Muslims and Liberals

The Columbus Dispatch
April 5, 2008

Pakistan’s new prime minister is distancing his government from the U.S.-sponsored war on terrorism that President Pervez Musharraf carried on for six years. In so doing, Yousaf Raza Gilani is reviving a stance typically adopted by Pakistan’s democratic regimes that succeeded pro-American dictatorships.

Pakistan’s new prime minister is distancing his government from the U.S.-sponsored war on terrorism that President Pervez Musharraf carried on for six years. In so doing, Yousaf Raza Gilani is reviving a stance typically adopted by Pakistan’s democratic regimes that succeeded pro-American dictatorships.

“Dictators always supported American policy to make themselves accepted” internationally, Peshawar University anthropologist Jamil Ahmed told me during a recent trip through Pakistan’s tribal areas. “But democracy gives people a sense of pride and makes them resent foreign hegemony.” Their resentment is heightened by America’s support of dictatorships.

The American neoconservatives who argue that democracy is an antidote for anti-Americanism in Muslim societies don’t get this point.

Gilani came into the Pakistani Parliament in 1985 as a protégé of the pro-American military dictator Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Ditched by the Zia regime, he joined the Pakistan People’s Party, from which he now leads a democratic government. To America’s chagrin, his government has vowed to stop military operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida and engage them in a dialogue.

Gilani’s coalition partner, Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League, was another protégé of Zia’s, under whom he became chief minister of Punjab province. After the dictator’s death in a 1988 plane crash, Sharif switched to democratic politics and was twice elected prime minister. His objection to the war on terrorism is even more forceful than that of the PPP leaders.

“We are dealing with our own people,” Sharif said. “When you have a problem with your own family, you don’t kill your own family. You sit and talk.”

The clash between democratic Pakistani governments and American policy dates to the charismatic leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been brought into politics by the leaders of Pakistan’s first military coup d’etat. As the foreign minister of the dictator Mohammad Ayub Khan, Bhutto told me during an interview that “Western democracy is not suited” to Pakistan.

But he plunged into a democratic movement after being fired by Ayub, and once elected prime minister, he vehemently resisted American pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear-arms program. Bhutto and his daughter, the recently assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, blamed his overthrow and eventual execution by Zia on a conspiracy hatched in the United States.

Musharraf, the current president, had become an international pariah after his 1999 military coup. He jumped on America’s war-on-terrorism bandwagon to gain international legitimacy, but his anti-Taliban campaign has made him a domestic pariah, as well. Polls have shown Osama bin Laden to be more popular than him.

Most Pakistanis, in fact, blame America and Musharraf for the rise of terrorism in Pakistan. “There were no suicide attacks in Pakistan or Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion (of Afghanistan) and Musharraf’s crackdown” on the Taliban and other militants, said Mukhtar Ahmed Ali, executive director of the Center for Peace and Development Initiatives in Islamabad.

It is a good thing that American diplomats John Negroponte and Richard Boucher have engaged the Gilani government in discussions over terrorism. Instead of trying to dictate made-in-America anti-terrorist measures, which proved counterproductive under Musharraf and would not be acceptable to the new government, they should let the Gilani regime try its democratic tools of dialogue and persuasion.

They might work. And America should think twice before coddling the next Pakistani dictator.