A Washington Post op-ed piece reports that Pakistan almost went into a state of emergency last week — until U.S. officials intervened:
President Pervez Musharraf was on the verge of imposing a state of emergency in Pakistan last week before being stopped by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and civilian advisers. It is clear to all in this extremely tense country that power is rapidly flowing away from Musharraf, even as he desperately tries to find a way out of an impossible political impasse.
Declaring a state of emergency would have suspended fundamental rights, placed restrictions on the Supreme Court and delayed this year’s elections. It is unlikely that an already angry and mobilized public would have accepted new restrictions, even those imposed by the army, which Musharraf heads. Massive street protests and further mayhem might have ensued.
But it’s clear as you read the Washington Post that part of what is happening is that the Bush administration miscalculated in its dealings with Pakistan (particularly on how stable it was and would be). Musharraf increasingly seems at worst on borrowed political (if not physical) time and at best isolated:
After eight years as president, Musharraf is battling for survival, refusing to yield power to civilians yet unable to exert the authority he needs to keep the peace at home and still be a useful ally to the West in rooting out Islamic extremists along the border with Afghanistan.
In recent weeks, Musharraf has considered imposing martial law, has tried to cut a power-sharing deal with exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and has enlisted support from President Bush to dampen the crisis that the country has been in since spring, but nothing has worked.
Bhutto is backing away from any deal, and her aides describe Musharraf as a drowning man.
According to this op-ed piece writer Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, who wrote “Taliban” and “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia,” the U.S. bungled is dealings with Pakistan:
Since 2001 the Bush administration has refused to understand that political stability in Pakistan requires a modicum of democracy, a political consensus among the country’s various liberal forces and a working relationship among the four provinces before any battle against extremism can succeed.
Washington presumed that because Musharraf wielded the army’s power there was no need to push for democracy or bother with civilian politicians. As a result, the Bush administration has lost the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people. (They have become further alienated while watching Pakistan become a whipping boy in debates between U.S. presidential candidates.)
The Bush administration looked away when the army rigged presidential and parliamentary elections in 2002 and ignored the exiling or sidelining of mainstream politicians and political parties by Musharraf.
For the past few months tens of thousands of the country’s liberal and secular elite — lawyers, female activists and political workers — have protested Musharraf’s wrongful suspension of the Supreme Court’s chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, in March.
Yet even as our civil society filled the streets, the U.S. State Department and the White House maintained a studied silence — betraying not only the Pakistani people and democracy but also America’s abiding interest in having a stable government in Islamabad that would be a meaningful partner in the war against extremism.
His analysis is probably correct. On the other hand, this is not the first time that an American administration felt U.S. interests were best served by firmly backing a friendly government, no matter what internal opposition the government faced. In some instances, the U.S. stuck by the government no matter what. In other instances, it eventually allied itself with those opposed to it.
One of the worst such U.S. policy failures of the entire 20th century was Iran, where the U.S. backed the Shah, until Jimmy Carter’s administration when, in the end, Washington essentially abandoned him — and what came after was a zillion time worse in terms of U.S. interests.
But if the U.S. had blasted Musharraf for internal controversies, all it would do would be to weaken him even more and empower his critics. So usually diplomats in this case do what diplomats presumably do best — apply pressure behind the scenes. Which, if this op-ed piece is correct, is what happened in the case of Musharraf deciding to impose a state of emergency.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.