Created by violence, preserved by violence

Pakistan has become an Islamist Don Quixote with a nuclear lance. New Delhi has called its bluff

- MJ Akbar

Pakistan's doctrinaire general Syed Asim Munir green-flagged the latest invasion of Kashmir with a reiteration of the defunct but toxic conjecture that Islam was sufficient as the basis of nationalism. The two-nation theory, endorsed by the British to partition India, died at the early age of 24 on December 16, 1971, killed by Bangladeshis who preferred Bengali to Urdu and reframed their Constitution on the more sustainable lines of linguistic identity.

Islam has never been the raison d'être of any other political entity. If Islam was enough, why would there be 22 Arab nations? They have both religion and language in common. Islam is a faith; it cannot be imprisoned in a country.

After 1971, Pakistan did not replace its birth theory with a one-nation rationale; instead, it slipped into a non-nation vacuum, struggling to contain fissiparous ethnic divisions under a common flag. For half a century, Pakistan has embraced an ideological ghost in search of life after death.

Terrorism, a vicious phantom war, is the inevitable preferred strategy of an unstable national ideology complemented by a permanent ruling establishment that is a volatile combination of the politically corrupt and militarily impotent. General Munir was not the first amnesiac to defy logic and history in search of geography. He will not be the last.

Pakistan invented modern terrorism within ten weeks of its Caesarian birth. On October 22, 1947, it sent some 5,000 terrorists, assisted by "soldiers of the Pakistan Army 'on leave'," according to HV Hodson, to seize Kashmir before Eid, due that year on October 26. The terrorists looted, pillaged, and killed; their descendants are still waiting to reach Srinagar.