[NYTr] Bush and Musharraf's grand illusion

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Bush and Musharraf's grand illusion

Democracy for Pakistan was never the deal -- and as Musharraf's latest
power grab throws his nation into turmoil, Bush will gladly go along.

By Juan Cole
Salon

In the fall of 1999, as he campaigned for the presidency, George W.
Bush was asked by a reporter to name the leader of Pakistan. Bush could
not. He famously replied: "The new Pakistani general, he's just been
elected -- not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy
is going to bring stability to the country, and I think that's good
news for the subcontinent." Although Bush didn't know Gen. Pervez
Musharraf's name and was confused as to how he got into office, the
soon-to-be American president was sanguine about the anti-democratic
developments in Pakistan.

More than seven years later, Bush's illusions about Musharraf -- and any
illusion of democracy in Pakistan -- have been shattered by the
dictator's declaration of a state of emergency. Tantamount to a coup,
Musharraf's actions on Saturday have not only thrown Pakistan into
turmoil but have also revealed the hypocrisy of Bush's foreign policy,
including the proclaimed goal of fostering freedom and the rule of law
in the Muslim world.

At a press conference on Monday, Bush said of the weekend coup, "We
expect there to be elections as soon as possible." But while Bush
admitted that Musharraf's actions would "undermine democracy," he
insisted that the general is "a strong fighter" in the war on terror.
That dual message was accompanied by the American president tepidly
declining to say what he would do if Musharraf did not move toward
elections. Also revealing was the fact that Bush had sent the weakest
member of his team, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, out to warn
Musharraf against the coup, indicating how little he was in reality
worried about it. If he had been deeply anxious, he would have called
the general himself. Many observers are viewing Musharraf's coup as a
major setback for Bush's policy, but in fact it changes almost nothing.

Although the United States has given some $11 billion to Pakistan
(mostly in military aid) since 2001, Bush needs Musharraf more than
Musharraf needs the United States. The war in Afghanistan is a key
reason: A major proportion of the war materiel for the 20,000 U.S.
troops, and additional 20,000 NATO troops, in Afghanistan (a landlocked
country) goes through Pakistan. U.S., British and Canadian troops on
the front lines fighting a Taliban resurgence could be endangered if
Pakistan were to cut off the flow of those supplies. On Monday, Rice
appeared to back off from earlier warnings to Pakistan that a coup
would jeopardize U.S. aid, saying that she doubted cooperation on the
war on terror would be affected by Musharraf's actions. Musharraf, who
was brought up in part in Turkey and is representative of the secular
stratum of Pakistan's middle class, is the Bush administration's ideal
ally. They point to his successes: Musharraf has moved a lot of
fundamentalist officers out of positions of power, removing them from
any authority over the country's stockpile of nuclear bombs. Under his
rule, Pakistani military intelligence has captured nearly 700 al-Qaida
operatives in that country, including high-value figures such as Khalid
Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. And Pakistani
cooperation was key in breaking up a plot in summer 2006 by Britons of
Pakistani heritage to blow up airplanes flying from London to New York.

But the 1999 interview revealed Bush's true stripes regarding the
Pakistani dictator, and his knee-jerk support for authoritarianism over
democracy. Bush was criticized then for applauding the overthrow of the
democratically elected Nawaz Sharif government in the Oct. 12, 1999,
military coup. His spokesperson at the time, Karen Hughes, said that
Bush was encouraged by Musharraf's promise that he would hold early
elections, restore "stability" to Pakistan, and ease tensions between
India and Pakistan. (In fact, Musharraf had been a notorious hawk on
India and may in part have carried out the coup because he saw his
civilian predecessor as too dovish toward New Delhi.) What the world
did not then know was that President Bill Clinton had negotiated a deal
not long before with Prime Minister Sharif whereby Pakistan would
deploy special operations troops to capture Osama bin Laden. When
Musharraf took power in fall of 1999, he refused to honor the deal,
since the operation was unpopular with the military's fundamentalist
officers. Indeed, Bush was supporting a man who derailed the best
chance the Clinton administration may have had to prevent Sept. 11.

Bush went on, of course, to talk a good game as president about
democratizing the Middle East, but that never appears to have been more
than a cover story for his projection of American power into the
region. And now he is standing by Musharraf as the latter dismantles
the fagade of civil society institutions in Pakistan.

Two crises pushed Musharraf to act. The first was an increasingly
assertive Supreme Court, which successfully fought back against the
general's attempt to dismiss its chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad
Chaudhry, last spring. The Supreme Court appears to have been planning
to declare Musharraf ineligible to hold the post of president, to which
he was recently reelected by Parliament.

The second major crisis was the conflict between Musharraf and Muslim
radicals. The United States had pressured him to crack down on the
Muslim hard-liners of the northern tribal areas, who the United States
alleges gave haven to al-Qaida operatives and protected training camps
used to prepare terrorists to strike the West. But the vast, rugged
territory had defeated the British Empire's attempts to secure it, and
Musharraf was not making better progress. In September 2006, he
concluded an accord with the chieftains of the tribal areas, which some
saw as a capitulation to the radicals. In spring and summer of 2007,
Musharraf was faced with an insurgency in Islamabad's Red Mosque
complex, which he crushed with some brutality in July. Although the
militants were not popular in most of the country outside the Northwest
Frontier Province, where many of the madrassas, or Muslim seminaries,
are located that produced the Taliban, no one liked seeing a mosque
invaded and seminarians killed (even if the latter were armed and
dangerous).

The twin crises reduced Musharraf's legitimacy in Pakistani society to
something near zero, and Washington swung into action. Rice called
Musharraf repeatedly this summer, urging him to allow exiled former
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto -- dismissed for corruption at the end of
both of her previous terms (1988-1990 and 1993-1996) -- to return to
the country. As a secularist who opposes the Muslim extremists, Bhutto
could have hoped to shore up the legitimacy of Musharraf's efforts
against them. As the leader of the popular Pakistan People's Party, she
has substantial grassroots support. The general eventually acquiesced,
and Bhutto returned on Oct. 18, though the massive bombing that greeted
her arrival at Karachi brought into question whether she could restore
stability.

For the Bush administration to whitewash authoritarian rule as a
promise of democracy in Pakistan is nothing new. After Sept. 11, then
Secretary of State Colin Powell used a mixture of threats and pledges
of aid to force Musharraf to turn on the Taliban in Afghanistan, which
had been a pet project of the Pakistani military. In January 2002,
Musharraf banned a number of militant Muslim groups whose members had
been trained in the Taliban terrorist camps that also produced the
Sept. 11 hijackers. America's new ally could hardly show his true face
as a mere military dictator, so on April 30, 2002, Musharraf held a
referendum on whether he should become "president." Since he was not
running against any rival, it was impossible for him to lose this
referendum, and voter turnout was low. Bush remained silent about the
charade, and a low-level state department official declared it an
"internal Pakistani matter."

In fall 2002, Musharraf held stage-managed parliamentary elections, in
which he interfered heavy-handedly in the campaigning. He was
attempting to throw the election to the only civilian party that
supported him, the Pakistan Muslim League Qaid-e Azam (PML-Q), called
in Pakistan "the king's party." In fact, Musharraf's maneuvering could
not give the PML-Q a majority, since the Pakistan People's Party of the
then-exiled Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) of
deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif showed some resilience.

What Musharraf's interference did accomplish was to give an opening in
the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan for a six-party
fundamentalist Muslim coalition, the Islamic Action Council, to take
power. The key components of the Islamic Action Council included the
Jamaat-i Islami, led by Qazi Hussain Ahmad, and the Clerical
Association of Islam of cleric Fazlur Rahman -- who had trained many of
the Taliban leaders. The council also took about a fifth of the seats
in the national Parliament, an almost unprecedented good showing, since
most often the fundamentalist parties got less than 3 percent in
Pakistani elections. American pundits ill-informed about Pakistan are
tempted to support dictators such as Musharraf because they distrust
the Pakistani electorate. But when allowed to participate in relatively
free elections, Pakistani voters have usually backed moderate leaders
and ignored the fundamentalists.

Musharraf's latest seizure of power shows that little has changed in
Pakistan since October 1999. Through thick and thin, Bush has stood by
"the general" in Islamabad whose name he at first could not remember,
the guarantor of "stability." It is predictable that Washington will go
on supporting the dictator, even though Musharraf's doffing of the faux
trappings of democracy in Pakistan has pushed the press corps to pose
sharper questions than normal to Bush about this apparent hypocrisy.

But Pakistan's military is the linchpin of Bush's policies in
Afghanistan and in the no-man's land of tribal Pakistan. Faced with
choosing between an ignominious rout in the region from which the Sept.
11 plot was launched, and perhaps even the fall of the Kabul government
to a resurgent Taliban, or otherwise having to suffer criticism for
hypocritically backing a military dictatorship, Bush will mouth some
polite phrases about the prospect of elections in the future (as he did
in 1999), and go on providing for Islamabad's military machine. Aside
from the cancellation of some ineffectual debates in a weak Pakistani
Parliament -- and the end of the illusion that any vestiges of
democracy remain -- nothing will change.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/06/musharraf/index_np.html