[NYTr] Against Us or Against Us: Ted Rall on Musharraf, Pakistan's Con Man

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Search and Destroy - Nov 9, 2007
http://www.rall.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#4410959196015516696#4410959196015516696

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AGAINST US OR AGAINST US

Pakistan's Con Man Still at It

by Ted Rall

"You're either with us, or against us." Bush had his then-Secretary of
State, Colin Powell, deliver that stark message to Pervez Musharraf
after 9/11. "Be prepared to be bombed," Musharraf says Powell's number
two at State, Richard Armitage, told him. "Be prepared to go back to
the Stone Age." Faced with that bleak choice, the military dictator
promised Pakistan's cooperation in the "war on terror."

Like Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi codenamed "Curveball," Musharraf was
nothing more than a con man. He collected $10 billion from American
taxpayers. Six years later, all we have to show for it is Khalid Sheikh
Mohammad, alleged Al Qaeda strategist, poster boy for waterboarding and
a candidate for worst morning face ever. But don't blame the general
for selling us a line of crap. Allying himself "with us" was never an
option.

In October 1999 I was traveling along the Karakoram Highway from
Kashgar in western China to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. As my bus
crossed the high-altitude Khunjerab Pass from China, we were startled
to find the Pakistani border unguarded. The passport control station
had been abandoned in such haste the door was wide open. A cup of
lukewarm tea sat on the registration desk. The bus driver shrugged. We
drove on into the "Northern Areas"--the section of Kashmir that had
been on Pakistan's side of the ceasefire line at the end of its 1965
war with India.

A few hundred miles south in Islamabad, Musharraf had just overthrown
Nawaz Sharif, the democratically-elected prime minister. The two men
had spent the summer blaming each other for a disastrous new offensive
against India. Musharraf settled the dispute by jailing and torturing
Sharif--and launching a desperate attempt to win the Kargil Conflict,
also known as the Third Kashmir War.

Opening Kashmir's border with China was beside the point. The real
action was taking place at the newly open frontier with Afghanistan,
where agents of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI)
invited the Taliban to send thousands of jihadis into the Northern
Areas to fight India before winter brought an end to the war season. As
usual, Pakistan claimed it was too poor and weak to man its border
posts and stop its proxy fighters.

Before long my bus was passing columns of Taliban soldiers on foot and
riding pick-up trucks and tanks. Pakistani Kashmir, an Afghan commander
manning a checkpoint told me, was under Taliban control.

The Kargil War ended in stalemate. But Musharraf's first act as
president was to forge an alliance with the Taliban and, by extension,
his country's radical Islamist parties. The marketing of Musharraf as a
bulwark against radical Islam and the Taliban is one of the biggest
jokes of the post-9/11 era. He wasn't for the Taliban before he was
against them. He was the Taliban.

I've been writing and speaking about Musharraf's pro-Islamist
affinities since 1999. Perhaps now, with thousands of journalists,
lawyers and political opponents imprisoned and Pakistan under martial
law, Americans will take notice that he's no better than Saddam.

There's no such thing as a "moderate dictator."

Actually, Musharaff is worse than Saddam. Despite occasional kowtowing
to fundamentalists in Iraq's Koran Belt, he was a secular socialist who
jailed radical Islamists. Musharraf's political prisoners, on the other
hand, are journalists, judges, lawyers, artists and peace activists.
"The first people to be arrested after the imposition of emergency were
not the leaders of Pakistani Taliban, nor their sympathizers in
Islamabad," wrote Mohammed Hanif, head of the BBC's Urdu service.
"There was no crackdown on sleeper cells that have orchestrated a wave
of suicide bombings across Pakistan."

The biggest joke of all was the war against Afghanistan, which has
become a political I.Q. test. Most of the presidential candidates, the
media and therefore the American people, think Iraq was a distraction
from the war we should be fighting in Afghanistan. In fact, the war
against Afghanistan is less justifiable, and even less winnable.

If U.S. officials had wanted to catch Osama bin Laden, all they had to
do was call Musharraf. On 9/11, the Al Qaeda leader was laid up in a
Pakistani military hospital in Islamabad. If the dictator refused,
invading Pakistan--if you're into that sort of thing--would certainly
have been more justifiable than Afghanistan or Iraq. A Pakistan War
could have neutralized the world's most dangerous nuclear threat,
established a valuable strategic American foothold between India and
China, and--if we worked with the UN--scored us popularity points for
restoring democratic rule.

Such a war would have been far more justifiable than Afghanistan or
Iraq. No country was more responsible than Pakistan for 9/11. Pakistan
hosted Al Qaeda's headquarters in Kashmir. Most of its training camps
were in Kashmir and Pakistan's Tribal Areas--not Afghanistan. On July
22, 2004, The Guardian reported that General Mahmoud Ahmed, chief of
the ISI under Musharraf, had sent $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the lead
9/11 hijacker. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Pakistani
intelligence had financed 9/11, but the 9/11 Commission decided not to
investigate our "strategic ally in the war on terrorism."

Since the Taliban were funded and armed by the ISI, we would have
gotten Afghanistan for free in an invasion of Pakistan.

In November 2001 Musharraf was asked on PBS' "NewsHour" why reporters
were able to find and interview bin Laden. "Why can't Pakistani
intelligence find him or help the U.S. to find him?" asked Robert
MacNeil.

"There's a general suspicion on--it's surprising that maybe ISI is not
contributing to the intelligence, yes--to the intelligence," replied
the military ruler. "Now it's not that simple. After all, then you send
in people. They're on the other side; they know who they are, and they
know what they have come for... It's not that easy that you send your
operatives in and find locations. One is trying one's best for
that--but if a reporter goes through contact--through some contact and,
after all, Osama bin Laden's purpose is to project himself in some way
and create some negative effects in the world, that maybe he would
welcome receiving a reporter and projecting whatever his thoughts are."

Musharraf was always a huckster. Anyone who paid attention could see
that, but that's the problem: we never do.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL