A Blow for Democracy
by Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes, August 18, 2008.

A great blow has been struck for democracy.

No, it wasn’t John McCain posturing about the nonexistent U.S. defense of Georgia and Mikhail Saakashvili. Nor was this blow struck by the keyboard commandoes who infest the media, congratulating themselves on their courage in standing up to the Russian bear.

It happened halfway around the world and, as is so often the case, the United States and its chattering classes were on the wrong side of history.

The military dictator Pervez Musharraf, facing certain impeachment, resigned the last of his usurped offices, President of Pakistan.

Although he allowed a fair amount of freedom in the English-language media, the media in the local languages were tightly controlled. He ran rigged elections repeatedly and attempted to undercut the long-term basis for a return to electoral democracy by jerry-rigging his own political party, united by nothing more than subservience to power. He eviscerated the judiciary; things finally came to a head when the until-then-compliant Supreme Court refused to endorse his participation in America’s border-spanning snatch-and-grab-and-torture campaign, which is called the “war on terror” and remains bound by no law and few canons of decency. For inquiring into the fate of Pakistan’s “disappeared,” Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was labeled a supporter of terrorism by Bush and Musharraf. As the confrontation escalated, Musharraf took repressive measures against lawyers and human rights advocates.

Musharraf played the role of an ally in the war on terror so well that he got over $10 billion in military aid from the United States since 9/11. Most of it was spent on advanced weapons systems of use only in a war against India – but the U.S. officials involved knew very well where it was going to go.

Musharraf helped foster the extreme Islamist parties as a counterweight to the established electoral system and materially supported the rise of the neo-Taliban, long after the United States scared him into terminating some support for the old Taliban leadership. While he was happy to let the United States take random innocent people and disappear them, key extremist militants were kept protected and operated with the cooperation of the state.

Ahmed Rashid, whose book Descent into Chaos is one of the few truly well-informed books about Afghanistan of recent years, considers that Musharraf simply pulled the wool over the Americans’ eyes, a view in which he is joined by Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

And yet, as the “war on terror” moved from failure to failure, bringing Islamist parties to power in the Northwest Frontier Province in 2002, turning Waziristan into a hotbed of Islamist rebellion, making Pakistan the target of a spate of suicide bombings that would be stunning in any country not occupied by American troops, the United States never ceased to trumpet Musharraf’s nonexistent secularism and respect for democracy, faulting him only for not acquiescing even more to the policies that were destroying Pakistan.

Democracy’s victory in Pakistan is only partial. As part of his agreement to step down, Musharraf got immunity for the crimes he has committed, a sorry compromise but one that was probably necessary in order to avert any more disasters. The Pakistani military is still the dominant power in the country; as Musharraf’s star fell, the United States prudently shifted its efforts to courting General Ashfaq Kayani, the current military Chief of Staff. The two political parties sharing official power right now have in general been hopelessly corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the Pakistani people.

The question for the United States, as always, is whether it will bother to learn from any of the disasters it has created. The Russia-Georgia war seems to show clearly that we have learned little if anything from the destruction of Iraq. We have not even learned that the United States does not get to dictate everything that happens in the world. Our leaders would rather engage in impotent posturing that openly reveals both our hypocrisy and our lack of ability to control events in Georgia than do anything constructive.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we have clearly not learned another lesson of Iraq; smashing things is not always the best way to deal with a problem. With Musharraf out, U.S. pressure on Pakistan to mount more invasions of its tribal areas will continue, as will high-intensity raiding in southern Afghanistan. Expect things there to get worse before they, eventually, get better and we hail the foresight of the warmongers as some are doing over Iraq right now.