America's Favorite Dictator

By Selig S. Harrison

The catastrophe now engulfing Pakistan was made in America. It is the direct and inevitable result of the huge infusions of U.S. military hardware and cash subsidies for the past half-century that have built up Pakistan's armed forces into a bloated behemoth with both overwhelming firepower and financial might beyond the reach of civilian control.
Whatever happens to Gen. Pervez Musharraf, it will be difficult to break the grip of the generals in Islamabad over economic as well as political life in Pakistan. A growing confrontation lies ahead between the armed forces and a politically aroused populace with explosive implications in a nuclear-armed state in a dangerous neighborhood.

In the most optimistic scenario for the weeks ahead, Musharraf will fulfill his promises to end martial law, step down as army chief of staff and permit National Assembly elections. But even if elections are held, campaigning will be controlled and the elections are likely to be rigged so that Benazir Bhutto does not get enough assembly seats to claim a meaningful share of power and ends up fronting for continued military rule.

If Musharraf does actually trade his uniform for a Savile Row suit, he is likely to be a figurehead president beholden to his anointed successor as chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. If Bhutto becomes prime minister, she is likely to use her limited power to rebuild her decimated Peoples Party and to reach out to disaffected ethnic minorities. Pakistan would then remain unstable, but intact.

By contrast, naked military rule without a civilian component would sharpen tensions between the Punjabi-dominated armed forces and the Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi separatists seeking to break up Pakistan into four ethnically defined independent states.

The U.S. buildup of the armed forces has been almost continuous since the founding of Pakistan. During the Cold War and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, U.S. military assistance totaled some $15 billion at current prices. But it was no secret that Pakistan wanted its F-16s and heavy tanks to bolster its balance of power with India — and did, in fact, use them against New

Delhi in two wars. Then came the World Trade Center attack and $10 billion more in new military aid and “counterterrorism” subsidies.

Emboldened by Washington's largesse, the successive military dictatorships of Ayub Khan, Zia Ul Haq and Musharraf have established an economic empire patterned after the military-operated conglomerates of Indonesia and Thailand.

In her just-published study, “Military, Inc.,” Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa estimates that these military-run enterprises have assets totaling $36.19 billion. The empire embraces everything from stocks, bonds, insurance and banking to breakfast cereals, bakeries and airlines. The biggest real estate firm in the country and the biggest trucking network are army-controlled. Civil servants in economic posts have been replaced by military officers, serving and retired. Parliamentary committees seeking to exercise oversight over the military role in the economy are brushed aside.

Faced with the economic tentacles of the armed forces throughout Pakistani society and their repressive machinery, both overt and covert, Benazir Bhutto and other mainstream opposition leaders are no match for “Military, Inc.”

But the separatists pose a serious challenge. The Baluch Liberation Army in the southwest is a well-organized guerrilla force with close ties to Sindhi dissidents in the adjacent coastal commercial center of Karachi.

Most important, a simmering Pashtun secessionist movement could lead to the unification of the 41 million Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the emergence, in time, of a new national entity, “Pashtunistan,” under radical Islamist leadership.

The United States ignores ethnic factors in its operations against the Taliban and other jihadi forces. For example, the Pashtuns have resisted Punjabi domination for centuries. Yet Washington wonders why Pakistan's Punjabi soldiers have so little success in their operations in Pashtun border areas.

Similarly, the Taliban is composed mainly of Pashtuns. Thus, when air strikes lead to large-scale civilian casualties in Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun areas, the United States inadvertently helps the Taliban capture the leadership of Pashtun nationalism.

In one estimate, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have numbered nearly 5,000 since 2001. The International Crisis Group reported that “indiscriminate and excessive force alienated the local populace” when Pakistani forces, under pressure from Washington, conducted helicopter and artillery attacks in early 2004 that displaced some 50,000 people in Pashtun border areas. More recently, many of the 300 seminary students killed in Musharraf's July assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad were Pashtun girls.

At a recent Washington seminar at the Pakistan embassy, Ambassador Mahmud Ali Durrani, a Pashtun, observed, “I hope the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism don't merge. If that happens, we've had it, and we're on the verge of that.”

Bush's repeated statements that Musharraf is an indispensable partner in the “war on terror” are puzzling. In his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” Musharraf made clear that he lined up with the United States after 9/11 not out of conviction but only because Washington had threatened to “bomb us back to the Stone Age” if he refused to do so.

On Sept. 19, 2001, to reassure pro-Taliban Pakistanis outraged by his alignment with Bush, Musharraf made a revealing TV address in Urdu not intended for American ears.

“I have done everything for the Taliban when the whole world was against them,” he said, “and now we are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to them.”

The evidence is overwhelming that Pakistan has permitted the Taliban to operate freely from sanctuaries in the border areas of Pakistan adjacent to Afghanistan since 2001 and in most cases has cooperated in apprehending al-Qaida operatives only when confronted with evidence on their whereabouts obtained by FBI and CIA agents in Pakistan.

So far, Bush's “pressure” for democratization in Islamabad has been a charade. When he called on Musharraf to end martial law and hold elections, it was easy for Musharraf to yield, since martial law had already enabled him to oust his nemesis, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhury, as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Now Bush should put U.S. influence to a more serious test by pressuring Musharraf to hand over power to a genuinely neutral caretaker government headed by an independent figure like Chaudhury so that the promised elections do not become another charade.

Is this a pipe dream? Not if the United States gives the generals a clear, firm and credible choice: a real democratic transition or a cutoff of the pipeline of weaponry and cash that has been flowing to the armed forces for five decades.

Source: theday.com
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