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Dubious future in Muslim heartland

STEVE HUNTLEY

shuntley.cst@gmail.com
Last Modified: Dec 2, 2011 05:21PM

The turmoil, upheaval, voting for Islamists and inbred distrust of the West that are roiling the Muslim heartland portend at least an unsettled future and maybe one filled with conflict and strife at odds with the hope inspired by President Barack Obama’s outreach to the Islamic world and by the Arab Spring.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Pakistan, where each new development seems to be a new crisis plunging relations with Islamabad to a new low and undermining prospects for a successful outcome in Afghanistan. The latest is the battle across the porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan that left two dozen Pakistani soldiers dead in NATO air strikes. The details of how this open warfare between supposed allies broke out remain murky pending an official investigation.

Pakistan’s army blusters about “blatant aggression” by America. But the embarrassing fact is that the army’s intelligence service funds and provides support to our enemies operating out of safe havens in Pakistan. Afghan sources say coalition forces were attacked by militants firing from positions that turned out to be close to two Pakistan military outposts. Given the history of Pakistani duplicity and double-dealing — as in Osama bin Laden hiding virtually in the shadows of Pakistan’s version of West Point — there is little if any reason to doubt this account.

Pakistan used the battle as a reason to pull out of an international conference aimed at reassuring the world that Afghanistan will emerge from war as a place safe for investment. One can wonder whether Islamabad worries that such reassurance will attract business to Kabul from Pakistan’s arch-enemy India, which already is committing resources there.

Next door, Iran flaunts its contempt for the West and international law by sending thugs to invade, trash and briefly kidnap diplomats at the British embassy. It was shades of the 1979 invasion and hostage taking at the U.S. embassy. And it comes only weeks after the disclosure of an Iranian plot to assassinate a Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington. The mullahs paid no price for that outrage, which perhaps encouraged the attack on the British. Who knows what’s next? A Persian nuclear bomb, most likely.

Iran’s bravado isn’t lost on the Islamic world. Spitting in the eye of the West always plays well in the Arab Street. No one should forget that amid all the talk about moderate Islamists making gains in the upheaval brought on by the Arab spring unseating dictators.

Consider Libya. Islamist-led forces throw off four decades of oppression, economic stagnation and torture under Moammar Gadhafi, and what is among the first priorities for their new regime? Reinstating polygamy.

In Egypt, ask Coptic Christians how moderate they rate the Islamists who are rushing in to fill the power vacuum left after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. They’ll tell you about mobs burning churches and murdering Copts. Followers of this ancient faith, predating Islam, are leaving Egypt, literally running for their lives. One-hundred-thousand Christian families have left Egypt since Mubarak’s overthrow, reports the New York Times.

Christians also are fleeing Holy Land areas dominated by Palestinians. The Christian organization Open Doors finds Christian churches persecuted in Islamic countries ranging from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Yemen.

Resurgent political Islamism has hardly shown itself to be an open-arms, peaceful movement.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/9178089-452/dubious-future-in-muslim-heartland.html?print=true