Bhutto,
Bush, And Musharraf
By
John Chuckman
30 December,
2007
Countercurrents.org
With
the assassination of Ms. Bhutto, we are given to understand, by many
newspaper stories and broadcasts, that anti-democratic religious zealots
killed Pakistan’s last hope for democracy.
Ms. Bhutto
was in many ways an admirable and accomplished leader, a talented woman
of courage, but her assassination was a far more complex event than
simplistic claims about the dark work of anti-democratic forces.
President
Musharraf, for most of the years since the American invasion of Afghanistan,
was treated in public as an acceptable ally by the United States. The
U.S. desperately needed Pakistan’s help in its invasion of Afghanistan,
a land about which American politicians had little understanding. To
secure that help, America forgave Pakistan’s debts, removed its
embargo-bad guy status (for developing atomic weapons in secret), provided
large amounts of military assistance, and even managed to swallow its
pride over the embarrassing work of Pakistan’s scientific hero,
Dr. A. Q. Khan, who supplied atomic-weapons technology to other countries.
Once Americans
had mired themselves in Afghanistan — after all the hoopla over
a “victory” which amounted to little more than massive bombing
while the Northern Alliance warlords did most of the fighting against
their rival, the Taliban — the extent of the mess into which they
had put themselves slowly dawned. This is particularly true regarding
the almost non-existent border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a huge
area that forms almost a de facto third country of Pashtuns.
Intense pressure
started being applied to Musharraf to allow American special forces
to conduct the kind of brutal and socially-disruptive operations they
have maintained in the mountains of Afghanistan. The American approach
to rooting out the dispersed Taliban, following its initial “victory,”
amounted to going from village to village in the mountains, crashing
down doors, using stun grenades, holding men at gunpoint in their own
homes, separating the village’s women from the men’s protection,
plus many other unforgivable insults in such a tradition-bound land.
All of this
has really been getting them nowhere. In effect, the American government
demonstrated it had no idea what to do in Afghanistan after it invaded,
only knowing it wanted to get the “bad guys.”
Recently,
Musharraf’s position vis-à-vis the U.S. has undergone a
dramatic change. Overnight, the State Department changed him from valiant
ally to enemy of democracy, and the American press obliged with the
appropriate stories and emphasis.
The reason
for this change was simply Musharraf’s refusal to cooperate enough
with Bush’s secret demands to extend America’s special-forces
operations into Pakistan’s side of the Pashtun territory: that
is, to allow a foreign country into his country to terrorize and insult
huge parts of its population. In Bush’s worldview, this only amounted
to Pakistan’s fully embracing the “war on terror,”
but for many Pakistanis, the “war on terror” is only one
more aspect of American interference in their part of the world. The
Taliban is viewed by millions there as heroic resisters, standing up
to American arrogance, a view not without some substance.
In trying
to accommodate Bush, Musharraf launched various showy operations by
Pakistan ’s army, but his efforts were viewed in Washington as
weak. The U.S. kept pushing the limits, trying to force Pakistan to
internalize the “war on terror,” and Musharraf resisted.
There was a horrific incident in which the U.S. bombed a madrassah (a
religious school) in rural Pakistan, succeeding only in killing eighty
children, falsely claiming it was Pakistan’s work against a terrorist
center.
Musharraf
has, rather bravely, opposed America’s demands for a de facto
American invasion of his country. He has been remarkably outspoken about
American policies on several occasions, not something calculated to
endear him to Bush’s gang. So, suddenly he became an undemocratic
pariah who needed to be replaced. It was easy enough to exploit public
dissatisfaction with a military dictator, even if he was only trying
to do his best for his country within some terrible limits.
America gave
Ms. Bhutto a blessing and a gentle push, likely a bundle of cash, and
undoubtedly the promise of lots of future support, to return home as
opposition to Musharraf. One could fairly say that her assassination
just proves how little Washington policymakers understand the region.
It sent her to her death, desperately hoping against hope to get what
it wanted.
Ms. Bhutto
was regarded in Washington as more amenable to American demands in Pakistan.
She had the double merit of being able to give Pakistan’s government
the gloss of democracy while serving key American interests. But it
couldn’t be clearer that democracy is not what the U.S. was really
concerned with, because Musharraf was just a fine ally so long as he
did as he was told.
The truth
is that Musharraf has, in opposing America’s demands, been a rather
brave representative of Pakistan’s interests, a patriot in American
parlance.
True democracy
for a place like Pakistan is a long way off, not because of this or
that leader or party, but because of the country’s backward economic
state. This is even truer for Afghanistan. You cannot instantly create
democracies out of lands living in centuries-old economies, burdened
with centuries-old customs. The best thing America could have done for
this region would have been generous economic assistance, but the U.S.
has demonstrated, again and again, it has little genuine interest in
that sort of thing. The customs and backwardness of centuries only melt
away under the tide of economic development. Democracy follows almost
automatically eventually.
The quick
fix is what the U.S. demands, a quick fix to its own perceptions of
problems under the guise of supporting democracy and opposition to terror,
will achieve absolutely nothing over the long term.
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