There is a lot of hand-wringing about Pakistan but not a lot of ideas about what to do. It's become fashionable to write "Pakistan is just f#@!ed" articles (see here, here, here, here, and here for examples of such articles from the last 2 days). My favorite blogger, Matt Yglesias, has also taken to writing blog posts saying essentially the same thing (see here, here, and here).
Now if you have been a good blog-reader and clicked on and carefully read all those links, you will know that Pakistan is well and truly f#@!ed. You will also not have a single clue about what the U.S. or anyone can do about the problem (unless you, say, exercised independent thought).
But I have an idea about what to do about Pakistan.
As I see it, what is happening is that the Pashtun minority is making a bid to take power from the Punjabi majority. The Punjabis, who are the country's elite, care a lot about their conflict with India; they want to take back Kashmir. To ths end, they have cultivated Pashtun warriors since the inception of the state of Pakistan, and used them as both soldiers and terrorists aganst India (even while denying the Pashtun their own state). More recently, Pakistan supported Pashtun radical Muslim groups ("Taliban") against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and afterward to exert proxy influence in Afghanistan. The Pashtun, beaten back in Afghanistan (where they are the majority) by U.S. power, are focusing on Pakistan instead. They have slipped the Punjabis' leash and are using their advantages - universal armament, warrior culture, high birth rates - to cow the more numerous but more urbanized Punjabis into submission. The Punjabis have fought back weakly, but they have so long been accustomed to using the Punjabis as their soldiers that actually fighting the Pashtun has been difficult or impossible.
Here's my solution: partition Afghanistan. Make the south of Afghanistan a Pashtun ethnic state. This will increase Pashtun nationalism over Taliban Islamist universalism; more Pashtun will want independence and less will want to impose hardline Islam on other peoples. Creating a Pashtunistan will change Pakistan's civil conflict from a religious one to an ethnic one; the Pashtun of Pakistan will most likely win their independence from the Punjabi central government, who will be happy to see them go, and join with the Afghan Pashtun state that we create. This policy will stabilize Pakistan in the long run, and will have the side benefit of ending the war in Afghanistan on terms favorable to us. What's not to like?
The downside of this is that Pakistan will break up. But why is this bad? The nuclear weapons will remain in the hands of Punjabi rump Pakistan, not in Pashtun hands. China, which has cultivated Pakistan as a client state to keep India weak, will lose influence in South Asia. And both the new Pashtun state and the new Punjabi rump Pakistan will be more favorably disposed to U.S. influence than the current Pakistan. The Pashtun might even deliver al-Qaeda fugitives into our hands out of gratitude for the country that gave them their first ethnic nation-state in centuries. Essentially I'm just proposing doing what the British should have done when they abandoned their empire decades ago.
And more to the point: if you think this idea sounds dangerous, what's your alternative? So far, all the foreign policy experts in the world have come up with precisely zero well-regarded action plans for Pakistan. Our policy until now has been to do nothing, and as a result we have watched Pakistan slide into violence and chaos. That strategy will continue to fail. It is time to start thinking big.
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