What do you do with a country like Pakistan? It is a nation that is led by a general who seized power in a military coup eight years ago and declared a state of emergency, that obtained nuclear weapons in defiance of non-proliferation regimes, that has sent missile and nuclear technology to some of America’s fiercest enemies, that has fought a long-running insurgency in Kashmir, and that is now home to a reconstituted and strengthening al Qaeda. It is also a vital U.S. ally and major recipient of U.S. aid in a region where we do not have many friends, one of the most strategically located countries in the world without whose help defeating the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan would be nearly impossible, and faces its own growing threat from Islamic extremists.
Dealing with all of these competing strategic interests is never going to be easy, especially for a U.S. administration not known for its diplomatic subtlety. Compromise to ensure stability would appear to be the best possible strategy to eliminate the chaos of the worst possible outcome. The fear of just what might happen if the lid were to come off has led to a policy of taking one step forward but always being forced to take two steps back. We stave off disaster in the short term, but the pressure continues to build and that worst possible outcome keeps getting worse.
Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, who has served as both president and head of the army since he seized power in 1999 and badly wants to keep both jobs, has played the complexities and contradictions of contemporary Pakistan to maximum advantage. Musharraf’s trump card, however, is America’s fear of an Islamist takeover of his nuclear-armed country, creating the perverse situation in which the less effective he is, the more important he becomes. American reaction to this new crisis has been predictably tame, with Pakistan’s minister of information exposing how the U.S. will let Musharraf get away with just about anything as long as he keeps the Islamists at bay, “they would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists.