Will Pakistan Break Up? - Carnegie Endowment for International ...

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I’m going to start with a citation from the Scripture. Scripture for me on the subject
of Pakistan is an important book called The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s
Partition, by Narendra Singh Sarila, a retired Indian diplomat who was the ADC to
Mountbatten. He got unprecedented access to the British archives. In his book he presents
detailed, definitive evidence showing that as early as March, 1945, Winston Churchill and the
British General Staff decided that Partition was necessary for strategic reasons. They
deliberately set out to create Pakistan because Jinnah had promised to provide military
facilities and Nehru refused to do so.
This is the key to understanding why Pakistan is so dysfunctional. It’s an artificial
political entity. The British put together five ethnic groups that had never before co-existed
in the same body politic historically. The Bengalis were the biggest. They outnumbered all
of the other four combined—the Punjabis, the Pashtuns, the Baluch and the Sindhis. Five
became four of course when Bangladesh seceded.
As it happened I was in Dacca during the Bangladesh crisis of 1971 when the Army
moved in to crush the independence movement. I had a memorable conversation with
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in which he said it would be best if the Bengalis did secede because
Pakistan would be more manageable without them. What he meant was that he would have
a better chance of running Pakistan in cooperation with the Punjabis if he could get rid of
the Bengalis. And that’s what happened except that the Army, as you know, eventually
executed him.
The Army bequeathed by the British to Pakistan was overwhelmingly dominated by
Punjabi officers and soldiers. So with the Bengalis gone the Baluch, Pashtuns and Sindhis
have faced a cruel historical irony. For centuries they had resisted the incursions of the
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