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Anti-Americanism in Pakistan: A briefhistorydawn.com
(http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214) November 14, 2014
The anti-Americanism wave today at least in most Muslim
countries issuch that the critique that comes with it is largely
knee-jerk in nature. AFP
Though anti-Americanism during the Cold War (1949-89) was mostly
theideological vocation of leftists, today some 25 years after the
collapse of theSoviet Union one can safely suggest that America is
undergoing a periodwhen its reputation is loathed more than it has
been before.
It is true that this is largely due to the conduct of the two
George Bushadministrations (2000-2008) and their utter lack of
prudent diplomacy.
However, the anti-Americanism wave at least in most Muslim
countries today is such that the critique that comes with it is
largely knee-jerk in nature.
http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214
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For example, the nature of anti-Americanism one often comes
across TV newschannels in Pakistan is primarily the animated
vocation of two interlinkedentities: the religious and conservative
parties and certain former militarymen. Both felt alienated and
angry after the American dollars that were dishedout for the
anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency in the 1980s dried up.
Once upon a friend
According to a research paper authored by Dr Talukder
Muniruzaman in 1971on the politics of young Pakistanis, a majority
of Pakistanis viewed Americapositively in the 1950s.
The paper also suggests that right up until Pakistans 1965 war
against India,most Pakistanis saw America as a friend, especially
in reaction to the SovietUnions close ties with India.
According to another lengthy
paper(https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/ecdecc/v32y1983i1p11-44.html)
(published byChicago University in 1983) on the ideological
orientation of Pakistansuniversity students (by Kiren Aziz and
Peter McDonough), anti-Americanismamong most Pakistanis remained
somewhat low even during the protestmovement (in 1967-68) against
the pro-US Ayub Khan dictatorship in spiteof the fact that the
movement was largely being led by leftist students, activistsand
politicians.
https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/ecdecc/v32y1983i1p11-44.html
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Ayub Khan rides in a car with American First Lady, Jacqueline
Kennedy, inKarachi.
Some leading leftist activists of the movement also suggest that
there wereprecious little incidents during the protests in which an
American flag wastorched.
The following is what Badar Hanif, a radical member of the
left-wing NationalStudents Federation (NSF) in the late 1960s,
wrote in a recent email to me:
"We were focused. We not only wanted to topple the US-backed
Ayubdictatorship, but the whole capitalist system."
When I wrote back asking him whether the US was a target as
well, Badarreplied:
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Some of us were pro-Soviet and some pro-China communists. Yes we
wereagainst the US, but more due to the fact that soon after Ayubs
fall (in 1969),the US and the Pakistan military began aiding and
backing right-wing Islamicparties. These religious groups offered
themselves to work as a bulwark againstthe rising leftist tide in
educational institutions and on the streets.
A National Students Federation rally against Ayub at the Karachi
University.
Kiren Aziz and Peter McDonough's paper suggests that
anti-Americanism inthe 1970s was ripe in many Arab countries due to
the United States single-minded support for Israel. This nature of
anti-Americanism finally made itsway into Pakistani society during
the Z.A. Bhutto regime (1972-77), especiallywhen Bhutto started to
expand his Islamic Socialism doctrine at theinternational level by
consolidating relations with various radical Muslimstates and Arab
countries.
However, the buildup to this was the Richard Nixon
administrations failure tomilitarily help its staunch South Asian
ally during its 1971 war with India.Nixon had otherwise been quite
sympathetic towards 'Pakistan's point of view'during the 1971
conflict.
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Seyyed Vali Nasr in his excellent book, Vanguards of the Islamic
Revolutionwrites that the religious parties (especially
Jamat-i-Islami) began attributingPakistan's defeat in the 1971 war
to the decadence and debauchery of men likeGeneral Yahya Khan and
due to the nation's failure to become good Muslims.
However, before that, a large number of Pakistanis had already
begun to blamethe US because it had refused to help Pakistan in the
war.
In his book Political Dynamics of Sindh 1947-1977, Tanvir Ahmed
Tahirsuggests that the post-1971 anti-Americanism in Pakistan was
more a vocationof progressive and leftist political groups. This is
confirmed in Hassan Abbasbook, Pakistans drift into extremism.'
A leftist students rally against capitalism and 'US imperialism'
at the KarachiUniversity in 1973.
So, if the religious parties were still refusing to criticise
the US, is it correct toassume that these parties were really being
escorted by the US against theperceived threat of a take-over of
pro-Soviet forces in Pakistani politics?
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Progressive student leaders, activists and politicians of the
era would answer inthe affirmative. Many of them explain this as a
consequence of the Pakistanreligious parties strong links with
oil-rich Arab monarchies, especially theSaudi Arabia, a country
that was a close ally of the US.
Anjum Athar who was associated with the Liberal Students
Federation (LSF) atthe University of Karachi in 1974-75 once shared
with me an interestingobservation. He said:
In those days (the 1970s) being socially and politically
conservative did notnecessarily mean being anti-West. Even the most
militant Islamic studentgroups in the 1970s who wanted the
imposition of Shariah were hardly everseen or heard badmouthing the
US. Religious groups were more threatened bythe rise of communism,
a threat they shared with the US and Saudi Arabia.That is why
anti-Americanism was more rampant among Pakistani leftists
ascompared to the religious parties.
This trend continued across the 1980s.
America remained Pakistans leading aid donor. According to Lubna
Rafiques1994 paper, Benazir & British Press, it was only in the
last year of Z.A.Bhuttos regime (1977), that he started to allude
to moving out of theAmerican camp, calling the US a white elephant.
He also went on to accusethe Jimmy Carter administration for
financing the religious parties agitationagainst him in 1977.
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ZA Bhutto raising a toast at a state dinner during his 1975 trip
to the US.
Throughout the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s,
anti-Americanismremained a much polarised affair in Pakistan. Most
religious parties and theirsupporters, and the industrial/business
classes that supported Zia, were eitheropenly pro-America or
ambiguous on the subject.
Zia was backed by the Ronald Regan administration with military
hardware anddollars during the US proxy war against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan(for which Pakistan was used) and against
communism in the region.Consequently, anti-Americanism thus became
more rampant among thoseopposing Zia.
For example, though anti-Americanism among most PPP workers and
itsstudent wing grew twofold after Z.A. Bhuttos execution at the
hands of the Ziadictatorship, the partys new chairperson, Benazir
Bhutto, advised her party toconcentrate on the removal of Zia
alone.
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In 1986, when she returned to Pakistan from exile and was
greeted by amammoth crowd in Lahore, groups of the PPPs student
wing, the PSF, begantorching a US flag at the crowded rally.
Benazir is said to have stopped themfrom doing this, pointing out
that they would not be able to fight a superpowerif they werent
even able to remove a local dictator.
Though by the late 1980s, the intensity of anti-Americanism had
grown inPakistan (compared to the preceding decades), it never
became violent.
Zia at the White House with Ronald Reagan.
The only violent case in this respect had taken place in 1979 in
Islamabad,when the US consulate was attacked by a crowd enraged and
provoked by abroadcast from Iranian state radio that had blamed the
US for engineering thattakeover of the Kaaba that year by a group
of Saudi fanatics.
Though the notorious takeover of the Muslims sacred place was
mastermindedby a band of armed Saudi fanatics, Irans new
revolutionary regime underAyatollah Khomeini used its media to
claim that the attack was backed by
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American and Zionist forces.
According to Yaroslav Trofimovs book, 'The siege of Mecca,
confusion aboutwho planned and executed the attack also arose when
the Saudi regime blackedout the news.
The gradual foe
In the 1990s as America largely divorced itself from the region
after the end ofthe Afghan civil war, Pakistanis got busy tackling
the bitter pitfalls of theAfghan war in the shape of bloody ethnic
and sectarian strife.
However, this also meant the drying up of American patronage and
funds forreligious groups and parties in the country.
Anti-Americanism returned to the fore (but with far more
intensity) after thetragic 9/11 episode in 2001 and not
surprisingly, the religious groups nowbecame its main
purveyors.
According to veteran defense analyst, Hassan Askari, this
post-Cold-Warversion of anti-Americanism in the country is an
emotional response of mostPakistanis to the confusion that set in
(in the Muslim world) after the9/11event.
Naushad Amrohvi - a member of the Maoist Mazdoor Kissan Party
(MKP) in1972 (obefore leaving for Sweden after the Zia coup)
recently told me: Anti-Americanism was more popular with leftist
youth before the 1980s. It wasmore of an intellectual pursuit. We
were more into negating the US policies byintellectually attacking
capitalism and modern imperialism and for this weread and discussed
a lot. We read a lot of Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, MaoZedong,
Frantz Fanon, Faiz Ahmed Faiz we even read a lot of Abul AlaMaududi
so we could puncture his theories!
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However today Amrohvi laments the fact that anti-Americanism in
Pakistanhas become an excuse to hide ones own failures: We wanted
to fight Americawith ideology and politics, and not through suicide
bombers and nakedhatred, he added.
Security outside the US Consulate in Karachi (2002).
Columnist Fasi Zaka in one of his columns suggested that the
kind of anti-Americanism found these days (among the urban
middle-classes of thecountry) is extremely ill-informed. He wrote
that a lot of young Pakistanis arebasing their understanding of
international politics by watching low-budgetstraight-to-video
documentaries on Youtube!
These so-called documentaries that Zaka is talking about are
squarely based onrehashed conspiracy theories that mix age-old
tirades and paranoid fantasies.All these are then further mixed
with flighty myths about and events recordedonly in polemical
literature and flimsy history books.
Thus, the post-9/11 confusion and emotionalism in Pakistan was
largely givenvent and an intellectual tilt by apologists of all
shapes and sizes amongthem being those had once been recipients of
US funds and patronage duringthe Cold War.
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Whereas there was a prominent streak of romantic rebellion
associated withthe anti-Americanism of Pakistani leftists during
the Cold War, nothing of thesort can be said about the widespread
anti-Americanism found in Pakistantoday.
Activists set fire to American flags at a protest rally of a
religious party inLahore (2012).
In fact, the present-day phenomenon in this context has become
an obligatorypart of populist rhetoric in which American
involvement is blamed foreverything from terrorist attacks, to the
energy crises, to perhaps even theoutbreak of dengue fever!
dawn.com (http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214) November 14,
2014
http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214