The Pakistani senator gazed at the headline in despair. It read: “US weighs new covert push in Pakistan.” Washington was authorizing “enhanced CIA activity” in the country while US Democratic candidates declared they were all ready “to launch unilateral military strikes in [Pakistan] if they detected an imminent threat.” Hillary Clinton wanted “joint US-UK oversight” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. In a country where anti-Americanism is almost a religion, said the senator, this is “an answer to a Taleban prayer.”
I am convinced that those whom God wishes to destroy, He first curse with foreign policy. For the third time in 20 years, the West is meddling with the world’s sixth most populous state. It did so to promote the Afghan Mujahedeen against the Russians in the 1980s, then to attack Al-Qaeda after 9/11, and now to “guard” Pakistan’s bombs against a fantastical Al-Qaeda seizure. Needless to say, the sole beneficiaries are the Taleban and the forces of disorder.
That said, few other conclusions can be drawn from a country that, more than any I know, is Churchill’s riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Pakistan has as many paradigms as pundits. You can take your choice. Thesis A is that President Pervez Musharraf is a well-meaning dictator who sought rapprochement with Benazir Bhutto to “transit” to democracy, and who still remains the best hope for guiding his country to civilian rule. Thesis B depicts him as a popinjay dictator who kills people, locks up judges, censors the media and runs a brutal fascist party, the MQM. He had no intention of working with Bhutto, whom he detested, and has so much blood on his hands as to be easily capable of consenting to her death.
Thesis C has Bhutto herself as a perfidious and corrupt hereditary monarch in thrall to a monster husband whose base was limited to Sindh province and London’s media drawing rooms. She indulged Washington’s John Negroponte in his ham-fisted attempt to prop up Musharraf last year, but only so as to escape corruption charges and enjoy a modest taste of power. Thesis D says this is outrageous. Bhutto was the one Pakistani politician with experience and stature at home and abroad. She knew she could rule only with army permission but could have faced down the military, negotiated with the Taleban districts and steered Pakistan to democracy. Her going is a catastrophe.
Forget that, says thesis E. The US-backed Pakistan Army, responsible for almost a quarter of the country’s economy, will never cede power. It is the sole embodiment of central control in this 60-year-old federal state, and its guarantor against another partition like Bangladesh in 1971. It cannot afford to trust unruly politicians such as Bhutto and her ilk and must be trusted by Pakistan’s allies abroad.
Rubbish, says thesis F. Pakistan’s army makes Saddam’s Republican Guard seem a bunch of pansies. Its Punjabi oligarchs and their agencies kill at will and feud even with their Taleban allies, as in last year’s slaughter at Islamabad’s Red Mosque. It has failed to curb the Taleban and nobody, not even Musharraf, is safe from it.
As for Pakistan in general, thesis G has it teetering on the brink of breaking apart, as the army readies itself to nullify next month’s election with rigging and corruption. A bloodbath will follow, in which Sindh province breaks away and the North-West Frontier becomes an Al-Qaeda enclave, lowering over Kabul.
No, it will not, says thesis H. Pakistan is made of rubber, bouncing back from every reverse. It has a mature “civil society” of lawyers, businessmen, politicians and even some generals, sensitive to their image abroad and deeply ashamed of their dictatorship. The elections may be a mess but they will somehow move Pakistan, stumbling and trembling, to eventual civilian rule. Religious parties are supported by barely 10 percent of the electorate, and even the army is overwhelmingly secular. An Islamist state is inconceivable.
Since there are grains of plausibility in all these theses, much turns on the fate of next month’s elections. Musharraf, weakened by his Nov. 3 coup, still has 60 top judges imprisoned, including the nation’s chief justice, locked up with his disabled son. With the charismatic Bhutto dead and the Negroponte intervention shattered, he is in a tight spot. He may yet cancel the vote and invite mayhem on to the streets.
There is certainly an openness to Pakistan’s dictatorship compared with other Islamic states, and some Westerners have appeased Musharraf as “our” dictator, operating a “doctrine of necessity.”
About 80 percent of US aid to Pakistan since Musharraf came to power has gone on military assistance, less than a quarter of it used even remotely against the Taleban. The virtual collapse of the state school system has followed a fall in education spending from 4 percent to 1.8 percent of GDP, one of the lowest in Asia. In its place have mushroomed the free madrasas.
America’s clodhopping sponsorship of Musharraf drove him to renege on the treaties with the tribal states, fomenting a Pashtun insurgency. The Afghan frontier has duly proved Al-Qaeda’s juiciest hunting ground, aided by every American bombing raid and every Pakistan Army atrocity. The Pashtun Mujahedeen (whose American backers are well-documented in the film Charlie Wilson’s War) is a Frankenstein monster that has turned its vengeance on Musharraf, Afghanistan and Washington alike.
Whatever the defects of democracy, and in Asia they are legion, it remains the least worst way of curbing authoritarian power. There is no alternative. America’s handling of Musharraf since 9/11 — essentially to capture one man, Osama Bin Laden — has rendered swathes of his country, from Balochistan in the south to Swat in the north, wholly insecure. Even the Grand Trunk Road from Islamabad to Peshawar is patrolled by the Taleban. The idea that Musharraf’s troops, let alone the CIA or the US Air Force, might suppress a people who have worsted every empire from the Moguls to the British is ludicrous. Modern armies are no agents of pacification. Civilian negotiation in a context of democratic assent is at very least worth a try.
Backing Musharraf has always seemed “a good idea at the time.” The next person to be cursed with Washington’s favor appears to be Musharraf’s successor as army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. However, by opting for the realpolitik of dictatorship the West has not just repressed democracy but aided insurgency and terror. It has yielded no security benefit to anyone.
If Pakistan becomes a “failed state,” the failure will, in large part, be one of democratic imagination in Washington and London. We simply refuse to practice what we preach.
