In recent months contacts between US’ strategic partner Pakistan and the government of US-occupied Iraq have grown. So has the Pakistani interest in Iraqi elections. Like most Muslim states Pakistan refused US demand for Pakistani troops for Iraq; yet it established ties with the Allawi government.
In fact in the post-Saddam period Pakistan’s relations with Iraq are on the mend. Late last year the Allawi government’s defense and foreign affairs ministers visited Pakistan. President Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz have both supported early elections in Iraq. The elections, they say, would help restore peace. Pakistan is already training Iraqi police and diplomats. The two governments are identifying specific Iraqi reconstruction projects in which Pakistan can take part. A Joint Ministerial Commission has also been established to increase economic cooperation.
President Musharraf, during his visit to Britain early this month, called upon the US-led forces to chalk out a plan for early departure from Iraq by training local troops more quickly. A Pakistani role in the region’s future defense architecture, underwritten by the US, cannot be ruled out. Musharraf has already declared that Pakistan would train the Iraqi national army.
Significantly for the second time in less than a year Pakistanis find themselves involved in another country’s election process. First it was Afghanistan. Unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq do not share a border. But like Afghanistan, the political fate of Iraq deeply interests the Pakistanis. The process and outcome of the Iraqi elections will have an impact on the entire region.
If the elections take place without colossal bloodshed Iraq will have taken the first step away from the post-occupation whirlpool of death and destruction. Most important, the election result will be a test of Washington’s ability to live with electoral outcomes that may not fit the US concept of democracy. As many nations in the Muslim world, such as Algeria and Iran have experienced, Washington seeks democratic outcomes that do not threaten its interests. In Afghanistan there are the first signs of US adjusting to some ground realities, as the US-backed Karzai government is keen on building bridges with the “good Taleban.”
Given the balance of power between the occupier and the occupied and the current state of utter mayhem in major parts of Iraq, rejection of the political process would perpetuate bloodshed and destruction more for the Iraqi people and less for the occupiers.
Iraqi armed resistance did politically undermine the occupier. It denied the occupier a complete victory, established the limits of the occupier’s power, prevented a genuine coalition of occupation, denied legitimacy to the US invasion and occupation and subsequently forced Bush to rethink his Iraq policy. But now the law of diminishing returns has begun to operate.
Pakistanis are mindful of the death and destruction American occupation has brought to Iraq. They do however see in tomorrow’s elections an opportunity for the Iraqis to seize the long denied political space. Elections can potentially be the first significant step toward reversing the US occupation. In neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistanis saw and suffered the fall-out of civil war lasting a quarter century. They know the Soviet Union committed the original sin of the 1979 intervention but subsequently all the governments including their own facilitated the tragic intra-Afghan warfare. Any repeat of such a blunder in Iraq must be avoided — for the sake of Iraq, the region and global sanity.
