Pakistan And Iraq

[Talk given at American Friends Service Committee Conference, 'Paths to a Just and Secure Future:Resisting Washington's Endless War' October 12, 2002]

It’s always really cheering to come and be with AFSC. You wake up in the morning and you read thenewspaper or watch the TV, and there really is a sense that it’s all going to hell. And you need to feelthat you’re not alone watching this. And so you come here and there are people who care, people who want todo something. You feel that there’s possibility, as Manning Marable was saying, that if the arch of historyis bending, it’s only because we’ve grabbed the other end of it together.

The last question that Manning Marable was asked was about the elections in Pakistan, which recently madethe news. Let me give you the alternative version from what you read in The Globe or The Timesor watched on CNN and Fox.

Three years ago, in October of 1999, General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan had just finished dealing withthe consequences of a military operation, which he had organized and put into play. He had sent thousands ofPakistani soldiers and Islamic militant fighters, also from Pakistan, in disguise, across the border intoIndian-held Kashmir. And they fought for months. And for the first time since the last major war betweenPakistan and India in 1971, the Indian Air Force was called into combat. And everybody worried about thepossibility of nuclear war between Pakistan and India.

The reason that General Musharraf had mounted this military operation was, as everybody knows, 18 monthsearlier India and then Pakistan had tested their nuclear weapons. With those tests, the Pakistani militaryunder General Musharraf felt very emboldened. Pakistan believed ‘We have what super powers have. We can dowhat we like.’

So he mounted this military operation, and it came very close to nuclear war. We now know how close itcame. A couple of months ago, a man named Bruce Reidel (who was in the National Security Council underPresident Clinton at the time of the crisis) described what happened when Pakistan’s Prime Minister at thetime became so concerned about the military crisis that he went to Washington to ask the United States to helphim find a way out.

At this meeting, where there were only three people, President Clinton, the Prime Minister of Pakistan andBruce Reidel, President Clinton asked the Prime Minister of Pakistan, ‘do you know that your army hasprepared to deploy nuclear weapons?’

And he did not know.

The man who took that decision to deploy those nuclear weapons was General Musharraf. He did this withoutconsulting his head of government, who was a democratically-elected Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan, for all his many failings, agreed with President Clinton to withdraw thePakistani troops and also the Islamic militant fighters that had been sent across the border. The consequenceof this was that, only a few months later, Pervez Musharraf staged his coup and overthrew the Prime Minister.

The United States was very angry, not only with Pakistan, but also with Musharraf. But as we’ve alllearned in the last couple of years, everything pales, democracy pales, the prospect of nuclear war pales,everything pales when measured against the balance of what Washington thinks is its interests. September 11thcame and General Musharraf did what any smart military or political leader would have done. When the UnitedStates threatened Pakistan ‘either you join us in the war against the Taliban or we will bomb you,’ ofcourse, he joined.

General Musharraf had a meeting with Pakistani newspaper editors to explain this huge shift in Pakistanipolicy. He told them that the Americans threatened to ‘make an Iraq’ out of us. In short, he was forcedinto supporting the U.S. So, if anybody thinks that General Musharraf is an ally, forget it! He did it becausehe had no choice. He did not surrender his relationship with the Taliban willingly. He did not allow U.S.troops into Afghanistan and into Pakistan willingly, but because he had no choice and also very importantly,he saw benefit in it.

That benefit has been harvested in abundance, because the United States, after more than 10 years, isresuming military aid and the supply of weapons to Pakistan. That is what we’ve seen in the last weeks andmonths. After having staged his coup, after having exiled two prime ministers, after having introducednumerous amendments to the Pakistani Constitution (more than the total of all amendments that had been madebefore) the United States is still willing to supply military aid and weapons to Musharraf under the auspicesof its ‘war on terror.’

I’d like to give you a better idea of what kind of president the US is supporting in Pakistan. Musharrafwas asked earlier this year, ‘will the new Parliament that’s been elected have to ratify yourConstitutional amendments?’ He looked at the hall full of press people and said, ‘I’ve made the changes.It’s done.’

The last thing Musharraf did, since he had to have these elections, was to send his boys fromInter-Services Intelligence to go around the country and pick candidates who would win and to scare off thosecandidates who may be opposed to General Musharraf. So they didn’t need bother to stuff ballot boxes. Theypicked the candidates. It’s a crude way of doing what happens here. Here, money talks. There, it is themilitary that talks.

What happened in Pakistan over the last few days is profoundly important for two reasons. One is that youcan fool all the people only some of the time, and the people of Pakistan had had enough of General Musharraf.And so, even though they had all the resources of the state, and candidates were brow-beaten, bribed, andintimidated, they could not produce an overwhelming majority in support of General Musharraf in the newParliament.

Second, what we have seen is that radical Islamic political parties – who are opposed to GeneralMusharraf - have won a sizable proportion of seats in the National Parliament. This is a political earthquake.And the reason for this can be laid absolutely, squarely at the doorstep of the White House.

At the same time, when you think of politics at national levels, it’s easy to miss what is also veryimportant, which is the politics taking place at the local level. What has happened at the local level is thatin key areas of the country, especially those bordering Afghanistan, in the Northwest Frontier Province and inBaluchistan, the radical Islamic parties are in position to control state legislatures. These are the placeswhere the U.S. has its bases and operates out of, chasing Al Qaeda through the mountains.

The implications of this are two-fold. One is that the radical Islamists now feel emboldened, not only tochallenge General Musharraf, but to challenge the entire possibility of some kind of democratic future forPakistan. These people are not interested in democracy. They want power. And they will try to destabilizeParliament and destabilize General Musharraf at the national level and in these state legislatures. The secondimplication is that it’s quite likely, (because this is the Pakistani habit) that the central governmentwill just abolish the Parliament and these state legislatures and rule directly.

Then what happens? The radical Islamists will be able to tie together for the first time a veryproblematical set of issues in people’s minds. Radical Islamists will be able to tell the people ofPakistan, ‘you voted for us and we tried to represent you. And now the government in Islamabad has takenaway your democratic rights.’ And for the first time they will claim that radical Islam representsdemocracy. They already claim that they are the only patriots – arguing that Musharraf and previous electedPrime Ministers sold out to the United States.

As that happens, the leaders of the radical Islamic parties will have two choices. One would be to mountsome kind of campaign, to demand fresh elections in an attempt to again represent the people in parliament.Another possibility is much more likely. With the military now clearly being shown to have been frustrated inits efforts to rule the country, with the democratic process being shown to have been eroded, there will be nolegitimacy left for any political authority in the country.

Ask yourself what happens in any country where there is no legitimacy for the exercise of politicalauthority. This is the basis for violent movements against all kinds of authority, against all kinds ofinstitutions.

We are beginning to lay the basis in Pakistan for an armed Islamic underground revolutionary movement,because the fact of the matter is, that the policies that Musharraf will follow will be tied much more closelyto what Washington wants than what the people of Pakistan want. And so the gap will just grow until it becomesunbearable, and then something will break.

I think that there’s a larger moral to this, though, than just what happens in Pakistan, because whathappens in Pakistan has crucial importance to what happens in India. The Indian government is already worriedabout the implications of these election results. The Indian government has also started to follow veryclosely the Bush reasoning over the war in Iraq. Senior Indian ministers have started to talk about whypreemptive war is the right of any state, not just the United States.

A dangerous tension is developing. As Pakistan becomes more fragile, the U.S. becomes ever more dependenton General Musharraf to hold it together and stop it from falling apart. If it falls apart, then not only isAfghanistan lost, but the Bush Administration and the oil companies’ ambitions for Central Asia are lostalso, because in all of these countries of Central Asia, the U.S. is basically propping up ex-Soviet tyrants,who, for a good sized Swiss bank account, will sell-out their country and their people. These leaders will notsurvive the tidal wave that will arise if Pakistan goes under. And the spill-over will be felt by India also.To prevent that, well, the Indians and the U.S. may well feel they have no option but to take preemptiveaction.

There is an even larger context. If the United States goes to war against Iraq, it will win (whatever itmeans to win war in our time... and we’ve seen enough of that to know). What it also means is that (aspeople have no doubt been reading) now no longer is this just about going to war. We are talking aboutinvasion, conquest and occupation. It is old-fashioned imperialism, where Iraq’s oil will pay for the U.S.to have fought and won and to rule, and to profit.

This is the something that American policy-makers have forgotten, because if they thought about it, itwould make them feel very bad. What they do remember is the Cold War. One of the insights that everybodyshould have about the Bush’s and the Cheneys and the Powells and the Rumsfelds is that they are playing intheir own minds the politics of victors. They think we won the war. This is ours now. And this means the wholeworld.

It is an attempt to remake the world the way they want it, as opposed to the way they inherited it from thecollapse of the European empires, when Britain and France pieced together Iraq and Saudi Arabia and the restof the Middle East. And it’s all very untidy. It doesn’t appeal to people trained in management. Theythink everybody should know where everything is and who it belongs to and none of this other business.

But the point is that, as Bush and Powell and Rice and others think about this and rewind history back to1945 (before the rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower) where the U.S. was master of all it surveyed, theyhave forgotten one thing: In the last 50 years there were two wars that took place, not just the Cold Warbetween the United States and the Soviet Union, but also the wars for the freedom of countries across theThird World.

People now will not tolerate the United States behaving like the British and the French conqueringcountries and creating new colonies. The people of the Third World did not fight for independence for 200years against the British and the French and the Dutch and the Belgians and every other little Europeancountry that thought it had the military and economic power to push brown and black and yellow people aroundbecause they had something that they wanted. Well, that period of history is past! The Vietnamese should havetaught everybody this. You do not go and take over somebody else’s country.

There are two ways for George Bush and Washington to learn this lesson. One will be a slaughter in Iraq andthen decades of violence, where there will be people who will step off the sidewalk when they see an American,because they are so afraid. Or Americans will realize this is not the world that they want. It is a choicebetween wars of conquest, wars of colonization, things of the past, or the future based on a common, sharedrespect for everyone. Thank you.

Dr.Zia Mian, is on the faculty of the Program on Science and Global Security (PS&GS) at PrincetonUniversity and lecturer of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.