Most Dems no better than Bush on Pakistan

The Bush administration's bungling in Pakistan and Afghanistan has led to a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida and loss of U.S. influence in the region. But Democrats did little to stop it.

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Richardson, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, Opinion, September 11th , Chris Dodd, Benazir Bhutto

Reuters

From left, President Bush; Benazir Bhutto; Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf

Jan. 3, 2008 | Last week, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto marked the failure of an ill-conceived U.S. attempt to orchestrate the return of a deeply divisive political exile, discredited by allegations of corruption and incompetence, to take power in Pakistan. The Bush administration's aim was to install a leader who would simultaneously "democratize" and secularize her country, fight terrorist groups, and make peace with Israel. Instead, the sad event of Bhutto's murder has exposed the strategic bankruptcy of the administration's Pakistan policy. But Democrats should not feel vindicated by this failure, for they have endorsed virtually all of the Bush team's mistaken views about Pakistan policy.

One of President Bush's more appalling flights of fancy in the foreign policy arena is his belief that democratically elected governments will somehow be more inclined than incumbent authoritarians to support U.S. policy objectives that are wildly unpopular with their own electorates. The logical absurdity of this proposition should be readily apparent, but, nevertheless, the Bush administration has proceeded blithely to test it in the real world: In January 2006, the White House and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted, over the objections of Palestinian and Israeli leaders, on holding elections in occupied Palestinian territories -- purportedly to elect a Palestinian government that would have the legitimacy to crack down on ongoing anti-Israeli violence. The result of this experiment, of course, was the victory of Hamas, long designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration did not draw the appropriate lessons from this episode and decided to extend its second-term push for "democratization" from the Middle East to embrace Pakistan as well. But on-the-ground conditions in Pakistan make any push for "free and fair" elections there a foolhardy course for U.S. policy. Polls indicate that the majority of Pakistan's population today is overwhelmingly opposed to many U.S. policy goals, including killing or capturing al-Qaida and Taliban affiliates and their Pakistani allies. In such an environment, any government produced by genuinely open elections will not be willing or able to support U.S. objectives in the war on terror. Nevertheless, the goal of democratizing Pakistan through presumptively "open" elections has been supported not only by the administration and other Republicans, but by the Democratic "opposition" as well (more on this below).

In 2002, President Pervez Musharraf allowed carefully controlled elections to be held in Pakistan. Those elections produced a relatively competent technocratic administration, including Shaukat Aziz, who was selected "finance minister of the year" by Euromoney and the Banker magazines. In 2004, Aziz became prime minister as well as finance minister; during his three years as Pakistan's head of government, he presided over the most sustained period of economic reform and modernization in the country's history. But Washington, in its bipartisan wisdom, said that this was not good enough.

The Bush administration coupled its support for Pakistan's democratization with an effort to handpick Benazir Bhutto as her country's democratic "savior." But we have also seen this (very bad) movie before in the administration's abortive effort to promote Ahmad Chalabi as the key to "democratizing" and stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq. Once again, the Bush administration turned to a Western-educated political exile, the head of a family kleptocracy who had twice shown herself to be an ineffective head of government, to shore up its tattered strategic partnership with Islamabad. Like Chalabi, Bhutto played to all of Washington's preferences, saying that she would lead a renewed fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida in northwestern Pakistan (notwithstanding the fact that, as prime minister in 1993-95, she authorized extensive Pakistani support for the emerging Taliban movement) and sending messages to Israeli leaders that she would recognize Israel.

In the aftermath of Bhutto's death, a conventional wisdom is already taking shape about America's Pakistan policy: that the Bush administration supported Musharraf for too long and too uncritically. Certainly, most Democratic presidential candidates and political leaders are making this charge. But the sad reality is that after Musharraf helped the United States in its post-9/11 campaign to unseat the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush administration effectively walked away from both Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as its predecessors did in the 1990s after a decade of extensive U.S.-Pakistani cooperation to support Afghan mujahedin resisting the Soviet occupation of their country.

Next page: Getting Pakistan "right" first requires getting Afghanistan "right"