Motus Mentis

While everyone is concentrating on the details of the death of Osama bin Laden, and on what his extinction will mean for the War on Terror, the more interesting question is what will happen in Pakistan. Don’t be surprised if all hell breaks loose.

Our relationship with Pakistan is excruciatingly difficult. As a “secular democracy”, Pakistan is, ostensibly at least, the enemy of our enemy, jihadist Islam — but only sort of, as sympathies within the ISI and the military are clearly divided. At the same time, though, it is also the enemy of our friend: India.

Because Pakistan controls a nuclear arsenal, we have a clear interest in doing what we can to maintain a working relationship with its government and military (if a clear distinction can be made between them), and in doing what we can to prop them up against a determined fundamentalist insurgency of which a great many Pakistanis (not all of them civilians) are partisan supporters. To further this interest we provide a steady flow of money and weapons, despite the fact that much of our largesse ends up where we wouldn’t like to think of it going. (Particularly worrying, especially in light of recent proposals to send state-of-the-art drones to Pakistan, is the cozy relationship between Islamabad and Beijing; it is reasonable to assume that any technology we provide to Pakistan will end up being reverse-engineered in Chinese laboratories.)

Meanwhile the USA is deeply unpopular in Pakistan (viscerally loathed might be a better way of putting it), and so the government’s cooperation with America, and with the secular West generally, is an enormous political liability; the regime exists with the consent and loyalty of only a fraction of its people. Our uneasy alliance with Pakistan, in other words, is a costly one on both ends.

What, in turn, are Pakistan’s interests? As always, local trumps global, and along with its homegrown insurgency, Pakistan’s overarching concern is its contiguous foe, nuclear-armed India. The nightmare scenario for Pakistan would be if Afghanistan, once the US departs (as it inevitably will), were to fall under India’s sway; such an encirclement would be a strategic disaster, and Islamabad must do everything it can to prevent it. With this in mind Pakistan has, since at least the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, allied itself with various Afghan militias and tribal factions, to ensure that it can influence Afghanistan’s internal balance of power. These interests and alliances, however, no longer coincide with US interests in the region, as they did during the 1980s, and this divergence makes for a great deal of uncertainty and duplicity as regards tactical cooperation and the sharing of intelligence.

Finally, the secular regime stands on very shaky ground these days. There have been waves of assassinations in recent months — notably, killings of prominent secularist officials for their stand against blasphemy laws — and anti-Western, Islamist sentiment has been running very high indeed. The Raymond Davis case brought things very nearly to a boil, and civil violence now erupts at the slightest provocation. The place is a tinderbox, a powderkeg — choose your metaphor — and although Osama bin Laden may not have been a wildly popular figure in Pakistan, the idea that the Pakistani government sold him out to the US may be enough to light the fuse. Both the US and Pakistan are bending over backward to deny any involvement by Pakistan in the operation, but this is surely just a cover story, and I doubt many will be fooled by it.

Pakistan is the most dangerous place on earth right now. I wonder what will happen next.