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2 COMMENT Neo-cons
have it wrong on Pakistan By
Najum Mushtaq
Just as a flicker of hope
emerged to bring back elected civilian rule to
Pakistan, the ideological warriors of
neo-conservatism are up in arms to douse it.
Having supported President Pervez Musharraf as the
stalwart general in America's "war on terror", US
neo-conservatives are panic-stricken at the
prospect of his political demise. No sooner did he
decide to relinquish his army post to become a
civilian president last week, than fear of
Pakistan's collapse and of loose nuclear weapons gripped
Musharraf's backers in the
United States.
Neo-conservative analysts
are hatching plans to raid the country and nick
the nukes before it sinks into chaos. Others, less
inclined to use the military option just now, have
come up with puerile analyses of how a
"Westernized core" of the military and Pakistani
civil society can be used to thwart the worst-case
scenario of Islamists taking over the country and,
with it, the dreaded weapons.
An
exasperated Charles Krauthammer attempts to untie
Pakistan's "tangled knots" and wonders, "What is
America to do about Pakistan?" He mumbles through
an ill-informed analysis of a post-Musharraf
Pakistan, where he says, "Islamic barbarians are
at the gates". Frederick Kagan, a leading light at
the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and
Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution,
foresee Pakistan's collapse and propose two
fantastic methods of direct military intervention
to secure the country's nuclear arsenal, which
should ideally be shipped to "someplace like New
Mexico". (Why New Mexico? Because "given the
degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish
these assets, it is unlikely the United States
would get permission to destroy them" in
Pakistan.)
And speaking at an AEI forum to
launch his new book, Surrender is Not an
Option, former US ambassador to the United
Nations John Bolton described the security of the
Pakistani nuclear arsenal as "the principal
American strategic interest". Conceding that the
Pakistani president "is no Jeffersonian democrat",
Bolton insisted: "We should support Musharraf. His
control of the army is most likely to hold the
nuclear arsenal in a secure place."
Three
basic assumptions underpin these writers' opinion
that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is in jeopardy.
One, that Pakistan without Musharraf and the
military at the helm is bound to disintegrate and
likely to be taken over by Islamic extremists.
Two, that Pakistan's polity consists of three
active factions: the Taliban-like religious
zealots, and "the two most Westernized, most
modernizing elements of Pakistani society - the
army ... and the elite of civil society, including
lawyers, jurists, journalists and students", as
Krauthammer puts it, also asserting that the
Taliban "are waiting to pick up the pieces from
the civil war developing between" the last two
elements.
The third, equally ill-founded
premise of the neo-con view of Pakistan is that
military intervention by the United States and its
allies would not only ensure security of the
nuclear arsenal, but also help the military "hold
the country's center" - Islamabad and populous
areas like Punjab - in Kagan and O'Hanlon's words.
Let's take these three assumptions one by
one and see if these Pakistan "experts" have any
contact with the reality of the country whose
future they would shape.
The myth of
barbarians at the gates The argument
pushed by Bolton and others that if not for
Musharraf and the military, Pakistan would have
fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Taliban,
is a beaten, much repudiated idea. Nothing
displays the neo-cons' ignorance of Pakistani
society and politics more clearly than this
drummed-up fear.
Facts point in the
opposite direction. It is under military rule like
Musharraf's that militants gain ground and
prominence. Whenever the people of Pakistan have
had the opportunity to express their will, they
have voted overwhelmingly for mainstream political
parties, and they are likely to do so again in
January 2008, when the next general elections are
scheduled to be held.
Pakistan's religious
parties are bitterly divided along sectarian
lines. Furthermore, practitioners of Islam in
Pakistan, as indeed elsewhere in the world, are
not a homogenous, monolithic entity. The Taliban
represent a marginal group within a minority Sunni
sect. The clergy of the rest of the Muslim sects
are as staunch in their opposition to the Taliban
as they are anti-America.
Even when they
are united - as they were under the banner of the
Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in the 2002
elections - they could not bag more than 11% of
the total vote. The electorate has always chosen
parties like the Pakistan People's Party of
Benazir Bhutto, the Muslim League of Nawaz Sharif
and other regional parties - none of whom are
religious extremists or pro-militancy.
It
is true that incidents of terrorism and the power
of the sharia movement have increased during the
eight years of the Musharraf regime. But still,
religious extremism remains on the fringes of both
Pakistani society and polity. There are pockets of
support for the Taliban in the Pashtun tribal
areas, but even there, if and when elections have
been held, traditional tribal elders or moderate
(relative to the Taliban) religious leaders win.
The best bet to countering the Taliban and
extremism in general is continued elected civilian
rule, not protracted dictatorship of the generals.
Few other countries have suffered more at
the hands of religious terrorists than Pakistan.
Yet, the people have refused to succumb to the
threat. Nor have they been forced into subscribing
to the extremist ideology of al-Qaeda. But instead
of investing in the democratic process and waiting
for the Muslim electorate of Pakistan to give its
verdict on what kind of government it wants,
impatient neo-conservatives are rushing to
conclude that without the military in power, the
country will slide into an abyss and fall apart.
If Washington wants to see a stable Pakistan, it
must not
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