft.) today, a level defined by the United Nations as “high stress”. Ninety-six percent of that goes to irrigation, and the Indus no longer reaches the sea in most years. That’s what has already happened, even before the melting of the glaciers has gone very far.
Fifteen or twenty years from now, the water shortage (and therefore also food scarcities) will be a permanent political obsession in Pakistan. Even now, Pakistani politicians tend to blame India for their country’s water shortage (and vice versa, of course). It will get worse when the shortage grows acute.
What turns a problem into a potential conflict is the fact that five of the six tributaries that make up the Indus system cross Indian-controlled Kashmir on their way to Pakistan. There is a treaty, dating from 1960, that divides the water between the two countries, with India getting the water from the eastern three rivers and Pakistan owning the flow from the western three. But the treaty contains a time-bomb.
India’s three rivers contain only about one-fifth of the system’s total flow. To boost India’s share up to around 30 percent, therefore, the World Bank arbitrators proposed that the treaty also let India extract a certain amount of water from two of Pakistan’s rivers before they leave Indian territory. The proposal was reluctantly accepted by Pakistan.
The amount is not small – it is, in fact, enough water to irrigate 320,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) – and it is a FIXED amount, regardless of how much water there actually is in the river. Now roll the tape forward twenty years: the glacial melt-water is coming to an end, and the total flow of the Indus system is down by half. But almost all of the loss is in Pakistan’s three rivers, since the smaller Indian three do not depend heavily on glaciers.
So India is still getting as much water as ever from the eastern three rivers, AND it is still taking its full treaty allocation of water from two of Pakistan’s rivers, although they do depend on glacial melt-water and now have far less water in them. As a result, India’s total share of the Indus waters rises sharply (and quite legally) just as Pakistanis start to starve.
In these circumstances, would an Indian government voluntarily take less water than the treaty allows? Get real. India will be having difficulties with its food supply too, though it will not be in such grave trouble as Pakistan. Any Indian government that “gave India’s water away” would promptly be driven from power – by parliament if it was the usual fractious coalition, or by voters at the next election if it were an unusually disciplined single party.
On the other hand, no Pakistani government, civilian or military, could just sit by as land that has been irrigated for a century goes back to desert and food rationing is imposed nationwide. Especially not if India’s fields just across the border were still green. That is the nightmare confrontation that lies down the road for these two nuclear powers.
Meanwhile, the homes of millions of Pakistanis are underwater. In terms of human suffering, it is twenty times worse than Hurricane Katrina was in the United States five years ago, and it needs a proportionate response now. But the future holds something much worse for Pakistan (and for India), unless they start revising this fifty-year-old treaty now, before the crisis arrives.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 6. (“When…far”)