Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
challenge than the much larger and more powerful India.
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Pakistan's leaders
have a profound distrust of New Delhi, and the latter's reassurances that India
'accepts' the existence of Pakistan are not taken seriously.
The dominant explanation of regional conflict held by Pakistan's strategic
community is that from the first day of independence there has been a concerted
Indian attempt to crush their state. This original trauma was refreshed and
deepened by the loss of East Pakistan in 1971. Many Pakistanis now see their
state as threatened by an increasingly Hindu and extremist India, motivated by a
desire for religious revenge and a missionary-like zeal to extend its influence to
the furthest reaches of South Asia and neighboring areas. There is also a strand
of Pakistani thinking that draws upon the army's tradition of geopolitics, rather
than the two-nation theory or ideological explanations to explain conflict
between India and Pakistan.
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Like Israel, Pakistan was founded by a people who felt a sense of persecution
when living as a minority, and even though they possess their own states (which
are also based on religious identity), both remain under threat from powerful
enemies. In both cases, an original partition demonstrated the hostility of
neighbors, and subsequent wars showed that these neighbors remained hostile.
Pakistan and Israel have also followed parallel strategic policies. Both sought
entangling alliances with various outside powers (at various times, Britain,
France, China, and the United States), and both ultimately concluded that
outsiders could not be trusted in a moment of extreme crisis, leading them to
develop nuclear weapons.
Further complicating India-Pakistan relations, the 1971 defeat was of central
importance to the Pakistan army, which has governed Pakistan for more than
half of its existence. Thus, to achieve a normal relationship with Pakistan, India
must not only influence the former's public opinion; it must also change the
institutionalized distrust of India found in the army. The prospects of this are
very slim.
Finally, Pakistani hostility to India has roots other than the tortured
relationship between the two countries. Indians assert that Pakistan needs the
India threat to maintain its own unity. There is an element of truth in this
argument—distrust of India, and the Kashmir conflict, do serve as a national
rallying cry for Pakistanis, and thus as a device to smooth over differences
between the dominant province, Punjab, and the smaller provinces of
Baluchistan, Sind, and the Northwest Frontier. India-as-an-enemy is also useful
to distract the Pakistani public from other concerns, such as social inequality,
sectarian (Sunni-Shi'ia) conflict, and the distinct absence of social progress in
many sectors of Pakistani society. These factors do partially explain Pakistan's
fear of India—but there remains a real conflict between the two states, Kashmir.
