Walter Russell Mead: evaluation

Transcript context

…Elsewhere, will Pakistan remain as one geographically intact nation? Was it just stitched together, and eventually, it’s just going to fall apart? I think I would put that, Tyler, in the context of a much larger question — which is one of the things that my research for The Arc of a Covenant put in my head — was that from 1850 to 1950, you see these large, multinational states crumbling away into individual ethnic, almost monocultures, and at the cost of enormous wars, fanaticism, all kinds of things. But this re-sorting of Europe and of the Ottoman Empire into smaller, more coherent units — it’s still continuing. The war in Syria today, the war in Libya today. It’s moving past its old heartline. The wars in Ethiopia and Sudan today, the conflicts in Nigeria today are all reflecting the reality that, as societies develop, different groups of people are less content to live in large, multicultural, multiethnic units and want to be ruled by people who they feel understand them. Now, Pakistan is an interesting case, where they’ve tried to hold the very disparate elements of Pakistani culture. Pakistan had never been a geographical unit before partition, and the tribal differences are enormous. Again, it’s a little racist to say “tribal differences.” If these people were in Europe, we would call the Punjabis a nation, not an ethnic group or something. These national differences were deep. In Pakistan, they tried to overcome them by emphasizing Islam as the unifying factor of Pakistani national identity. As the strains in Pakistan have grown greater, there’s been a fanaticization among some elements of Pakistani society around Islam, again, trying to double down on this point of unity. Now, what we are seeing is that none of this has prevented a massive failure of governance in Pakistan. It’s not all their fault. The Afghan war brought a lot of trouble, a lot of refugees to them, but Pakistan has been badly governed for a very long time. Now, the schools don’t work, the flood control doesn’t work, the economy is in terrible shape. For a long time, their relationship with the United States was keeping them afloat. They had turned to China, hoping that China would keep them afloat. China doesn’t seem that interested in propping up expensive, money-losing regimes. Now they’re in real trouble. Where this goes, I can’t tell you. It’s a constellation of factors, but we should not forget that the strongest single institution in Pakistan is its nuclear-armed military. This military has a strong institutional sense of coherence and a strong loyalty to the Pakistani state. We can’t keep that out of the mix when we try to think about what’s going to happen in Pakistan. What does it look like for the northeast of India to break away from the Indian state? You look at a map — it doesn’t make sense, right?…

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