Muslims and Liberals

Dawn – Editorial
August 26, 2005

IN HIS Independence Day message President Pervez Musharraf reiterated his vow to defeat terrorists and extremists. He took that vow after the United States began its war against “Islamic terrorism.” On July 18 Benazir Bhutto accused him again of not “doing enough to combat terrorism.” The message: She can do the job better.

Never in Pakistan’s history has its military and political leadership competed so openly for an American mandate to rule Pakistan. Never has Pakistan identified so completely with an American agenda that rejects Pakistan’s key values and threatens to undermine its integrity.

Today’s Pakistani campaign to combat Muslim terrorism reminds me of the days Muslim youth fought Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan and Indian forces in Indian-held Kashmir. We called them mujahideen and bowed our heads when we ran into them or heard of their martyrdom.

A peace process is underway in Kashmir, and one hopes the Kashmiris’ nightmare will someday be over. Many Afghans think they can’t do much about their president’s American tutelage or about the American troops and bases on their soil. But there are youth in Kashmir and Afghanistan who believe they should keep the pressure on the occupation forces, and many Pakistanis support them.

Americans call them terrorists, as they do in case of Muslim freedom fighters everywhere else. The delegitimization of Muslim struggle for rights and freedom is an interesting development, which was spotlighted by an American bureaucrat.

John R. Bolton, then US deputy secretary of state (now UN ambassador), was briefing journalists and went at a tangent about Iran’s complicity with the Lebanon’s “Hezbollah terrorists.” I mentioned that Hezbollah had expelled Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in the manner “Minutemen” guerrillas chased British colonial troops in Massachusetts.

“How would you define terrorism?” I asked. The neoconservative’s eyes blazed as he looked at me. “I know a terrorist,” he growled, “when I see one.”

America doesn’t bother to define terrorists. It decides who’s one and just goes after him. Arabs resisting Israeli occupation of their lands have long been called terrorists by Americans. A more discriminating attitude prevailed awhile towards people fighting occupation forces in other parts of the world. In the 1980s, at the Washington Times news desk, I would be editing a dispatch from Peshawar about “mujahideen” shooting stinger missiles at Soviet troops. Later that evening I would receive another story from Jerusalem about Palestinian “terrorists” attacking Israeli troops. We called Kashmiri, Sikh, Tamil, Kurdish and East Timorese guerrillas “rebels,” “insurgents,” “militants,” or “fighters,” but not “terrorists.” The US government hadn’t taken positions on many of those insurgencies, and we believed journalistic ethics didn’t permit making value judgments on their struggles (except in the Palestinian case).

The end of the Cold War gradually changed the yardsticks of values of American elites, including most media managers, as America emerged as the sole superpower. In 1992 a group of mostly Jewish neoconservatives conceived a grand mission to preserve America’s sole-superpower status. They got the then Defence Secretary Dick Cheney to approve of it. After much preparation, the Project New America Century (PNAC) was launched in 1997 and became the foreign policy guide for this administration. The core PNAC goal is to maintain US global domination by preventing any nation or ideology from “challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” China and Islam are viewed as the main obstacles to that mission.

For the neocons, 9/11 confirmed the prognosis about the Islamic threat, and they viewed it as an opportunity to eliminate that threat. They think Muslim anti-Americanism stems from an “ideology,” and Wahhabi and Deobandi madressahs and “Islamist” political organizations are spreading it. Pakistani madressahs are particularly suspect because many of them follow Deobandi curricula.

The neocons viewed Iran and Iraq as the states most hostile to their Middle Eastern agenda and subsequently masterminded the Iraq war, but they believe that the real challenge to their mission comes from non-state Muslim groups from around the world. To work people up against these groups, they gave them a blood-curling name: “Islamic terrorists.” Because “Islamic terrorism” calls for a global war, America needed allies worldwide. Calls went out to nations of the world to decide “whether you are with us or with the terrorists.” Among the first to come aboard were countries facing Muslim insurgencies: India, China, Russia and the Philippines.

As the price of their collaboration, the United States slapped the “terrorist” label on Kashmiri, Chechen, Uighur and Abu Sayaf guerrillas. Muslim monarchies and autocracies such as in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, which are facing domestic challenge to their repressive rule, also jumped on the bandwagon and got America to designate their dissidents as “terrorists.”

Pakistan is important for America’s global anti-terrorist and strategic agenda for two broad reasons. First, its proximity to Afghanistan, its madressahs and its youth with Islamic fervour supposedly make it a hub of international “terror infrastructure.” Second, Pakistan’s location makes it attractive for the US strategic planning. The PNAC mission calls for the US military presence in the oil-rich Gulf and Caspian Sea basin. Pakistan is at the junction of both, and its importance has increased with the Iraq disaster and budding Russo-Chinese alliance.

The Iraqi mayhem has unsettled US plans to make that country the bastion of American military power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, China and Russia, operating through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are poised to challenge US bases in their neighborhoods. They already have got Uzbekistan to ask Washington to fold up its Karshi-Khanabad airbase.

Useful as Pakistan is to America’s strategic interests, its political fluidity is of concern to American policy planners. Attempts on Musharraf’s life has heightened those concerns, which can be allayed by his partnership with Benazir. In order not to antagonize the Pakistani president, they’ve kept Benazir at arm’s length but know she has embraced their agenda. Two weeks after 9/11 she wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal citing her clashes with “many of these people, including Osama bin Laden” and her crackdown on “their madressahs that turned children into fanatics and criminals.”

During her frequent US visits she has blasted Muslim terrorism and applauded Bush for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. One interesting refrain in her statements: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” The emphasis obviously is on “all your eggs,” as she knows that the United States, despite its rhetoric about democracy, wouldn’t want her as the substitute for its ties to the Pakistani military. The Pakistan Muslim League being divided, Americans expect the Pakistan People’s Party to win the 2007 elections handily. And Benazir knows that electoral victory in Pakistan doesn’t guarantee getting or keeping the prime minister’s job; American blessings will.

A Musharraf-Bhutto partnership could make Pakistan the kind of dependent ally of the United States it never was. Pakistan has historically been schizophrenic about American tutelage. Washington was always able to lure Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic brass with aid and other favours, but its political leadership usually held out.

The schizophrenia began in 1953 when the Eisenhower administration offered Pakistan a package of military aid in return for its joining an anti-Communist alliance. The alliance wouldn’t commit America to defending Pakistan against foreign (read Indian) aggression. Gen. Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief, and Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad, a former bureaucrat, jumped at the offer. Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin didn’t “see much in it for Pakistan” and decided to sit on it. One afternoon Nazimuddin was summoned to the governor-general’s house and was “pleasantly surprised” to see Ayub Khan in a portico. Minutes later the prime minister was fired by Ghulam Muhammad and soon afterward-replaced, unsurprisingly, by Mohammad Ali (Bogra), Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington.

Nazimuddin didn’t challenge his unconstitutional dismissal. He was warned, he told visiting East Pakistan Chief Minister Nurul Amin that such a “foolish step” would trigger martial law. Nazimuddin had played a major role in the Muslim League’s historic victory in the 1946 elections in Bengal that facilitated the creation of Pakistan. Martial law and regional feud, he explained to Nurul Amin, could tempt India to wreck “the infant state.”

The last of this breed was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who resisted relentless American pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear programme and, according to Benazir, paid for it with his life. In her autobiography, she writes that then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had warned of making her father “a horrible example” for defiance of America. A year later, she adds, the CIA conspired with Gen Ziaul Haq to have him overthrown. In any case, Z.A. Bhutto ended the era in which America coddled Pakistan’s military and military-backed dictators while democratic forces were held at bay.

If Pakistan continues to pursue the American agenda, with or without a Musharraf-Bhutto partnership, it could pay a price for it. Already, Musharraf’s support for the Afghanistan war, campaign against Islamic institutions, etc., have spawned regionalism in Pakistan.