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Pakistan's Politics and Our Own Lowell Ponte This week Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is in Kabul in neighboring Afghanistan for a "jirga," a gathering of tribal and other area leaders. During this meeting, Musharraf may again be targeted for assassination by Islamist radicals, who have nearly killed him in several previous attempts. He seized power in Pakistan in a 1999 coup. Under political pressure he may be compelled to relinquish or at least to share power following elections expected to happen no later than early 2008. Why has President George W. Bush invested so much hope in this slender, vulnerable reed to support America's war against terrorism? Many fear that radical Islamist Iran might soon acquire nuclear weapons that thereafter could be delivered to Western targets by suicide bombers. This could beget multiple 9/11s with mushroom clouds erupting from Manhattan to Paris and Tel Aviv. But as New York Sen. Hillary Clinton reminded a presidential debate audience of labor leaders on Tuesday night, Pakistan is a Muslim nation that already possesses nuclear weapons — perhaps 40 of them. If President Musharraf is assassinated or otherwise removed, the result could be an Islamist takeover of Pakistan's government — or, at a minimum, an increased risk that Muslim zealots within the military might divert nuclear weapons into al-Qaida, Taliban or other terrorist hands. Story Continues Below
President Bush was playing what this columnist called "Big Casino" when he ordered U.S. troops into Iraq in 2003. Bush's calculated gamble recognized that during the Cold War the United States had often supported military dictators in the Middle East to maintain stability and pro-American (or at least anti-Godless Communist) regimes to pump our oil. The Shah of Iran, e.g., was a brute, but he was our brute. He kept oil flowing to Israel during Arab embargoes. And his Westernizing influence extended rights to women, which horrified the reactionary Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini. When the most evil President in American history, Jimmy Carter, withdrew U.S. support for the Shah, this installed Khomeini as Iran's theocratic dictator. The loss of America's ally, the Shah, precipitated more than 500,000 deaths in an Iran-Iraq war that gave Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein the fourth largest army on earth. It caused the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which produced the rise of jihadi resistance by Osama bin Laden and his group al-Qaida, among others, who later used what they learned there to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11. (Jimmy Carter — thus responsible for murdering more people and causing more horror than most of the bloodiest tyrants in world history — would, after years of lobbying, be given a Nobel Peace Prize.) Musharraf is today's Shah of Iran where U.S. policy is concerned. He is a military dictator but one who permits a large measure of press freedom, criticism and Westernizing influence in Pakistan, a Muslim country like Turkey (a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and Indonesia where the military has always restrained certain undemocratic Islamist excesses. President Bush's Big Casino gamble recognized that dictatorships like Saudi Arabia's are weakening and likely soon will be overthrown by bullets or ballots. These countries will tilt either towards Islamist fanaticism, as Iran did, or towards democracy and modern civilization. Mr. Bush, albeit ineptly, has tried to tip Iraq in the latter direction. With the Shah gone, America's alternative future model for the Muslim world is Turkey, a secular democracy established by coup d'etat after World War I by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his Young Turks. Ataturk's government gave women the right to vote before England did. He realigned his nation — former center of the Ottoman Empire (and Islamic "Caliphate") — with Western modernity.
To understand why liberals hate, and President Bush likes, Pervez Musharraf you need to know what the liberal media never reports about his background. The son of a Pakistani diplomat, Musharraf, from age 6 to 13, lived and was educated in Turkey. He speaks fluent Turkish. He calls modern Turkey's founder Ataturk his "most admired person." "Turks to me are brothers," Musharraf declared at Ataturk's mausoleum during his state visit there after becoming Pakistan's president. "Even to Pakistani children, Turks are brothers." "I can very proudly say," he declared in one speech, "that Pakistan and Turkey share a commonality of vision and a commonality of thought . . ." Musharraf's two brothers and son opted for careers in the United States. His own late father became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Musharraf was educated at St. Patrick's High School in Karachi and Forman Christian College in Lahore. Musharraf is, in short, the closest thing to a pro-American ally we could hope to have as president of nuclear-armed Pakistan. No wonder so many in the American left want to undercut him. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the liberal New Republic Magazine, in the July 26 Time magazine parroted the current left line that we should pressure Musharraf into sharing power with Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, deposed in 1999 amid corruption allegations. It's easy to see why Beinart loves Bhutto, who got her liberal education at Radcliffe, Harvard and Oxford. She is head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose slogan reads: "Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy . . ." This could be the slogan of America's Democratic Party, welcomed to Tuesday night's union-sponsored debate by AFL-CIO boss John Sweeney, a card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America. Musharraf sees the reviving, revanchist power of our Democratic Party, which betrayed U.S. allies in Vietnam and Iran and appears eager to do the same in Iraq. He sees us promising nuclear technology to atom-armed India, Pakistan's rival next door. And he hears our presidential candidates, from Democrat Barack Obama to Republican Rudy Giuliani, threatening unilateral U.S. military incursions into Pakistan. No wonder Musharraf has strengthened his ties to China and attempted (unsuccessfully) to reduce tensions with Islamist tribal leaders in Waziristan along the Afghan border. (His own intelligence services prior to 9/11 backed the Taliban as the most pro-Pakistan of potential Afghan governments.) History's roulette wheel continues to spin in the geopolitical Big Casino. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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