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

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

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:

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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