Author: Richard Rapaport
Publication: San Francisco Chronicle
Date: November 13, 2001
America's new best friend, Pakistan's
President Pervez Musharraf, has been a busy strongman since September 11.
Weekly, U.S. Cabinet secretaries, the British prime minister, generals
and diplomats arrive at Islamabad's President's House to pay court. Saturday,
at a joint press conference in New York, Major Gen. Musharraf was given
President Bush's public seal of approval and a billion dollars in aid.
All tailored suits and crisp manners,
Gen. Musharraf is very much the model of a modern major general, fitting
Margaret Thatcher's characterization of former Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev as a man with whom we can do business. Superficially, the match
seems reasonable.
Musharraf's Anglo-Saxon-isms and
the Pakistani military's British personality have helped smooth the way
for the West's "tilt" toward the Islamic world's sole nuclear power. But
the United States might want to dampen its enthusiasm for Musharraf and
his "good guy" status; conjuring, as it does, the Philippine's Ferdinand
Marcos, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, South Vietnam's Nguyen Van Thieu, Indonesia's
Suharto and Cambodia's Lon Nol, all authoritarian "new best friends" for
whom American benediction and foreign aid did little to ensure their shaky
governments or even further long-term American interests.
Similarly, this latest manifestation
of America's foreign policy propensity for taking the easy way out by aligning
ourselves with the Pakistani dictator will not necessarily help the United
States achieve its goals of stability and peace in South Asia or further
the battle against Islamic radicalism. The deal with Pakistan indicates
an inability on the part of the United States to think through long-term
strategies, and is shameless in its transparency. Only last summer, Pakistan,
the chief backer of Afghanistan's Taliban, was under international sanctions
for violating the nuclear-test-ban treaty, supporting terrorists in Kashmir
and for the anti-democratic coup that brought Musharraf to power.
There is precedent for America's
latest "tilt"; the phrase "tilting toward Pakistan" has been in the U.S.
foreign policy lexicon since the Nixon administration, when the United
States supported another modern major general, Yaya Khan, who declared
himself president of Pakistan in 1969.
Then as now, America's South Asian
tilt meant cooling relations with Pakistan's archenemy, India. It also
prevents recognizing that India, rather than Pakistan, should be the stable
anchor of U.S. regional policy.
The logic is a powerful one. India
is a nation created very much in America's image; a huge, market-driven
economic power, which shares a common heritage of English-speaking democracy
with the United States. India and the United States are the world's two
largest constitutional democracies. Both have strong political parties
committed to representational government. Even during crisis, India has
stuck to its democratic guns. By contrast, for half its history, Pakistan
has been ruled by "modern major generals" such as Musharraf, who have toppled
elected leaders.
This totalitarian tendency derives
from a fragility that has plagued Pakistan since its independence. Pakistan's
diverse, often-warring ethnic groups have meant a fractious history, with
the Pakistani military periodically providing the glue preventing national
disintegration. The one unifying issue that has helped hold Pakistan together
is the goal of taking the Muslim-majority territory, Kashmir, from India.
Kashmir has been the spark for wars and continued tension with India largely
because Pakistan's political disunity necessitates a unifying crusade against
a foreign devil.
During these conflicts, India, with
a population more diverse than Pakistan's, maintained its democratic instincts
and institutions. In democracy's greatest test, the Congress Party, which
ruled India since independence in 1947, lost its parliamentary majority
in 1977 and accepted its role as the opposition party without so much as
a whisper of retaining control through unconstitutional means.
But even as a democratic paragon,
the party's socialist ideology clouded U. S.-Indian relations since the
late 1940s. Nor did advocacy for nonalignment by India's first prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, endear India to the United States. For Americans, India
has been a diplomatic prickly pear, ironically reminiscent of the United
States' own spiny world image.
Since the Cold War's end, much has
changed in India. Its command economy is transforming into a powerhouse
capitalist engine. India has played a crucial role in America's technology
primacy by providing thousands of engineers and software professionals
working in the United States and India. With a middle class of 400 million
-- and growing -- India is an increasingly important consumerist partner
of the United States. Demographics alone compel:
India's population of 1.033 billion
is eight times Pakistan's. Included are 145 million Muslims, equal to the
total population of Pakistan and only surpassed by Indonesia as the world's
largest Islamic country.
India's Muslims are loyal citizens.
Which raises the puzzling question of why, while the United States struggles
to find linguists and other experts to unravel the Islamic terrorist conundrum,
it has not turned to India which has its own large stake in defeating terrorism.
In recent years, thousands of Indians have been killed by Kashmiri insurgents,
many trained at the al Qaeda camps that produced the September 11 hijackers.
Far closer relations with India could provide a bonanza of intelligence
capabilities for the United States.
Indians have a right to feel let
down by this latest tilt, which the Times of India calls "The U.S.-Pak
Lovefest." This is especially true because of the reassessment of U.S.-Indian
relations during the Clinton administration.
In 1999, President Clinton delivered
an electrifying speech to the Indian Parliament outlining the seeming arrival
of intimate relations between the two nations. The speech, a milestone
in U.S.-Indian relations, received little notice here.
Even the Bush administration, seemingly
determined to undermine all things Clintonian, decided that the rapprochement
between India and the United States should continue. Unfortunately September
11's shock has provoked yet another reflexive "tilt" toward Pakistan.
Whatever the tactical gain, U.S.
policymakers need to reassess the strategic realities of betting on Musharraf,
the fourth general to name himself president of a country that is a poster-child
for political instability.
Musharraf is likely to succumb to
the political turmoil that undid each of his military dictator-predecessors.
And, ironically, greater distance from the United States in the face a
rising tide of pro-Taliban and Islamic sentiment in Pakistan may help Musharraf
survive longer than will the perception of his status as an American puppet.
Most importantly, America must recognize
that it is the superpower India, not the political and economic basket-case
Pakistan, that is key to long-term peace and stability in South Asia, and
perhaps even to a victory in the war on terrorism. With a solution to Kashmir
unlikely, and a violent, perhaps even nuclear confrontation between India
and Pakistan a distinct possibility, America needs to think clearly about
where its true long-term interests lie and the dangers posed by a Pakistan
emboldened by another U.S. tilt.
(Richard Rapaport has written about
India for Wired and Forbes ASAP.)
