Lext week, when President George W Bush and President Pervez Musharraf meet in Islamabad, the occasion will be historic. The last time an American president visited Islamabad (Bill Clinton in 2000), there was a debate in Washington about whether or not he should stop over in Pakistan for five hours en route to spending five days in India. In the event, far from bearing gifts, President Clinton set some tough preconditions for his layover: he refused to be photographed shaking hands with a military dictator and he lectured Pakistanis live on TV and Radio. This time round, however, President Bush will brave increased security hazards, embrace General Musharraf in public, toast his “friend’s courageous war against terror” and shower new economic and political rewards on him. The niggling issues will be raised in private while smiles will be exchanged in public.
There are two critical differences between 2000 and 2006 which are bound to overshadow the visit. First, Pakistan is so awash with anti-Westernism in general and anti-Americanism in particular that the resurgent religious parties have consciously strategized to keep the recent anti-Western sentiment triggered by the blasphemous cartoons at a high pitch in order to inject certain meaning into the Mush-Bush meetings. Abetted by the government, there was an ominous dress rehearsal last week in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar which focused on attacking President Bush and America rather than the offensive cartoon-publishers. True to form, the mullahs have now vowed to besiege Islamabad despite the ban on political protests and meetings. Second, General Musharraf was domestically strong in 2000 (in the sense that, despite lacking any political support base, he was sitting pretty because nobody in Pakistan was crying over the departed “corrupt politicians”) and weak internationally (in the sense that Pakistan’s failing economy and derailed polity were regarded as manifestations of a failing state) whereas the situation is dramatically different today. Despite a one-party stranglehold over the political system, Musharraf faces real or imagined resistance from Baluch and Sindhi sub-nationalists, religious parties, jihadi groups, Al-Qaeda terrorists and even refurbished mainstream liberal oppositionists; and, despite backing from the diplomatic enclave, the international media has got its fangs out for him over several issues ranging from Dr A Q Khan’s nuclear proliferation, human rights violations, neglect of women’s issues, and soft-pedaling on religious extremists in the borderlands of Pakistan.
Therefore it is easy to discern the agenda for the talks. President Musharraf will point to his economic achievements and, in the face of the rising tide of radical political Islam, stress the stability and longevity of his moderate and secular political dispensation. But if President Bush were to “buy” this, he would be doing a great disservice to the international community and showing great disrespect to the people of Pakistan. After all, General Musharraf is not only responsible for marginalizing the mainstream pro-West political parties and undermining the democratic and popular impulse in Pakistan, he is also responsible for establishing the political space in which radical political Islam is trying to entrench itself in the country. Until his advent, the religious parties were constantly bickering among themselves and never occupied more than a handful of seats in the national or provincial parliaments; but during the last election conducted by General Musharraf in 2003, they were prodded to band together into the formidable MMA and helped to capture 25% of the seats in the federal parliament as well as a majority in the NWFP assembly. Indeed, General Musharraf went so far as to manipulate the slot of the leader of the opposition for the MMA instead of the PPP which deserved it on merit. The specter of radical Islam provokes fear in Pakistan and abroad and serves the purpose of soliciting valuable economic and political “rent” for Musharraf’s Pakistan from the international community.
Under the circumstances, it is critical that this short term and rather opportunist nurturing and exploitation of the genie of radical political Islam by the Musharraf regime is effectively challenged by President Bush because it is fraught with dangerous and irrevocable longer term implications for the country, region and beyond. Surely, the last thing that the international community should want is to be blackmailed into submitting to dictatorship in Pakistan as it has succumbed to in Egypt, the Middle-East and elsewhere because of short term exigencies. The alternative to military or autocratic rule in Pakistan and the Middle East where the West has established interests or serious concerns should not be radical political Islam but mainstream secular pluralistic democracy as in India.
Equally, however, Pakistan’s national interests lie in diligently refusing to get embroiled in Bush’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. Indeed, if Islamabad can play a constructive role in defusing regional, global, ideological or civilisational tensions, General Musharraf should put the case forcefully to President Bush. After all, it is unjust and inequitable American foreign policies that have created much of the mess in the world today.
Some straight talking is needed by both leaders in the larger national and global interests of both Pakistan and America.