Sol Sanders Archive

The President mentioned Pakistan several times in his State of the Union Address in mid-January. And were that not enough, it would have been the tip-off that if and when the presidential three-ring circus falters, the MSM [main stream media] would turn its attention to Pakistan.

The elections now scheduled for Feb. 14th to select a new Pakistan parliament are going to provide the platform for pontificating by all and sundry.

Washington’s rumor mills have already been busy with reports that the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congress, whoever, is unhappy with the way things are going in Pakistan – particularly in relation to the U.S. and NATO commitment in neighboring Afghanistan. So don’t just stand there, do something! There are reports that the Washington establishment would like to intervene, either directly with military units to chase what in Indo-Pakistan English are called “miscreants” along the border. Or, at least, the U.S. ought to be training Pakistan militias and army on how to root them out [with our now bitterly learned expertise from Iraq!]

The Pakistanis, oddly enough, are somewhat miffed that their own military is considered incapable. If leaked Washington tidbits were not enough, U.S. Pacific Commander Adm. Timothy Keating looked into the soul of Chinese interlocutors and saw possibilities of collaboration in operating aircraft carriers!

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, little MSM attention has gone to the fact that as this is written at least three Pakistani military operations are taking place in the tribal regions. In an area screened by Himalayan geography, poverty stricken tribal politics, Pakistani reluctance to admit errors, and just poor communications, conflicting reports indicate there has been some success in rooting out “foreigners”. These are Arab, Central Asian, and North African jihadists seeking training or joining up with the local Al Qaida/Taliban opponents, not only of the U.S., but of Pakistan and its Gen. President Pervez Musharraf. He has, after all, been a several times target for unsuccessful assassination.

But the historically “unpacified” tribal territories along the Northwest Frontier Province are not Musharraf’s only worries. The psychotic suicide bombers have shown up in urban areas. There are other tribal conflicts in the huge western Baluchistan province and even in its capital Quetta, a frontier city grown out of the old British Indian cantonment. Sabotage of gas pipelines, attacks on army and police posts, occasional ambushes of police, paramilitary, and the army itself, daily dot the Pakistan media – which military dictatorship or no, offer a good deal more evidence of media freedom than Washington critics would concede.

Nor, again as this written, has there even a grudging concession that the killing of Al Qaida’s No. 3, Abu Laith al-Libi, in the tribal are of North Waziristan, with a missile, probably from an American drone, might just have had something to do with U.S. Pakistan intelligence collaboration. [Al-Libi was an Al Qaida training camp leader who, during a visit by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in Feb. 2007 was likely behind the bombing of the U.S. base at Bagram that killed 23 people.]

There is a certain parallelism between the hysteria which grips much of the Pakistan polity and the critics of Musharraf in the West. That Pakistan is a near failed state does not come as a surprise to those who have watched it for the past half century. Assigning blame is a mug’s game – it takes delving into history, not only of British India which preceded the hasty and bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947, but into events long before Alexander passed this way in 327 BCE.

But the crazed mobs that occasionally race through Pakistan’s fetid cities – as they did after the murder of Benzir Bhutto in December – share the hysteria that percolates in too much written about the country in the West. Example: a Washington think tank presents arguments built by a committed partisan based on opinion polls in a country where perhaps more than half the population is illiterate, much of it living on subsistence agriculture, and constantly at the mercy of the fierce elements of the monsoon and earthquake prone subsoil. Was the polling done by sign language or with smoke signals?

The MSM media has, for example, complained bitterly about Musharraf’s dismissal of the chief justice of the country’s supreme court and a flock of other judges. Few of those critics, apparently, realize the incumbent was himself installed in the same manner, or that there were other important if complex business and economic issues. Unfortunately, the inherited mixture of Anglo-Saxon law, British Indian Muslim code, sharia, and tribal custom, has transmogrified it into one of the most corrupt systems in the world. Pakistani lawyers are not, contrary to MSM presentation, knights of the round table.

Holding elections is a complicated process under the best conditions. [Florida 2004 anyone?] And Pakistan, with its crippled public services and current environment of violence, does not have those. Musharraf spent a good deal of time, apparently not too convincingly, telling the Europeans at various venues in January that the forthcoming elections would be fair. That, of course, remains to be seen. But beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder.

Voltaire said the perfect is the enemy of the good. No one would be so foolish as to defend many of the mistakes of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. But the question arises, given the difficulties of any kind of representative government in that country, now under the fullblown attack of the Islamofascists, how much progress can one reasonably anticipate and at what speed.

What does echo down through the halls of recent history, however, is that sometimes the efforts to correct the defects of a regime under fire with a scalpel rather than balm may not be the best method. The Shah gave way to Khomeini and an Islamofascist dictatorship. President Diem gave way to chaos and a Communist holocaust in Vietnam and Cambodia. Even Somoza [FDR: He may be a SOB but he is our SOB] gave way to Sandinistas and civil war.

P.S. One [RIP] of the many local American officials, critics, and plotters against Diem who had preached the gospel of “nothing could be worse”, meeting me in Saigon not long after the Vietnamese leader’s murder, said: “It was more complicated than we thought”. I could only mournfully respond, “Yes …than we thought.”