In My View

Pakistan in trouble

With Pakistan, the USA is between a rock and a hard place. Now that Gen Parvez Musharraf has declared an internal emergency in Pakistan, the American policy pundits have suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy and rule of law. Demands for the George W Bush government to dump the general have reached a crescendo.

All the while when Pakistan military was bombing, strafing, gunning and abducting people in the northwestern part of the country – all without the emergency powers they now enjoy – the demigods of ‘democracy’ in Washington did not have any conscience pangs. Only when Gen Musharraf found himself in a legal tangle with the Pakistan Supreme Court on the verge of ruling his recent re-election void did the Bush Administration and its capper boys found him to be utterly unpalatable.

They now want him to write his own dissolution by handing over power to Benazir Bhutto after a cursory Parliamentary poll early next year. This is the same Bhutto who in her previous incarnation as the head of a kleptocratic regime had denuded the country of all fair play. Now that she is ready to do any one’s bidding – particularly that of the Americans – for her own anointment, the US strategic punditry has found in her the visions of liberal liturgy that would deliver them all Islamic terrorists residing in the region.

So, in other words, Washington is swinging from one bad choice to one worse, because they have no other. In the past 25 years, ever since Pakistan under Gen Zia-ul Haq decided to become a frontline state in the Cold War battle in Afghanistan, the Americans have joined hands with successive regressive regimes in Islamabad to systematically destroy all semblance of decency and progressivism in the country’s politics.

They have not allowed any institution in the country to survive barring the armed forces. They have fostered the feudal lords to thrive in the country in the guise of democratic politicians. And for more than decade, they let forces of Islamic radicalism grow just so that it could act as a bulwark of American interests – under the aegis of a Wahabi philosophy pioneered by the other American stooges, the Saudi royal family.

Now all those policies are coming home to roost. Gen Musharraf might not have been the paragon of virtue that the American policymakers expressly profess as their motto, but nor was he the embodiment of evil that the US’s pro-establishment, mainstream media is drumbeating about. Musharraf is a man who has shown his liberal instincts a number of times, though often obscured by his high showmanship.

For a long time, he struggled hard to maintain a balance between his necessity of confronting the Islamic radicalists and not going against the theological bent of the population. He did even try to shift Pakistan from the path of endemic anti-Indianism as a sine qua non of its existence as he realised that it was coming in the way of his attempts at modernising the country. Unfortunately for him, Pakistan’s ruling elite had been weaned away from sharing power with the people – evident in a limited way in the early days of Pakistan – and to a total dependence on the USA.

Having been bred in Pakistan army that has been the largest beneficiary of this American largesse, Musharraf was not in a position to make a clean break with the past. Moreover, after 9/11 he took the conscious decision of siding of with that section of world opinion, which was against religious obscurantism driving Islamic terrorism. Coincidentally a shade of this opinion was being led by the US and Musharraf decided to make this work to his advantage thus gaining legitimacy for his regime.

This attitude of his helped India also to deal with cross-border terrorism aimed at the country even though often the newly established systems failed to deliver. But for the first time in the sub-continent’s past did a ruler of Pakistan veer away from the path of the anti-India bandwagon. But curiously, neither the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government nor the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government allowed him to garner some political mileage out of his endeavour that could gain him elbowroom in the politics across the borders.

Possibly, both the Indian regimes were keener to please their new friends in Washington, thus keep up an unrelenting pressure on him. The basic fallacy in this Indian strategic argument was the lack of a Pakistani civil society that could buttress a democratic push against the Islamic radicalists. India could at least have held Musharraf’s hand in putting up that kind of a political resistance and not have taken such a securo-centric stand on the whole complex relationship.

Now, it might already be too late for even India to salvage its Pakistan policy that goes beyond keeping the former’s borders benign. For whichever regime comes to power in Islamabad in a post-Musharraf phase would seek to hide their American apron strings under a radical verbiage targetted against India. They would try to balance their hardline stance against Islamic terrorists targeting the USA with a softer line against those that seek to destabilise India.

If anyone in New Delhi believes that the policy mavens of Washington would actually live up to their rhetoric about eliminating “all terrorism” launched from Pakistan, s/he should be given the highest honour, saved for utter naivete. The desperation levels of the US elite is too high for them to consider any view that does not cater directly to their immediate interests.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in . He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme at the Centre.