DE BORCHGRAVE: Alice in nuclear Pakistan

COMMENTARY:

In his 143-year-old “Wonderland” classic, Lewis Carroll has Alice saying, “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

Substitute Alice for Pakistan and one begins to understand Pakistan’s alternating personality syndrome.

Depressive disorders affect 34 percent of Pakistan’s 165 million people (the range is 29 percent to 66 percent for women, and 10 percent to 33 percent for men vs. 25 percent of ages 18 and older in the United States for both sexes).

The outpourings of Pakistan’s TV news talk shows may be part of the problem. They embrace anger, hatred and divisiveness and make Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, on the American right, and Thom Hartmann, Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, on the left, sound like paragons of matchless objectivity. And 80 million Pakistanis - half the population - watch TV.

On Urdu talk shows, Pakistan’s Muslim fundamentalists explain Islamist extremists who launched 61 suicide bombers in 2008 against political parties and their rallies as reactions against their spineless anti-Americanism. Terrorist attacks on military installations are rationalized as understandable reactions against an army chief who is pro-American. The three English schools torched in Peshawar recently were described as “nests of paganism.”

A majority of Pakistanis believe the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were a CIA-Mossad plot to justify a crusade against Islam. That helps explain why there is no shortage of volunteers for suicide missions. Tens of thousands of 16-year-old boys, who have completed 10 years of Koranic studies in madrassa schools, brainwashed against the U.S., India and Israel, are mentally conditioned to believe martyrdom is the highest calling against the heathen.

Every major city in Pakistan and all seven tribal agencies on the Pakistani-Afghan border have been hit by suicide attacks. In the Swat Valley, once Pakistan’s tourist garden spot, security forces have battled Taliban guerrillas for the past year.

About 25 percent of Pakistan’s population is middle class, for the most part oriented toward Britain and the United States. But that doesn’t necessarily mean their children share Western values. British security services have been tracking some 30 terrorist plots to attack western targets, almost all of them traced to Pakistani Brits.

Some 400,000 Pakistanis travel between Pakistan and the United Kingdom each year. Those with British passports can enter the United States without visas. Most Pakistanis reject the seriousness of the situation as explained by non-Pakistanis familiar with the gravity of what madrassas continue to produce.

The coalition of six politico-religious parties known as MMA was defeated in last February’s elections and lost its grip on two of Pakistan’s four provinces. But they have a chokehold on mullah-run madrassas and sabotage numerous attempts to widen the curriculum to other disciplines.

Lives are lost in Afghanistan because the Pakistani army cannot control the tribal areas where the two Taliban wings - Pakistani and Afghan - and al Qaeda enjoy relatively safe havens and much local support. The border itself is sievelike, jagged mountains, narrow gorges and some 60,000 Pakistani soldiers deployed in isolated posts along 1,400 miles. Another 60,000 are assigned to the interior of the seven tribal agencies where they are, for the most part, unwelcome.

The Pakistanis have sovereignty but can’t seem to exercise it because the mostly Punjabi Pakistani army has few Pashtu speakers to communicate with 3.5 million, mostly illiterate, Pashtus. But the army still thinks of them as Pakistanis and resents having to kill those who protect Taliban. Pashtus see the Pakistani army as an alien force. And some fundamentalist talk show voices argue the army should redeploy whence it came - on the Indian border.

Senators endorsed the idea, rejecting as a “cock-and-bull story” the claim by India that a group of 10 Pakistanis had traveled on a boast from Karachi to reach Mumbai to carry out attacks against leading hotels, defying India’s entire security apparatus for three days. U.S. insistence that known Pakistani culprits be brought to justice is proof for the talkmeisters Washington has sided with India against Pakistan.

In the tribal agencies, unmanned U.S. Predators inevitably kill innocent women and children in the compounds where Taliban fighters gather to plan their next attack. And these raids, in turn, add fuel to the anti-American mood of Pakistani people. Some Pakistani senators, immediately echoed on TV gabfests, called for Pakistan’s “immediate withdrawal” from America’s war on terror, as it was “not in the national interest.”

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