The problem of Pakistan
I've always said that if a nuclear exchange occurs anywhere in the world, my money would be on it happening on the subcontinent, between longtime enemies Pakistan and India.
Currently, India is sliding into a Hindu nationalist regime under prime minister Narendra Modi. His government is making moves to erase any non-Indian references to national history.
But, at the least, India is more-or-less stable. The same cannot be said for its neighbor.
Pakistan wasn't supposed to exist. The Partition was not in Mahatma Gandhi's vision. The subcontinent was supposed to be a single, unified state, of Hindus, Muslims, and all the other confessions and ethnicities.
But egged on by a British administration which saw value in keeping Hindus and Muslims warring, the Raj was partitioned, leading to one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the postwar period.
Pakistan has never been a stable state. It barely has control of peripheral tribal lands. Most of its history has seen it under brutal military rule. And when it's under civilian rule, it's been under two dynasties, the Bhutto and Sharif families, backed by their feudal allies and factions within the military.
That pattern was broken when Pakistani cricket hero Imran Khan found God and ran for office on an anti-corruption platform. He won power in a landslide, and in the first election he was the military's favorite, as he deposed an ally of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif—now in self-imposed exile—who had a frosty relationship with the military. However, Mr. Khan soon ran afoul of the military, as most civilian prime ministers do, and was ousted in a no-confidence vote.
The thing is, Mr. Khan remained, and still remains, the most popular politician in the country. His blend of populism, anti-establishment language, and anti-Western ideology sell well in the Muslim nation. Since his ouster last year he has led several massive demonstrations, challenging the legitimacy of the current government.
After a few unsuccessful attempts, the government's prosecutors have succeeded in finding charges against Mr. Khan which have stuck. He was convicted of corruption while in office for selling gifts he received from other nations, and was sentenced to three years in prison. He was then banned from electoral politics for five years.
His followers are not the sort to take this lying down. And he has urged them to not remain silent. So, a mass political movement which operates outside of the normal feudal political parameters is about to clash violently with that system. It's impossible to predict what will happen, but none of it will be good.
And, of course, there's the elephant in the room: If Pakistan becomes ungovernable, what happens to its nuclear weapons? Who will exercise control? Will control over them even be possible? The most stable institution in the country is the military, but will it remain so if Pakistan descends into anarchy? If there's any country which should never have had nuclear weapons due to chronic instability, it was Pakistan. And what will India do if it sees its foe circling down into the whirlpool?
What Pakistan is an example of is of another one of Western colonialism's chickens coming home to roost. The British Raj created the conditions for what we're seeing now. Hopefully the people of the region will come out relatively unscathed. But nothing is guaranteed. Human hubris strikes again.
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