Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In the next four years (October 1958-June 1962), under military rule, Pakistan was put on a more hopeful course. A sweeping land-reform program restricted owners to 500 acres of irrigated, or 1,000 acres of nonirrigated, land, with the surplus distributed to existing tenants or other peasants. Former landlords received compensation for lost lands in long-term bonds. Extensive efforts were made to establish cooperative villages copied from those of Yugoslavia, and to reduce the birthrate. The second Five-Year Plan (1960-1965) got off to a good start with extensive foreign aid, including that of the World Bank, the United States, a European consortium, and increasing help from the Soviet Union. In March 1962 a new constitution with a strong presidency (reserved for three years to Ayub Khan) was announced, martial law ended, and elections were held. But the precarious international position of the country, going back to its original rejection of neutrality, continued.

This rejection of neutrality was based on a mixture of resentment toward India and Afghanistan, a vague feeling of fellowship with other Muslim states of the Near East, and a basic instability of political life. These impelled Pakistan toward a more dynamic foreign policy than India and led it to involvement in the Dulles network of treaties, including SEATO and CENTO.

This network of treaties in Dulles’s eyes was aimed at the Soviet Union, but in Karachi it was much more likely to be viewed in terms of Pakistan’s enmities with Afghanistan and India. This, in turn, tended to increase Soviet influence in Kabul and in Delhi. The Kremlin made vigorous protests against the Pakistan-Turkish Treaty of Cooperation of April 1954, the Pakistan-Iraqi alliance of January 1955, the United States-Pakistan negotiations for military cooperation of 1954-1955, and, above all, against the Baghdad Pact of November 1955. The growing militarization of Pakistan, not only from its domestic instability but from the advent of American arms, led to a growing Indian concentration of its military forces in the west. This in turn was interpreted in Pakistan as a threat to Kashmir, and drove tension upward. At the same time, Afghanistan, whose independence of Russian influence had been guaranteed by the British position in India for over a century, found itself, at the British withdrawal, exposed to increasing pressure both from the Soviet Union and from Pakistan. The nature of these pressures may be seen in the fact that a concession to France to explore Afghanistan for oil in 1952 had to be canceled because of Russian protests. On the other hand, American military aid to Pakistan was protested by Kabul, and led it to accept Soviet aid agreements in 1954.

Afghanistan was a multinational, or rather multitribal, state in which the chief group was the Pushtu. The creation of Pakistan in 1948 left almost half of this language group in Pakistan, and Afghanistan at once began to agitate for self-determination for the Pushtu. Success in this endeavor would create a new Pushtunistan state which would absorb much of western Pakistan and would extend from Soviet Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. The Russians naturally supported these claims, to retaliate against Pakistan cooperation with the United States and to open a Russian outlet to the southern ocean. In counterretaliation, in 1955, Pakistan tightened its control over its Pushtu areas and closed the Afghan border, stopping all Afghan commerce to the south and leaving Afghanistan almost completely dependent on Soviet outlets. This opened the way to a great increase in Communist influence, including that of Soviet satellites, in Afghanistan. These relations were sealed by a state visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin to Kabul in November 1955. From this came a Soviet loan of $100 million (of which $40 million for arms) at 2 percent interest over thirty years. Large amounts of Soviet arms and hundreds of Czech technicians began to move into Afghanistan.

For the Soviet Union the critical area in Asia was that on either side of the Caspian Sea. That was the only frontier where no buffer state stood between the Western bloc and the Soviet Union itself. This was a consequence of Stalin’s aggressive threats to Iran and Turkey in 1946, which had driven them into alliance with the West, but it went far back in history to the old Russian ambitions to reach the Persian Gulf and the Aegean Sea. Because of the danger to the Soviet Union in that area, especially to the Soviet oil fields of the Caucasus, the Kremlin was for a long time reluctant to bypass the Turkish-Iran-Pakistan barrier to seek to intervene in the troubled conditions of the Arab Near East. Those conditions obviously provided ample opportunities for Soviet economic, ideological, and political disturbances which could be injurious to the West, especially to western Europe, which was so dependent upon Middle East petroleum supplies. Stalin never was willing to intervene in any area which could not be directly accessible to Soviet troops, and, once his territorial ambitions in northeast Turkey and northwest Iran were defeated in 1946-1947, he left the whole Near East relatively alone.

This condition continued almost unchanged, in spite of domestic disturbances of a major character in Iran and among the Arab States, particularly Egypt. It was not until the summer of 1955 that the new Khrushchev effort to exploit the troubles of the Near East in order to build up local nationalism against the West was made possible by the growing instability of conditions in the area and was called forth by Dulles’s persistent efforts to organize the area on an anti-Soviet basis. Thus in this area, as in southeastern and southern Asia earlier, the American insistence on the noncommitted nations adopting anti-Soviet lines opened the way for the Soviet to pose as the friend of such nations by supporting their neutralism.

In Iran and Turkey, already burned by Soviet fire, this effort was a failure, but south of this barrier the situation in the Arab world was, from Moscow’s point of view, far more promising. There is little doubt that the Soviet decision to upset the apple cart in the Near East by selling arms to the Arab States was a reprisal for Dulles’s long-drawn efforts to get the northern tier of Near Eastern states (Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan) into the Western bloc.

These efforts began as far back as May 25, 1950, when the Western Powers offered to sell arms to the Near Eastern states themselves, if the recipients would guarantee not to use such arms for aggression. Fortunately, nothing came from this foolish offer, because the Arab states refused to promise not to use any arms against Israel. In fact, they were very definite that they would do just that as soon as they could untangle their own intra-Arab squabbles. In the interval, Iran and Egypt had domestic disturbances which created severe international repercussions.

Until recent years Iran remained a fairly typical underdeveloped Muslim country, but with distinctive features of its own from the fact that it was not an Arab but an Indo-European country and had an ancient heroic cultural tradition of Persian origin which was distinctly different from the Arab traditions of the Near East. It shared, however, the tribal, patriarchal, pastoral, and poverty-stricken nature of the Near East, and was included in a common geographic pattern by semi-aridity, emphasis on animal husbandry, survival of nomadic life, and the fact that its chief natural resource was oil.

Although most of Iran’s inhabitants are Muslim, only about one in ten speaks Arabic as his primary language, while over half speak Persian. The rest speak a variety of dialects of which about a fifth are Turkic. Only about one person in seven is literate, usually in Persian, using Arabic script. Most persons know more than one language, and it is not uncommon to speak one language in the family, write a different language, and pray in a third.