IN NOVEMBER OF 1999, when he was first running for the White House, then-Texas governor George W. Bush famously flubbed a Boston TV reporter's challenge to name Pakistan's military chief, who had seized power in a bloodless coup just weeks earlier. "The new Pakistani general," Bush stammered. "I can't name the general." He also muffed questions about the leaders of India and Chechnya, and identified then-Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui merely as "Lee." Democrats could barely contain their giggles. "I guess we know that 'C' at Yale was a gentleman's 'C,'" quipped Gore spokesman Chris Lehane.
Bush's lackluster results on the pop quiz obscured his vague praise for "the general," Pervez Musharraf--praise that, in retrospect, offered a prescient clue as to how Bush's administration would handle the Pakistani regime. "He's just been elected--not elected, this guy took over office," Bush said. "It appears [Musharraf] is going to bring stability to the country and I think that's good news for the subcontinent."
Prizing "stability" over democracy: That doesn't sound like a rhetorical trope of President Bush, does it? Certainly not when he's waxing apologetic about the Arab and Muslim worlds. "We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East," Bush told a British audience at London's Whitehall Palace in November of 2003. "Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain: to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring
stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold."
This has also become a favorite talking point of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "For 60 years," she said at the American University in Cairo last June, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East--and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."
What about Pakistan? Following the 1947 partition, India's neighbor spent over a half century alternating between periods of martial law, sham democracy, and corrupt kleptocracy. Sure, Pakistan technically falls just outside the "Middle East" proper, but it also boasts the world's second largest Muslim population and has long been both a breeding ground and a transit point for anti-American terrorists, such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and for rogue arms dealers, such as A.Q. Khan. For that matter, Pakistani intelligence incubated al Qaeda and orchestrated the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in the 1990s. If ever there was a nation that seemed to affirm George W. Bush's guiding precept that dysfunctional political systems fuel radicalism, it was Pakistan.
Since 9/11, however, the president has all but carved out an immunity clause for Pakistan in his push for Islamic democracy. Call it the Musharraf factor. The embattled Pakistani strongman has been, a few blips aside, a fairly reliable ally in hunting down al Qaeda fighters, assisting U.S. military forces, and promoting a moderate form of Islam. No, Musharraf is not a democrat; nor has he done enough to stanch the flow of Pakistani terrorists into Kashmir and Afghanistan; nor has he doffed his military uniform for civilian threads, as he once pledged. Critics squealed loudly in 2002 when he cooked up a bogus referendum to "win" another five-year term as president, tinkered with the constitution to expand both his and the army's powers, and then tried to doctor parliamentary elections. But as the Economist, hardly a cheerleader for the Pakistani general, admitted last week, "Mr. Musharraf has shown great courage" in combating terrorism. Indeed, he has survived multiple assassination attempts.
|
