Pakistan - The Country

It just goes to show, doesn't it? You can't turn your back for five minutes before the Karachi Kids are up to all sorts of things in DP's absence. The boyz in Pakistan have had a very busy time of late: there've been nuclear bombs to test, a minor war to conduct with India over Kashmir, attempted assassinations to carry out (or dodge), and the usual political squabbles with games of musical chairs to play between the military and the politicians; then of course they've had to spare a bit of time to trash the imperialist hyenas (the Brits) at cricket. No, the big news in Pakistan this year, or at least just as DP was going to press, is that when the music stopped the military were all sitting in the right seats. The politicos were all left standing. Or to be more accurate the Prime Minister was left sitting under house arrest, wondering if it really had been such a good idea to fire his military chief of staff. Probably not, on balance. That said, given that the last military dictator in Pakistan died in an awfully convenient plane crash, perhaps General Musharraf had better watch his steps (or his flights). For the moment, though, Pakistan is back under tender, loving military rule; and no one appears to care very much. Most of the population were too busy switching back to MTV to bother with anything as radical as a protest. I mean, what difference does it make when about 5 percent of the population actually bother paying their taxes? No big surprise there, when you consider the mess the politicos appear to have made of the place of late. We at DP aren't too hot on politics, but Pakistans's politicos really are in a league of their own. Take Benazir Bhutto. Her father, Ali Bhutto, was the chap who got his neck stretched by the last military ruler, General Zia ul-Huq when he took over in 1977. He was hanged after there were more votes counted (for him) than there were people voting! His daughter, herself an ex-Prime Minister, has been sentenced to a few years in the clink on corruption charges. She wisely now leads the opposition from abroad. Nawaz Sharif has had to contend with assassination attempts (he got away), corruption charges (he wriggled out . . . just), a military coup (which he didn't handle very well), and now a few more corruption charges while the generals spin a coin for heads (guilty) or tails (a retrial . . . that's to say another toss of the coin until it comes up heads).

In the meantime, Pakistan rather unsportingly had its membership of the Commonwealth suspended. Some people have no sense of humor. The good news, which you might have guessed by now, is that it doesn't really matter who is in control in Pakistan. The country still attracts planeloads of trekkers, hippies, and hard-core mountain climbers to discover some of the world's most rugged scenery, smoke a bit of hash and explore many of the wild and dangerous areas. British adventurers, such as writer Rudyard Kipling and explorer Sir Richard Burton, maintained a healthy respect for the "wily Pathans," who have always controlled the remote mountainous regions of northwest and the arid southwest of Pakistan.

The North-West tribal areas of Pakistan have never really felt the presence of any government, let alone tourists. Here Pashto-speaking tribes and warlike clans maintain their own social, political and military structures, free from politics, taxes and MTV. Many of the more entrepreneurial tribes still view travelers and visitors as walking CARE packages. Today, Pakistan is a crude welding together of four semiautonomous provinces Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan. It also encompasses federally administered tribal and northern areas (FATA/FANA) and lays claim to the Indian-administered but mostly Muslim states of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The teeming population of Pakistan is as diverse as it is large. Its 130 million people are comprised of Punjabi (56 percent), Sindi (23 percent), Pashtun (13 percent), Baluchi (5 percent) and others, including Mohajirs, or Urdu-speaking Muslim emigres from India. Pakistan is dirt-poor, even by African standards. The per-capita annual income in 1992 was US$410. Thirty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and only 35 percent of the population can read and write. Only 20 percent of Pakistani females can read and write, and barely 40 percent of children of primary school age were actually enrolled in schools. Poverty aside, Pakistan remains a country that still tops the list of any adventurer.

The bad news about Pakistan, (which is why Pakistan rates in DP), is that it has had some of the worst political violence of any regional country that is not in the middle of a declared war. Starting in the mid 1980s the violence began in Karachi, spread to the Punjab and as DP went to press had infected the previously immune diplomatic center of Islamabad. Doesn't sound good. Cheap weapons and heroin, freely available from neighboring Afghanistan have fostered a massive gun culture that almost equals the United States'; drug addiction (there are estimated to be as many as 4 million drug addicts in Pakistan) and rampant corruption are also the norm in Pakistan. That, of course, is the here and the now.

If you wanna know the "why" for all this, well, it goes back to the last guy who liked military parades and shoving the politicos on trial: General Zia ul-Huq. To get to the point, he rammed through a whole load of religious laws in the '80s that suited the Sunni majority, but not the 10-15 percent Shia population. (The first step on the proverbial banana skin.) Then he set up the madrassehs, or religious schools, for the not-so-rich-kids. They might have been called religious schools, but when Saudi Arabian "Wahabi" sects began to sponsor the schools they ended up churning out the Sunni Islamic version of Terminator II. Not much to look at maybe, but sure as hell packs a punch. (You don't, by the way, get any prizes for guessing where the Taliban emerged from.)

To get the picture here, you've got to see all this happening within the context of the Afghan (predominately Sunni) "jihad" against the Soviets and the (mainly Shias) Iranian revolution and the ensuing Iran-Iraq war. It's kinda complicated and-I'm afraid -gets even more complicated. Suffice to say both Sunni and Shia political parties began to get religious with something of a martial flavor to their daily "let's all tune in to God" meetings. The Sunnis and Shias, from tolerating (and even liking) each other began to exchange bursts of gun fire instead of "hellos." So a whole load of tit for tat killings started, which quickly spiralled into all out massacres of worshippers of the other faith. All rather unpleasant, really. Groups emerged, leaders were killed, more violent splinter groups emerged . . . it's all horrifically complicated and about as easy to untangle as a couple of mating cobras. But, at risk of ridicule, we at DP will have a go.

In the Sunni corner a whole string of groups emerged dedicated to trashing Shias: the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), previously known as the Society for the Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet (at least they shortened the name), set themselves up in the Punjab. Needless to say, they were not wild about Shias. In 1990 their top dog, Nawaz Jhangvi, bit the dust in a hail of bullets. Not to be outdone a few of the less literate Shia kids set up the Sipah-e Mohammed Pakistan (SMP) and had a laugh a minute gunning down just about anyone who was Sunni that they didn't like. Some even less literate Sunnis boyz took one look at them, said "what a bunch of wimps" and set up their own little-more fanatical anti-Shia-group, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), named after the wasted chief of the SSP. If you're a DPer and ever happen to be in the Punjab you might like to know that these kids like to hang around Shia mosques. They can be identified by the large machine guns and their tendency to spray bullets in an indiscriminate manner. So, that's the local side of things dealt with.

Well, sort of . . . I guess I'd better mention that relations with India haven't been too cool recently. Pakistan still has claims over Kashmir, and in 1999 the two countries had a bit of a squabble over the region. It started with the infiltration of a few (thousand) guerrillas from Pakistan, continued with an artillery duel on the border, got a bit heavier as troops from both countries battled it out for a couple of months, but cooled down before either side used their nukes. I mean, after all, what politician wants to go down as the ass who got half his country destroyed in an afternoon? So, two questions. Did Pakistan gain anything from its nice little two month war with India? And why did they start it? The answer to the first question is pretty much, er, a resounding "no." To the second, well . . . they figured that a bit of a war (with both sides armed with nukes), might panic the international community enough to make them persuade India to redraw the borders over the disputed areas. But as nobody gave a damn what was happening on some godforsaken mountain top in the middle of nowhere, it didn't work. In 1998 Pakistan officially joined the nuclear club, exploding five nuclear bombs in the Baluchistan desert. Just to rub the point in, Pakistan's equivalent to Dr. Strangelove (nuclear scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan), held a bit of a press conference to have a quick gloat over how his atomic bomb was better than India's, not to mention that the Pakistani Ghauri missile was much better than the Indian Agni missile (that's what he said, at least). Everyone else started putting in orders for underground nuclear shelters. He's the top man in Pakistan when it comes to building nuclear bombs. He's also top of a few other lists, too. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (for it is he) is wanted in Holland for stealing classified information from the Almelo uranium enrichment plant. The Dutch government has kindly offered to put him up for free for a whole 4 years if he ever wants to drop by Amsterdam again. The international Atomic Energy Agency would also like a chat with Dr. Khan over minor allegations that he even (very naughty, this) offered to sell atomic secrets to the Thief of Baghdad (yes, our very own Saddam Hussein). If you, too, want to meet Pakistan's equivalent to Dr. Strangelove, then DP will give you a head start. He likes to hang out at the top secret Kahuta plant, where the uranium enrichment program is run, not far from Islamabad.

For those of you DPers thinking of a trip to Pakistan, you should know that U.S. citizens aren't really flavor of the decade at the moment, at least among some sections of Pakistani society (the heavily armed, lunatic section, that is). In August 1999 a Pakistani religious scholar (mufti) declared that U.S. citizens were all fair game. Nizam-ud-din Shamzai's charming little declaration that "the spilling of American blood is permissible" came on the anniversary of the U.S. cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan. If you're wondering what result the U.S. missile strikes actually had on the region, well . . . they reinforced Osama bin Laden's image of the Che Guevara of the Islamic world and gave the religious fruitcakes in Pakistan lots of excuses to make the kind of noises described above. Oh yes, they failed conspicuously to even come anywhere close to hurting bin Laden as well. Another monumental waste of cash and missiles; but, hey, at least it looks good in this age of sound bites and 30-second media attention span.

Pakistan was the first country created as an Islamic state. By law, the country's president must be a Muslim. The legal system follows both the Islamic code of justice, or Sharia, and old British laws. Even the banking system must abide by Koran dictates that say it is improper to charge or pay interest. Bank customers actually share the profits and losses with the institutions where they do business. However, fiscal common sense still supersedes religious zeal, when, every year, just prior to Ramadan, customers withdraw their entire bank accounts to avoid the Zakat tax, a 2.5 percent levy on certain bank accounts charged annually on the eve of Ramadan.

Pakistan (Islami Jamhuria-e-Pakistan, or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan) became independent on August 15, 1947, when Britain sliced up India in response to public pressure to create a separate Muslim state. East Pakistan seceded and became the separate country of Bangladesh in March 1971. Pakistan aligned itself with the United States and was a vital supply line for anti-Communist Afghan insurgents in Afghanistan. Population growth is among the world's highest, the literacy rate is low and deteriorating, and the unofficial unemployment rate is greater than 25 percent. Agriculture still accounts for about 70 percent of total exports.

Good for What Ails You

Travelers to Muslim countries are used to getting goofy on too sweet tea and whooping it up on watery yogurt. Ingesters of the fermented liquid form of the hop, grape and grain will be happy to learn that alcohol in Pakistan can be prescribed for medicinal purposes. Although alcohol is banned in Pakistan under Islamic law, you can order hard liquor and beer by the bottle through room service at the swank hotels in the large cities. You must fill out a form (for non-Muslims only), pay a small fee (about a dollar), and then sit in the quiet solitude of your room feeling like a junkie on methadone treatment. Malt beverages (beer without alcohol) are commonly available, and some remote areas feature homemade brews.