Anti-Americanism in Pakistan: A brief

history
dawn.com (http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214) November 14, 2014

The anti-Americanism wave today at least in most Muslim countries is

such that the critique that comes with it is largely knee-jerk in nature. AFP
Though anti-Americanism during the Cold War (1949-89) was mostly the
ideological vocation of leftists, today some 25 years after the collapse of the
Soviet Union one can safely suggest that America is undergoing a period
when its reputation is loathed more than it has been before.
It is true that this is largely due to the conduct of the two George Bush
administrations (2000-2008) and their utter lack of prudent diplomacy.
However, the anti-Americanism wave at least in most Muslim countries
today is such that the critique that comes with it is largely knee-jerk in nature.

For example, the nature of anti-Americanism one often comes across TV news
channels in Pakistan is primarily the animated vocation of two interlinked
entities: the religious and conservative parties and certain former military
men. Both felt alienated and angry after the American dollars that were dished
out for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency in the 1980s dried up.

Once upon a friend

According to a research paper authored by Dr Talukder Muniruzaman in 1971
on the politics of young Pakistanis, a majority of Pakistanis viewed America
positively in the 1950s.
The paper also suggests that right up until Pakistans 1965 war against India,
most Pakistanis saw America as a friend, especially in reaction to the Soviet
Unions close ties with India.
According to another lengthy paper
(https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/ecdecc/v32y1983i1p11-44.html) (published by
Chicago University in 1983) on the ideological orientation of Pakistans
university students (by Kiren Aziz and Peter McDonough), anti-Americanism
among most Pakistanis remained somewhat low even during the protest
movement (in 1967-68) against the pro-US Ayub Khan dictatorship in spite
of the fact that the movement was largely being led by leftist students, activists
and politicians.

Ayub Khan rides in a car with American First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, in
Karachi.
Some leading leftist activists of the movement also suggest that there were
precious little incidents during the protests in which an American flag was
torched.
The following is what Badar Hanif, a radical member of the left-wing National
Students Federation (NSF) in the late 1960s, wrote in a recent email to me:
"We were focused. We not only wanted to topple the US-backed Ayub
dictatorship, but the whole capitalist system."
When I wrote back asking him whether the US was a target as well, Badar
replied:

Some of us were pro-Soviet and some pro-China communists. Yes we were

against the US, but more due to the fact that soon after Ayubs fall (in 1969),
the US and the Pakistan military began aiding and backing right-wing Islamic
parties. These religious groups offered themselves to work as a bulwark against
the rising leftist tide in educational institutions and on the streets.

A National Students Federation rally against Ayub at the Karachi University.

Kiren Aziz and Peter McDonough's paper suggests that anti-Americanism in
the 1970s was ripe in many Arab countries due to the United States singleminded support for Israel. This nature of anti-Americanism finally made its
way into Pakistani society during the Z.A. Bhutto regime (1972-77), especially
when Bhutto started to expand his Islamic Socialism doctrine at the
international level by consolidating relations with various radical Muslim
states and Arab countries.
However, the buildup to this was the Richard Nixon administrations failure to
militarily help its staunch South Asian ally during its 1971 war with India.
Nixon had otherwise been quite sympathetic towards 'Pakistan's point of view'
during the 1971 conflict.

Seyyed Vali Nasr in his excellent book, Vanguards of the Islamic Revolution
writes that the religious parties (especially Jamat-i-Islami) began attributing
Pakistan's defeat in the 1971 war to the decadence and debauchery of men like
General Yahya Khan and due to the nation's failure to become good Muslims.
However, before that, a large number of Pakistanis had already begun to blame
the US because it had refused to help Pakistan in the war.
In his book Political Dynamics of Sindh 1947-1977, Tanvir Ahmed Tahir
suggests that the post-1971 anti-Americanism in Pakistan was more a vocation
of progressive and leftist political groups. This is confirmed in Hassan Abbas
book, Pakistans drift into extremism.'

A leftist students rally against capitalism and 'US imperialism' at the Karachi
University in 1973.
So, if the religious parties were still refusing to criticise the US, is it correct to
assume that these parties were really being escorted by the US against the
perceived threat of a take-over of pro-Soviet forces in Pakistani politics?

Progressive student leaders, activists and politicians of the era would answer in
the affirmative. Many of them explain this as a consequence of the Pakistan
religious parties strong links with oil-rich Arab monarchies, especially the
Saudi Arabia, a country that was a close ally of the US.
Anjum Athar who was associated with the Liberal Students Federation (LSF) at
the University of Karachi in 1974-75 once shared with me an interesting
observation. He said:
In those days (the 1970s) being socially and politically conservative did not
necessarily mean being anti-West. Even the most militant Islamic student
groups in the 1970s who wanted the imposition of Shariah were hardly ever
seen or heard badmouthing the US. Religious groups were more threatened by
the rise of communism, a threat they shared with the US and Saudi Arabia.
That is why anti-Americanism was more rampant among Pakistani leftists as
compared to the religious parties.
This trend continued across the 1980s.
America remained Pakistans leading aid donor. According to Lubna Rafiques
1994 paper, Benazir & British Press, it was only in the last year of Z.A.
Bhuttos regime (1977), that he started to allude to moving out of the
American camp, calling the US a white elephant. He also went on to accuse
the Jimmy Carter administration for financing the religious parties agitation
against him in 1977.

ZA Bhutto raising a toast at a state dinner during his 1975 trip to the US.
Throughout the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s, anti-Americanism
remained a much polarised affair in Pakistan. Most religious parties and their
supporters, and the industrial/business classes that supported Zia, were either
openly pro-America or ambiguous on the subject.
Zia was backed by the Ronald Regan administration with military hardware and
dollars during the US proxy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
(for which Pakistan was used) and against communism in the region.
Consequently, anti-Americanism thus became more rampant among those
opposing Zia.
For example, though anti-Americanism among most PPP workers and its
student wing grew twofold after Z.A. Bhuttos execution at the hands of the Zia
dictatorship, the partys new chairperson, Benazir Bhutto, advised her party to
concentrate on the removal of Zia alone.

In 1986, when she returned to Pakistan from exile and was greeted by a
mammoth crowd in Lahore, groups of the PPPs student wing, the PSF, began
torching a US flag at the crowded rally. Benazir is said to have stopped them
from doing this, pointing out that they would not be able to fight a superpower
if they werent even able to remove a local dictator.
Though by the late 1980s, the intensity of anti-Americanism had grown in
Pakistan (compared to the preceding decades), it never became violent.

Zia at the White House with Ronald Reagan.

The only violent case in this respect had taken place in 1979 in Islamabad,
when the US consulate was attacked by a crowd enraged and provoked by a
broadcast from Iranian state radio that had blamed the US for engineering that
takeover of the Kaaba that year by a group of Saudi fanatics.
Though the notorious takeover of the Muslims sacred place was masterminded
by a band of armed Saudi fanatics, Irans new revolutionary regime under
Ayatollah Khomeini used its media to claim that the attack was backed by

American and Zionist forces.

According to Yaroslav Trofimovs book, 'The siege of Mecca, confusion about
who planned and executed the attack also arose when the Saudi regime blacked
out the news.
The gradual foe
In the 1990s as America largely divorced itself from the region after the end of
the Afghan civil war, Pakistanis got busy tackling the bitter pitfalls of the
Afghan war in the shape of bloody ethnic and sectarian strife.
However, this also meant the drying up of American patronage and funds for
religious groups and parties in the country.
Anti-Americanism returned to the fore (but with far more intensity) after the
tragic 9/11 episode in 2001 and not surprisingly, the religious groups now
became its main purveyors.
According to veteran defense analyst, Hassan Askari, this post-Cold-War
version of anti-Americanism in the country is an emotional response of most
Pakistanis to the confusion that set in (in the Muslim world) after the
9/11event.
Naushad Amrohvi - a member of the Maoist Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) in
1972 (obefore leaving for Sweden after the Zia coup) recently told me: AntiAmericanism was more popular with leftist youth before the 1980s. It was
more of an intellectual pursuit. We were more into negating the US policies by
intellectually attacking capitalism and modern imperialism and for this we
read and discussed a lot. We read a lot of Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mao
Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Faiz Ahmed Faiz we even read a lot of Abul Ala
Maududi so we could puncture his theories!

However today Amrohvi laments the fact that anti-Americanism in Pakistan

has become an excuse to hide ones own failures: We wanted to fight America
with ideology and politics, and not through suicide bombers and naked
hatred, he added.

Security outside the US Consulate in Karachi (2002).

Columnist Fasi Zaka in one of his columns suggested that the kind of antiAmericanism found these days (among the urban middle-classes of the
country) is extremely ill-informed. He wrote that a lot of young Pakistanis are
basing their understanding of international politics by watching low-budget
straight-to-video documentaries on Youtube!
These so-called documentaries that Zaka is talking about are squarely based on
rehashed conspiracy theories that mix age-old tirades and paranoid fantasies.
All these are then further mixed with flighty myths about and events recorded
only in polemical literature and flimsy history books.
Thus, the post-9/11 confusion and emotionalism in Pakistan was largely given
vent and an intellectual tilt by apologists of all shapes and sizes among
them being those had once been recipients of US funds and patronage during
the Cold War.

Whereas there was a prominent streak of romantic rebellion associated with

the anti-Americanism of Pakistani leftists during the Cold War, nothing of the
sort can be said about the widespread anti-Americanism found in Pakistan
today.

Activists set fire to American flags at a protest rally of a religious party in

Lahore (2012).
In fact, the present-day phenomenon in this context has become an obligatory
part of populist rhetoric in which American involvement is blamed for
everything from terrorist attacks, to the energy crises, to perhaps even the
outbreak of dengue fever!

dawn.com (http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214) November 14, 2014