countries (Miller, 2000: 76). However, it was a role driven not by
altruism, but by calculations of Pakistan’s interests at a number of
different levels, and at different times by different leaderships. In
order to make sense of Pakistan’s positions, it is important to out-
line some of the peculiarities of Pakistan’s geopolitical context,
both with respect to Afghanistan and in the wider politics of the
Indian subcontinent.
Pakistan emerged as a state from 15 August 1947 as a result of
the partition of British India by the Indian Independence Act. Its
birthpangs were extraordinarily traumatic, and go a long way to
explaining the existential insecurity which has dogged Pakistan
since its emergence, leading one analyst to dub it an ‘insecurity
state’ (Thornton, 1999: 187). In contrast to independent India,
which has been formally a democratic state for almost the entire
period since its creation, Pakistan has endured prolonged periods
of military rule – from 1958–62, 1969–72, 1977–88, and most
recently from October 1999. Even when military rule has not been
exercised directly, the fear of military intervention has impacted on
the practice of politics, supplying members of the civilian elite
with incentives to use political office as a positional good for the
purpose of personal enrichment while they can. In this, the modern
Pakistani elite has moved far from the ethos of the founders of
Pakistan, most notably Mohammed Ali Jinnah (Ahmed, 1997).
Longer-term Pakistani interests
Pakistan has been confronted by problems of national integration
and identity since its creation. Perilously, it emerged as a territor-
ially bifurcated state, with India separating ‘East Pakistan’ from
‘West Pakistan’. Relations between the two wings were strained
almost from the moment of partition, as the new Pakistani leader-
ship asserted the primacy of Urdu as the national language, in the
process affronting the overwhelming majority of East Pakistanis,
who were Bengali speakers (Ahmed, 1996: 220–1). This fuelled
Bengali nationalism, and in 1971, following the victory of Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League in the December 1970 elections,
The Development of Afghan Resistance 67