Question
With No Answer: Is Musharraf a Friend or a Closet Foe of the US
WASHINGTON:
His US tour may be over, but questions persist about Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, Pakistan's president-cum-dictator. Which countries
is Pakistan giving nuclear technology to? Do the Pakistani Army
and Inter-Services Intelligence (still) support extremist groups?
Does the general have enough control to crack down on Islamic
extremists? Does he really want to? How long, exactly, does he
plan to stay in office? How long will he be allowed to?
As
a key US ally in the war on terror (and an intermittent beneficiary
of US aid and trade carrots), Musharraf is caught between his
allegiance to the United States and his need to contain domestic
extremists and Al Qaeda sympathizers without inflaming a deeply
anti-US population. Musharraf may be a military dictator, but
it's not clear he's fully in charge. He's certainly vulnerable;
just this week Osama bin Laden's deputy called for Muslims to
topple Musharraf, for being a "traitor" to Islam. Time
puts it bluntly: "Whose Side, exactly, is Pakistan on?"
"In early summer US soldiers scrambling after Taliban remnants
along the craggy mountains of southeastern Afghanistan made a
surprising discovery. Among the gang of suspected Taliban agents
they nabbed were three men who, it emerged in interrogations,
were Pakistani army officers. Authorities in Pakistan clapped
the three in a military brig; an official from military intelligence
called them 'mavericks.'" Eliminating
extremism in Pakistan will be no easy feat, as the Time
reporters point out:
"For years, the top brass drummed into midranking officers
a sense of Islamic mission. A Prophet-length beard helped an officer's
promotion, as did praying five times a day. Now, says [a retired
lieutenant] 'the army is taking measures against officers who
are too religious minded.' Those deemed overly fanatic are discreetly
steered into nonsensitive or dead-end jobs, he says, and a soldier
needs permission from his commanding officer before he is permitted
to grow a beard.
The
difficulty of redirecting the army toward moderation is illustrated
by Musharraf's struggle to reform Pakistan's powerful internal-security
apparatus, ISI, once the Taliban's No. 1 ally. These days, says
a Western diplomat in Islamabad, the ISI's top brass carries out
Musharraf's bidding, but some of the lower-echelon officers seem
to retain ties, ideological and financial, with their former Taliban
proteges."
According
to the report, in June US Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage showed Musharraf satellite images of terrorist training
camps located along Pakistan's side of its border with India:
"'Musharraf
acted outraged and upset,' a State Department official told Time,
but it wasn't clear to the Americans whether he was angry that
the camps were functioning or that the US had uncovered them.
Musharraf
has failed to sustain his promise to crack down on extremist groups
that in the past fed fighters to the Kashmir cause, carried out
sectarian killings and attacked Westerners. In January 2002, at
the insistence of the US, Musharraf banned five such groups. Yet
the government has allowed them to resurface under new names.
Abdul Rauf Azhar, formerly of Jaish-e-Muhammad, says, 'We are
still doing our work.'"
Bernard-Henri
Levy, the French philosopher who recently published a book, based
on a year's immersion in Pakistan, about the abduction and murder
of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, told the Washington
Post he doubts that Musharraf has complete control:
"What has become obvious is the tremendous power of the ISI,
Pakistan's secret service - so dreaded by average citizens that
they rarely speak its name but refer to it instead as the 'three
letters' - and the deep infiltration of this powerful organization
by militant fundamentalists and jihadists.
"The
most dominant factions in the ISI, in fact, have come to constitute
a virtual jihadist group itself. And this is why Pakistan has
become the subject of numerous other urgent questions: Did it
shelter Osama bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda after the
Sept. 11 attacks? Has it provided bin Laden with medical attention
since the Afghan war, in the Binori Town Mosque in Karachi, which
I happened to visit? Was it involved, and to what extent, in the
murder of Pearl?"
Musharraf
recently admitted that Pakistan received ballistic missile technology
from North Korea, but says that it did not provide nuclear weapons
technology to them. In the US last week, he said Pakistan's nuclear
material was under strict control, but he didn't sound too convincing.
And anyway, Pakistan's nuclear know-how resides with the scientist
Abdul Qader Khan, who isn't necessarily inclined to take orders
from Musharraf. Says Levy:
"This public figure, this great scientist, this man who knows
better than anyone (since it is he who developed them) the most
sensitive secrets of Pakistan's nuclear program, is both close
to the ISI and a member of Lashkar e-Toiba, a group closely allied
with al Qaeda. My story concerned Khan's 'vacations' to North
Korea and his links with bin Laden's men; one of my hypotheses
is that Pearl may have been killed to prevent him from reporting
on such trafficking of nuclear know-how."
Dr. Ahmed Faruqui, writing in Pakistan's Daily Times,
questions Musharraf's overall intentions, wondering why it took
September 11 and US pressure to get the General to turn against
the Taliban. "If this policy was bad to begin with as he
now asserts, Musharraf should have dispensed with it once he became
the nation's Chief Executive in October 1999," he says. Faruqui
echoes moderates who ask:
"How credible is it to say in Ottawa that Pakistanis should
'shun militarism and extremism, which will get us nowhere' when
he rules the country only because he is the army chief and when
everyone knows that it is the Pakistani military whose proxy wars
have contributed to the rampant extremism that now holds the country
in its grip?"
Levy wonders why the United States, which has promised Islamabad
billions in aid - doesn't do more to reform the country:
"Is it not possible at least to tie this aid to certain simple
political conditions -- for example, that the Pakistanis must
give proof of a genuine effort to reform the ISI; or that they
impose the most severe sanctions on their high-ranking nuclear
scientists and officials who take "vacations" in Iran,
North Korea or Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan?"
Not to be lost in all of this is Faruqui's main point, that Musharraf
has no right to speak on behalf of Pakistan. Musharraf refuses
to say when he will step down, and he wants parliament to ratify
a bill that would essentially make the military the guardian of
the democracy after he steps down. That job is usually given to
the country's supreme court.
On
the far side of Musharraf's rule, says Levy, is another Pakistan,
one "which is liberal, democratic, secular, which fights,
back against the wall, against mounting Islamism, and which does
not understand why, in this combat, we are not at its side."
That,
of course, is the best-case scenario. A less rosy view, and one
held by not a few US policymakers, is that a democratic, pluralistic
Pakistan would swiftly catapult to power an Islamist firebrand,
hostile to the US and less than cooperative in its war on terror.
Whether
having such a government in a nuclear-armed Pakistan represents
an improvement over Musharraf, at least from the point of view
of international security, is a question that could soon be more
than academic. Either way, it's unlikely the United States will
have much say in the matter. - Courtesy Time Magazine
