Did Libya Stab Pakistan in the Back?

Libya’s mercurial leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, threw in the towel late last year in his three decades-old battle of nerves with the west. In a series of well-orchestrated conciliatory moves, he accepted responsibility for the shooting down of a PanAm jumbo jet over Lockerbie, in Scotland, in 1988, and of a French airliner over Chad, a year later. He opened Libya’s ample coffers to compensate the families of the victims of the two tragedies to the tune of several hundred million dollars.

However, what truly delighted the U.S-U.K. condominium of global hegemony of interests was Qaddafi’s gratuitous decision to come clean on his weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t have much to boast of in that category but whatever rudiments of a programme of lethal weapons he had was regarded as a treasure trove by Bush and Blair.

It wasn’t so much what Qaddafi had, or didn’t have, in his arsenal. But what was of importance to the Anglo-Americans was that they had managed to break the most vocal and loud-mouthed of the hostile Arab leaders. This was of great psychological boost to the deadly Bush-Blair duo increasingly feeling the heat, at home, of rising public anger for having been taken for a ride on Iraq by their blatant lies and half-truths. The corralling of Qaddafi was as important to Washington and London as the capture, in flesh, of Saddam Hussain and the dismantling of his Baathist apparatus in Iraq.

But for Pakistan, Qaddafi’s somersault proved to be the costliest, because in the process of making a clean breast of his past ‘sins’ the maverick Libyan leader also spilled the beans on his being a recipient of the Pakistani largesse in the transfer of nuclear technology. With the benefit of hind-sight it now seems apocryphal that the ship carrying centrifuges for Libya—made in Malaysia but trans-shipped from Dubai—was intercepted by CIA and FBI by accident in the ‘friendly’ port of Port Said, in Egypt. The Egyptians have been the most reliable and faithful friends of Washington for more than a quarter century in the Arab world.

However, to a layman in Pakistan Col. Qaddafi would’ve been the last man in the world to blow the whistle on Pakistan. Such was the aura, and popular charisma of Qaddafi that Pakistan’s premier Cricket Stadium in Lahore was named after him. He was a larger- than- life figure to millions of fawning Pakistani fans.

Qaddafi had made his way into the gallery of contemporary romantic Muslim ‘heroes’ in Pakistan—and into the hearts of a hopelessly hero-worshipping Pakistani people—on the wings of his many maverick and unconventional deeds.

The dashing, handsome, 27 year- old soldier who toppled an archaic and ossified ruling system in his native Libya in 1969 didn’t have to sweat to become an icon to the Pakistanis. They saw in his antics—supporting the IRA in Northern Ireland against Britain, or the Moro Liberation Front against a repressive Filipino government in Manila—the spark of a revolutionary leader out to settle scores with an exploitative west. He was, in his good looks and daring exploits in far reaches of the world, made of hero material in their eyes. Little could they imagine, then, that with the dawn of the 21st century their daring hero would expose feet of clay, just like so many of his Arab peers.

The rise of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto on Pakistan’s firmament in the early 70s also consolidated the lore of Qaddafi. The two were not only contemporaries but had great temperamental similarities. They were cut from the same cloth. Both were mercurial and impetuous. Both, apparently, loathed the west and yearned for the salvation of the Muslim Ummah. The 1974 Islamic Summit in Lahore—a crowning achievement of Bhutto—brought the two closer to each other. That historic photograph of the two leaders, standing arm in arm with clenched fists in a pavilion of the historic Shalimar Gardens, is still etched on the memory of millions of Pakistanis.

There is little doubt that Bhutto and Qaddafi shared a vision of reviving the glory of the Islamic world. Their notion of Pan-Islamism, however romantic or unrealistic in retrospect, did spawn a natural bond of camaraderie between them. That explained the rationale for Qaddafi helping Pakistan’s nuclear programme, in its infancy, with injections of money. He was so incensed by Ziaul Haq’s callous decision to hang Bhutto, in the face of fervent pleas from Qaddafi and others to the contrary, that he decided to expel all 50 thousand- plus Pakistanis then working in Libya. It took Pakistan months of fervent diplomacy to dissuade him from implementing it.

It is also an open secret that it was Libya and Syria—both professing revolutionary credentials in the Arab camp—that sheltered and nurtured the Bhutto clan abroad during the Zia era in Pakistan; after Zia’s demise the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi took over that ‘obligation’.

The question is why has Qaddafi so radically and precipitately changed his tune, as also his stripes, beyond recognition?

One, simple, answer is age. He is no longer the youthful romantic who fancied that with his abundant wealth he could redraw the map of the world. Age has mellowed him and made him wiser about the limits of power.

But a more plausible and convincing answer is that the horrible example of Saddam Hussain has driven the fear of American retribution in Qaddafi’s heart deeper than anything else. He had been visited before by the Americans when Reagan, in 1984, bombed Qaddafi’s military barracks in Tripoli on spurious and trumped up suspicion of sponsoring terrorism in Europe against American interests. But Qaddafi didn’t lose his nerve then, although Reagan’s brazen adventure took the life of his adopted daughter. So why did he buckle under now?

Obviously, Qaddafi felt threatened by Bush’s open-ended ‘war on terror’ which could also engulf him, just as it did Saddam. He also saw himself, after Saddam’s fall, as without friends.His peers in the Arab resistance camp have been eliminated, one by one, by forces of nature and circumstances. Syria’s Hafez Al-Assad is no more; Yassir Arafat has been as good as neutralised by Ariel Sharon’s barbarity, condoned by Bush; and now Saddam too has been liquidated. The age of the titans in the Arab world is over, and the Arab camp is in total disarray. Qaddafi, dejected and frustrated by his failure to galvanize his Arab ‘brothers’ to his mission, has decided to call it a day. Now greying, he seems more concerned with leaving behind a legacy that his posterity wouldn’t find too embarrassing to live with. Hence his somersault and his uncharacteristic pandering to those he decried as colonists and exploiters, par excellence, all his life.

Fine. He may be pardoned for changing his spots so late in life and cozying up to his nemeses and worst detractors. But why, in God’s name, did he have to rope in Pakistan and pull the plug on a country that had stood by him unflinchingly for so long?

An answer to this question should be sought from the Pakistanis and not from Qaddafi. He has behaved exactly as an Arab tribal chieftain does in a crisis. When in a crunch, the first, instinctive, gut reaction of an Arab tribal chief is to run for cover. Thinking, first and foremost, to protect himself and his clan and tribe is a typically Arab Bedouin instinct. Qaddafi has lived up to that tradition and has exposed Pakistan, if at all he did, to save himself and his country. The age and culture of tribalism is still alive and kicking amongst the Arabs.

It is the fault of the Pakistanis that they have never tried to understand the Arab cultural moorings in their historical context and perspective. Swayed by their own heady wine of Pan-Islamism, the Pakistanis—rulers and the ruled alike—have viewed the Arabs from a narrow religious prism. It has always been a romantic, fancy, notion of the Pakistanis that oneness of religion should over-ride all other considerations and subsume them. This is despite the fact that even at home, this magic potion failed to keep a pristine, geographically-divided, Pakistan intact. The birth of Bangladesh within less than a quarter century of Pakistan should have cured this national amnesia but apparently didn’t.

So if Libya has ditched Pakistan and blown the whistle on it, it is not an act of sacrilege. Is it? Qaddafi has thought of his and his nation’s interest first and given primacy to it. Pan-Islamism , since this romantic vision was first floated by Jamal Uddin Afghani in the twilight of the 19th century to create a united Muslim platform to combat colonialism, has been a baggage of Indian Muslims( subsequently of Pakistani Muslims,too ) more than any other. The Arabs, in particular, don’t suffer from this hangover.

Afghani’s romanticism was proven hollow in World War-I when T.E. Lawrence—who seemed to know the Arabs much better than Afghani—exploited the Arab tribal instincts to foment an uprising against the Ottomans, who were as good Muslims as any.

Even Henry Kissinger understood the Arab tribal instincts well and, armed with this knowledge, drove a wedge between Egypt and its fellow Arabs when Anwar Sadat was persuaded to cut a separate deal with Israel.

Are the rulers of Pakistan—both in uniform and in mufti—so ignorant or purblind as not to know this history at all ? Even if they do, they have found it politically convenient to keep the people of Pakistan shrouded in the Pan-Islamic cloak. Exploiting the easily excitable religious fervour of the Pakistani people has always come in handy to the Pakistani rulers of all stripes and shades. Raise the slogan of Islam, unfurl the banner and let the people cry themselves hoarse. It is as simple as that. The magic works all the time, and under all circumstances.

So if Qaddafi is guilty of leaving Pakistan in a lurch, the generals holding the Pakistanis in their thrall haven’t behaved differently, either. When the moment of truth came they had no compunction in feeding Dr. Qadeer Khan and his acolytes to the wolves. They and Qaddafi are even. Both are secure, for the moment, behind their sandbags.