Being Patient With Pakistan

November 12th, 2007 at 05:49pm Mark Noonan

Mark Steyn, with his usual good humor, injects a note of reality into the debate about Pakistan:

Pakistan is not Persia. For one thing, it’s a country only 60 years old whose slapdash creation was one of the worst disasters of British imperial policy. Yet even those who thought so at the time would be astonished to find that, a mere couple of generations on, a regional afterthought is not only a nuclear power that has dispersed its technology around the planet but also a driving force of the world’s first global insurgency. If General Musharraf is shooting without a script, what would you do stuck in a toxic soap opera where the incoherent plot twists pile up with every passing decade? It may well be that a Bhutto restoration will be the happy ending foreign-policy “realists” predict. But it’s more likely that a return to traditional levels of democratic corruption will cramp the economic interests of much of the military and lead key factions to make common cause with the Islamists — as Pakistan’s intelligence service did with the Taliban. I don’t know for sure, and nor does anyone else. But sometimes it helps to bet on form. And, given the last 60 years, the real question is how bad things will be after Musharraf. This thing can’t be scripted, in Washington or anywhere else.

It is good to keep that in mind - Pakistan came into being because the Moslems of India refused to be placed under the rule of long-despised Hindus who were taking over from an exhausted British Raj. It is where most of India’s Moslems lived, but not all of them - and millions of them were forced (by one means or another) to remove themselves from Hindu-ruled India and settle in Pakistan, a nation which never existed even in theory prior to 1947.

Pakistan is a swamp of conflicting ethnicities and interests to which has been added the poison of Islamo-fascism. Musharraf may be every bad thing everyone says, but he is also still the best the world has got in Pakistan. Steyn points out earlier that a very large number of Pakistanis are in direct opposition with Musharraf’s anti-terrorism efforts - in fact, a vote in Pakistan would probably result in a decidedly Islamist government directly at odds with our strategy in the War on Terrorism. We want democracy to spread over the Moslem world, but we want it to spread with a message of life and hope, not war and despair. Right now, in Pakistan, the Islamists propaganda coupled with extreme ruthlessness in Islamist controlled areas has resulted in a still-vigorous Islamo-fascism while it has faded in Afghanistan and Iraq. It will take some time to crack this very tough nut - and the worst thing we can do is go blundering into Pakistani politics.

Patience is what is required - we must, of course, prod Musharraf into securing liberty for his people and an eventually democratic transition of power. But we’re also not in a rush here - Pakistan, in a very real sense, has never known a moment of truly free government in all of the 6,000 odd years civilization has existed in that area. Another 5 or 10 years before they get it won’t be the worst thing that ever happened in human history. In the end, it is either show some patience or resign ourselves to another Iraq-style campaign of four or five years of forcibly midwifing democracy. We can do it that way, but I much prefer to let the Pakistanis do it entirely on their own - and given that Musharraf, for all his flaws, is no madman like Saddam and does seem to want a good future for his country, I’m willing to give Musharraf his chance.

Tags: March of Democracy, Musharraf, Pakistan

Entry Filed under: War on Terror