THOMSON: Decline of Pakistan

COMMENTARY:

The decline and fall of Pakistan continues apace. Should it become a failed state, locked in an extremist embrace, Pakistan’s crucial geographical position and nuclear arsenal would pose grave dangers to peace in Central and South Asia, and throughout the Muslim world.

President Pervez Musharraf’s imminent passing from the scene brings sighs of relief and may possibly end military rule. However, the immediate future will most surely see the continuation - in fact, accentuation - of distinctly troubled times for Pakistan and, prospectively, the region.

The country’s history has been far from rosy since gaining independence from Britain and separation from India in 1947. Muslims from India swarmed to the bifurcated Pakistan, located to the northwest and east of the Indian Subcontinent, as Hindus fled from the newly created nation, to join their respective coreligionists. At least 1 million souls perished and perhaps 40 million were more made homeless in the massive, panic-driven migration.

Initially a dominion of the British Commonwealth, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was declared in 1956. Within 15 years East Pakistan became Bangladesh, independent from the dominant, domineering and less numerous West Pakistanis, bringing to an end what were widely divergent ethnicities, languages and lifestyles, plus an unworkable geographical divide of more than 1,000 miles.

A major development that inhibited U.S.-Pakistani relations for several years, was the 1998 detonation of the country’s first nuclear device, virtually simultaneous with India’s initial nuclear explosion. Even more unsettling was the subsequent revelation that Dr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear program, had sold vital development technology to numerous countries, including North Korea and Iran.

Since the two entities separated, Bangladesh has had a flawed and corrupt, if nominally democratic history; while former West Pakistan has endured a flawed and corrupt, military-dictated existence for 30 of the last 52 years.

Granted, Mr. Musharraf’s reign, launched with a coup that ousted corrupt Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999, was different from its predecessors. Mr. Musharraf’s finance minister, later prime minister, Shaukat Aziz (a former top Citibank executive) put the country on a sound and growth-oriented footing that continued until early 2007. In fact, Pakistanis generally admit that, for eight years, they had not known life to be so peaceful or prosperous.

Moreover, Mr. Musharraf was able to advance greatly Pakistan’s always poor relations with India, creating a solid working relationship with India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

To maintain power, President Musharraf triangulated among moderate and radical factions in his own military base of support, and the United States. Following Sept. 11, 2001, he negotiated an anti-terror partnership of sorts with Washington, reversing Pakistan’s previously having been one of only three nations that recognized Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But the U.S. alliance came at a high financial price to the United States and resulted in stiff demands by the jihadist bloc in the military.

In addition to providing some $600 million annually in civilian and military aid, Washington made an additional estimated $1 billion annually available in special military assistance designed to strengthen the government’s ability to root out and eliminate al Qaeda and Taliban extremists. However, Mr. Musharraf’s fundamentalist colleagues insisted he stall on hunting down al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and their sympathizers in Pakistan’s wild Northwest Frontier Province bordering on Afghanistan. Major Pakistani military elements simply blocked effective action.

Virtually every Bush administration official - President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, plus former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairmen Gens. Richard Myers and Peter Pace, made multiple trips to Islamabad seeking Mr. Musharraf’s agreement to at least allow U.S. incursions into the ungovernable areas bordering Afghanistan.

As one senior diplomat involved put it: “Musharraf always welcomed us warmly and we usually seemed to come to agreement, but within days the message would come that it would be better to postpone action until a more propitious moment. We finally have been forced to act unilaterally”.

Unwittingly, the seemingly unflappable Mr. Musharraf’s stalling game was sewing the seeds of his own downfall. The reluctance to clean out the radical Muslim elements along the Afghan frontier gave the impression to extremist cadres elsewhere that their time had come, and sporadic civil disobedience evolved into mass demonstrations and suicide bombings, culminating in the assassination last December of Benazir Bhutto, freshly arrived just two months earlier from a nine-year self-imposed exile.

Parliamentary elections this past February placed the two leading parties (Mrs. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz) in a contentious coalition that eventually elected Yousuf Raza Gilani their prime minister. Mr. Gilani took some bold if ill-informed steps, including ordering the army to make strong sorties against the al Qaeda and Taliban border enclaves. But he overstepped when he tried to rein in the army’s vaunted ISI, Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and ordered it placed under civilian control, a move that lasted exactly one day.

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