Who Started the Fire?

But barely three decades ago,the subcontinent was a very different place. It had many problems,but violent religious extremism was not one of them.

Pakistan was widely seen as a moderate Islamic state. Although Pakistan was created in the name of creating a homeland for Muslims in the subcontinent,it quickly broke up amidst the assertion of ethnic nationalism in East Bengal. Pakistan was indeed obsessed with the Kashmir question,but did not seek to win it through religious extremism.

Afghans were deeply religious and intensely conservative. Their ruling elite was nevertheless a secular one.

In India,the secular fabric designed by the founding fathers seemed to survive many odds in the post-Partition phase. While India’s Muslims had many grievances,few took to violent extremism. And the forces of Hindutva were confined to the margins of the political mainstream.

All that has radically changed with the turn of the 1980s. Hiro,a prolific writer based in London,recounts the rise of jihad and the brutalisation of the subcontinent since then. This tale has been told before. Scholars and journalists have written extensively about the origins and evolution of the jihad in South Asia.

The rise of the Taliban,the 9/11 attacks in the US,the American war on terrorism and occupation of Afghanistan,and the emergence of the northwestern subcontinent as the epicentre of terrorism has made the story of South Asian jihad an interesting and consequential one.

Hiro updates the story with new material from the Soviet archives and the more recent leaks of the US embassy cables from the subcontinent.

With his experience covering the politics of the Islamic world for many years,Hiro is well-placed to tell the tale. He walks us through the communist revolution in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s,the Soviet intervention to protect the left-wing regime,Zia-ul Haq’s injection of extremist Islam into Pakistan’s politics,the Pakistan army’s role in instrumentalising the jihad in Afghanistan with Western and Saudi support in the 1980s.

Buoyed by the successful ouster of the Russians from Afghanistan,the Pakistan army applied similar tactics of cross-border terror against India from the 1990s. Hiro reflects on the impact of all these developments on India’s internal security,especially on Indian Muslims and on Kashmir.

He then turns to the more recent emergence of the Pakistani Taliban,its confrontation with the army and the unfolding convulsions in Afghanistan amidst US President Barack Obama’s plan to end America’s combat role there by 2014.

Hiro is quite adept at identifying the tragic strands of South Asia’s contemporary history; but he leaves us dissatisfied at the end with the failure to tie them all together. Jihad on Two Fronts offers neither significant new insights about the subcontinent’s recent past nor thoughtful assessments about its future.