Muslims and Liberals

Boston Globe
September 19, 2001

MY DAUGHTER, ALIA, WAS SHAKEN WHEN SHE CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL THE OTHER DAY. A MAN HAD ASKED HER FRIEND, AN 11TH-GRADER, ABOUT HIS PARENTS’ NATIONALITY. THE BOY SAID, “PAKISTANI,” AND THE MAN SPAT ON HIM. A friend in Frederick, Md., inquired if I was OK. She had been discussing last week’s terrorist attacks with a friend who said, “We should find every Muslim in the country and kill him.”

As war on Afghanistan looms, Pakistanis in the United States are as worried about the fate of Pakistan as they are about their own safety. And Muslims in general are concerned about the future of the Muslim world.

Pakistan has already paid a price because of pro-American military generals. In 1958, a Pakistani general, after a trip to Washington, overthrew our first government under a democratic constitution. My mentor, Nurul Amin, led a democratic movement of nine political parties for a decade. We implored the United States, through its embassy, to help us restore democracy, which alone could have saved the old Pakistan.

We never received a response.

Another pro-American Pakistani military dictator was arranging Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China in July 1971 during the very week politicians from the country’s eastern province were asking Indians for military aid for its secession. They realized that independence of what would become Bangladesh was their only way out of Pakistani army repression.

And look whom the United States has now pressured into joining its war against Afghanistan – Pakistan’s latest military ruler, who has been under domestic pressure to restore democracy. General Pervez Musharraf has promised elections, which he can forget now.

At stake in Pakistan, however, is more than elections. Most Pakistanis are devout Muslims with deep sympathies for the people of Afghanistan. The Musharraf regime’s collaboration in the US war against the Afghans could trigger an Islamist-led upheaval of unprecedented proportions, whose outcome nobody can predict. In effect the United States is pushing the Pakistanis down the slope it had sent the Iranians tumbling, only to regret later.

In the 1953 the Iranians elected a government under secular Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. Soon the Eisenhower administration gave Mosaddeq “the choice” between joining an anticommunist alliance (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and incurring American displeasure.

The prime minister hesitated, and then-US Brigadier General H. Norman Schwartzkopf and CIA Director Allen Dulles engineered a coup in Iran, replacing the affable, Sorbonne-educated democrat with the ruthless autocrat Muhammad Riza Shah. A Bangladeshi saying has it that you need a thorn to take out a thorn. It was left to the Islamist leader Ayatollah Khomeini to end the shah’s reign of terror. The Khomeini revolution became an American nightmare.

Should Pakistan come under Islamist rule because of its collaboration in this war, other Muslim countries could be swept by the same tide as they become destabilized by the war.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has vowed to “end the states who sponsor terrorism.”

All who live in southern Iraq, now under the no-fly zone, are Shiite Muslims. If Iraq is on Wolfowitz’s list, we could end up with an Iraqi Shiite theocracy next to the Shiite theocracy of Iran. The Islamist wave would also stalk other Muslim countries that may be affected by the war.

War cannot “smoke out” terrorists. It will invigorate them, while Muslims are hounded and social life disrupted in the United States.

The ghastly terrorists and their sponsors who visited this tragedy on the United States must, of course, be brought to justice. Tackling terrorism in the future is a different problem requiring different remedies, the foremost of which is resolving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

Historically, the United States has coddled dictatorships in Pakistan and extolled democracy in neighboring India, and occasionally played one against the other. The two countries, feuding over Kashmir and other issues, will remain important to US strategic interests. The United States can best serve those interests by engaging in peace making between them, instead of causing instability in the nuclear-armed subcontinent.