

Sol Sanders Archive Flashback: Nov. 9: Pakistan's 'perfect storm' a history test for policymakers Never was that old mock-adage so relevant: history begins when the Americans arrive. The most frightening thing about the current bloody crisis in Pakistan is to listen to the American TV networks hyperventilating with their own gaseous commentators, or often worse, interviewing so-called instant experts. Many of the Inside-the-Beltway telerrati know little or nothing of the country’s history but nevertheless are available to pontificate. This self-intoxicating lather of the American media is not a small element in the current crisis. These kind of commentaries in the world of instant communication feed back to the already over plentitude of nihilism and confusion inside the country itself, a phenomenon which defies all sound barriers. Also In This Edition All through the morning of the happening one waited impatiently for the various TV talking heads to remember that President Pervez Musharraf, himself, had been victim of three [publicly known] assassination attempts in recent memory. For it does lend a little credence to the thought escaping most of the commentators that any of the major Pakistani cities — at best always near chaos for all the usual reasons of poverty, corruption and misgovernance in the Third World — are a setting made for just such violence. Musharraf was, after all, attacked in a military convoy in the same general area where former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto met her death, significantly the most important military cantonment in Pakistan. Unless you are in a Martian cloud of conspiracy theories, so much for answering the immediate and rampant indictment of Musharraf for not offering enough “protection” to Bhutto. Given Pakistani conditions there can be little surefire protection against such fanatical acts of violence against the leadership. As to accusing an allied and friendly foreign head of state and government of direct implication, as many of the in-house anchors and their invited guests did without a shred of evidence, it is to say the least, outrageously cavalier. Nor, apparently, did it occur to any of the illustrious commentators that Musharraf, were he not moronic, would be the last one to want the kind of crisis which has arisen from Bhutto’s martyrdom. Or remembering that Bhutto had virtually invited an earlier attack when on her homecoming last fall she insisted on a parade into downtown Karchi from the airport rather than a helicopter lift, leading to an almost successful attempt then on her life. Only U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton had the good sense immediately to point out that the State Dept. midget Michaevelians and their Georgetown lobbyist hanger-ons who have been on an orgy of pressuring for “democracy” in Pakistan [and some on Bhutto’s payroll], have contributed to the present crisis. When it became clear last year that Musharraf had failed in his effort in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Tribal areas to do virtually what U.S. Gen. David Petraeus seems successfully to have done with the Iraqi Sunni insurgency – co-opt it with money and an occasional military strike around the ears – it was clear that the wind was up. That old British Indian strategy had been more or less successful in the days of the raj and since by all the Pakistani governments. It was the alternative to coping with what could easily turn into a bitter and limitless guerrilla war in the regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border which have never known peace even before Alexander trounced through, thought better of it, and turned back almost 2500 years ago. In the new world of state of the art communication with telephone and internet and mobility of a huge Pakistan-Indian Moslem diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and Australasia, employed by the international terrorists, the old solution no longer works – at least not on the minor scale Musharraf tried it. [The U.S. Congress is now considering a massive $750-million five-year program to try to perhaps accomplish it on a larger scale.] But it has to be remembered that Afghanistan, even with U.S. and NATO forces, cannot police its side of the disputed border on the map but which runs right through tribal groups and is largely fictitious. Insisting as Washington has that Musharraf make a deal with Bhutto, and perhaps even worse, welcome back Nawaz Sharif, another equally incompetent and corrupt former prime minister, who has Islamicist and [surprise! surprise!] Saudi backing, was a strategy for catastrophe. Elections in Pakistan under the best circumstances in the past have been found wanting. [Ayub Khan, perhaps Pakistan’s most successful ruler, albeit a military dictator, in the 60s tried to set up a staggered village to the top stepped up electoral structure which collapsed, like all the others.] Forcing them in a time of increasing civil unrest, a resuscitation of the Taliban insurgency in the border regions with Afghanistan, an insurgency in the Baluchistan west, and continued probable disloyalty in the security organs, and perhaps even in parts of the military, was throwing oil on the flames. [Significantly, Rashid Rauf, a key suspect in the alleged plot to blow up trans-Atlantic jetliners wanted by both British and American authorities, and whom earlier the Indians had release after he took hostages a hijacking, escaped from a Pakistan jail only days before Bhutto’s death, apparently with connivance from his jailers.] At the moment, for better or for worse, only Musharraf and his senior military stand between a creaking alliance with America and the Hamasization of Pakistan. [The reverberatuions of such a breakdown in Pakistan would create a new and bewildering crisis for India with its Muslim population of more than 160 million larger than Islamabad’s. Nor is it clear what effect it would have on China, in alliance with Pakistan on a my enemy’s enemy is my friend basis.] Attempting in Washington to micromanage Pakistani domestic politics [with often Indian inputs] is a little like running an Iowa Democratic Party caucus from Washington. But that is what Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a prisoner of her staff in one of the Foggy Bottom dungeons with their monomaniacal warped concept of “negotiations”, has been trying to do. In late November, partly at the insistence of Washington but also under pressure from the civilian political establishment, led by Bhutto, Musharraf relinquished his second “hat” as active chief of the military to Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, retaining the civilian presidency to which he has recently been reelected by his largely chosen provincial assemblies. Pakistan’s imitation of the old British Indian army, the 7th largest military in the world, with all its strengths and weaknesses at some 650,000 with a half million reserves, is the skeleton on which the decrepid Pakistan state hangs. Its unity – despite a suspected infiltration of Islamofascist elements and an erosion through graft and corruption when it is in control of civil government as now – is paramount to any stability of the state. That is why much depends on Musharraf’s choice of Kayani. A scion of the old Muslim Rajput north Indian warrior class, Kayani is considered a Musharraf loyalist; it was he, for example, who investigated the two back-to-back attempts on Musharraf’s life, apparently successfully – although there was little or no public revelation of the culprits – for which Musharraf awarded him Pakistan’s highest decoration. He has headed the controversial Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency, the organization through which most of American aid to the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan was funneled during decade of Moscow’ occupation and defeat and subsequent implosion. After the Afghan conflict ended, Washington withdrew completely from the area [seen as abandonment by the Pakistanis], and the ISS installed the pro-Pakistan Taliban in Kabul, when in turn gave sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden. And it was presumably Kayani who purged the ISS, or attempted to do so, of its pro-jihadist elements when Islamabad switched sides following 9/11. Kayani, as many Pakistani officers, has attended American military schools and has a long record of contact with the U.S. military and the CIA. It is presumably he and his coterie of high fellow officers who control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, one of the chief preoccupations of Washington – and the Indians across the border as well as Pakistan’s Chinese Communist allies. [The Chinese and the North Koreans have supplied Pakistan with missiles and missile technology, and, perhaps, contributed to the supposedly renegade A.G. Khan network which produced its nuclear bombs and sold off elements to the Iranians and the Libyans.] Kayani is generally seen as a relatively modest but skilled political infighter as well as a good soldier. That remains to be seen, however, in the rough times ahead, and it would not be the first time a Pakistan military sponsor was replaced by his protégé if he were to replace Musharraf in the next wave of the crisis. It remains to be seen whether Washington will have recognized its failure to anticipate the complexity of the Pakistan situation [much as earlier it did in Iraq]. With the jihadists having won an important propaganda victory – whether they were directly behind the assassination or not – against secular forces in Pakistsn with Bhutto’s death, the simple question of law and order in a society riven with all sorts of pressures will be uppermost in the next days. That may call for a return to martial law, not “democracy”, or even elections; it could bring on some bloody repression of assorted non-political villains always ready to exploit a political situation, if nothing more than a TV set or two stolen from a shop. Washington would be well advised to remain aware of the fragility of the situation and, perhaps to the extent it can, help calm the domestic American media circus. That, of course, as always depends more on whether there may be other unforeseen headlines ahead some place else for the thundering herd of the telegentsia to turn its attentions. Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com . Click Here to Write a Letter to the Editor

