Washington’s Pakistan debacle

by Alex Alexiev

Musharraf – troublesome ally at best, a danger at worst.

Three weeks after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto there is yet no indication of who killed her and every indication that we’ll never know. What we do know with considerable certainty is that Pakistan will have another round of phony elections on February 18 that will perpetuate General Musharaf’s oppressive rule and continue the nuclear power’s inexorable slide into violence and chaos. Unfortunately, what is also increasingly clear is that the vast majority of the Pakistani people now blame the United States for their unhappy predicament. Even more unfortunately, they have a point.

Unpleasant as this is to admit for those of us who have supported President Bush for years, it is high time to acknowledge that his policies toward Pakistan have been an unmitigated failure and have contributed in a major way to the unfolding disaster there, while seriously imperiling our hard-won successes in Afghanistan and the larger war on terror beyond.

[More]Washington ‘s failure derives from its fundamental inability to come to grips with Pakistani reality. It is based on the false twin premise that Musharaf and the military are genuinely interested in assisting America in the war on terror and in restoring democracy in Pakistan . Six and a half years after the administration’s costly marriage-of-convenience with the Islamabad dictator and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Bush Administration stubbornly continues to maintain the fiction that both of these premises are correct.

To start with the latter, from President Bush on down, administration officials have never tired of singing paeans to the purported democratic intentions of Musharaf on the basis of empirical evidence that points to the exact opposite. It is useful to review briefly some of this evidence in order to document just how egregious this disconnect is.

Setting aside overthrowing the elected government in 1999 – for which Pakistan was kicked out of the British Commonwealth – Musharaf has on numerous occasions engaged in blatant electoral fraud, suspended the constitution twice, packed the Supreme Court and imposed martial law in total disregard of constitutional norms.

An April 2002 referendum, by means of which the general installed himself as president for five years, gave him a Soviet-style approval rate of 98% with twice as many people reported voting as ever before. Prominent Pakistanis called it “naked fraud’ and “the greatest scam in Pakistan’s history.” Last November 3, he declared martial law in order, as he put it, to deal with the threat of Islamist extremism. He then proceeded to confront extremism by arresting 10,000 secular opponents, firing the supreme justice who had dared to stand up to him and imposing press censorship, including criminalizing   “anything that defames or brings into ridicule the head of the state.” All measures that evidently reassured US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher that Pakistan “was now making a successful transition to democracy.” And this is not just diplomatic fluff. The day after the assassination of Bhutto, US officials told the media that the Administration was still wedded to “the creation of a political center revolving around Musharaf.”

If President Musharaf has not been the perfect democrat, perhaps he has more than made up for that by being America’s key “strategic ally in the war on terror,” as President Bush himself has repeatedly told us. Let us look at the record.

Virtually the only tangible help Pakistan has provided to us since the fall of the Taliban is arresting and handing over to the U.S. an estimated 600 Al Qaeda members, the vast majority of them small fry. Given the $11 billion or more we have given the good general as recompense, this works out to about $18 million per Al Qaeda small fry. Hardly a great bargain.

Especially if one looks at what Musharaf has not done. Despite solemn promises, Pakistan has neither closed down the numerous terrorist groups and jihadist training camps operating on its territory nor even made an honest effort to do it.   According to a new report by the Pakistani Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) in Peshawar, virtually all terrorist organizations that were ostensibly banned by Islamabad in 2002 and 2003 and many new ones continue to operate with impunity. Aided and abetted by Islamist governments in the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan and a never-ending supply of young zealots mass-produced by thousands of radical madrassas tolerated by the regime, the jihadists are talibanizing vast stretches of the country and turning it into a breeding ground for home-grown and foreign terrorists alike.

While six years ago only a small part of the tribal territories bordering Afghanistan was under extremist control, today much of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are no longer under the writ of Pakistan law and terrorist mayhem and chaos is spreading further and further outside of them.  Terrorist attacks more than doubled in 2007 to over 1500, claiming 3500 victims, including hundreds of soldiers and policemen. In a clear sign of the regime’s helplessness and incompetence in the face of the terrorist onslaught, not one of the 60 suicide bombings that took place in 2007 has been properly investigated.

For the United States this is an ominous if not entirely unexpected trend. With   large numbers of Taliban-supporters and terrorists effectively controlling the Afghan border and providing key logistic and training support for the reinvigorated Taliban with complete impunity, our ability to prevail in Afghanistan can no longer be taken for granted. And that’s not all.   Pakistan-based Deobandi, Ahle-Hadith and Jamiat e-Islami extremist networks and clerics are increasingly active in radicalizing Muslim communities abroad, including the United States. There are now numerous Deobandi “Darul Uloom” madrassas North America whose curriculum is indistinguishable from that of the hate factories in Pakistan. These radicals already completely dominate the Muslim establishment in Great Britain, for instance, where only 6% of the imams speak English, according to a recent study.

The undisputable bottom line is that more than six years after Washington allied itself with the Pakistani dictator,   the nuclear armed state is beset by the kind of intractable conflict, violence and extremism that may lead to its undoing. By continuing to support the most hated man in Pakistan today, America has placed itself in the unenviable position of being seen by most Pakistanis as complicit in this unfolding debacle.

What accounts for the unusual myopia of the Bush Administration in refusing to fess up to this objective reality, draw the appropriate conclusions and change course?

If there is one single reason behind that, it is the inability of Washington to understand the profoundly undemocratic nature of the Pakistani military and the corrosive role it plays in Pakistani society.  To put it simply, Pakistan is not a normal state with a military establishment, but a military establishment that owns a state. And it owns it not only politically, but also economically.

This is a country where the military claims 30% of the budget and gets pensions five times the size of civilian ones and where retired and active duty officers control not only all government institutions, but directly own large parts of the economy from construction, banks and airlines to hotels, shopping malls and farm land. The Pakistani military, as a recent book (Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc., Pluto) has argued persuasively, is in fact a huge, unscrupulous and corrupt holding company dominating the economy and operating for the benefit of the officer caste at the expense of civil society and the market.  This in one of the poorest countries in the world with 20% literacy among women and 1.7% of the budget spent on education.  

To protect its monopolistic power the military has had to do two things – suppress secular politics and civil society and portray itself as the indispensible guardian of the nation by conjuring up existential threats by aggressive enemies such as India and the West. And, in this, the military establishment has always found a reliable ally and willing accomplice in radical Islam.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that it was a military dictator, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, that Islamized   Pakistani society from the top down beginning in the 1970s, and that it was the military which set up both the Taliban and the numerous Pakistani terrorists groups in business for use as proxies.  Or the fact, that Pakistani military intelligence (ISI) has always been used and continues to be used as a political police against secular and democratic forces. To expect that Musharaf and the military would on their own accord choose democracy or seriously consider moving against the Islamists is to expect them to act against their own institutional interests.

The problem is that in playing the Islamist card, the Pakistani military has been gradually penetrated and Islamized itself to the point where it is no longer clear that is immune to an Islamist takeover. And the longer it stays in power the less immune it is likely to be.

So what is to be done. There is no plausible alternative to restoring democratic politics in Pakistan, however imperfect and corrupt they have traditionally been. To continue supporting dictatorship is to continue aiding and abetting the country’s slide into the Islamist abyss. Musharaf and the military are not part of the solution; they are a large part of the problem. In the long-term, the rebuilding of Pakistani civil society and restoring secular government and the rule of law is the only promising way to deal successfully with the Islamist threat.

Nor is it a great secret how this could be accomplished. As a policy briefing from the International Crisis Group has recently argued, Musharaf must be forced to resign and a new neutral caretaker government appointed. The constitution must then be fully restored , basic rights guaranteed and an independent judiciary and an impartial election commission installed prior to internationally supervised elections. Should the United States put Pakistan on notice that our continuing financial support and weapons deliveries depend on genuinely free elections, the military, if not Musharaf, may listen.  If the Bush Administration is not willing to do it, Congress should step in and do it for them by cutting off all funds until they do.