The leftist editorial board of the Guardian urges the White House to stop talk of a Taliban takeover, to redouble its support of the elected government of Pakistan, to help Pakistani Prime Minister Zardari and Afghan Prime Minister Karzai fight the Taliban with wisdom and patience, and to remember that the Taliban have problems of their own.
[Speaking of which, the Washington Post recently posted an article about a backlash against the Pakistani Taliban because of their brutal enforcement of Islamic law.—RWT]
We all need to become more familiar with the newly contested battlefield: Pakistan.
(See here for a map of Pakistan, and here and here for information on the country's different regions.)
Pakistan is a nation of 132 million. Three regions of the country are in war: 1.) Kashmir, 2.) the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, 3.) the North-West Frontier Province, and 4.) parts of Balochistan.
These areas (including all of Balochistan) have a combined population of 30 million. If Islamabad and the Northern Province that neighbors the troubled areas of the country are included, the population that is under direct threat by the Muslim insurgency totals 32 million people.
The other 100 million Pakistanis live in the Punjab and Sindh provinces in central and southern Pakistan. The majority of these people are sympathetic to radical Islamic ideas and hostile to the West.
On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of the people in Punjab and Sindh support the relatively liberal elected government; 80% of Punjabis voted for the ruling party. These people are from the areas of Pakistan that the British Empire most strongly influenced. To us, here in America, these people look like Indians, and to some extent they are—these regions straddle the Indus River, which gave India its name—even though they are Muslim and they have strongly anti-American sentiments (as strongly anti-American as those of the Arabs, the Iranians, and the Turks).
The political culture of Pakistan is ambivalent. There are Punjabis with a British-influenced regard for modern education and a British-influenced belief in the rule of law. And there are backcountry and hill tribesman of the Pashtun region in the North Western Frontier Provinces and Balochistan.
Are the residents of Punjab and Sindh—100 million strong—going to stand up against anarcho-Islamic rule favored by the majority of the other 32 million? Will they fight? Or are these citizens of Pakistan willing to give up the northern and western third of their nation to the Taliban?
It may take five or ten years for us to find out, but we will see.
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