The "situation in Pakistan," as government officials are wont to calmingly call it, is unstable and lethal---and it is poses dangers for the United States and the rest of the Western world.

"Pakistan" conjures in the Western world images of loose nukes and crazy jihadis, men in the shadows and women in burkas. It's hard to turn on CNN and not come upon reports of mayhem in Pakistan.

The "situation in Pakistan" was predictable, and predicted, from the beginning of that nation's history. "Pakistan" ("land of the pure" in Urdu and an acronym for the various regions of the northwest corner of the Indian subcontinent) was conceived by an Indian Muslim intellectual in Cambridge in the early 1930s as a state that would be the home of India's minority religious community. It was born in violence, created 60 years ago as a result of the dissolution of the British Empire in India and the partition of the subcontinent, with Pakistan created out of the northwest and northeast corners of the subcontinent (the latter now Bangladesh).

From the beginning, Pakistan was (or believed it was) beleaguered and threatened by the much larger India. Soon after its founding, one expert on foreign relations warned in Geographical Review, "The prospect may well prove to be a military state with little to spare for social services and, if relations with India are permanently strained, social bankruptcy of the most devastating kind-the kind in which the Army takes its pay where it can find it, in fact takes over the state."

That was an ominous but accurate prediction. Pakistan emerged from its colonial shadow with almost no industrial base. The initial disparities between Pakistan on one hand and India, its neighbor and rival, on the other, underscored Pakistan's sense of vulnerability and made it determined to defend itself. In 1948 India had 857 cotton mills compared with 11 in Pakistan. India had 36 iron and steel works, while Pakistan had none. The same gloomy comparison was true for cement, paper mills, and glassworks. Muslim nationalism (invariably enhanced by perceived threats from India), regional particularism, and ethnic pluralism presented additional challenges to the newly-invented country.

Hamza Alavi, a noted Pakistani historian and political scientist, has noted that Pakistan emerged at independence, paradoxically, an "overdeveloped" state by virtue of the overwhelming influence of its military-bureaucracy complex. In its six-decade history Pakistan has been led by non-military leaders only intermittently; it has experienced countless military coups; and it has never developed norms of democratic and civil society that mark its neighbor and sibling, India.

The fear of its larger neighbor that was the core idea of Pakistan's existence is at the root of Pakistan's determination to develop a nuclear weapon capability, which it achieved in 1998, twenty four years after India exploded a nuclear bomb.

Just as some observers in the 1940s feared, Pakistan has developed into a society whose identity and external relations are based on its hostile relationship with India, making Islam and the country's military ever-important parts of its national politics.

Pakistan's fate was not anticipated by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah was a British-educated lawyer and a secular Muslim (indeed, he both drank and smoked, some reports say as many as 50 cigarettes a day). He envisioned a nation that would be liberal, moderate, and tolerant. Jinnah was once quoted as saying, "I do not believe in mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman's game."

But the dreams of the "father" of Pakistan are either unknown or have little visible influence in many parts of the nation he fought for.

Indeed, not much of Jinnah's vision for his country is evident in Pakistan today. The military that scholars feared in the 1940s has become the strongest institution in Pakistan and is seen by many Pakistanis as the country's most glorious symbol of nationalism and greatness. The testing in 1998 of Pakistan's first nuclear devices constituted a proud achievement for Pakistan and its people and it reinforced the position of the military in Pakistani society.

The problem confronting U.S. strategists is immensely complicated, because the United States' interests in the region are in uncomfortable tension with its broader goal of promoting democratization and reform as the basis for a stable political order. Those who expect the government of the United States (led by either political party) to promote democracy at the risk of alienating Pakistan's military fail to appreciate that Pakistan is a fragile, ethnically diverse and unstable country---and one that has a nuclear arsenal. As the nuclear historian Scott Sagan has noted, Pakistan developed its nuclear weaponry primarily as a counterweight to India. And the same jihadis currently out of the reach of the Pakistan Army in the Northwest Territories would love to acquire one of those weapons to use against their enemies, namely us. The thought of Pakistan's current government, led by General Musharraf (who took power in 1999 following yet another coup,) falling is a terrifying one for Western military planners who have to worry about the security of Pakistan's nuclear facilities, regardless of the imperfections of Pakistan's political processes.

So we are faced with a state that has developed nuclear weapons, has been openly hostile to its neighbors, has no democratic legitimacy to speak of, and has difficulty confronting the threats from al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Northwest Territory. The United States and the West cannot afford to weaken Pakistan's military leadership simply because of the monumental threat that Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of non-state actors. Paradoxically, and tragically, our policy must actually strengthen the Pakistani military because of the immediate, and overwhelming, security threat posed by this nuclear weaponry. In addition, the West cannot allow the Taliban and al Qaeda to regroup in the Northwest Territory where they can plan and launch future conventional attacks on Afghanistan.

Thus in the short term it is difficult, if not impossible, to find an acceptable balance between our effort to promote democracy on the one hand and guard against nuclear proliferation on the other. For the present, the United States must continue to work with the Pakistani government to hold elections and move toward a democratic mandate.

In the longer term, these efforts must continue to help build and fortify Pakistan's burgeoning political institutions to the point where they are commensurate with the task of shaping Pakistani civil society without the "assistance" of the military. The very lawyers and other young professionals who were arrested in last month's chaos reveal that there is a growing segment of Pakistani society that seeks independence from the military and the promise of a liberal and tolerant civil society. These dissidents are our long-term allies.

And that, in sum, is "the situation in Pakistan."



Editor's Note: For further reading on the split of India and Pakistan, we recommend Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann.