THE LUNACY OF A BRITISH LEGACY

[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on July 28, 2006.  Now in May of 2025, India and Pakistan are risking nuclear war between them once again.  So it’s timely to refresh ourselves with an understanding of how this came about.]

The border between Pakistan and India is one thousand eight hundred miles long, running from the Karakorum-Himalaya mountains next to China all the way to the Indian Ocean. Along its entire length, there is one land crossing for foreigners, between Lahore, Pakistan and Amritsar, India, called Wagha.

To make the crossing, you take a taxi to the Pak side of Wagha, where porters are waiting to carry your bags. After going through passport and customs control, you walk a thousand yards over bare ground to the Indian side, where your Pak porters turn over your bags to a swarm of Indian porters who fight amongst themselves to carry them.

When the porters start grabbing your bags from each other, you have to physically intervene to keep your bags from being torn apart. It is over 100 degrees in the shade.

Then you walk another thousand yards across bare “no man’s land” to Indian passport and customs control. The Indian customs guy writes your passport number by hand in an ancient logbook.

I first did this in 1963. When I described the ordeal to my son Jackson, he found it hard to believe. He believes it now, for we just did this – and the process is exactly the same, unchanged in 43 years.

It’s one more example of the lunacy of the legacy of the British in India.

The British take rightful pride in their ending centuries of Moslem oppressive rule over India’s Hindus and Buddhists* (see note at end), and in the very creation of India as a unified state, stitching it together from several hundred kingdoms, principalities, and petty statelets.

Then they proceeded to break their achievement apart in a vast deluge of death, war, and endless hatred.

The year was 1947. England had emerged victorious in World War II with the “British Raj” intact, extending from the Durand Line, negotiated by Sir Mortimer Durand with Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan in 1893 demarcating the border with Afghanistan, to British Burma’s border with Thailand (Siam).

The Brits had created a separate colonial administration for predominantly Buddhist and non-Hindu Burma in 1937, and had always looked upon Burma as clearly distinct from neighboring India.

Yet Burma served as a rationale for India’s Moslems to demand a state of their own. They were afraid of being treated by Hindus in an independent India the way they had treated them when they ruled India. An All India Moslem League, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), began agitating for separating two Indian states – Punjab and Bengal, in which Moslems were “numerically in a majority” – from the rest of India.

But the craziness of carving a separate state out of India based solely on religion – guaranteeing a government based on theology and not secular democracy – wasn’t the weirdest part.

The hyper-craziness was that Punjab and Bengal were 1,500 miles apart on either side of the rest of India.. These Indian Moslems were so nuts they thought they could build one nation out of anti-Hindu hatred, one nation in two parts a thousand and a-half miles from each other, and the rest of India with hundreds of millions of Hindus in between.

The only thing more nuts was that the British – who had dumped Winston Churchill in gratitude for saving them against the Nazis and elected a spineless socialist wimp named Clement Atlee** (see note at end) as Prime Minister – agreed to it.

It was the total moral collapse of British will. Punjab became West Pakistan, Bengal became East Pakistan in the Partition of 1947. Even the name “Pakistan” was impossibly stupid. PAK was an acronym for Punjab, Afghan, and Kashmir (“i-stan” means “land of”), leaving out Bengal, Kashmir stayed in India, and “Afghan” referred to another country.

Millions of Hindus fled their homes in Punjab and Bengal to flee into India, while millions of Moslems left their homes in India to flee into now West and East Pakistan, killing each other by the hundreds of thousands in spasms of communal violence along the way.

Immediately after Partition, Pakistan tried to seize Kashmir by armed force, precipitating a war that cost tens of thousands of more lives. Jinnah died of cancer. The Pakistan military, run by mostly Punjabi officers, took control of the country. It lost another war with India over Kashmir and a southern desert wasteland called the Rann of Kutch in 1965.

Then it lost East Pakistan.

In November, 1970, a hurricane hit East Pakistan, killing 500,000 (yes, a full half million people). The lack of help from West Pakistan catalyzed a secession movement which was brutally suppressed by Punjabi soldiers of the Pak military. In March, 1970, secessionist leader Ziaur Rahman declared East Pakistan to be the independent country of Bangladesh (Land of Bengal).

After months of Bengali guerrilla fighting while the Punjabi Pakistan military slaughtered Bengalis by the hundreds of thousands, the Indian Army invaded and forced the surrender of the Pakistan Army in December, 1971. Bangladesh was now free.

The disgrace of Pakistan’s military allowed the election of a civilian, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who promptly formed a group of scientists led by Abdus Salam (later a Nobel Laureate in Physics) to develop nuclear weapons.

The Pak military showed its gratitude to Bhutto by overthrowing him in a coup led by General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in 1977. Zia got rid of Bhutto by ordering his execution for a made-up crime.

Zia was a complex and contradictory man. He established a martial-law military dictatorship, and introduced strict Islamic Sharia law into Pakistan’s legal system. At the same time, he reversed Bhutto’s socialist economic policies and promoted free market capitalism, creating an economic boom.

Zia’s greatest virtue was his hatred of the Soviet Union and Communism, and the extraordinary courage he showed when the Soviet Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

With the Shah overthrown in Iran (thanks to Jimmy Carter), the only way any help could be sent to the Afghan freedom fighters (“Mujahaddin”) was through Pakistan (Afghanistan is landlocked, surrounded by Iran in the west, the Soviet Union – now Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan – in the north, and Pakistan in the east and south).

Zia not only allowed but encouraged and organized a vast flow of weaponry and supplies funneled through Pakistan to the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan. Paid for by the CIA, Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and other materiel were produced in China and Egypt and shipped to the Pak port of Karachi.

It was this support that enabled the Mujahaddin to defeat the Soviet Union. It was that defeat that catalyzed the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the USSR itself. The Berlin Wall fell less than nine months (November 9, 1989) after the Soviets completed their retreat from Afghanistan (February 15, 1989).

In other words, it was Zia ul-Haq who enabled America’s victory in the Cold War.

He never got to see it. On August 17, 1988, the Soviet KGB wired his plane with explosives and blew it up, killing him.

Zia’s monumental mistake was to allow this enormous flow of weaponry, supplies, and money to the Mujahaddin to be completely controlled by the Pak secret police called the ISI – Inter-Services Intelligence.

Another British legacy, the ISI was founded by British Major General Robert Cawthome in 1948, who was then acting Deputy Chief of Staff for the Pakistan Army. Used by the Pak military rulers to spy on and control the lives of Pakistanis, the ISI grew into a “government within a government.”

Zia was able to seize power with the help of his friend, ISI Director and Army General Gulam Jilani Khan. When Jilani retired, Zia made his biggest mistake of all, replacing him with a radical Moslem fundamentalist, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul.

It is Hamid Gul we can thank for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and September 11.

As ISI Director, Gul persuaded Zia to impose Sharia law on Pakistan. It was Gul who let the Saudis establish Islamic schools or medressahs all over the country teaching Wahhabi Islamic radicalism.

It was Gul who insisted the bulk of all weapons and supplies to the Muj go to the one commander who hated America and was a pro-Khomeini fascist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

It was Gul who, when Gulbuddin proved incapable of taking Afghanistan over after the Soviet retreat, organized a group of stone-age Moslems in Kandahar called Taliban (“students’) to overrun the country.

It was Gul who allowed Osama Bin Laden to establish his base of operations with the Taliban. In the two weeks immediately prior to September 11, Gul was in Afghanistan with Osama. Within hours after the terrorist attack on America, Gul, then back in Islamabad (Pakistan’s capital) publicly announced it was perpetrated by the Jews of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad.

It was Gul who protected Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Oadeer Khan and coordinated his program of selling nuclear secrets to such outlaw regimes as North Korea.

It was Gul who organized and supported the terrorist groups in Indian Kashmir, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba. Such support continues to this day.

It was Gul who organized the pro-Taliban, pro-Al Qaeda fundamentalist political party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) that has seized political control of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan and dominates Pakistan’s national legislature.

And it is Gul who continues to ensure ISI support for the Taliban terrorists fighting American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

It is absolutely astounding that neither the CIA nor Indian intelligence has had the competence and spine to rid the world of Hamid Gul years ago, that he is still alive and practicing his evil ways today.

Pakistan has no future until it rids itself of the ISI. The only institution capable of doing so is the Pak military, yet the ranks of its officers is riddled with ISI agents. The positive news is that as a whole, the Pak military officers hate the ISI.

They are led by Army Chief of Staff and current president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, who overthrew the elected civilian leader Nawaz Sharif in a coup in 1999. Sharif was a stooge of Hamid Gul’s, and had ordered that Musharraf be replaced with Gul’s chief ISI lieutenant Khwaja Ziauddin.

Musharraf threw Sharif in jail, then exiled him. Since then, and especially since 9/11, Pakistani politics has essentially been a sub-rosa war between the Army and the ISI, between Musharraf and Gul.

Musharraf can’t go after Gul directly, and feels he can wait him out, as Gul is now in his 80s. While he waits for Gul to die, Musharraf has been systematically purging the ISI of Islamic fundamentalists and steadily reducing its power. By now, there are 40% fewer ISI agents than in 1999 and Musharraf intends to keep going.

So there is hope for this country. While in India I was surprised to see so comparatively little change, in Pakistan I saw comparatively much more. This is not – repeat not – a radically Islamic country.

No doubt it is a fully Moslem country, but the key test is how women are treated. In the Pushtun tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, women are only seen publicly in burqas (full body dress, just their eyes visible) and are rarely seen at all. Yet the Pushtuns form only about 7% of Pakistan’s 165 million.

Women among the dominant ethnic group, the Punjabis, are far, far freer. Yes, most (not all) wear the hijab head scarf, but they work in offices everywhere and display a friendly, confidant competence. Billboards with attractive women’s pictures are everywhere, advertising various Pakistani products.

Musharraf’s current campaign is to repeal or seriously weaken the “Hoodood Ordinances” medievally restricting women’s rights and freedom under the Sharia laws passed by Zia.

Pakistan has a very, very deep hole to pull itself out of. But its economy is improving, its people are hard-working and wonderfully friendly. I am coming away from here with more hope than I expected.

Once Gul dies, which hopefully will be soon, the purge of the ISI will accelerate. Musharraf’s PML-Q party should win a controlling majority of parliamentary seats in the coming elections, while the radical MMA will be reduced. Musharraf will remain president.

That’s if he stays alive. The ISI has made a number of attempts on his life, which is why he lives at Army Headquarters in Islamabad, not the Presidential Palace. Pervez Musharraf is the only thing holding Pakistan together right now.

The ultimate lunacy of the British legacy, and the ultimate irony, is that if India had stayed in one piece with Hindus and Moslems democratically competing in political parties, it would be a superpower today, larger and stronger than China.

The combined population of India (1.1 billion), Pakistan (165 million), and Bangladesh (145 million) — over 1.4 billion – exceeds that of China (1.3 billion).

What’s more, India still has an enormous Moslem population, 130 million, the fourth largest Moslem population in the world (behind Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh).

That means a unified India today would have 440 million Moslems, with whom India’s 900 million Hindus would have to cooperate and could never oppress in a democracy.

But in place of an Asian superpower, we have two militaries at each other’s throats, both armed with nuclear weapons, and presenting the world’s best chance for nuclear war.

Everywhere you go in Pakistan, you see pictures of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, worshipped as the Father of Pakistan. If only he had succumbed to cancer ten years earlier or was stillborn. Pakistan’s separate existence from India is a ridiculously tragic farce.

And we have the British to thank for it.

**Note: Churchill had a bottomless contempt for Atlee. An example took place in the Members of Parliament private men’s room, in which there is a long line of urinals. Atlee came in and went to a urinal at one end. Churchill came in shortly after, saw Atlee, and went to the opposite end. They were the only two, there was no one else.

Atlee, looking down the long line of urinals to Churchill as they both stood there performing what was necessary, said, “Being a bit stand-offish, today, eh, Winston?”

With the famous Churchillian glower, Churchill replied, “Why no, Clement, it’s that every time you see something large that works, you want to nationalize it.”

The veracity of this story was personally confirmed to me by Churchill’s grandson, Winston III. It was witnessed by a third Member in one of the toilet stalls.