The
US Media “Discovers” Pakistan’s Musharraf Is A Dictator—Why
Now?
By Keith Jones
03 June, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angles Times have all published
editorials in recent days taking the Bush administration to task for
its unabashed and unequivocal support for Pakistan’s military
dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.
In an editorial titled “Musharraf’s
follies: When will the US hold the Pakistani president accountable for
his abuse of power?” the Los Angeles Times compared the Bush administration’s
support for Musharraf to the “terrible mistake” the US made
in propping up three Cold War dictators who were ultimately swept from
power by popular upheavals—the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s
Anastasio Somoza, and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.
“Replace,” said
the LA Times, “the words ‘reliably anti-communist’
with ‘reliable US ally in the war on terror,’ and despair
at the Bush administration’s willingness to excuse heinous repression
from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Azerbaijan. Worst of all is its policy
toward Pakistan, where the administration refuses to distance the US
from the increasingly errant autocrat Pervez Musharraf.”
Bill Clinton’s Democratic
administration made no fuss in the fall of 1999 when Musharraf, then
as now the chief of Pakistan’s armed services, seized power. After
all, the Pentagon has enjoyed an intimate partnership with Pakistan’s
military since the early 1950s and Washington’s political establishment,
for almost as long, has held the military to be the chief bulwark of
a “stable Pakistan.”
But the Bush administration
has not just acquiesced to military rule in Pakistan. It has lavished
praise and gobs of money on the Musharraf regime, declared Pakistan
a “major non-NATO ally” of the US, repeatedly hailed the
general as a pivotal leader in the war on terror, and proclaimed the
various maneuvers he has taken to perpetuate military rule and run roughshod
over the country’s constitution as steps on the road to “full
democracy.”
Till now the US media has
essentially peddled the administration’s line. Certainly there
has been no chorus of media voices pointing out the incongruity and
downright absurdity of the Bush administration’s claims to have
restored democracy in Afghanistan by entrenching military rule in Pakistan.
The New York Times inadvertently
admitted its only complicity when in its May 23 editorial, “Propping
up the General,” it counseled the Bush administration to “use
the leverage it gets from [providing Islamabad] roughly $2 billion a
year in aid to encourage an early return to democratic rule.”
An early return—after seven years and seven months of military
dictatorship!
If sections of the press
have now “discovered” that Musharraf is a despot, it is
because they fear that the general is losing his grip and are anxious
about the consequences for US interests and influence in Pakistan, as
well as for the US’s larger strategic ambitions in South Asia,
Central Asia and the Middle East.
Since March, Pakistan has
been convulsed by a mounting political crisis—a crisis that has
precipitated the largest anti-government protests since Musharraf seized
power and that has split the legal establishment.
The trigger for this crisis
was Musharraf’s sacking of the chief justice of the Supreme Court,
whom the general feared could not be relied upon to rubber stamp his
phony “reelection” as president. But the opposition to the
trumped-up corruption case against the chief justice is fueled by the
absence of democracy, neo-liberal economic policies that have resulted
in deepening social inequality and economic insecurity, and Musharraf’s
support for US imperialism in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq .
Desperate to stamp out the
mounting challenge to his authority, Musharraf unleashed murderous violence
on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan’s principal city, on May 12-13.
More than 40 people were killed in two days of violence orchestrated
by the thugs of the pro-Musharraf MQM in connivance with the authorities
of Karachi and Sind province.
This bloodbath has only served
to underscore the popular feeling that the Musharraf regime has become
intolerable. As for Musharraf’s political cronies, they are publicly
fighting amongst themselves as they seek to escape public opprobrium.
The Bush administration,
meanwhile, has remained steadfast in its support for the general-president,
issuing not a word of criticism of the Pakistani government in the wake
of the violence in Karachi.
The editors of the New York
Times, LA Times and Post are alarmed by what they perceive to be the
Bush administration’s myopic policy of tying the fortunes of US
imperialism to the hated and increasingly isolated Musharraf. Yet none
of the three editorials calls for the US to repudiate Musharraf, let
alone cut off relations with his government. They merely counsel Washington
to broker a deal between the military and the principal bourgeois opposition
parties, warning that otherwise a regime hostile to the US may ultimately
come to power in Pakistan.
In fact, the Bush administration
has signaled that it would like Musharraf to reach a deal with Benazir
Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). But such a deal
has floundered over the division of the prerogatives and spoils of office,
and the Bush administration fears that without the iron fist of military
rule Pakistan could become embroiled in class and ethnic conflicts menacing
to US interests.
There is also, undoubtedly,
concern in the Bush administration that a change of regime in Islamabad
could endanger various sordid, secret operations that US military and
security forces are currently carrying out in Pakistan, including the
warehousing and torture of alleged terrorists and training exercises
for an attack on Iran.
Whilst fear that Musharraf
is stoking a popular rebellion that could threaten US interests is the
principal reason sections of the press are now calling for the Bush
administration to distance itself from the general and begin planning
for a “post-Musharraf Pakistan,” it is not the only reason.
Put bluntly, many sections
of the US establishment don’t think they are getting their money’s
worth from Musharraf. That is to say, they do not think he has been
sufficiently pliant in acting on US demands that his government root
out Taliban operatives who have found refuge in Pakistan’s border
areas with Afghanistan and violently suppress a growing indigenous tribal/Taliban
insurgency in north and western Pakistan.
All three editorials combine
complaints about Musharraf’s authoritarian rule with sniping that
the general has proven a poor bargain for US imperialism. “Congress,”
declared the New York Times, “must insist that future payments
[to Pakistan] be linked to actual counterterrorist activity and results,
as some American military officials now recommend.”
The Pakistani people have
suffered horrendously under the yoke of a string of US armed and sponsored
military regimes. The regime of General Ayub Khan (1958-69) ruthlessly
suppressed the working class and toilers, while pursuing an industrialization
policy that enriched a tiny elite, the so-called 20 families. US President
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger encouraged his successor, Yaya Khan,
in mounting a campaign of bloody repression against the Bangla-speaking
people of East Pakistan (Bangladesh), who had been denied their basis
rights within the Pakistan federation. This campaign resulted in the
deaths of hundreds of thousands and caused millions more to seek refuge
in India.
But in many ways it was the
dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq (1977-88) that has proven the most
destructive to the social fabric of Pakistan. The US made Zia’s
regime the pivot of its strategy of fanning, in alliance with the Saudi
regime, an Islamic fundamentalist rebellion against Afghanistan’s
pro-Soviet government and ensnaring the Soviet Red Army in a counterinsurgency
war. Pakistan’s role in arming and organizing the Islamicist insurgency
in Afghanistan dove-tailed with Zia’s own efforts to use Islam
to legitimize his regime and to promote the religious right as a bulwark
against the working class and all progressive thought.
Two decades on, Pakistan
continues to lives with the consequences of the US-backed dictator Zia’s
Afghan adventure and promotion of Islamicist politics—everything
from deep and oftentimes violent cleavages between different Muslim
sects and a widespread drug and Kalashnikov culture, to the existence
of a well-organized and financed network of Islamicist institutions,
political parties and militias.
“One reason”
General Musharraf “is unpopular, conceded the Washington Post,
“is his alliance with the United States.”
Yet the PPP, Nawaz Sharif’s
PML (N) and the rest of the bourgeois opposition clutch to the coattails
of the US, hoping—seven-and-a-half-years of rebuffs notwithstanding—that
they can convince the Bush administration they can better serve the
US’s predatory interests than Musharraf.
The venal Pakistani bourgeoisie
has always sought to gain money and geopolitical influence by serving
imperialist interests. Before Washington, it looked to London.
But the opposition’s
appeals to Washington are above all grounded in its fears that any popular
mobilization against the Musharraf regime could escape its control,
undermine the military, and become a threat to the bourgeois order.
Second only to the Pakistani military itself do the Benzair Bhuttos
and Nawaz Sharifs look to the imperialist powers, and above all the
US, as the bulwark of their own privileges, of a socioeconomic order
that condemns the vast majority of Pakistanis to a life of poverty,
ignorance and squalor.
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