Benizir Bhutto’s assassination this week rightly sparked widespread revulsion and protests across the globe, from ordinary people and politicians alike. Love her or loathe her, the murder of a political figure by their opponents (whoever, in this case, they turn out to be) flies in the face of everything the words ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’ are meant to stand for. As Iraq has shown, in a society where ideas can’t be exchanged without the fear of having one’s head blown off, lofty ideals tend to ring a little hollow. Whichever angle you look at it from, it’s a step backwards.

And so, predictably over the past few days we’ve witnessed the usual chorus amongst the World’s self-appointed guardians of democracy. Bush began the rounds condemning the “cowardly acts”, whist Brown, Sarcozy and Karzai all piled in to register the usual ‘disapproval’ ‘condemnation’ and ‘disgust’. Vladimir Putin, perhaps spurred by his recent selection as Time Magazine’s Person of The Year, went one better, declaring the assassination an act of ‘terrorism’.

At a time when Russia’s post-Soviet hangover grows more distant by the day, it’s interesting that it was Sheriff Putin, rather than the White House Cowboys, who was so keen to make the connection between the current anarchy in Pakistan and the bearded-man-of-whom-no-one-dare-speak. Five years ago, you can guarantee that Bush wouldn’t have missed a heartbeat in pinning this one on Mr. Bin Ladin and his vile cohorts. Instead, in a hangar in Texas, The President’s face was one of a man counting down the days until 20th Jan 2008 every bit as impatiently as the rest of us. He didn’t answer questions, nor did he give any indication of what this meant for American policy in Pakistan. It was a far cry from Moscow.

So why the timidity? Well, part of the answer lies in the fact that Bhutto’s assassination, personal tragedy aside, has left American policy in the area in one hell of a mess. To put it mildly, America backed the wrong horse, pouring billions of dollars into a regime which it now feels obliged to condemn as a pariah and leaving the region and American interests there at greater risk than any other point in recent history.

Bhutto offered a handy route out of that mess; a player ideally placed to act as a bridge between US interests whilst, for a change, also enjoying popular support within her own country. With her death, the US is fast running out of options in a nuclear-armed country which, regardless of your view of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is of far greater strategic importance than either. George Bush might not have been so keen to blame Al Qaeda for the crime simply because, at this stage, he’d like to leave his options open. Even he now realises that the ‘war against terror’ narrative simply isn’t going to wash, with recent events now leaving policies shaped by that simplistic world view more or less in shreds.

That said, for an individual who claims to want nothing more than to be the World’s number one defender of democracy, Bush’s policy in Pakistan over the past 8 years has been strangely inconsistent. When Pakistan’s elected government was toppled by the army in 1999, led by a military general Pervez Musharaff, the rest of the world quite rightly denounced it and called for the restoration of democracy in the region. The Commonwealth suspended the rogue state, whilst the EU promptly suspended a partnership agreement. In comparison to today, and what had come before, such foreign policy priorities in the 1990s appear positively ethical.

Then came 9/11, which turned a White House of parochialists not much bothered with the World, into one determined to use the full might of America to shape the World to a Texan worldview. In the immediate days after the attacks, Richard Armitage, Deputy US Secretary of State, had promised Musharraf’s intelligence director that the US would bomb the country “back into the stone age” if they didn’t cooperate in shutting down Bin Ladin. The military dictator of Pakistan, sensing, like Blair, that this was his chance to legitimise himself as a World statesman, readily agreed.

Within days, every single news outlet of the World went from referring to Pervez not as ‘General’, as before, but ‘President’. Immediately ‘aid’ in the form of new weaponry for the Pakistani army (yep, the one that had only a couple of years before toppled a democratic government), began flowing in, going from $9.1million between 1999-2001, to $4.7billion a year (that’s a 50,000% increase), as did lucrative trade agreements and personal endorsements for Pakistan’s courageous leader, taking a stand against the forces of tyranny. Thus, for a time, at least, the US had found itself a staunch ally and the military dictator had succeeded in transforming himself into a guardian of democracy.

6 years on to 2007 however, and, mirroring Bush’s other blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan wasn’t looking so hot either. Musharraf’s contribution to the US war effort in the Afghan border regions of Waziristan wasn’t winning him many friends amongst his own population, while at the same time, human rights organisations noticed that the President’s definition of ‘terrorist’ happened to include his political opponents. Add to that growing frustration at the lack of terrorist scalps being delivered in return for Washington’s $4.7bn investment, and Musharraf was clearly in hot water. The time, even Bushites realised, was soon approaching when they’d have to wash their hands of him.

If, 3 months ago, you’d wanted clues as to what Musharraf did next, you might look back to the example of another US ally, back in the days of another Republican president, an equally vocal opponent of tyranny. His name was Saddam Hussein, and despite being, like Musarraf, to put it lightly, of dubious political origins, was, nonetheless for a time a key American ally. Over the course of his rule he received $350bn in Western loans, American military intelligence and arms in return for his courageous stand against the forces of Soviet and Islamic extremism in Iran. In addition, there were the countless atrocities against his own people, rigged elections and all the other features of his rule which it now suits US interests to draw attention to.

At the time, of course, as with Musharraf, such actions were no barrier to partnership with Uncle Sam. As long as Saddam followed America’s short-termist agenda for the region, he was safe. But, as a child who is ‘given an inch and takes a mile’, it becomes inevitable that the dictator would push his luck too far. When this time came with the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Western governments and and the media alike suffered from a sudden, collective bout of amnesia. Hands were promptly washed, and the sides reverted to type. The dictator freed himself from the shackles of respectability, unleashing upon his population an even greater degree of brutality, whilst his sponsors, their hands now clean, reverted to their role as protectors of democracy, giving him a good thumping in the process.

If that parallel doesn’t take your fancy, you could look to Iran itself, prior to the rise of the Ayatollahs who Saddam was sent to defeat. The Shah of Iran, like Musharraf, was brought to power in a coup against a democratically elected government, gradually tightening his grip on power whilst enjoying American and British support. This is a story which can be repeated throughout the Middle East, South East Asia and, most famously, Central America, take your pick.

In the days following 9/11, we were told the US was done with these old games. That it would no longer tolerate dictators or give room to those who sheltered tyrants. That it was a friend of democracy, and a friend of free people, everywhere. For all my misgivings about the Bush regime, I wanted to believe him. The photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with a 1980s Saddam said it all though. As we’ve seen in our less-than frosty dealings with Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia over the past 8 years it’s business as usual.

We are, as usual, backing the wrong horses, pouring money into the regimes of tyrants, turning their people against us, and reaping the ‘blowback’ that inevitably comes a few years later when we outsource our dirty work to dirty men, who are then overthrown in favour of even more extreme, hostile regimes. Oblivious, we shrug and continue to pour taxpayer’s billions into the pockets of extremists, and think that making deals with dictators to consider elections at some point in the future constitutes a path to democracy.

The question of what Musharraf did next should, by now, be obvious. He suspended the constitution, he shut down the press, called a state of emergency, and then used his failure to bring security to the country as an excuse to postpone elections. Battening down the hatches, he played out the same script as every other American ally-turned-pariah over the past 50 years. Cornered by his own people, his political opponents, The West and Islamic extremists within his own country, Musharraf is no longer a man in control of his own destiny. The question that really matters now is not what Musharraf, but what the current administration, and especially the next one, chooses to do, next.

Share This