Push Or Pull Factors On Gangs

LOFTON: In At ESR

Pakistan: The Push Me Pull You Beast of the East, Part V « Author ...

My writing partner, Holmes, is a man with experience in intelligence and covert operations, and, as such, needs a deep knowledge of history to be effective at his work. Over the past weeks, he’s been giving us a timeline of Pakistan: The Push Me Pull You Beast of the East,  Part I,   Part II ,  Part III , and Part IV  to help us understand how we Americans can be sending billions in aid to people who harbor our enemies. In those articles, he shared peak events from ancient times up to the brief leadership of Benazir Bhutto in the 1980s and 90s. This week, he concludes the series and discusses the presence of Bin Laden within Pakistan.

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“They Had to Know,” But Who are “They”?

By Holmes

The Indus River Valley in modern Pakistan has served as a highway for trade, culture, and the movement of armies for thousands of years. To compare it to an American and Canadian equivalent, Pakistan has developed as a giant “highway-town,” constantly influenced by new immigrants, transient armies and the movement of trade, people, and ideas along the Indus River Valley.

The further one travels from that river in Pakistan, the more parochial the local culture becomes. The “father” of modern Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, described a vision of a cohesive Pakistan with basic civil rights that included religious freedom and religious tolerance. That vision was very different from the unblended cultural and political stew that is Pakistan today. The nearly 170,000,000 people of Pakistan share very little cultural and political common ground. Their sense of national interest has not been strong enough to overcome localized interests, and that dynamic has completely dominated the development of modern Pakistan since it’s birth in 1947.

In the face of a mostly uneducated electorate, every elected official in Pakistan struggles between performing modern governmental tasks versus the need to placate the Islamic fascists. The amount of actual “governing” that occurs is restricted by that unavoidable factor. That’s why in Pakistan, bad government is often the result of the lack of opportunity and will to govern rather than the implementation of bad policy.

While the majority of the 30 million middle-class Pakistanis look to the future and embrace progress and modern education, many of the other 140 million remain isolated and lack a functioning education system. One of the critical impacts from the lack of an education system in Pakistan is that unregulated Islamic madrassas serve as schools and day care for many Pakistani children. Estimates of school age children attending madrassas range from 1% to 33% depending on who is doing the estimate.

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