Lying down with dogs
When you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that it’s taken this long for Dubby’s association with thugs to bite him in the butt, considering how volatile they’ve been. Musharraf is a very bright and charming man — and ruthless; Osama is no doubt a big fan [and likely colleague.]
The Neo-Pub’s don’t have an understanding of Karma … of “what goes around, comes around” … of consequences, as mentioned previously. Lie down with dogs, get fleas.
Dubby stared into Pooty-Poot’s soul and called him righteous; now Putin has all the daggers strategically placed to undercut him every chance he gets. And if Bush thought Musharraf provided him a stable platform as an ally, well … this is the Era of the Dictator [our experience with Dub as “Decider” comes waaaaay too close to misunderestimate what he really wants] but he didn’t count on The Times and its demand for freedom — he’ll be out of office when the wheel comes back around, but that may not protect him from the rage of this nation.
George may think this Pakistan situation is going to work for him, even as he postures as pro-democracy and tries to soft-peddle his response … but the benefits are short-term. The long-term is quite another story. And what is clearly evident … watching Dubby wizzle before our very eyes [no codpiece now, huh, Dubya?] is that with Putin AND Musharraf — and of course China, who owns so much of our paper that we can only growl politely — he’s given away the sticks and has very few carrots left.
The fleas are jumping everywhere. What a mess!
Jude
Bush and Musharraf’s grand illusion
Democracy for Pakistan was never the deal — and as Musharraf’s latest power grab throws his nation into turmoil, Bush will gladly go along.
Juan Cole, Salon
Nov. 06, 2007
In the fall of 1999, as he campaigned for the presidency, George W. Bush was asked by a reporter to name the leader of Pakistan. Bush could not. He famously replied: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected — not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country, and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.” Although Bush didn’t know Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s name and was confused as to how he got into office, the soon-to-be American president was sanguine about the anti-democratic developments in Pakistan.
More than seven years later, Bush’s illusions about Musharraf — and any illusion of democracy in Pakistan — have been shattered by the dictator’s declaration of a state of emergency. Tantamount to a coup, Musharraf’s actions on Saturday have not only thrown Pakistan into turmoil but have also revealed the hypocrisy of Bush’s foreign policy, including the proclaimed goal of fostering freedom and the rule of law in the Muslim world.
At a press conference on Monday, Bush said of the weekend coup, “We expect there to be elections as soon as possible.” But while Bush admitted that Musharraf’s actions would “undermine democracy,” he insisted that the general is “a strong fighter” in the war on terror. That dual message was accompanied by the American president tepidly declining to say what he would do if Musharraf did not move toward elections. Also revealing was the fact that Bush had sent the weakest member of his team, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, out to warn Musharraf against the coup, indicating how little he was in reality worried about it. If he had been deeply anxious, he would have called the general himself. Many observers are viewing Musharraf’s coup as a major setback for Bush’s policy, but in fact it changes almost nothing.
Although the United States has given some $11 billion to Pakistan (mostly in military aid) since 2001, Bush needs Musharraf more than Musharraf needs the United States. The war in Afghanistan is a key reason: A major proportion of the war materiel for the 20,000 U.S. troops, and additional 20,000 NATO troops, in Afghanistan (a landlocked country) goes through Pakistan. U.S., British and Canadian troops on the front lines fighting a Taliban resurgence could be endangered if Pakistan were to cut off the flow of those supplies. On Monday, Rice appeared to back off from earlier warnings to Pakistan that a coup would jeopardize U.S. aid, saying that she doubted cooperation on the war on terror would be affected by Musharraf’s actions.
Musharraf, who was brought up in part in Turkey and is representative of the secular stratum of Pakistan’s middle class, is the Bush administration’s ideal ally. They point to his successes: Musharraf has moved a lot of fundamentalist officers out of positions of power, removing them from any authority over the country’s stockpile of nuclear bombs. Under his rule, Pakistani military intelligence has captured nearly 700 al-Qaida operatives in that country, including high-value figures such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. And Pakistani cooperation was key in breaking up a plot in summer 2006 by Britons of Pakistani heritage to blow up airplanes flying from London to New York.
But the 1999 interview revealed Bush’s true stripes regarding the Pakistani dictator, and his knee-jerk support for authoritarianism over democracy. Bush was criticized then for applauding the overthrow of the democratically elected Nawaz Sharif government in the Oct. 12, 1999, military coup. His spokesperson at the time, Karen Hughes, said that Bush was encouraged by Musharraf’s promise that he would hold early elections, restore “stability” to Pakistan, and ease tensions between India and Pakistan. (In fact, Musharraf had been a notorious hawk on India and may in part have carried out the coup because he saw his civilian predecessor as too dovish toward New Delhi.) What the world did not then know was that President Bill Clinton had negotiated a deal not long before with Prime Minister Sharif whereby Pakistan would deploy special operations troops to capture Osama bin Laden. When Musharraf took power in fall of 1999, he refused to honor the deal, since the operation was unpopular with the military’s fundamentalist officers. Indeed, Bush was supporting a man who derailed the best chance the Clinton administration may have had to prevent Sept. 11.
Bush went on, of course, to talk a good game as president about democratizing the Middle East, but that never appears to have been more than a cover story for his projection of American power into the region. And now he is standing by Musharraf as the latter dismantles the façade of civil society institutions in Pakistan.
Two crises pushed Musharraf to act. The first was an increasingly assertive Supreme Court, which successfully fought back against the general’s attempt to dismiss its chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, last spring. The Supreme Court appears to have been planning to declare Musharraf ineligible to hold the post of president, to which he was recently reelected by Parliament.
The second major crisis was the conflict between Musharraf and Muslim radicals. The United States had pressured him to crack down on the Muslim hard-liners of the northern tribal areas, who the United States alleges gave haven to al-Qaida operatives and protected training camps used to prepare terrorists to strike the West. But the vast, rugged territory had defeated the British Empire’s attempts to secure it, and Musharraf was not making better progress. In September 2006, he concluded an accord with the chieftains of the tribal areas, which some saw as a capitulation to the radicals. In spring and summer of 2007, Musharraf was faced with an insurgency in Islamabad’s Red Mosque complex, which he crushed with some brutality in July. Although the militants were not popular in most of the country outside the Northwest Frontier Province, where many of the madrassas, or Muslim seminaries, are located that produced the Taliban, no one liked seeing a mosque invaded and seminarians killed (even if the latter were armed and dangerous).
The twin crises reduced Musharraf’s legitimacy in Pakistani society to something near zero, and Washington swung into action. Rice called Musharraf repeatedly this summer, urging him to allow exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto — dismissed for corruption at the end of both of her previous terms (1988-1990 and 1993-1996) — to return to the country. As a secularist who opposes the Muslim extremists, Bhutto could have hoped to shore up the legitimacy of Musharraf’s efforts against them. As the leader of the popular Pakistan People’s Party, she has substantial grassroots support. The general eventually acquiesced, and Bhutto returned on Oct. 18, though the massive bombing that greeted her arrival at Karachi brought into question whether she could restore stability.
For the Bush administration to whitewash authoritarian rule as a promise of democracy in Pakistan is nothing new. After Sept. 11, then Secretary of State Colin Powell used a mixture of threats and pledges of aid to force Musharraf to turn on the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had been a pet project of the Pakistani military. In January 2002, Musharraf banned a number of militant Muslim groups whose members had been trained in the Taliban terrorist camps that also produced the Sept. 11 hijackers. America’s new ally could hardly show his true face as a mere military dictator, so on April 30, 2002, Musharraf held a referendum on whether he should become “president.” Since he was not running against any rival, it was impossible for him to lose this referendum, and voter turnout was low. Bush remained silent about the charade, and a low-level state department official declared it an “internal Pakistani matter.”
In fall 2002, Musharraf held stage-managed parliamentary elections, in which he interfered heavy-handedly in the campaigning. He was attempting to throw the election to the only civilian party that supported him, the Pakistan Muslim League Qaid-e Azam (PML-Q), called in Pakistan “the king’s party.” In fact, Musharraf’s maneuvering could not give the PML-Q a majority, since the Pakistan People’s Party of the then-exiled Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) of deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif showed some resilience.
What Musharraf’s interference did accomplish was to give an opening in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan for a six-party fundamentalist Muslim coalition, the Islamic Action Council, to take power. The key components of the Islamic Action Council included the Jamaat-i Islami, led by Qazi Hussain Ahmad, and the Clerical Association of Islam of cleric Fazlur Rahman — who had trained many of the Taliban leaders. The council also took about a fifth of the seats in the national Parliament, an almost unprecedented good showing, since most often the fundamentalist parties got less than 3 percent in Pakistani elections. American pundits ill-informed about Pakistan are tempted to support dictators such as Musharraf because they distrust the Pakistani electorate. But when allowed to participate in relatively free elections, Pakistani voters have usually backed moderate leaders and ignored the fundamentalists.
Musharraf’s latest seizure of power shows that little has changed in Pakistan since October 1999. Through thick and thin, Bush has stood by “the general” in Islamabad whose name he at first could not remember, the guarantor of “stability.” It is predictable that Washington will go on supporting the dictator, even though Musharraf’s doffing of the faux trappings of democracy in Pakistan has pushed the press corps to pose sharper questions than normal to Bush about this apparent hypocrisy.
But Pakistan’s military is the linchpin of Bush’s policies in Afghanistan and in the no-man’s land of tribal Pakistan. Faced with choosing between an ignominious rout in the region from which the Sept. 11 plot was launched, and perhaps even the fall of the Kabul government to a resurgent Taliban, or otherwise having to suffer criticism for hypocritically backing a military dictatorship, Bush will mouth some polite phrases about the prospect of elections in the future (as he did in 1999), and go on providing for Islamabad’s military machine. Aside from the cancellation of some ineffectual debates in a weak Pakistani Parliament — and the end of the illusion that any vestiges of democracy remain — nothing will change. ++
Bush’s Musharraf Envy
Scott Horton, Harpers Magazine
November 6, 2007
Yesterday, President Bush spoke publicly for the first time about General Musharraf’s coup d’état in Pakistan. His remarks and his conduct overall make for a curious contrast with his recent reaction against the Burmese dictatorship and its crackdown against demonstrations that sprang out of the nation’s faith-based community. His words directed towards Musharraf were astonishingly mild and understanding. Musharraf’s coup was a strike first against the Rule of Law. The enemy he identified consisted of the judges, the courts and the legal profession. He claimed they were taking the country down. Musharraf’s moves had been very carefully crafted to echo Bush’s own rhetoric: his denigration of lawyers, courts and judges, and his steady erosion of constitutional rights in order to bolster his own war-making powers. If Bush can play this game, Musharraf thought, why can’t I? But apart from his religious salutations, Musharraf’s speech could almost have been given by Dick Cheney at his next visit to a Whites-only country club. Musharraf’s main speech even evoked Abraham Lincoln in language which could have been taken straight from the pages of the Weekly Standard. They hit their target.
Developments in Pakistan since Saturday warrant close attention. I am not a Pakistan expert, though I track the affairs of Central Asia very closely, and Pakistan is a vital peripheral power to my zone of concentration. Moreover, those who are deep into counterterrorism studies know that no country in the world is nearly so much a subject of concern as Pakistan. Let’s rehearse the key facts.
We don’t have to fret over whether Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and delivery system. There’s no doubt about it. It does. And it’s been the world’s most tireless agent of nuclear proliferation for twenty years.
Every few months, the handful of Americans who do not suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder ask: Where is Osama bin Laden, and why has he not been brought to justice? And the answer is: he is lounging comfortably in Pakistan, or somewhere very close to the Pakistani frontier in Afghanistan, surrounded by friends and admirers.
Where have the Taliban been permitted to regroup, draw fresh recruits and launch attacks on NATO troops, including young Americans, in Afghanistan? In Pakistan, of course. Indeed, the Taliban is often seen as the brainchild of some key players in Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI, who continue to this day to maintain close relations with it.
Where has Al Qaeda itself been permitted safe harbor, been given facilities to conduct its operations, communicate with its various arms, raise fresh recruits, and plot its strategies of terror and mayhem? In Pakistan, of course.
Pakistan, not Iraq and not Afghanistan, was the key battleground of the war on terror on 9/11 and it has never ceased to hold that position. Yet the U.S. Government never really gave Pakistan the attention it needed. If you had to struggle for one word to describe the official U.S. engagement with Pakistan, no doubt it would be “ignorant.” As in: fundamentally uniformed. As Pakistan becomes a greater and greater risk, there is no point in which U.S. policy towards the world’s only Islamic nuclear power, and the center of a global nuclear proliferation problem, has been so poorly informed. Indeed, the Pakistan relationship continues to be described by key foreign policy strategists in terms of medieval feudalism. General Musharraf is seen as a “friend,” and the continuance of a personal relationship with Musharraf is seen as the substance of the relationship.
As I outlined earlier, however, Condoleezza Rice pushed a new policy for the U.S. on Pakistan—it focused on working to create a government with a broader and potentially more stable basis. Condi Rice’s concept, which actually seems to have first come out of Whitehall, was to arrange a shotgun wedding between Musharraf and Bhutto. And Bhutto, sensing she had the upper hand with Pakistan’s key Atlantic allies, drove a very hard bargain. Whatever defects one sees in Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party, and they are severe, this plan offered a lifejacket to a floundering Pakistani state. And for the first time in recent memory, American policy was focused on Pakistan, and not the persona of the current dictator in charge.
So what went wrong? In my view, Musharraf sensed a fault line in the U.S. between Condoleeza Rice, the author of the arrangement with Bhutto which he found so unappetizing, and his “friend” Dick Cheney. Musharraf gambled that in the end, Cheney and not Rice would be the advisor to whom Bush would turn. And Musharraf was spot on.
For those interested in tracking what’s going on in Pakistan today, my advice would be not to waste too much time reading the newspaper accounts. They cover the major facts, but their analysis is pretty tepid. The best work on the analytical side consistently came from Barney Rubin, whose live-blogging from Islamabad was an essential tool for the better journalists covering the story. (Disclosure: as those of you who have read Rubin’s pieces will know, I am an occasional conspirator with him—particularly in working out the very complex legal tangles that have driven much of Musharraf’s moves.)
The developments in Pakistan are extremely dangerous. And the posture adopted by Bush points to the usual triumph of dumbed-down cronyism over intelligent analysis. It reflects Bush’s vision for himself and the world, namely, no vision at all. ++
Musharraf Leaves White House in Lurch
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and HELENE COOPER, NYT
November 4, 2007
WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 — For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.
On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.
General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly alienated public.
Mr. Bush entered a delicate dance with Pakistan immediately after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when General Musharraf pledged his cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda, whose top leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be hiding out in the mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The United States has given Pakistan more than $10 billion in aid, mostly to the military, since 2001. Now, if the state of emergency drags on, the administration will be faced with the difficult decision of whether to cut off that aid and risk undermining Pakistan’s efforts to pursue terrorists — a move the White House believes could endanger the security of the United States.
Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, told General Musharraf and his top generals in Islamabad on Friday that he would put that aid at risk if he seized emergency powers.
But after the declaration on Saturday, there was no immediate action by the administration to accompany the tough talk, as officials monitored developments in Pakistan. Inside the White House the hope is that the state of emergency will be short-lived and that General Musharraf will fulfill his promise to abandon his post as Army chief of staff and hold elections by Jan. 15.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, traveling in the Middle East, called Mr. Musharraf’s move “highly regrettable,” while her spokesman, Sean D. McCormack, said the United States was “deeply disturbed.”
Teresita Schaffer, an expert on Pakistan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called General Musharraf’s action “a big embarrassment” for the administration. But she said there was not much the United States could do.
“There’s going to be a lot of visible wringing of hands, and urging Musharraf to declare his intentions,” she said. “But I don’t really see any alternative to continuing to work with him. They can’t just decide they’re going to blow off the whole country of Pakistan, because it sits right next to Afghanistan, where there are some 26,000 U.S. and NATO troops.”
The hand-wringing began even before General Musharraf imposed military rule. Ms. Rice said she has had several conversations with General Musharraf in the past few weeks — the last one two days ago — in which she appealed to him not to declare emergency powers. The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had also been exhorting General Musharraf and his top deputies against making that step, Ms. Rice said.
“We were clear that we did not support it,” Ms. Rice said, speaking to reporters aboard a flight from Istanbul to Israel, where she is traveling for regional talks. “We were clear that we didn’t support it because it would take Pakistan away from the path of democratic rule.”
But even as she criticized General Musharraf’s power grab, Ms. Rice stopped short of outright condemnation of General Musharraf himself, even going so far as to credit him for doing “a lot” — in the past — toward preparing Pakistan for what she called a “path to democratic rule.”
That seeming contradiction highlights the quandary in which the Bush administration now finds itself.
There has long been a deep fear within the administration, particularly among intelligence officials, that an imperfect General Musharraf is better for American interests than an unknown in a volatile country that is central to the administration’s fight against terrorism. In recent months the White House had been hoping that a power-sharing alliance between General Musharraf and Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, would help the general cling to power while putting a democratic face on his regime.
Now, experts predict that the United States will be watching Pakistan closely in the coming days to see how hard General Musharraf cracks down on his opponents — and whether opposition political leaders, journalists and scholars are imprisoned. Much of the attention will be on Ms. Bhutto, who strongly condemned the emergency declaration and quickly cut short a visit to Dubai to return to Pakistan during the crisis.
Officials will be watching to see whether Pakistan’s fractured opposition, including Ms. Bhutto and her political party can unite and pose a serious challenge to General Musharraf. They will also be watching the reaction of the military, which has been demoralized by a spate of suicide bombings against military targets.
Whatever happens, experts say that General Musharraf’s decision was not good news for the Bush administration. Even if Pakistan does get back on the path to democracy, Saturday’s action will likely tarnish the Pakistani leader, as well as the legitimacy of any election organized by his government.
Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the current situation could easily plunge Pakistan into chaos, leading to an increase in violence by Islamic fundamentalists or provoking demonstrations by opposition political parties.
“You could have chaos in the street, or a situation where it would be suicidal for Bhutto to try to participate in the process,” he said, adding, “Either of those scenarios puts the U.S. in a very difficult position.” ++
Ginger Thompson contributed reporting.
Another Bush Backfire
[snipped from] Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Monday, November 5, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
[open to get to articles]
President Bush’s coddling of Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf suddenly risks being exposed as another case of White House anti-terror policies going spectacularly bad.
The ultimate anti-terror backfire, of course, is the war in Iraq, which U.S. intelligence shows has helped al Qaeda much more than it’s hurt it.
But now, with Musharraf declaring emergency rule over the weekend, the country that Bush considers a bulwark against terror may gain infamy as a crucible for terror instead.
Michael Hirsh writes for Newsweek:
- “After six years of propping up and making excuses for Pervez Musharraf . . . Washington doesn’t have many friends left to call on in Pakistan — perhaps the No. 1 generator of anti-U.S. terrorism in the world today. That’s the dilemma that democracy crusader George W. Bush faces after Musharraf, one of his firmest allies, took the dictator’s path and declared martial
law on Saturday. . . .
“Some U.S. officials now fear that that this nuclear-armed nation is teetering on the verge of chaos, and the result could be every American’s worst nightmare: that nuclear material or knowhow, or God forbid, a bomb, falls into the hands of terrorists. ‘If you were to look around the world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it’s right in their backyard,’ says Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council.”
Ben Feller writes for the Associated Press:
- “President Bush says he gains influence with world leaders by building personal relations with them. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf got a dose of that diplomacy at the White House last fall, when Bush hailed him as a friend and a voice of moderation.
“‘The president is a strong defender of freedom and the people of Pakistan,’ Bush said that day, side by side with Musharraf.
“Over the weekend, that advocate of freedom emerged with a different world image: a military dictator willing to crush the rights of his own people. . . .
“By unleashing a police state on his country, Musharraf put in motion a trifecta of trouble for the Bush administration. A nuclear-armed Pakistan lurched further into instability, civil rights and parliamentary elections were shoved aside, and the credibility of a Bush-backed leader took an enormous hit.”
Renee Schoof and Warren P. Strobel write for McClatchy Newspapers:
- “The imposition of emergency rule on Saturday in nuclear-armed Pakistan underscores how little influence the Bush administration has on events in a country that has become the bulwark in the U.S. fight against terrorism. . . .
“Washington’s lack of influence . . . was palpable. On Friday, both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Turkey for talks on Iraq, and Adm. William J. Fallon, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, had warned Musharraf not to impose emergency rule. But Musharraf didn’t even wait for Fallon, who was in Pakistan, to leave the country before making his declaration.”
Paul Richter writes in the Los Angeles Times:
- “In Musharraf, an American president sometimes accused of naive neoconservative faith in democracy made the ultimate realist’s bargain to help prop up an authoritarian leader.
“The step Musharraf has taken now has raised fears that the world may end up with a nuclear-armed state that is at once more fractured and host to a stronger Islamic militant force. . . .
“[F]rom the beginning, U.S. officials have acknowledged concerns that the Pakistani government was not doing enough to foster democracy and halt nuclear proliferation. And an increasing number of U.S. officials have become convinced that Musharraf’s regime hasn’t done enough to fight militant Islamists. . . .
“Musharraf promised Bush from the beginning that he would eventually give up his position as head of the army, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, and hold free and fair elections at the risk of ending his own rule. Yet his declaration of emergency rule has been widely judged a desperate attempt to hold onto power as the Pakistani Supreme Court deliberated on the validity of his recent reelection.”
White House Still Reeling
Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post:
- “The Bush administration seemed to still be reeling from Musharraf’s announcement Saturday and waiting for the rapidly shifting events to settle before making any move beyond expressing strong disapproval.
“U.S. aid to Pakistan over the past six years has totaled nearly $11 billion, most of it in military hardware and budget support. Immediately after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush lifted aid sanctions imposed on Pakistan and India after both countries tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Additional sanctions set against Pakistan after Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 were also waived.”
Here’s what Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat and presidential candidate who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the Nation” yesterday:
- “What I hear from the administration and the brief briefing I got last night, I don’t know that they have any notion of what they’re going to do right now. There’s still this faint hope that this martial law will last only a day or two, but I think that is–I think we’re kidding ourselves. So they’re in a very tough spot. Look, as–you know, this administration has a–has a– has a Musharraf policy, not a Pakistani policy. It’s tied to Musharraf, and it’s also–its hands are pretty well tied right now. And it’s put itself in a very difficult position and, in turn, us in a difficult position.”
Another Casualty
John D. McKinnon and Neil King Jr. write in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):
- “President Bush’s vaunted ‘freedom agenda,’ using U.S. aid, influence and example to advance political liberty around the globe, suffered one of its worst setbacks this weekend when Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan. . . .
“Mr. Musharraf’s crackdown — which appeared to catch administration officials by surprise — has dramatically underscored how much Mr. Bush’s freedom march has slowed, and in a few cases gone into retreat. . . .
“[W]ith little more than a year to go in his term, the president’s once-lofty hopes for expanding world freedom increasingly are being replaced by fears over security and stability. This is true not only in Pakistan, but also in other trouble spots where the U.S. has been deeply involved, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories.”
The White House response to the Journal’s thesis: “Mr. Musharraf’s move was ‘disappointing and discouraging, but let’s see where this goes before making judgments as to the freedom agenda,’ said [White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe].”
What Cheney Wrought
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid writes in a Washington Post op-ed:
- “The spread of anti-Western feelings and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have been fostered by a U.S. policy that has sought to prop up Musharraf rather than forcing him to seek political consensus and empower a representative civilian government that would have public support for attacking the extremists.”
And who’s most responsible for that policy? Here’s what Rashid wrote in The Post in June:
- “Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department. “No one in Foggy Bottom seems willing to question Cheney’s decisions.”
Bush Flashback
Here’s more from Bush’s Sept. 22, 2006, joint press availability with Musharraf at the White House: “I admire your leadership. I admire your courage. And I thank you very much for working on common strategies to protect our respective peoples.”
Bush explained:
- “We talked about democracy. The last time I was with the President, he assured me, and assured the people that were listening to the news conference, that there would be free and fair elections in Pakistan in 2007. He renewed that commitment, because he understands that the best way to defeat radicalism and extremism is to give people a chance to participate in the political process of a
nation.”
Here’s Bush just last July, speaking in Cleveland:
- “Musharraf is a strong ally in the war against these extremists. I like him and I appreciate him. I’m, of course, constantly working with him to make sure that democracy continues to advance in Pakistan. He’s been a valuable ally in rejecting extremists. And that’s important, to cultivate those allies.”
The Money Still Flows
David E. Sanger and David Rohde write in the New York Times:
- “The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president.
“In carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments about the limits of American leverage over General Musharraf, the man President Bush has called one of his most critical allies, the officials argued that it would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with their best hope of ousting Al Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from the country’s mountainous tribal areas.”
But consider what all that money has — or hasn’t — bought us.
Greg Miller writes in the Los Angeles Times:
- “Despite billions of dollars in U.S. military payments to Pakistan over the last six years, the paramilitary force leading the pursuit of Al Qaeda militants remains underfunded, poorly trained and overwhelmingly outgunned, U.S. military and intelligence officials said. . . .
“[R]ather than use the more than $7 billion in U.S. military aid to bolster its counter-terrorism capabilities, Pakistan has spent the bulk of it on heavy arms, aircraft and equipment that U.S. officials say are far more suited for conventional warfare with India, its regional rival.
“That has left fighters with the paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps, equipped often with little more than ’sandals and bolt-action rifles,’ said a senior Western military official in Islamabad, even as they face Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters equipped with assault rifles and grenade launchers.” ++
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