EDITORIAL: Growing terror threat in Pakistan

OPINION:

Pakistan is a headache for the West, with its 185 million Muslims suffering a fragile combination of its military, the only viable national institution (civil Punjabi elite descended from British India) and a growing threat of Islamic terrorists. That balance may be coming unhinged, and then a bigger headache. Chaos in Pakistan would threaten further mischief in the 1.3-billion ummah, the Islamic world stretching from Zamboanga in the southern Philippines to Dakar in West Africa.

A secret trial of 10 would-be assassins, originally charged with attempting to murder the 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, a teenage advocate of female education, has collapsed. Only two of the assassins have been convicted. They climbed aboard a student bus, asked her to identify herself, and shot her through the head. She survived, to become a Nobel Laureate, a symbol of resistance to the Muslim fanatics. She nevertheless dares not return to her home in Pakistan.

Conviction in April of the original suspects, with a penalty of life imprisonment, usually amounting to 25 years in the Pakistani system, has been annulled. Salim Khan, a senior police official, tells Reuters that eight suspects were freed because of “lack of proof.” Such trials are held in deep secrecy in fear of retribution from “militants.”

Hardly a day passes without a terrorist attack, either against the civilian government or by Sunni or Shia terrorists getting even with neighbors of the “wrong” sect. In western Baluchistan province, where a violent civil war has gone on for decades, dozens of bus passengers from the wrong side of the religious divide have been killed over the last few weeks. Christians have been condemned to death for violating Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Late last year 145 students and teachers were slain by Taliban terrorists in an attack on a school supported by the military.

Pakistan’s deficit economy survives with major infusions from the United States, Saudi Arabia and China. The United States began providing economic assistance along with military aid in 1947, shortly after the creation of the country, and $67 billion was lavished on Pakistan between 1951 and 2011. After abandoning Pakistan in the ’90s in opposition to its successful development of nuclear weapons, Washington authorized another $7.5 billion, though it has not always redeemed the annual $1.5 billion commitment.

This swing and sway of Washington’s policies, and virulent radical Muslim propaganda, has produced bitter anti-American hostility. And the U.S. has had a hard time facing up to terrorism, sometimes an extension and outgrowth of the Pakistani military and intelligence in its constant low-level support of pro-Pakistan and independence guerrillas in Kashmir, the Himalayan state contested with India. A massacre in Bombay in 2008 took the lives of 164 civilians and nine terrorists, including six Americans.

Pressure from Washington in that year assisted in the ouster of Pervez Musharraf and his “civilianized” military government. The current weak, Saudi-supported administration, imitating the rule of law of the much-vilified British India, is constantly under threat of another military takeover. For more than half of Pakistan’s history the military has ruled the land. The hidden drama of the Malala trial suggests a breakdown under the increasing terrorist threat, and that may bring back army rule, or something worse.

The implications for the United States, India (home of more Muslims than Pakistan), Bangladesh and the Pakistan diaspora — a half-million Pakistanis live in the United States — are great. Given the sorry record of the Obama administration in the Middle East, the prospect of a Pakistan implosion is frightening.