Pakistan’s useful Dictator

COLUMN READING:

Odd thing, popularity. Last year the US President refused to be photographed with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Today President Musharraf is the number one photo op in the world.

Popularity of the temporarily convenient kind is, by definition, ephemeral. It has its downsides because it can come at the cost of integrity and independence in the name of what the weak call 'pragmatism', for in the amoral world of international affairs pragmatism has come to mean compromise. Popularity, of whatever kind, is useless if it is not harnessed to take a quantum leap.

Nawaz Sharif took a popular decision when he tested our bomb, despite the known and expected economic disadvantage and international opprobrium. He became unpopular for allowing IMF-inspired poverty growth, corruption and cronyism, not because of nuclear sanctions. So when Musharraf removed Sharif people danced. In Pakistan it was a popular coup but the world made Pakistan an outcast and Musharraf a pariah. But when Musharraf decided to go along with America's Afghan war, he became instantly popular in the West.

Last year 'The Economist' called Musharraf 'Pakistan's useless dictator'. Useless, obviously to the West, not Pakistan. Now he has become a useful dictator. Obviously to the West, not necessarily to Pakistanis. This demonstrates that popularity depends, not necessarily on doing the moral thing, but on whose interest you serve. As the Afghan mess gets messier and more innocent Afghans are killed, Musharraf's popularity will wane at home, for unfortunately Muslims are increasingly seeing this as a war against Islam. A mundane lesson out of all this is that you cannot please all of the people all of the time. You shouldn't even try.

To exploit his western popularity for our good Musharraf must begin by ensuring that Pakistan is not on the list of US targets somewhere down the line, as many fear. He does so by persuading the US to grow out of Cold War adversarial dynamics and accept long-term all weather friendships. Easier said than done. Bush is as truly convinced of the righteousness of his cause as Osama is of his. And both are equally genuinely convinced about the evilness of the other. To expect Musharraf to help Muslims break out of their past-based fanciful existence and propel them into today may be asking too much. But he can point them in this direction by convincing America that anti-Americanism will end only when they stop labeling people threatening them with choices like 'either you are with us or against us'.

That duplicity might take time but duality must stop now because what is good for the American people is good for the rest of humanity. That it is pragmatic to co-opt Muslims fairly instead of treating them unfairly as spontaneous enemies, because there is no way they can shackle a billion and a half of them. America can't even handle 20 million Afghans and has allowed half as many Jews to co-opt it unfairly, not just to the disadvantage of the Palestinians and Muslims but to the peril of the world. This is the root cause of what they call 'Islamic terrorism'. The answer is not the extermination of Muslims, just as much as it is not the extermination of Jews or anyone else. The answer is to recognize that we are all part of one great human family, as Allah says, free to believe what each wishes without fear because each is answerable to Him and Him alone. That will happen when we genuinely accept the truism that we only have one world to share, and for the sake of peace and the prosperity of the human species we must respect our world and share it equitably. We the Muslims must recognize, too, that the end of the century just gone by saw not the ultimate triumph of capitalism over communism and liberal democracy over any other political system (as Francis Fukuyama would have us believe in 'The End of History and the Last Man'), but certainly their dominance, symbolized by the disintegration of the USSR and the breaking of the Berlin Wall. That much of the values and belief systems that the West has successfully implemented as state policy are exactly what Islam enjoins in 'Haqooq ul Ibad', the Rights of Man. We must recognize that the last century ended with the dominance of Western capitalism and liberal democracy over the Muslim world too and this one must end with Muslims, Christians, Jews and all other religions coexisting in peace and harmony.

All this may be too much for Musharraf. But is it too much to ask him to understand the dominant American dynamic? There are contending forces in US capitalist democracy, as there are in any vibrant society, the two most powerful being the oil lobby dominated by Southerners and Wall Street's financial lobby controlled by the Jews. A new force, information technology, has emerged, but it is not yet a lobby for it has not developed political clout. The last US presidential election brought the competition between the oil and the financial lobbies to the fore. Wall Street actually won, but oil managed to wrest victory from its grasp. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment went along with the theft of the election. Why? Because it is all about oil. Oil is driving what is happening in Afghanistan, what happened to Iraq and what is going to happen. Afghanistan is not only about a gas pipeline; take a bet that it is floating on a sea of oil. Take a bet that so is Pakistan. Thus, instead of being framed by America and being disintegrated too, we should become as important to the world as the Middle East is, without losing our dignity and independence.

If we play our cards right Afghanistan need not be divided between north and south, for that would accelerate our centrifugal forces. Which would really put a spin on India's centrifuge. That could spell chaos greater than Partition, greater than anything since the Second World War. The onus is on Pakistan, which, don't forget, was created to show the world the way, to prevent cataclysmic change by kick-starting the modernity process in Islam, by making America accept the diversity of the world, which should not be so difficult considering that it is the most diverse country in the world, and by teaching humanity that the earth is our habitat and we destroy it at our peril.

Pakistan should stop thinking small, like becoming the frontline state in Afghanistan's reconstruction and picking up the crumbs that fall off the table, but by becoming the frontline state in providing the world its energy, its intellectual stimulus and its unity in diversity.