Psst, We Don't Need Musharraf

Why does the West prop up Musharraf? Well, we're told that he's the only thing keeping al Qaeda from having a nuclear weapon. But is he? It appears not if you look at Juan Cole's breakdown of Pakistan's election:

"Bottom line, the Pakistani public has demonstrated a dislike of extremism, including religious extremism, awarding a plurality of seats in the national legislature to secular parties and the rest to right-of-center parties, but roundly rejecting the fundamentalists."

If the election results are any indication, neither Pakistanis nor the West need Musharraf.

Searching for something intelligent to say

I must confess that I don't know much about Kenya - a bit more than Mel Lastman perhaps, but not much. As a general comment though, I'll observe that in the past few years we've really had a problem with countries thrown together by European imperialists. Iraq contains three groups that don't like each other, Kenya appears to be in a similar situation and in Pakistan the problems with the Afghan border seem to be derived in large part from the fact that an arbitrary British line slices Pashtun lands in half.

Taking Over The Family Business

Benazir Bhutto's 19 year-old son, Bilawal is set to become the new head of her Pakistan Peoples' Party. This would appear to be a function of the fact that Benazir Bhutto allowed for no rivals in her party.

Tariq Ali on Bhutto's Death

This piece probably nails the implications of Bhutto's death best. A sample:

"Benazir's horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation."

(Via Dennis Perrin who points out how most US coverage seems to see this as a political football for the primary season.)

Benazir Bhutto: A Complicated Legacy

The type of press that Benazir Bhutto will probably get over the next few days will probably tout her as a model of moderation and liberalism in the Muslim world. Certainly being a women and being relatively young when she came to power means that some of this is not without merit. Also, she appears to have stood up to bin Laden before any Westerners knew who he was.

There was another Benazir Bhutto though, one that appeared to be massively corrupt. In addition, it's no secret that her family owed its prominence to the continuation of feudalism in Pakistan. She may not have been a religious fanatic, she may not have been a military dictator yet she was surely not without her faults. If the West was pinning a great deal on Bhutto's chances at being elected, even without the tragic events of this day, there surely would have been problems. The challenges facing Pakistan were never solvable by any one person, be it Musharraf or Bhutto.

Benazir Bhutto

It's a shock when it happens, and yet in the grand scheme things, tragically unsurprising. I don't know what else to say about the suicide bombing death of Benazir Bhutto.

Another Former PM Returns to Pakistan

I'm not sure what makes Nawaz Sharif think that he will succeed with Musharraf where Bhutto failed, but he has returned to Pakistan. To me it now appears that Musharraf has two fomer prime minister he can now ignore.

Suspended from the Commonwealth

I'm not sure if Musharraf will rethink his dictatorial rule now that Pakistan is suspended from the Commonwealth. Truth be known, I'm not even sure what membership in the Commonwealth gets you anymore. Vijay Sappani has a much better idea here.

In the meantime, I would love to have Musharraf's publicist. The meme that he is all that stands between Pakistan's nukes and the Taliban is still very potent. You can explain that the extremists really are not as popular in Pakistan as the media would have you believe, but for some people Musharraf remains the sine qua non of peace and security in his country.

Who Musharraf claims to be

Haroon Siddiqui quotes Tariq Ali on the image of Musharraf that most of the West has:

'Our public discourse has it that "all that stops a jihadi finger finding the nuclear trigger is (Pervez) Musharraf," writes Tariq Ali, the Pakistan-born British author.'

This is of course not news and it is also a gross mis-characterization of the situation in Pakistan. Nonetheless the perception of Musharraf as the last sane man ruling a nation of jihadis persists.

No Lawyer Jokes This Month

At least not in Pakistan:

"Hundreds of lawyers took to the streets of Islamabad on the fourth consecutive day of the state of emergency to protest against Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf. Observed by the cameras of the international press the police kept a low profile, but behind the scenes thousands of lawyers, journalists, activists and citizens have been arrested or placed under house arrest all over the country."

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Dictator?

Musharraf's Pakistan is going from bad to worse. This is a situation that never really had good options - I'd like to see a democratic Pakistan but there I'm not sure that the West has a credible way to pressure Musharraf. This recent chaos though seems to have everything to do with Musharraf's general disdain for an independent judiciary. Given that we've allowed Musharraf a fairly free reign over the past few years, I suppose it's no surprise that he feels that he can switch on martial law like it was a lightbulb.

If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to read it.

Doing Better than Musharraf

Juan Cole's group blog has an interesting bit by Manan Ahmed on Pakistan. Conventional wisdom has it that the two choices for that country are Musharraf or some kind of Talibanesque regime (but with nukes!) Money quote:

"Instead of reducing this sprawling, diverse, multi-denominational and multi-cultural nation to nothing more than a caricature of its madrasas and tribal chieftans, US policy must explicitly support immediate and full democracy in Pakistan. As we continue to insist on a flat, binary world of those with us or against us; as we continue to distrust those masses populating the streets of Pakistan; as we continue to believe that the only outcome to an election in Pakistan will be power for the extremists, we ignore the birth of a real and pure movement for democracy – and we ignore it at our peril."

If there's one lesson that the West really, really, really ought to have learned since the invasion of Iraq is that seeing the world as good-vs-evil isn't "moral clarity" as much is it is dangerous oversimplification. Whatever policy we take on Pakistan (and I'm still skeptical about all of the available options) we ought to do it with our eyes open.

How do you solve a problem like Pervez?

Or is Pervez Musharraf actually a problem? I had previously commented that Musharraf had been ineffective in dealing with North Waziristan. It does appear though that he's waging some sort of counter-insurgency there - perhaps it's just not going all that well. Will North Waziristan remain a small wedge of the world impenetrable to anything but its own tribal codes and hierarchies? I'm sure the West could invade it and occupy it but like Afghanistan I'm sure that the West would have much more difficulty changing it. Is it conceivably a semi-permanent hideout for al Qaeda's top brass?

What is Al Qaeda? II

Juan Cole explains the difference between the guys in Afghanistan/Pakistan and the guys in Iraq:

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is of course just a bogeyman phrase to describe Salafi Jihadis there. But they obviously feel some kinship to the real al-Qaeda (you never want to see that) and they are threatening to get up an attack on the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Saddam`s Iraq, so it is Bush who has created this current threat, which did not have to be there.

From being a single network of training camps and cells, al Qaeda has turned into a catch-all term. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that "al Qaeda" simply means "the base" in Arabic? It's a wonderfully vague term that must sound vaguely menacing in its native tongue, even absent the baggage it has acquired in the past ten years or so. It's also unique in not being laden with any very specific ideological connotations.

What if Pakistan was Iran?

It seems as though Pakistan is getting a fairly free ride on the issue of capturing Al Qaeda (remember those guys, with the airplanes and the buildings and stuff). What I wonder is, what if Bin Laden made Iran his home at least part of the time? (Something he is almost certainly doing with Pakistan.)

This would undoubtedly be used in the current attempts at building war fever. So to recap, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and is probably the home of Bin Laden's tree fort or whatever he lives in. Iran is years away from a bomb and none of the terror groups they support can hold a candle to Al Qaeda. (Remember kids, Iran does NOT support Al Qaeda, it's a Sunni-Shi'a thing.)