Author: Andrew C. McCarthy
Publication: National Review Online
Date: December 27, 2007
URL: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTExNmE0MzY3YjBlYWEwZDkzOThkMWJiM2JmZGQ2NDE=
A recent CNN poll [1] showed that 46 percent
of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.
Aspirants to the American presidency should
hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda
emir easily beat out that country's current president, Pervez Musharraf, who
polled at 38 percent.
President George Bush, the face of a campaign
to bring democracy -- or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass
for democracy -- to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!
If you want to know what to make of former prime
minister Benazir Bhutto's murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning
democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists
using the "rule of law" as a cudgel to bring down a military junta.
In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent
family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption,
was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of
the United States and the West.
The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic
holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable
than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman --
indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding
whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded [2] as an enemy
of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.
The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence
services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who,
during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet
mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters -- warlords like Gilbuddin
Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman,
the stalwarts of today's global jihad against America.
The real Pakistan is a place where the military,
ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the
thin line between today's boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be
a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.
In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto's murder
is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.
It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that
our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank
country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates
their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.
Pakistan just won't cooperate with this noble
narrative.
Whether we get round to admitting it or not,
in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad.
For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism.
They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto
on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence -- the symbol, however
dubious, of democracy's promise. They are the same people who managed to kill
her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing
about Musharraf -- as if he were the problem -- can camouflage that fact.
In Pakistan, it is the regime that propounds
Western values, such as last year's reform of oppressive, Sharia-based Hudood
laws, which made rape virtually impossible to prosecute -- a reform enacted
despite furious fundamentalist rioting that was, shall we say, less well covered
in the Western press. The regime, unreliable and at times infuriating, is our
only friend. It is the only segment of Pakistani society capable of confronting
militant Islam -- though its vigor for doing so is too often sapped by its own
share of jihadist sympathizers.
Yet, we've spent two months pining about its
suppression of democracy -- its instinct not further to empower the millions
who hate us.
For the United States, the question is whether
we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization
at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly.
The transformation from Islamic society to true
democracy is a long-term project. It would take decades if it can happen at
all. Meanwhile, our obsessive insistence on popular referenda is naturally strengthening
-- and legitimizing -- the people who are popular: the jihadists. Popular elections
have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform
a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be
reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.
We don't have the political will to fight the
war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans.
And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American
history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have
the resources to do it.
But we should at least stop fooling ourselves.
Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or
democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of
law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they'll
kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.
- Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for
Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies [3].
