Pakistan and the Muslim World: National Security Imperatives and Islamic Trans-Territoriality

Abstract

For many Pakistanis, various crucial developments in the 1990s came as a traumatic shock. Firstly, closure of the Pakistani Embassy at Kabul in early 1994, following intermittent attacks by factionalist Afghans, bewildered a population which, for more than a decade, had endured numerous hardships, including loss of numerous precious human lives and urban property by virtue of its playing a vanguard role in assisting Afghan resistance against the communists. Pakistanis were still hosts to millions of uprooted Afghans whom the world apparently seemed to have forgotten. With a turbulent and equally uncertain Afghanistan now assuming hostile postures, Pakistan’s cherished dream of relinking itself with the newly independent Central Asian Republics (CARs) appeared to have been dashed to the ground. With the emergence of a Taliban-led regime in Kabul, Pakistani hopes were again revived yet the unabated internecine conflicts did not allow any breakthrough.¹ Secondly, in March 1994, the Pakistani government, despite euphoria about Indian-controlled Kashmir, ‘suspended’ its sponsorship of a resolution before the UN Human Rights Commission at Geneva censoring Indian policies in the Valley.