The Pakistani Corner Has Become Even More Dangerous

And we’re back in Pakistan, the most dangerous corner of the world. Almanac data: a country with 187 million inhabitants — 95 percent are Muslim and 35 percent are less than 15 years old — bordering China, India, Iran and Afghanistan. There are sectors in the population that are virulently anti-Western and out of government control. One other detail: Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal (like its neighbor and rival India), with a history of exporting technology.

So it’s also a corner of very nebulous activities. Of course it was inconceivable (in the words of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan) that Osama bin Laden had a network of support in the country. After all, his “cave” was a fortified house in the heart of the country, a short walk away from the equivalent of West Point military academy. But who helped and how can the impunity be explained? All answers are disturbing, ranging from protection to incompetence.

Pakistan is a country of institutional duplicity. The government of President Asif Ali Zardari alleges that it did not know that the most wanted person in the world was in Abottabad. What’s more, he says that Pakistan has done its part in the battle against al-Qaida. What was the percentage of its involvement? It is easy enough to say the involvement was a joke. Zardari is known as “Mr. 10 Percent,” as a result of the allegations of corruption involving the commissions he was accustomed to receive when his wife, Benazir Bhutto, governed the country. But he is a widower. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by terrorists in December 2007.

It is conceivable that the weak civil government did not know of the comfortable cave in Abottabad. This is a more sympathetic government to the West. However, it has to set the scene for an audience with many anti-American aspects that now hisses against the violation of sovereignty that occurred with the operation to catch and kill Osama bin Laden.

The military and intelligence apparatus either pretended to not know, or it was simply an accomplice of terrorists. The relationship of this apparatus with the Americans is promiscuous. It plays for and against and, for lack of a better option, the Americans participate in this game. It’s worth keeping in mind that U.S. aid for people like Osama bin Laden during their struggle against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan 30 years ago was conducted across the then-Pakistani military regime.

Now back to the promiscuity of the present: there are sectors of this Pakistani military apparatus that sponsor extremist groups in the country and also the Taliban in Afghanistan. There are sectors that are actively or passively pro-al-Qaida. On the other hand, to trap and kill terrorist leaders thousands of Pakistani soldiers have already died in combat. It’s perfectly conceivable that sectors of the Pakistani military apparatus have facilitated the American operation against Osama bin Laden, however they didn’t know the details nor who the target was. The Pakistanis are always an accomplice of someone. They say one thing yet do another.

With this dangerous and foggy corner, French scholar Guy Sorman has an interesting take. He says that it is possible to conceive of the geographic boundaries of Pakistan, but the country is an illusion. It’s a loose mix of nations and ethnicities, with no common language and few common interests. The exception in this fragmentation is this military apparatus, of which the majority are of Punjabi descent, whose purpose is to battle India. Since the division of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, everything has been done according to this imperative: nuclear arsenal construction, sponsorship of divisions of Islamic terrorism (remember the attack on Mumbai in 2008) and support for the Taliban to impede any government in favor of the Indians in Kabul.

Osama bin Laden was convenient for this purpose by generating terror and instability, aside from impeding the U.S. from getting too close to India, to the extent that Washington now needs Pakistan to battle Islamic extremism. The country is vital in strategic terms but has no credibility.

So what should we do with this institutional duplicity in Pakistan? Writer Salman Rushdie (Muslim and Indian) wrote this week that Pakistan should be declared a terrorist state. Pakistan has components of a banana republic, but it is also a nuclear republic. Pakistan is not a head-on enemy of American or Western interests, but it should be treated with utmost suspicion.

And if Pakistan were actually declared an enemy, how would we deal with it? Confrontation is dangerous, as is abandonment. Maybe it would be ideal to provide fewer billions of dollars toward its military and give more aid toward its educational system (whose collapse contributed to the strengthening of madrasahs, religious schools which are the focus of recruitment for the jihadists). There is growing fizzling in Congress in Washington, by the way, against such generous aid.

It is better to keep some enemies or suspect elements close to us. There is no doubt that the episode of the operation that culminated in the death of Osama bin Laden is a serious challenge to the preservation of the institutional duplicity of Pakistan. But a definitive implosion in the most dangerous corner of the world would be a cursed legacy of the global star of terrorism.