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Terrorist Attack Response Help

The unprecedented attack on the United States committed on September 11, 2001 has brought tremendous challenges to our country and society.  Among those challenges are the spiritual and religious challenges before us.  Here is a collection of material that may provide some guidance or help in this most difficult time.

This article is written by a missionary who spend much time in Pakistan.  The article was given us by Rev. Fred Stock, another missionary who has spent a lot of time in Pakaistan.  Fred and Margy Stock have been personal interest missionaries of Whittier Presbyterian Church for a couple of decades.

WHAT SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT PAKISTAN?

R. Michael Medley

     The US news media shows the streets of Pakistan's cities thronged with bearded young men burning American flags and brandishing posters of their hero Osama bin Laden.  Perhaps the teachers of those young men, if they attended school, once sat in a workshop for English teachers that I conducted.  Maybe I once sat in a beat up little tea shop slurping hot chai across the table from their uncles.  It may have been their cousins who once earnestly came to me when I lived at F.C. College to ask me difficult questions about the nature of Jesus.  Their old grandfather no doubt used to welcome me with a hearty laugh, calling me into his shop and inquiring how my wife and kids were.

    These days people who know that I worked in Pakistan for eleven years often ask me what I think about what is going on in Pakistan.  Until October 7, not many people knew where Pakistan was located or even cared to know much about it.  Now their dominant impressions are being shaped by what they see on their televisions.

    The cameras show these young men shouting with such vehemence it looks like their jaws could come unhinged and the veins in their foreheads shoot red plumes onto their white turbans.  These are not the Pakistani people I remember.  People of all stations and stripes who welcomed me heartily into their homes.  People with strong family ties and large families.  People who gave priority to personal relationships and not just getting through the day's agenda.  People who were long-suffering, who endured inefficient drainage systems when monsoon clouds dropped three inches of rain. People who uncomplainingly tolerated telephones that didn't work a third of the time and who sweltered without fans through long electricity outages.  Men who on 100-degree days carried bowls of concrete on their heads up a bamboo ladder to pour the roof of a new building.  Women who ordered the family chicken slaughtered to feed the foreign guests and then baked chappatis on an iron griddle over a wood fire.

    Oh yes, Pakistan has its problems--problems that lie rooted deep within its own culture, problems which it cannot blame on the United States of America.  Not the least of these is a problem that mightily disturbs me:  systematic discrimination against Christians and Hindus on the basis of religion.  But prejudice is wider than that, too.  A social caste system based on clan, skin color, and family occupation still relegates many to a life of grinding poverty even if they be most devout Muslims.  There is a huge chasm between the lifestyle of the wealthy with their posh bungalows and shiny Toyota Landcruisers and the lot of the desperately poor.  The poor fatalistically accept their lot: God has willed it so.  The wealth of the nation is consumed on the one hand by uncontrolled population growth that outstrips all development efforts and on the other by the rapacious greed of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

    Still, even these problems do not occur in a historical vacuum.  The colonial and post-colonial experiences of Pakistan have exacerbated the country's plight.  For decades as part of British-ruled India, the land that is now Pakistan lagged far behind England in its development.  The colonial system was always designed to be more profitable to the colonizers than to the colonized.  The great irrigation system and railroads built by the British were intended to provide cheap cotton and sugar cane for British mills which could turn them into more expensive manufactured products.  Since independence more than half a century ago, the colonial system has not changed much.  The bureaucrats and wealthy industrialists who took over after the British left continue lording it over the people in collaboration with masters of the new global economy.  Under the "new" post-colonial arrangement, large corporations take advantage of cheap labor and lax safety and environmental regulations to produce various goods for export-hand-sewn soccer balls, stainless steel surgical instruments, and hand-woven carpets. These goods are sold at huge profit margins in the West.

    But why are they burning the American flag? What has the United States done to earn such hostility in Pakistan?  Not much, and that's the problem.  US-government policy is seen in Pakistan for what it truly is:  self-serving.  And even the US State Department will own up to this characterization because US officials religiously maintain that they pursue foreign policy that is solely in the interests of the United States.  Even foreign aid is handed out only as a tool of national self-interest.

    The 52 years of Pakistan's existence as a nation corresponds roughly to the era of US global domination, first as a superpower sharing the stage with the USSR and then, since the demise of that "evil empire," as the world's hyperpower.  Those decades in South Asia have been tension-filled with India's and Pakistan's disagreement over Kashmir.  How much interest has the US has shown in resolving this issue?  Not much. The disputing countries have fought two wars over Kashmir.  Because of Pakistan's intense distrust of India, the military budget of Pakistan has consistently consumed a huge share of the nation's resources; in 1994 it was 26% of the budget.  This is in a country where the minimum wage is $1.28 per day.  If only a superpower invested some money and energy into defusing the Kashmir conflict, millions and millions of people would be almost instantly better off.  In 1971 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became Pakistan's president and in 1973 its prime minister.  He was scorned by the US because of his pro-socialist leanings and good relations with the Soviets.  The former East Pakistan started a war of independence. Much to the chagrin of the West Pakistanis and those who supported a united government, the Indian army intervened and Bangladesh came into the world of nations. What did the US do to prevent the Indians from tipping the balance of power in the direction of Bangladeshi independence? Not much, the Pakistanis bitterly recall.  In 1977 General Zia ul Haq came to power in a coup that saw Prime Minster Bhutto thrown in prison and later hanged, against the outcry of governments around the world.  The United States became good friends with General Zia, especially when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on the northern border of Pakistan in 1979.  Pakistan became the conduit for US arms to the Mujahideen (translate: Islamic fundamentalist holy warriors).

 Did the United States care about what the negative consequences for Pakistan would be? Not much, as long as they could use Pakistan to oppose their Soviet arch-enemies.  The consequences have been disastrous. The arms pipeline to Afghanistan had lots of leaks.  Of course, there were also millions of Afghans living in Pakistan at the time where the pipeline could leak.  As a result, the Pakistani citizenry became armed as they never had before and violence within the society began to rise.  Along with the guns came drugs, the prime method used by Mujahideen warlords to finance their operations.  The arms traveled up the Indus highway toward Afghanistan and the drugs came back down it.  There were leaks in the drug pipeline as well, so millions of Pakistani young men became ensnared in heroin addiction.

    Continued US support for the repressive regime of General Zia also damaged the country.  The "law and order" that General Zia brought was not all bad.  However, since one of the chief effects of his rule was to suppress all normal political activity, people found other more dangerous ways to express themselves.  Political parties provide opportunities for people who share a commitment to particular public policies to join together in common action-regardless of their religious or ethnic backgrounds.  With political parties outlawed, Pakistanis instead united only with people of their own ethnic groups and religious sects.  In fact, Zia sometimes deliberately played off one ethnic group against the other.  In Karachi and Hyderabad in 1986 and following, this policy had deadly results.  We know of these results personally because we lived in Hyderabad when the ethnic battles began and spent many days locked up in our house because of curfews. We also had several adventures with the army and the police as we attempted to enter the city when curfew was imposed.

By the mid-1990's violence had spread to warring sects of Islam, especially the minority Shi'ites and the majority Sunnis.  Mosques were bombed.  Ordinary people at prayer were brutally machine-gunned.  Religious leaders were assassinated. The private militias of the opposing sects mushroomed.  Though General Zia was now gone, killed in a mysterious plane crash in August 1988, the conservative religious legacy that he left continued to wrack the nation.  For women, laws promulgated by General Zia made it nearly impossible for them to prove that they had been raped and to disprove that they had committed adultery, a capital crime.  For the minority Christian population, it meant political apartheid: they are unable to vote except for Christian candidates who run for a limited number of reserved seats.  It also meant the dread "blasphemy laws."  Anyone accused of blaspheming the prophet Mohammed (PBUH), may be condemned to death. Several Christian have been murdered or unjustly imprisoned on the basis of this law.  And last, but certainly not least, it meant granting legitimacy to the madrassas (the mosque schools). These could now be considered part of the government education system and supply desperately needed classroom space and teachers for Pakistan's burgeoning population.  Many of the madrassas have been turned into laboratories which take in traumatized orphans and children of the poor and transform them into fundamentalist haters of the West.  These madrassas  are one of the legacies of General Zia's government.  From these madrassas in the Frontier Province have sprung the Taliban.

What was the United States doing while all this was going on?  You guessed it: not much. The US proved the saying "a friend indeed, is the friend you need." When you no longer have a need, the "friend" is disposable.  As long as Pakistan was needed as an arms conduit to Afghanistan, it was the recipient of enormous sums of foreign aid.  After the Russians withdrew, the aid receded.  As the nineties wore on, the US slapped more and more sanctions on Pakistan for pursuing its nuclear program. The economy of Pakistan worsened.  Sectarian and ethnic violence surged.  Pakistan was an old "friend in need," but the US did not care any more.

    How do the Pakistanis really feel about us?  Do they really hate us?  The United States is still a popular destination for immigration from Pakistan. Many millions of "liberated women" and well educated men look  in fear and disgust on fundamentalism and sectarian violence.  There are many millions more of pious, peace-loving, hospitable Muslims.  Pakistan's official literacy rate is only about 40% but functional literacy, in fact, is much lower.  So most of these are not well educated people and they latch on to false conspiracy theories easily.  Many believe that the World Trade Center was destroyed by Mossad, the Israeli secret service as a way of provoking American wrath on the heads of Muslim nations. They can be forgiven because "they [literally] know not what they do."  When politics was permitted in Pakistan the so-called religious parties were never able to garner more than ten percent of the vote and thus seldom ever elected any members to parliament.  Political power they may lack, but they have excelled in "street power."  And with the current military regime, the only way they have to debate government policies is by calling their men onto the streets to shout anti-American slogans and burn George Bush in effigy.

    A couple of weeks ago I stood with the peace protesters on the corner of Main and Market Streets.  Street power we did not have!  The big old county courthouse loomed in back of a motley crew of a dozen or more college students from EMU and JMU, a youngish couple with small children, a retired dentist, and me.  Some of us were holding signs calling for no retaliation in answer to the terrorist bombings of a month ago.  My sign said: "Overcome evil with good-silence the violence."      Stopping their cars for the traffic lights some people avoided looking at us.  Some stared and shook their heads at us as if we were a disgusting sight.  Others glared angrily.  Several people shouted out challenges at us from their open windows.  At least one group of people yelled four-letter obscenities and told us to go to Afghanistan.      Standing there for an hour with my sign and not much to talk about with the others, I had a chance to think.  I began to think about what a little thing it is to bear this kind of opposition in a "free country" where the "right to free expression" is so strongly entrenched though not always cherished.  I contrasted my experience with that of my Pakistani friends and former coworkers.  They are facing much more virulent opposition right now-hatred from "fellow citizens" of their country.  Fundamentalist clergy broadcast over mosque loudspeakers that Christians are "relatives" of the white Americans who are attacking their Muslim brethren in Afghanistan; they should all be killed so that Pakistan may be purified.  It is a little thing to bear this prejudice when my Christian brothers and sisters in Pakistan face a much deadlier danger. 

    I wonder if my government is aware of what is ethically at stake in using Pakistan as its base for staging attacks on Afghanistan.  What costs will be paid to achieve American aims and who will pay the costs?  I wonder if it is worth destabilizing a nation of 145 million, bringing it to the brink of civil war or fanning the flames of  fundamentalist Islamic revolution.  I wonder how the three million Christians in Pakistan will pay for your security and mine.  As I consider how things went from bad to worse in Pakistan after the US aided the Mujahideen in the eighties, I wonder what disaster awaits the country after this episode.  Unless the United States is energetically committed to genuine friendship, wise use of foreign aid in the region, and mediation of the Kashmir dispute, how much of a chance does Pakistan have of not slipping into an abyss of immense human suffering and chaos?  Not much.  I fear that it may be too late for Americans to begin asking what we should think about Pakistan.

 Mike & Debbie Medley

78 Laurel St.   Harrisonburg, VA 22801    (540-574-4277)