US
Vows Continued Aid To Musharraf
By Bill Van Auken
06 November, 2007
WSWS.org
Protesting
lawyers, students and other civilians staged pitched battles with riot
police in cities across Pakistan Monday, the third day of the martial
law regime imposed by the country’s military strongman General
Pervez Musharraf.
Even as the protests mounted
and Pakistan’s jails were filled to overflowing with thousands
of political prisoners dragged off of the streets or from their homes,
the Bush administration signaled that it will not take any substantive
reprisals against the regime in Islamabad.
Speaking at the White House
Monday following a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, Bush summed up his administration’s position in remarks
characterized by his usual ignorance and cynicism.
“Our hope is that he
will restore democracy as quickly as possible,” Bush said of Musharraf.
He claimed that in discussions with the Pakistani regime his administration
had “made it clear that these emergency measures would undermine
democracy.”
But he quickly added that
“President Musharraf has been a strong fighter against extremists
and radicals,” and that “All we can do is continue to work
with the president.”
Asked whether he would order
a cut in US aid to Pakistan—which amounts to some $150 million
a month, totaling close to $11 billion since September 2001— if
Musharraf did not rescind martial law, Bush dismissed the question as
“a hypothetical.”
Bush’s remarks echoed
those of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert
Gates.
Speaking in Jerusalem, Rice
declared: “We are going to review aid. But we do have concerns,
continuing counter-terrorism concerns, and we have to be able to protect
American citizens by continuing to fight against terrorists.”
Rice reiterated this position
twice, declaring that the primary concern of the White House was “to
protect America and protect American citizens by continuing to fight
against terrorists,” and adding, “We have to be very cognizant
of the fact that some of the assistance that has been going to Pakistan
is directly related to the counterterrorism mission.”
And, while the Pentagon announced
that it canceled a trip to Pakistan by Eric Edelman, US undersecretary
of defense for policy, who was to head a US delegation for annual talks
with the Pakistani military, Gates also stressed that aid would continue
to flow.
Washington was “mindful
not to do anything that would undermine counterterrorism efforts,”
Gates stressed.
Islamabad clearly got the
message. According to the New York Times Monday, aides to Musharraf
described the US response as “muted.” Speaking of Washington’s
attitude, Tariq Azim Khan, Pakistan’s minister of state for information,
said, “They would rather have a stable Pakistan—albeit with
some restrictive norms—than have more democracy prone to fall
into the hands of extremists. Given the choice, I know what our friends
would choose.”
According to a report in
the Washington Post Monday: “A close adviser to Musharraf said
Sunday that the president’s inner circle believed that before
he issued the order, the United States and Britain had grudgingly accepted
the idea of emergency rule, despite earlier objections. He said he did
not expect any action against Musharraf by the West. ‘When we
convinced them that it would only be for a very short time, they said,
Okay,’ the adviser said.”
Of course, it is precisely
the so-called “war on terrorism” that Musharraf invoked
as the pretext for his Saturday night martial law decree suspending
the Constitution, sacking the Supreme Court, shutting down the independent
media and indefinitely postponing parliamentary elections set for next
January.
“The government system,
in my view, is in semi-paralysis,” Musharraf declared. “All
government functionaries are being insulted by the courts. That is why
they are unable to take any action.”
He continued: “Terrorism
and extremism are at their peak. I suspect that Pakistan’s sovereignty
is in danger unless timely action is taken. Extremists are roaming around
freely in the country, and they are not scared of law enforcement agencies.
“Inaction at this moment
is suicide for Pakistan, and I cannot allow this country to commit suicide.”
Specifically, the military
ruler charged the judiciary with interfering with the struggle against
terrorism by challenging the government’s right to detain people
indefinitely without charges and interfering “with the executive
function,” i.e., Musharraf’s exercise of unlimited dictatorial
powers.
No doubt, in surveying the
actions taken by the Pakistani regime, there are not a few in Washington
who envision the Bush administration or its successor taking similar
measures in the name of the “war on terrorism.”
Musharraf’s invocation
of this war and, for that matter, the war itself are pretexts designed
to justify the pursuit of definite interests.
In the case of the Pakistani
regime, the martial law decree was imposed to block an imminent ruling
by the Supreme Court that would have invalidated last October’s
presidential elections, which were rigged to give the military strongman
another five-year presidential term. Musharraf issued the decree as
head of the armed forces rather than president, leading some to call
it his “second coup.” His first was in 1999, when he led
the military in the overthrow of then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
After the decree was announced,
Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry—whose
firing earlier this year provoked mass protests that forced his reinstatement—joined
with six other justices in ruling it illegal and unconstitutional. Musharraf
responded by firing Chaudhry and placing him and the other justices
under house arrest.
The martial law decree combined
with the firing and imprisonment of the judges sparked a renewal of
the mass demonstrations by lawyers that shook the country earlier last
spring, when Musharraf first attempted to fire Chaudhry.
On Monday, over 2,000 lawyers
gathered outside the High Court building in the eastern city of Lahore.
When they attempted to march onto a main road, chanting “Go Musharraf,
go,” riot police fired tear gas into the crowd and beat them with
batons, leaving many injured and bloodied. Hundreds were grabbed by
squads of plainclothes police and thrown into waiting police vans.
Violent confrontations also
erupted in the western city of Peshawar, the southern city of Karachi
and in other parts of the country Monday. In Islamabad, larger demonstrations
have so far been blocked by the virtual militarization of the city,
with the Supreme Court building and other government installations ringed
with concertina wire and guarded by heavily armed army rangers. Nonetheless,
a few hundred lawyers assembled at the district courts shouting “Go
Musharraf, go!” and “Musharraf is a dog!” but were
blocked by police from marching in the street.
“This police brutality
against peaceful lawyers shows how the government of a dictator wants
to silence those who are against dictatorship,” said Sarfraz Cheema,
a senior lawyer at the demonstration. “We don’t accept the
proclamation of emergency.”
“He has held the whole
nation of 160 million people hostage, just with the backing of the gun
and the Western powers,” said M.S. Moghul, another of the protesting
lawyers.
Protests were also reported
at a number of Pakistani universities, both against the martial law
decree and against the arrest of faculty members.
An Interior Ministry spokesman
acknowledged Monday that as many as 1,800 people have been detained
nationwide in the martial law crackdown. Opposition parties and human
rights groups, however, put the number at twice that. Those arrested
have not been charged and their whereabouts are unknown to their families.
Meanwhile, the independent
broadcast media remained shut down for a third day, with the government
station, broadcasting Musharraf’s decree, the only one operating.
According to media sources, the government has attempted to impose a
“code of conduct” sharply restricting political coverage
as a condition for allowing the stations to resume their broadcasts.
Behind the cynical balancing
act playing out in Washington, between token criticism of Musharraf’s
brutal crackdown and continued support for his reactionary regime, the
Bush administration is facing a deep crisis of its own making in Pakistan.
It has counted this regime,
particularly since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as a useful
ally and accomplice in the drive by American imperialism to employ military
aggression to impose its hegemony over a broad swath of the Middle East
and Central Asia.
Now it fears that the methods
used by Musharraf and his cronies in their attempt to hold onto power
could provoke a massive popular backlash.
One telling indication of
the extreme instability of the regime came Monday when Musharraf found
himself forced to deny rumors sweeping Pakistan that he had been placed
under house arrest by other sections of the military. “It is a
joke of the highest order,” he told the Reuters news agency. When
such a “joke” is believed by a large part of the country,
however, it undoubtedly reflects deep divisions within the military
and the country’s ruling establishment as a whole.
Meanwhile, Benazir Bhutto,
the former prime minister who returned to Pakistan last month to further
a power-sharing deal being brokered by Washington and London with the
aim of rescuing Musharraf’s regime, has largely echoed the “muted”
reaction of the US, leaving even supporters of her own Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP)
uncertain of which way she would turn.
While initially declaring
her opposition to confrontation and refusing to rule out a resumption
of the power-sharing negotiations, on Monday she indicated that she
intended to go to Islamabad to participate with other opposition parties
in a November 9 protest against martial law and for the restoration
of the constitution.
In the final analysis, the
vacillation of Bhutto and the PPP is a function of Washington’s
own flailing about in search of a way of stabilizing the situation in
Pakistan, either through propping up Musharraf, or perhaps searching
for another general to replace him.
In the meantime, political
and social tensions in this country of 160 million are building to the
point where Washington could soon confront in Pakistan the kind of debacle
it suffered in Iran nearly three decades ago.
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