The General in his labyrinth

Pakistan’s dramatic shift towards democracy may unseat President Pervez Musharraf, but he need not worry about the judgement of history – his manipulation of America’s hectoring post 9/11 foreign policy is a lesson for the ages.

In the six years since then-US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is said to have warned the General that he should, “[b]e prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age” if he didn’t side with America, Musharraf has handled the contradictions of the ‘global war on terror’ with an adroitness that Talleyrand would have admired. Saddam Hussein lost his country and his head over nonexistent WMD, but Musharraf has received $10 billion of US aid even though he pardoned and continues to shelter AQ Khan, the man responsible for the gravest instances of nuclear proliferation since the end of the Cold War. (Khan dealt with North Korea but Pakistan has unaccountably been allowed to prevent the International Atomic Energy Agency from interviewing him.)

Musharraf has also managed to prevent US military strikes against Al Qaeda occurring within Pakistan’s borders because former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld feared that these would destabilize America’s “major non-Nato ally”. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ‘stability’ has done far more for the Taliban and Al Qaeda than it has for America. Furthermore, Musharraf’s support for Rumsfeld’s wars has seriously undermined his popular appeal within Pakistan. One recent poll revealed that inside Pakistan the President has now become less popular than Osama bin Laden. This is not just a political embarrassment, many intelligence analysts believe that both Ayman Al-Zawahiri and bin Laden are currently hiding somewhere in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Somehow, despite grandiloquent promises, the General has proved impotent against a terrorist network whose survival has guaranteed him Washington’s support. Is that surprising? America’s misadventures elsewhere in the Middle East have allowed Pakistan to get away with a great deal of shadow-boxing against the Islamist foe it played such a large role in creating in the first place. An enemy, it should be noted, that would likely disappear if democracy were to prevail – a September poll suggested that the MMA coalition of militant Islamist parties would win less than 5% in a proper election. Musharraf’s government has made great play out of its supposed crackdown on the ‘Islamist threat’ while arming itself for the far more likely and potentially apocalyptic confrontation with real, longstanding enemy: democratic India.

Suddenly, with a flawed election behind him and a state of emergency that has allowed his government to arrest Supreme Court judges, lawyers, opposition leaders and thousands of their supporters, President Musharraf has turned into something perilously close to a textbook example of the sort of leader that the vaunted US National Security Strategy was meant to deter: a dictator with weapons of mass destruction (at least 50 of them) at his disposal. Stability has morphed into repression; realpolitik – suitably hidden beneath the rhetoric of ‘liberty and democracy’ – has pushed another country into political chaos. It was a day that had to come. Washington may yet finesse the situation, but with so many untidy democratic forces in play, perhaps not.