Pakistan is an interesting case study in Imperial strategic organization. When western corporate forces removed their immediate presence from South Asia and divided up the massive territory that was then called India, the largely Punjabi pro-West Muslim leaders who made up the group that would go on to be the main power in Pakistan was rewarded for their loyalty to the British through two World Wars. When they created Pakistan, the new state was divided into two regions, East and West.

This post attempts to examine the nature of the schism created by political Islam among different cultural and ethnic groups in Pakistan by comparison to the unity created among different cultural and ethnic groups by early Islam.



The ruling elite and the organizational command structure of the Pakistani military were overwhelmingly culturally and ethnically based on West Pakistan, being made up of a majority of Punjabis, but also some Sindhi and Pashtun elements as well. East Pakistan was what is known today as Bangladesh, and made up about sixty percent of the combined population. Bengali Muslims were darker-skinned, spoke a different language, and their practice of Islam had picked up a lot of formal and ritual elements from Hinduism. This was a fact that was used to justify the militarily directed mass-rape of Bengali women by soldiers from West Pakistan when formal invasion (causing three million Bengali casualties- which is half the toll of the holocaust in less than a year) became necessary to control the populace after the democratic victory of the Bengali Awami in general Pakistani elections in 1970. Aside from these basic cultural differences, East and West Pakistan were also separated by over a thousand miles of India-controlled territory. The remote-controlled Empire had created a child in its own image. It was made in miniature, but possessing the same characteristics as its imperial father.

Islam was a religion that united disparate ethnic groups, that had previously been fighting with the ruling empires and with each other, by dispelling the cultural norms that kept various nomadic tribes from working together. Pakistan was a state, on the surface created along Islamic lines, which could never form a national identity that would be capable of overwhelming ethnic allegiances. The creators of Pakistan tried to use Islam for the same purpose as the prophet, but utterly failed where he had succeeded.

Western imperialism had learned to operate by remote control, with some help from the remnants of the Moghul Empire, and they decided to apply what they had discovered to their allies in Pakistan. Bengal was an obvious choice for a mini-colony situated according to the Imperial model. The Bengali conquest was one of the first major victories for corporate Imperialism. It was taken by the chartered armies of the British East India Company at the battle of Plassey in 1759. When the British, enervated by two world wars, finally withdrew almost two hundred years later, it was left in the hands of their local allies.

But as I said, this new nation was created in the image of its Imperial father. Being a microcosm of western Imperialism, we can make some observations about the fate of our own civilization by looking at what took place in Pakistan.

“The majority view in the Punjab was that drunk and incompetent generals combined with Indian military intervention had lost them Pakistan. As I have argued, this was a simplistic chauvinist view that ignored the structural exploitation of East Bengal by a predominantly West Pakistan-based elite.”

-Tariq Ali, Pakistan: On the Flight Path to American Power, p. 105

The wealth from the Bengal province’s massive agricultural production was mostly redistributed in West Pakistan, and mostly used for creature comforts, consumer products, and fancy living.

“The resulting distribution was at the expense of the peasantry, but few cared. US economic advisors echoed Papanek’s [Harvard economist] view that ‘great inequalities were necessary in order to create industry and industrialists,’ and that the growth generated in this fashion would lead to ‘real improvement for the lower income groups.’ This was what later, in the era of globalization, became known as the trickle-down effect. It did not work then as it does not work now. The upper-income groups in the towns paid no taxes and illegally moved their money abroad. Little was invested in the productive non-agricultural sector. Even the official planning commission set up by the government bewailed the bad habits of the city elite in West Pakistan. Keith B. Griffin, an Oxford economist well versed in the economic problems confronting the country, produced a report showing that between 63 and 83 percent of saving transferred from agriculture were wasted in non-productive extravagances, i.e. the sumptuous style created by nouveaux riches. Griffin went on to point out that in West Pakistan ‘the potential surplus of these savings units was used to consume more, to buy more ornaments, jewellery and consumer durables and to bid up the prices of real estate and farm lands, helping their owners disinvest. Often such surplus was devoted to luxury house construction or to open up one more retail store in the already crowded streets and bazaars.’”

-Ali p.61

Like I said… in the image of its father…

So what is the result of this kind of economic strangulation of a distant land for the profit of those at home?

Ideologically democratic, the west goes about offering democracy to the people that it has just invaded, and when they cast their vote for the leader they want, the empire immediately overturns the result. This is not an effective long-term strategy. It requires those in authority absolutely must embrace hypocrisy, and embrace it with passion. That’s the sort of thing that drives people to revolt. In order to justify their Imperial ambitions to the voting public, democratically elected leaders must affirm their commitment to democracy and claim to be working to advance the cause of that ideology. They can’t actually do this, because the democratically elected governments that would spring up in their conquered territories would be naturally hostile to western corporate interests.

Pakistan has dealt with this problem; in a far more direct way, for its political life from 1947 until the creation of Bangladesh. When the Bengali majority toppled the Muslim League government in provincial polls in 1954, General Ayub Khan was prompted by the Britain and the USA to assume military control of Pakistan.

Bengali conversion to Islam was a relatively recent phenomenon. Like in many predominately Hindu areas, one of the key motivating factors behind this was a desire to find religious expression while escaping the tyrannical caste system imposed by most forms of Hinduism. Because Bengali Islam was fairly new, a new social class had been created. Whether we’re looking at the beginning of Christianity or the Industrial revolution, such an event always creates unrest among those of the old order.

In a sense, this capacity to free people of their society’s previously established hierarchy was the reason that Islam was so successful to begin with. As I noted in my post on the Mongol creed, a successful revolutionary ideology must uproot the established class system in the society it seeks to dominate, and replace it with its own. Islam had achieved that in the Bengal province to the extent that it created a comfortable middle-class among the Bengalis, which were not beholden to the feudal Hindu system, but had not won the imperial favor enjoyed by Punjabi Muslims.

Pakistan’s Imperial masters, because it was beholden neither to aristocratic tradition or a predictable caste system, saw this group as dangerous. The Awami League ran on a campaign that (Ali, p. 62) amounted to “no taxation without representation.” Bengali agricultural profits had been redirected to West Pakistan to be enjoyed by a minority elite that was in the pocket of Britain and the USA. Popular democratic ideals prompted this elite to hold elections, but their own needs and the needs of those who created the state of Pakistan prompted them to overturn the results. The masses in East Pakistan saw through this rather thin façade, and a revolt began which finally drove the West Pakistani military to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Bangladesh was formed because of the massive popular uprising, and because, as the west had planned, they were surrounded by a foreign power that was hostile toward their pseudo-Imperial masters in West Pakistan. This part of the matter is pretty straightforward. What is striking is the contrast to early Islam. In the beginning, Islam overcame ethnic and cultural differences to unite a people into a nation of believers. Pakistan, however, was a state that contained multiple nations. There were, to name a few, Punjabis, Sindh, Bengalis, Pashtun and others, not to mention Sikhs and Hindus belonging to those ethnic groups as well. The idea behind Pakistan was to create an Islamic state, but Mohammed al-Jinnah was a secularly minded individual. He failed to understand the necessity of defining the new state as such, hoping to keep Pakistan to some extent a secular nation. Tariq Ali lauds him for this, but I see this as the mistake that allowed a great deal of the nonsense that followed to take place.

Maulana Maududi and his Deobandi fundamentalists could never have exercised the influence that they did in a Pakistan that had a clearly defined political notion of Islam, in much the same way that the secular quality of the USA allowed Christian fundamentalists to slip under the radar and swarm the White House. In the secular west, religious beliefs are seen as a personal thing, and we consider it poor taste to question them too deeply. In post-Jinnah Pakistan, Maududi’s followers succeeded in muddying the definition of Islam to the point that they could have their political enemies declared kaffirs and heretics when it became expedient for weak leaders to curry favor with the likes of the Islamic Party. Additionally, toads like Ayub Khan and Muhammed Zia-ul-haq could never have seized control of a truly religious state. They were common mercenaries.

Pakistan declares itself to be an Islamic nation, but it has no definite legal idea of what that means. Just sit back and use your imagination for a second. That set-up gives an opportunistic plutocracy a great deal of wiggle room to advance its agenda. Which means it was not an accident.

Early Islam united people of different backgrounds in a common jihad because it gave them a weapon against imperialism. Pakistan’s leaders were on the side of the invading empire after the Syed Ahmed Khan did his tour of Europe, and convinced European leaders to give the minority Muslims authority to act as the Bantustan “keepers” of the Hindu majority, and later of non-Punjabi Muslim ethnic groups, as well as Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus.

The point?

Being on the side of the foreign tyrant, the rule of the West Pakistan elite accentuated, rather than overcoming, the ethnic and cultural differences of the people of Pakistan.