An editorial in Pakistan's Daily Times acknowledges that since 9/11, Pakistan has had to make an about-face in its support for jihad -- and that the process is still incomplete, even within the heart and mind of Pervez Musharraf:
The opposition in Pakistan says Islamabad is bending too far backward to obey the election-related fiats coming from the United States. They accuse President Pervez Musharraf of making war against his own people on the orders of George Bush. No one believes the government's version of the Wana Operation and everyone tends to ignore the latest flurry of arrests of the so-called Al Qaeda agents in the country. The government says that the Jamaat-e-Islami, the party of the chief of the religious alliance MMA, has been found sheltering the terrorists, which hardly anyone believes because of the general impression that everything Islamabad says is usually dictated by the United States. What is the truth?The fact of relentless American pressure is difficult to deny. Pakistan's great volte-face against the Taliban and jihad after 9/11 took place because of the extraordinary pressure applied directly by Washington on the military rulers of Pakistan. Indeed the coercive change has been so sudden that most Pakistanis simply cannot understand it....
After General Musharraf turned on a dime in 2001, there was political dislocation in Pakistan. The following year an entire swath of its population in the NWFP and Balochistan voted against the big change. The jury is still out on whether the election was rigged in favour of the MMA but a strong impression remains that General Musharraf did not exactly anticipate the electoral backlash against the big change in the army's Taliban policy. There is evidence also that the 2002 election saw the playing field fixed against the two parties that General Musharraf wanted to splinter and render ineffectual. But by far the bigger challenge emerged in the shape of an aggressive clerical opposition with which he finally negotiated himself into some sort of political legitimacy through the 17th Amendment of the Constitution....
Such American and personal "compulsions" apart, there is a purely Pakistani perspective to consider too. As a consequence of the "strategic depth" policy followed by the army with the Taliban after 1996, Pakistan's internal sovereignty had been all but bartered away. The jihadi organisations virtually ruled the big cities while the law enforcement agencies worked slavishly as their handmaidens. Then the pressures emanating from 9/11 began the process of rolling back the jihad, something on which President Musharraf may have the support of the vast silent majority of Pakistan. Would he have done it without the American pressure? Would he have done it if there hadn't been assassination attempts on his life? Those who say that the sincerity of his commitment against Islamic extremism should be assumed after the attempts on his life by the erstwhile jihadis should remember that he also repeated his commitment to jihad in Kashmir in a recent interview to a Pakistani English daily.
'Mushie' just wants to hold on to power.Of course
he is worried about assassination attempts and he
needs America's dollars. By the way this is recent quote from Musharraf 'three Uzbek Al Quaeda suspects were arrested covered in burkas posing as women...' Maybe this is why Muslim men have this fixation about burkas - provides a get
away kit for escaping Jihad warriors.
Musharraf is an ally of convenience, and has to regarded as such. His support is not to be overestimated.
Pakistan, of course, is not ever to be trusted. Whatever cooperation is obtained will be obtained only through pressure, not through meeting Pakistani demands. Despite the marxisant behavior of Krishna Menon in the old days, India and not Pakistan should have been cultivated. But the blindness about Islam -- believed to be a "bulwark against Communism" (yes, it was, but so were the Nazis -- so what?)-- with such things as that CENTO alliance of Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan that proved to be pointless, even worthless (though not to the recipients of American aid -- no, they always come out on top).
Musharraf talks a good game about his youth in Turkey (his father was posted there). But he was in up to his neck in the ISI promotion of terrorist attacks in Kashmir. (One wonders what he was doing, as a young man, during the war to suppress Bangladeshi independence, when the local forces for Bengali freedom were massacred by the army of Pakistan, with the active support and collaboration of the most ferocious local Muslims, including the maulanas, who killed, looted, and raped, not only the obvious targets -- HIndus in Bangladesh -- but also those "Infidels" or rather, those Muslims who thought that independence for Bangladesh was more important than keeping Pakistan together at gunpoint (the motto of these people was "If you destroy Pakistan, you destroy Islam." More eyewitness testmony from that period by Bengalis who lived through it, and who witnessed the behavior of the Muslim clergy, and more fanatical Muslims, in East Pakistan, can be found at www.faithfreedom.org and www.secularislam.org. For these people, keeping Pakistan one, as a "powerful Muslim state," outweighted all other loyalties -- or rather, they had no other loyalties).
Musharraf claims a biography of Ataturk is his bedside reading, his livre de chevet. Really? Does he know how Ataturk, step by systematic step, tried to constrain and limit Islam in every way? Does Musharraf want that? Musharraf's son lives and works in Massachusetts. Like most of the elite in Muslim countries, Musharraf wants his son to live in, and enjoy, the Infidel West (how many executives at al-Jazeera would do anything to have their children study in, live in, even become citizens of, the United States?). There is a refusal here to understand that precisely the kind of tolerant and civilized and open society that you wish for your own children, is what Islam itself, which you do not touch, is responsible for precisely the opposite in your own lands. The Muslim elites, including Musharraf, must be deprived of the certainty that they can use the West for medical care. There is not a single Muslim leader who, when seriously ill, doess not fly off to Europe or North America, for treatment in Infidel hospitals by Infidel doctors. Tell me, truthfully -- if you were told that you could no longer rely on the best doctors, unless you started to seriously modify the anti-Infidel stance of the country you ruled, and you were of an age where you needed to rely on Western medicine, would that not help to concentrate your mind?
And if you knew that your children would have no chance to travel to, to study in, much less to live permanently in, that West, until you began to collaborate completely and seriously, in suppressing the Jihad and, further, constraining all mosques and madrasas so that, for decades to come, until the Infidel world can sufficiently educate itself as to the real problem, Islam is permanently constrained, well -- wouldn't that have an effect on your decisions, if you cared very much about your children's destiny?
That these weeapons -- denying the Infidel world, declaring it off-limits to the spoiled children of Muslim rulers, and denying medical care, and even denying them the use of Europe and America as a shopping paradise, and a fun fair-cum-brothel (what stories could be told here) will have its effect. Every weapon, every weapon (including a little of that old blackmail-in-the-brothel stuff, that might get the attention of an important personage here and there) should be employed. It sometimes worked for the K.G.B. Is the C.I.A. too squeamish? Or does it have too many employees now or likely in the future to be on the receiving end of Saudi and other Arab money, who have convinced themselves that this is different -- oh so different -- from the case of Robert Hanson. That was Communist money. This is Saudi money. And Saudi Arabis is "our ally" and "our friend."
Get with the program.
Pakistan is headed for chaos. Musharraf's call
for 'enlightened moderation' (which means thatJihadis should target the Indians rather than the Americans for now) is like Gorbachov's call for perestroika and glasnost in the USSR. USSR broke up. Modern Russia now has both perestroika and glasnost (atleast more than what Gorbachov promised). Pakistan's break up into a land locked Punjab and a docile Sindh may provide enlightened moderation to Pakistanis. NFWP and Baluchistan were a part of Afghanistan throughout history. The became a part of British India due to the infamous Durand line drawn after the British Afghan war. If these jihadi infested provinces revert back to Afghanistan, NATO forces will ensure that it is no longer a terrorist hideout.
HUGH FOR STATE!
Pakistan is on the list. When they decided to join the nuclear club, like all new members, they are welcomed by the butler, handed their smoking jacket, cuban cigar and brandy, then invited to sit in the library for a chat with the incumbents.
Then they get the rules read to them:
1. Now that you're in, you can't check out.
2. All members respect each other but they all dial-in each other as primary strategic targets. Think of this as a sort of "special" treatment afforded to each member by all the others.
3. There is a recently adopted rule that has become known as the "Bush Doctrine": First-strike action is now considered to be a defensive act. This new rule allows continued compliance with UN Charter Article 51 while one erases another country. This rule applies to members and non-members.
4. Lobbing nuclear weapons at one's neighbors will require other members to make sure that there is a clear winner in the exchange. To put it more succinctly, one of the belligerents will necessarily lose. So one or two tactical warheads lobbed at a neighbor may be met with a host of well placed thermonuclear events, complements of incumbent members acting in full pre-arranged complicity. This will ensure that the next war in the affected region will be fought with clubs.
5. Accountability and control: members who cannot provide full accountability or control of their inventories will be subject to special operations treatment.