The Impotent Hegemon
"Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind."
Emerson's couplet comes to mind as the New Year opens with Pakistan, the second largest Muslim country on Earth, in social and political chaos, trending toward a failed state with nuclear weapons.
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom the White House pressed to return home from exile to form an anti-Islamist alliance with President Pervez Musharraf, is dead, assassinated on the second try in two months.
Her 19-year-old son, who has spent most of his life outside the country, is now the declared leader of her Pakistan Peoples Party but is remaining at Oxford. Her husband, widely regarded as the bag man of the Bhutto family, is playing regent, denouncing the Pakistan Muslim League with which Musharraf is affiliated as a "murderers' league."
As riots ravage the country, the PPP is demanding that the Jan. 8 elections go forward and calling on the nation to repudiate Musharraf and bring the PPP to power—in her memory.
Nawaz Sharif, a two-time prime minister like Bhutto who presided over Pakistan's test of an atom bomb, who is close to the Islamists, who was also ousted for corruption, and who is detested by Musharraf, had declared an election boycott. Now his party, too, is urging that the elections go forward. Sharif wants Musharraf out and himself in.
If Musharraf postpones the elections, or they are not regarded as free and fair, the whole nation could erupt. If he does not postpone the elections, he will almost surely be repudiated.
Revealed by all this is the inability, if not the impotence, of America to assure a desired outcome in a nation whose support is indispensable if we are not to lose the war in Afghanistan, now in its seventh year.
Moreover, the reactions of some U.S. presidential candidates suggest they are not ready to run this country, let alone Pakistan. After Bhutto's assassination, Bill Richardson called on Musharraf to resign. Hillary Clinton has suggested that Musharraf could be toppled and demanded that he submit to an outside investigation of the murder of Benazir Bhutto.
Nancy Pelosi is suggesting a cutoff in U.S. aid if there is no outside investigation and demanding the White House ensure that Pakistan's elections are "free and fair." Perhaps the Pakistanis will demand observers this year in Florida and Ohio.
But if Musharraf stands down, who steps in? Do we know? And if elections go forward, are we ready to accept any outcome?
After all, this is a country whose provinces bordering on Afghanistan, the Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan, are ruled by a coalition of Muslim parties sympathetic to the Taliban. Tribal regions along the border play host to the Taliban and perhaps Osama himself. Elements of Pakistan's military and intelligence services are Islamist. The nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan and Osama are far more popular than Musharraf or Bush. Lose Pakistan in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban and you lose the Afghan war.
In recent elections in the Near and Middle East, many of them called at the insistence of President Bush, the winners were Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Moqtada al-Sadr and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
What are the primary U.S. interests today in Pakistan? That its nuclear weapons remain in secure and friendly hands and that Pakistan remains an ally in the war against al-Qaeda.
Whatever happens in the elections Jan. 8, or later, the United States should retain close ties to Pakistan's military. As Rome's emperor Septimus Severus counseled his sons on his deathbed, "Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter."
But the United States must begin now to look at the longer term.
It seems clear that we are so hated in that country that any leader like Bhutto, seen as a friend and ally to the United States, is ever at mortal risk. Musharraf has himself been a repeated target of assassins.
Second, our ability to influence events is severely limited. What does democracy mean in a country where 60 percent of the people are illiterate and parties are fiefdoms of families and political instruments of religious radicals?
As Burke reminded us, "It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
We need to ask ourselves hard questions. Has the blood we have shed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the hundreds of billions we have plunged into these wars, and into foreign aid, made us safer? Has it made us more friends than enemies? Perhaps, as is seen today in Anbar, locals are better at dealing with al-Qaeda than even our American soldiers.
Russia, China, India, and Japan are closer to Pakistan than we. Yet, none of them feels the need we apparently do to be so deeply enmeshed in her internal affairs.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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Great article, Path. Of course the Bush administration (or any of its likely successors of either party) are not prepared to "accept any outcome" of a Pakistani election, and you're right to question whether a country of illiterate peasants can even hold a meaningful election. Sometimes I wonder whether the US can even hold one, given the utter ignorance of basic logic, to say nothing of history, political science, and economics, that prevails here. Most Americans cast their vote by either following a party line or following whatever type of empty rhetoric personally appeals to them -- "standing tall" and "showing the terrorists they can't scare America" on the one hand, or "peace" and "equal rights" on the other.
Argh, I mistyped your name and failed to catch it. "Path", indeed. Sorry, Pat!
The Democrats represent not a political movement but an emotional state, the GOP a feckless enabling father figure, both factions trending towards irrelevance.
Buchanan asks an important question when he queries why we meddle in the affairs of a nation 10,000 miles from us when other great powers nearby feel no such compunction.
In a boost, perhaps, to the cause of returning realism and prudence to our foreign policy, Tom Lantos will retire due to illness. A hackneyed voice of interventionism is silenced.
Bhutto’s death a blow to ‘war on terror’
Even before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been planning for severe disruption of its supply lines from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The situation is now even more critical, and with Pakistan’s political map no longer anything like the one dreamed up in Washington, US special forces are highly unlikely to be given Islamabad’s permission to operate inside Pakistan to beef up the border. -
-- by M K Bhadrakumar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JA03Df02.html
"In recent elections in the Near and Middle East, many of them called at the insistence of President Bush, the winners were Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Moqtada al-Sadr and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
The question must surely be piqued as to whose side the President is on...
Musharaff stands in my opinion admirably well between a rock (i.e. the west with rocks for brains) and a hard place (the Islamist extremists in his own country) who clearly are the ones who offed Benazir Bhutto. She insisted to go to the area where she was recently assassinated vis a vis the likes of suicide bombers although she had been prevented by Musharaff in the past to her own chagrin and protest from going there due to the ongoing threats.
And in her armor-plated vehicle she insisted to pop up out of her sun-roof for more waving. There were two thousand military there protecting her thanks to Musharaff. The West's insisting to send her over there was not so much a threat to Musharaff as an embarrassment, albeit a threat too in another way because Musharaff walks a fine line in his own country between once again the ignorant west (these days) and the Islamist extremists who ironically are only further excited and upset by what the West insists Pakistan and other such third world nations in that region of the world embrace culturally.
Musharaff under the circumstances is doing as good a job as can be expected given the naieve and self-centered expectations of the West and how those expectations only further fan the flames of Islamist extremists.
It's really almost unbelievable given how for example Saddam Hussein held Iraq together but we insisted to go over there and completely destroy and ruin all of that relative stability while ruining ourselves back in the U.S. financially (oil today $100 per barrel), and the cost of the war in Iraq heading over the trillion dollar mark not to mention all of the residual costs in its eventual aftermath (whenever that might be.) And yet we are so stupid (these days) we DON'T learn (thanks to the media) from our most obvious and drastic mistakes - instead we send over another element of profound instability in Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan and then blame Musharaff for everything he subsequently has to do in his worsening high wire act of trying to keep his own, now nuclear nation - from going up in smoke.
There's really no such thing as a 'free' press in any kind of absolute sense there is only a very diverse press wherein there are many points of view being expressed and rather equally heard due to all of their voices having currency, having access. But the mainstream press and media in the U.S. has been a single monolithic and corporate voice by design for the past 100 years with consolidation becoming ever more the case in the past few decades. Thus as a practical matter there is no 'free' press in the U.S. and it will always cover its own behind for its mistakes as it sets the nation's agenda, and so we will never learn much that the coporate giants in cahoots with their twin big government don't want us to recognize.
Why don't we send David Letterman to Pakistan next? He's wearing a beard now since the writer's strike. He could advise Musharaff. Given relative peace with whom would you rather have dinner? What a joke what a bad joke these days.
"Lose Pakistan in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban and you lose the Afghan war", says Mr Buchanan, but I think he's got it backwards. The reason why Pakistan is now being lost is because the whole world knew that Afghanistan was an unwinnable war from the word go and the only question was whether or not Bush would declare victory and leave before Musharraf's pants fell down. How many more dominos will fall before 20 January 2009 remains to be seen.
Another analysis by M K Bhadrakumar, former Indian ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey, on ramifications of Bhutto's assasination:
Al-Qaeda to the rescue for Bush's legacy
For the George W Bush administration, the best it can hope for in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination is to pin blame for it on al-Qaeda and get on with old business. The dynamics of the region have changed, though. Overnight, Pakistan has replaced Iran on the US's radar screen. Moscow's cooperation in the "war on terror" could be conditional on Washington rolling back its containment policy toward Russia. And the US's ability to retain its trans-Atlantic leadership role is itself in the firing line. - (Jan 4, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JA05Df02.html
Some say that U.S. has failed in Iraq. I don’t think the U.S. has failed, I think that the Bush-administration has obtained exactly what they intended in Iraq. The Bush-administration has built military bases in Iraq, killed a million iraqians, destroyed Iraq and its infrastructure, and split the country in three warring factions which will create orders for the military-industrial complex for decades to come. I believe that this was exactly what the neocons envisioned.
When it comes to Pakistan, I believe that the neocons have exactly the same goal for Pakistan as for Iraq. I believe that it was CIA/ISI that killed Bhutto on the orders of the neocons in order to create the same chaos in Pakistan as in Iraq. The neocons want to split Pakistan into warring factions so that they can pit several sides against each other and keep a civil war going in Pakistan for decades to come. That will create endless money for the military-industrial complex and ensure that Pakistan is no blockage for the neocons in their quest for world domination.
#10, roger - the most perceptive of all the Chronicles' summaries on the situation, I think. The ageless "divide et impere". A win-win for both the military-industrial complex & the neocon fifth column.
Is it true that Septimus Severus was black?