Dictator Days
In matters of politics, it’s often hard to tell who’s the bad guy. There rarely is one. Pervez Musharraf is an illegitimate leader who wrested power away from an inept one. Given the circumstances, Musharraf fared rather well. The economy thrived under his administration, and Pakistan’s military power grew immensely, thanks to billions of dollars of US support. It was no surprise that he enjoyed support both at home and abroad.
Musharraf is one of those leaders that really has to irk the US government. He’s a necessary evil. He’s a military dictator. He controls a country in a volatile region of the world where the US is desperately seeking a foothold in its ‘war on terror’. To the South, Pakistan is flanked by India, a nuclear power. Wedged between India and Pakistan is Kashmir, a hotly disputed former Eden now blossoming into a burgeoning wasteland. And that brings us to the northern border. Afghanistan. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, the formal Taliban government was dissolved, but the radicals didn’t disappear. They went to Pakistan.
Story time. When I was a kid, I went to Pakistan a couple times. I went to both Karachi, the super urban port city, and Sialkot, which back in 1992 could probably still be considered a town/village. I remember something. I remember seeing teenagers and old men walking around with green bandannas. I wasn’t supposed to talk to them, nor even greet them. They were Jamaat-i-Islam members. I dont think they were militants, but they were the Islamic equivalent of (Jerry) Falwellers and (Pat) Robertsonians. My uncle was followed home by one of them once. A 17 year old boy. He came to my uncle’s house, and told him that he’d seen him praying at the mosque. He informed my uncle that he was praying wrong. My kind of people.
I went back to Pakistan in 2003. The Jamaat-i-Islam has clearly grown in strength. It’s disconcerting. Moderate Muslims in Pakistan are concerned with the change. And rightly so.
In the face of growing fundamentalism, the US needed an inside man who had military clout. Musharraf was that man. And now he’s gone completely nuts. He violated every democratic mandate that mattered. But we still love the guy, because we have to. Why would the US continue to support a man who suspended the constitution, dissolved the supreme court, and who conceivably turned a blind eye to Benazir Bhutto’s security needs? Because Ms. Rice perceives Pakistan’s internal problem with fundamentalism to be legitimate, and urgent.
So who is Pervez Musharraf? A political tough guy. A military man. A clumsy negotiator. A poor statesmen, and a master strategist. Musharraf called a state of emergency, and suspended democracy, despite the US’s warnings against doing so. The same US that funds his government. Musharraf called our bluff. He knows his place in history. He knows that he is far too important to the region’s military stability for the US to have cut his allowance for merely derailing his own country’s political evolution.
