Favored
Nation
By Mahir Ali
10 October, 2007
Zmag
“The most powerful weapon
in the struggle against extremism is not bullets or bombs - it is the
universal appeal of freedom. Freedom is the design of our maker, and
the longing of every soul.” After all the crimes against humanity
that his administration has committed in the name of freedom, it takes
an unusual degree of spineless audacity to cite George W. Bush as an
authority on the subject. Even Republican stalwarts keen to succeed
him in the White House would think twice before saying anything that
could be construed as uncritical admiration of the incumbent and everything
he stands for.
Such considerations did not
deter Benazir Bhutto from prefacing the foregoing quotation with “President
Bush has rightly noted” in an article published under her byline
in The Washington Post last month. The former prime minister’s
determined charm offensive has included frequent forays into the US
and close encounters with the likes of Bush’s UN ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad (who has previously served as the administration’s proconsul
in Kabul and Baghdad), and late last month she returned to woo the Democrats
who control both houses of Congress - and who, by and large, are considerably
less enamoured of their president’s disastrous stance on Iraq
than Bhutto.
Apart from weaving for American
politicians and bureaucrats the sorts of fantasies they are vulnerable
to at the moment - for instance, the illusion that she would somehow
be better-equipped than General Pervez Musharraf to deal with the dire
situation in Waziristan - Bhutto has also been schmoozing the American
press, winning plaudits from, among others, the right-wing columnist
Robert Novak, who is convinced the “beautiful, charismatic and
determined ... graduate of Harvard and Oxford” is bent upon returning
to Pakistan “to promote democracy and fight extremism”.
There can be little doubt
Bhutto remains convinced that the primary constituency she needs to
convince of her suitability as a born-again prime minister of Pakistan
consists of the government machinery and the congressional majority
in Washington, DC. Her attitude 20 years ago, at a time when she genuinely
enjoyed mass popularity at home, was strikingly similar. It’s
an unfortunate state of mind but, even more unfortunately, it does have
a basis in reality.
There is a strong chance
that Benazir’s basic frame of reference in this context is her
father’s lamentable fate. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto arguably headed
the only long-term government in Pakistan that did not instinctively
kowtow to Uncle Sam at every available opportunity. ZAB was disinclined
to be dictated to, and it is quite likely Washington was more perturbed
by evidence of his closeness to relatively radical Arab nationalists
such as Muammar Gaddafi and Houari Boumedienne than by his government’s
friendship with China or increasingly cordial relations with the Soviet
Union.
It was over Pakistan’s
nuclear ambitions that Henry Kissinger infamously threatened to “make
an example” of Z.A. Bhutto, and by the time the crisis of 1977
erupted, no one had the slightest doubt about the side on which its
the United States and its interventionist intelligence agencies stood.
Bhutto’s judicial murder more or less coincided with dramatic
political events in Kabul, whereafter General Zia-ul-Haq’s emergence
as Washington’s favourite military tyrant was only a matter of
time.
The moral of this story,
as far as Benazir is concerned, is that Papa’s nonchalance about
Washington’s opinion of him was a fatal error, and she wouldn’t
dream of repeating the mistake.
It was possible, of course,
to draw a rather different lesson from the foregoing tragedy: it could
have, for instance, reinforced the determination to establish a level
of sovereignty that Pakistan has never before experienced. But that
was not to be.
It does not follow, however,
that blame for Pakistan’s multifarious woes can be laid squarely
on the shoulders of the US. Washington’s influence has played
a deletrious contributory role in many respects over the decades, but
we are essentially the authors of our own misfortunes - not least in
terms of offering the US repeated opportunities to establish - and abuse
- its clout.
In the years after its inception,
unlike many other post-colonial states, Pakistan opted against non-alignment.
Using as leverage an invitation from the Soviet Union, the country’s
first prime minister succeeded in procuring an extended vacation in
the US, well before Washington had shown much interest in enlisting
the brand new nation as an ally in the incipient Cold War. Within its
first decade of existence, Pakistan became a signatory to the Baghdad
Pact (whose nomenclature was revised to make it the Central Treaty Organisation,
or Cento, after Iraq pulled out in 1958) and the Southeast Asian Treaty
Organisation, or Seato.
Both of these Western-sponsored
bodies were intended as bulwarks against the much feared spread of communism
in Asia and the Middle East. They were part of the “spheres of
influence” game played by the superpowers, and Pakistan was disinclined
from the outset to even feign neutrality. Among the consequences of
this frame of mind were bizarre foreign policy stances. For instance,
when Britain and France, in collaboration with Israel, militarily threatened
Egypt’s sovereignty over the Suez Canal in 1956, the Suhrawardy
administration wasted no sympathy on the victim of aggression.
The following year, The Pakistan
Times took notice of US ambassador Horace Hildreth’s comments
at the Dacca Press Club to the effect that “criticism of Pakistan’s
foreign policy generally came from people who were uniformed and unaware
of the facts of life”. The Lahore-based newspaper, then still
an independent entity, editorialised: “In condemning all the critics
of the Pakistan government’s foreign policy as ignoramuses, the
US ambassador has not only violated the rules of diplomatic conduct
but insulted a large number of parties...” What’s interesting,
of course, is that ten years into Pakistan’s existence, the US
envoy felt perfectly comfortable giving vent to petty political grievances.
In an era when the US did
not even pretend to have qualms about military dictators (provided they
were unequivocally anti-communist at the domestic and regional levels),
it took a shine to General Ayub Khan, and before long he was being hailed
as the epitome of a Third World strongman and as the Asian de Gaulle.
Passions on both sides cooled somewhat in the wake of the 1965 war,
which had led to the suspension of American arms sales to India as well
as Pakistan. This wasn’t hypocrisy on Washington’s part:
it had made it clear to Islamabad that military assistance was only
conceivable in the event of conflict with a communist or pro-communist
state. India clearly did not fit that category.
It was nonetheless a sobering
moment for Pakistan, as it reflected on the conditionality of American
friendship. Perhaps it should have been paying more attention: Dwight
Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had frankly
pointed out a decade earlier that the US had no friends, only interests.
Pakistan’s next military
dictator, Yahya Khan, served as a conduit for American contacts with
China, and his reward was the Nixon administration’s infamous
- and broadly inconsequential - “tilt towards Pakistan”
during the Bangladesh war. Tellingly, there is no record of any attempt
by Washington to curb its ally’s genocidal behaviour in 1971.
By far the deadliest phase
of American involvement in Pakistan unfolded nearly a decade later.
Not long after Soviet tanks had rolled into Kabul, General Zia accompanied
Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
to the Afghan border and literally begged the Americans to step in and
prevent the communist hordes from overrunning his country. Incursions
into Pakistan weren’t on Moscow’s menu, and Zia’s
desperation was mainly by other considerations: the illegitimacy of
his regime posed a problem both at home and abroad, and he hoped collaboration
with the US on its favourite battlefield - anti-communism - would serve
as a reprieve for his detested regime. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
What he presumably didn’t know at the time was that the man standing
next to him had been instrumental in provoking the Soviet intervention
- as Brzezinski himself confessed without remorse many years later.
Zia’s stock in Washington
steadily rose as the CIA’s biggest covert war since Vietnam got
under way and the Carter administration made way for the Reaganites.
The mujahideen, trained by Western and Pakistani commandos, not only
fought the Soviet forces and the Kabul regime’s army but also
targeted all symbols of enlightenment, including schools - and especially
schools for girls. There is more than an element of irony in the fact
that many of the aims of the US-backed Karzai administration are not
all that different from what the Soviet-backed governments were attempting
to achieve. And it’s at least equally ironic that some of the
leading beneficiaries of American munificence in the 1980s, including
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, are now allied with the
Taliban.
If Pakistan was among the
leading victims of Washington, Riyadh and Islamabad’s Afghan policy,
its status is certainly no lower in the blowback stakes. Nor was the
interim between the Zia and Musharraf dictatorships as uneventful as
Benazir Bhutto would like the world to believe. She told an audience
in the US Senate last month that extremists had been unable to gain
a foothold in Pakistan during her two terms as prime minister. Not surprisingly,
she must have deemed it imprudent to remind her potential benefactors
of the inconvenient truth that it was during her second stint as head
of government that the Taliban were transferred to Afghan soil from
madrassahs in Pakistan.
One of the intentions behind
this move was to reduce their nuisance value on the Pakistan side of
the border. In retrospect, the attempt clearly backfired.
In the aftermath of 9/11,
Musharraf had little choice but to acquiesce in American designs. The
consequences for Pakistan have been unpleasant, and there is plenty
of cause to suspect that the truth about the subsequent role of American
forces on Pakistani soil has been covered up. Yet, notwithstanding periodic
pats on the back from Benazir’s favourite political philosopher,
George W. Bush, American trust in Musharraf has never quite been unequivocal.
His tightrope performance has frequently been found unconvincing. Somewhat
arbitrarily, it has been decided a double act with Benazir would somehow
be worthier of international applause.
At the time of writing, it
isn’t clear whether Anglo-American efforts towards a Bhutto-Musharraf
deal have produced results. It’s conceivable that the military
ruler’s strictly conditional offer to discard his uniform in the
event of his “re-election” is part of the package. Benazir
has in recent years frequently indicated that she would end her exile
“soon”; she never did. Her promised return this month, however,
is reinforced by the Western support she has succeeded in garnering:
it has been reported that Condoleezza Rice even brought up the subject
during her notorious 2am phone call to Musharraf, during which Pakistan’s
president was ordered not to impose emergency rule.
None of the foregoing is
intended to suggest that Pakistan has somehow been singled out for special
treatment by Uncle Sam. Various forms of intervention have been a pillar
of US foreign policy since the 19th century, beginning with Latin American
countries, many of which have fared considerably worse than Pakistan
over the decades. After the Second World War, Washington spread its
net farther and wider even as it nudged the old European colonial powers
towards relinquishing their hold on vast swaths of Asia and Africa.
Its anti-communist crusade included not only replacing French military
power in Indochina but also manipulating political events in Italy,
for instance, condoning the murder of democracy by Greek colonels in
the mid-1960s and backing the apartheid regime’s endeavours in
southern Africa until well into the 1980s, when Pretoria’s description
of Nelson Mandela as a terrorist was still being parroted by its friends
in Washington and London.
Nor is Pakistan by any means
the only country where military dictatorship has, from the American
point of view, been the preferred form of governance. Not all that long
ago, uniforms were common enough in the corridors of power throughout
Latin America. Over the past couple of decades, however, the trend has
been towards ensconcing trusted civilians in power. Pakistan has lagged
behind in this respect, and now we may be about to witness a relatively
rare phenomenon: a Punch and Judy act sponsored by the production company
that has to its credit two regional theatres of war.
Email:
[email protected]
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.