As Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf fights off the most serious challenge to his eight-year dictatorship, the United States is supporting him to the hilt. The message to the Pakistani public is clear: To the Bush White House, the war on terrorism tops everything, and that includes democracy.
The crisis began on March 9, when Musharraf suspended Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who bravely threatened Musharraf’s plans to consolidate his power. That triggered street protests demanding Musharraf’s resignation, which were met by a government-led crackdown on lawyers, the opposition and the media.
The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban’s main patron: ignoring Musharraf’s despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Queda and cut loose the Taliban. Today, despite $10 billion in US aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain lies in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Queda’s senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan’s chaotic border regions.
The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in US expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in US history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney’s office.
Current and past US officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any US criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department.
No one at Foggy Bottom seems willing to question Cheney’s decisions. Richard Boucher (Asst Secretary of State for South and Central Asia), for one, has largely limited his remarks on the crisis to expressions of support for Musharraf. Current and retired US diplomats tell me that throughout the previous year, Boucher refused to let the State Department even consider alternative policies if Musharraf were threatened with being ousted, even though 2007 is an election year in Pakistan.
With Cheney in charge and Rice in eclipse, rumblings of alarm at the Defence Department and the CIA can be heard. While neither agency is usually directly concerned with decision-making on Pakistan, both boast officers with far greater expertise than the White House and State Department crew. These officers, many of whom have served in Islamabad or Kabul, understand the double game that Musharraf has played — helping the US go after al-Queda while letting his intelligence services help the Taliban claw their way back in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani establishment that has sustained four military regimes is deeply divided. The judiciary and the legal system are out in the streets, demanding an end to military rule. They are backed by the country’s gleeful federal bureaucracy, which resented being shunted aside by Musharraf, and joined by civil society organisations and opposition parties. The protesters’ ranks have also been swelled by poor people protesting increases in the price of food and other necessities and shortages of electricity.
On the opposing side stand Musharraf’s remaining allies. The most important is the powerful, brooding army. On June 1, its top brass issued a strong statement of support for Musharraf that dismissed the protests as a “malicious campaign against institutions of the state”. But on TV talk shows, pundits are lambasting the US army for the first time, shocking many viewers. Such withering criticism has forced younger officers to question whether the entire military establishment should risk the public’s wrath to keep one man in power.
Musharraf promised the international community that he would purge pro-Taliban elements from his security services and convinced the Bush administration that his philosophy of “enlightened moderation” was the only way to fend off Islamic extremism. But Pakistan today is the centre of global Islamic terrorism, with Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar probably living in the country.
Instead of confronting this threat, the army has focused on keeping Musharraf in power — negotiating with extremists, letting radical Islamic students set up a base in Islamabad and so forth.
The logical strategy for Musharraf would be to apologise to the nation for hounding the chief justice, bring all parties to a reconciliation conference and agree to early elections under a neutral interim government. If he still insisted on running for president, he would have to agree to take off his uniform first so that no matter who won, Pakistan would return to civilian rule.
But how can a commando general carry out such a U-turn without losing face, especially when he is being publicly backed by the White House? A secretary of state with vision — a James Baker or a Madeleine Albright — could have recognised that Musharraf’s time was up. Instead, we have Rice and Boucher and Cheney, who — just as in Iraq — can only reinforce a failed policy.
LA Times