Pakistan: 60 Years On

September 2, 2007

The 60th anniversary of Pakistan was celebrated in lavish style back in the mother land last week on August 14. Over here in Miami local Pakistani Americans held a large festival at Bay Front Park in order to celebrate the anniversary. Kids went on stage singing patriotic songs, adults gave speeches discussing how far Pakistan has come in its short history, and all filled their bellies on a spicy array of South Asian food that surely left most of the uncles and aunties reaching for their preferred anti-acid reliever.

One of my closest friends is a Bengali American who I grew up with in South Florida. We went to the same local Islamic weekend school, played sports together as kids, and this past year we shared an apartment together as I was going to grad school in Boston and he was working. One of the main principles of the religion of Islam is the stress on unity through diversity. By staying with people who think like you do, who eat what you eat, who think the way you think, your world can be a very limited and intellectually unfulfilling place. My faith has taught me that interacting with people of different stripes can lead myself and others to achieve greater understanding of both ourselves and the world we collectively live in. It has also taught me that everything I may have learned may be up for criticism and revision.

As a Pakistani American child I learned, through my adult relatives' conversations mostly, that Pakistan was a great regional military power that had fought and defeated India multiple times in warfare. Pakistani soldiers, I was told, were Muslim heroes who strapped grenades to themselves in the face of Indian tanks and laid down in front of the tanks in order to take out the more powerful Indian military. They sacrificed their lives for Pakistani freedom. I believed all of this, more or less, never really thinking twice about what I was told. I was never interested in Pakistani history in general for the compelling reason that I believed my parents' former home to be a dump after repeated visits to the country as a youth. Why study Pakistani history when I lived in the most powerful nation in the world? Why waste time on insignificant Pakistan? I'm an American and a Pakistani second, if at all. That was my own rationale anyway. What I knew of Pakistan was always informed by my childhood memories of Pakistani military power, sacrifice, and religious devotion.

Anyone reading this obviously knows how warped my view of Pakistan was and knows that I had a very limited understanding of my parents' old home. The fact that I didn't care of my own history, as a child of Pakistani immigrants, made my world view limited in scope and susceptible to justifiable criticism. My old Bengali friend enters the picture here. It's not that he taught me anything I didn't already know, but it was his own family history and his own history as an individual coming from a different background that allowed me to understand the limits of my own historiographical interpretation of Pakistani history. His parents were in East Pakistan when the military clamped down on protestors fighting against election results not being honored by the dominating Pakistani military (and its powerful intelligence apparatus). He told me they never even speak about what happened there. It was that bad. But as a student of history I had to do my own digging. What I found made me realize how right I had always been about my approach to history specifically, but life in general. The rule I followed was that whatever I may have thought about something or whatever I believed to be true, I must always be open to other possibilities. A simple enough rule, but one that I have seen too few people actually follow and that leads to rigid, dogmatic understandings of the world's vast issues.

The Pakistani military, under General Yahya Khan, literally massacred hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Bengalis in 1971. There were millions of ethnic Bengalis, Muslim and Hindu, who fled across India's border seeking protection. India came to the rescue of the Bengalis as India was actively encouraging armed Bengali resistance movements, likely using the opportunity as a means of striking a major blow to Pakistan. The Pakistani military capitulated quickly and was forced to sign a humiliating treaty. The Pakistan experiment of having two separate geographical areas was over. The Bengalis gained their own country much to the chagrin of the Pakistani military.

The importance of this historical episode to me and my friend actually made us closer. I understood much more clearly what happened in 1971. It was not a stab in the back as many Pakistanis still claim. It's what you deserve when you cheat and kill. You deserve to be humiliated, put down on your knees, and tarred and feathered when you treat people like garbage, especially when you claim to be a pious Islamic republic. Pakistan was not a republic when it decided to ignore the democratically elected party of Mujibar Rahman and it was not Islamic when its military decided to slaughter protestors, professors, and civilians, men, women and children.

Celebrating a nation's birth should not be limited to its successes. It should include even more forthrightly the missteps and follies it carried out and supported. The lows need to be focused upon in order that future generations do not foolishly believe that national honor was lost because of failure to defeat the Indians in 1971. National honor was relinquished when Pakistan, as a Muslim nation, decided to murder its fellow brethren in faith over politics. As an American I can wag my finger at Pakistanis for being so blind due to their nationalism, but I too have a responsibility that involves my own country, the United States. Yahya Khan's rampage could not have been carried out without American support, in the form of a wink of an eye and a nudge by President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger. Letters from American staff working in East Pakistan at the time clearly demonstrate that Nixon and Kissinger could care little for the brutality that was being carried out in East Pakistan in spite of the fact that many American officials resigned as a result. The National Security Archive has released these files. They demonstrate how Nixon and Kissinger gave a green light to Yahya Khan to crush the Bengali resistance in order to secure their own political interests in Pakistan. "Yahya is a good friend," Nixon mentioned. Much like Musharraf is now.

On a personal note, my views and interpretations on this subject have not been well received by Pakistanis here in America. Despite the ample historical evidence that points the finger at Pakistan and the Pakistani military more specifically for the genocide that occurred in East Pakistan, many Pakistanis have not come to terms on this issue. Bengalis are deemed sellouts and Hindu-collaborators. The loss to India and the effects this loss had upon the conflict over Kashmir only exacerbated the discontent and anger many Pakistanis had for Bangladesh and India, even till today. If these people would only be so wise as to take a step back and get another perspective, such a dogmatic outlook would likely burn away when the light of the evidence would shone upon it.