NYT
When Zalmay Khalilzad was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he would clash with Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, over whether Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan was friend or foe.
Khalilzad saw a disingenuous Pakistan whose post-9/11 commitment to undoing its Taliban creation was ambivalent at best. Far from confronting the Islamist radicals, Musharraf’s security apparatus — or elements of it — abetted the reconstitution of the Taliban in the border areas.
It was clear to Khalilzad that the age-old Pakistani dream of a weak Afghanistan under Islamabad’s sway endured.
Powell was skeptical of this view from Kabul. His priority in 2003-2004 was shoring up a friend, Musharraf, to pursue Al Qaeda and hold the line in a nuclear-armed Islamic state. His message to his Afghan envoy: don’t criticize the Pakistanis, they’re doing what they can.
Uncoordinated policy tends over time to produce a mess. Pakistan and Afghanistan present linked problems — of Islamist radicalization, transborder Pashtun restiveness and democratic transition — but the Bush administration’s dealings with them have been erratic.
And here we are, three years later, with a beleaguered Musharraf imprisoning lawyers and gagging the press in the name of a “state of emergency;” a revived Taliban leavened with foreign jihadists destabilizing southern Afghanistan and turning on Pakistan itself; Pakistan’s democratic transition on hold and Afghanistan’s democratic experiment in danger.
Things could be worse. Pakistan’s nukes are not in the hands of the Islamist International. The Taliban has not retaken Kabul. But the picture is bleak.
U.S. funds — $22 billion — have poured into Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban even as $10 billion has gone to a Pakistani military still inclined to view the Taliban as agents able to provide Islamabad with “strategic depth” to the Afghan west as its confronts India to the east.
These self-defeating financial flows illustrate the discombobulated Bush foreign policy also evident in Iraq: the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. The result is self-amputation. Musharraf should have been held to account much earlier on the Taliban’s steady revival.
This failure has led to the recent rampages of Islamist militants in Pakistan’s Swat valley, long a vacation spot, now a war zone. From Pakistan’s remote tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the threat has turned inward.
As Vishakha Desai, the president of the Asia Society, has pointed out, these Islamist attacks near Swat have already included the partial destruction of a seated image of the Buddha carved into a 130-foot-high rock, a work of Buddhist art second only in importance in South Asia to the Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban.
Blowback, outrageous Buddha-blasting and all, is visiting Pakistan. A strategy conceived to undermine Afghanistan now threatens Pakistan. The army, with U.S. help, has responded by getting serious in the border areas. Many Pakistani soldiers have died. But it’s late in the day.
This is the uneasy backdrop to Musharraf’s promulgation of a provisional constitutional order. That’s Orwellian for martial-law lite. Confronted by a serious legal challenge to his recent re-election, the galvanizing presence of Benazir Bhutto and the baby-turned-monster of Taliban-jihadism, the general chose repression.
His measures have been deplorable. But this is not the dictatorship of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who hanged Bhutto’s father. Musharraf, as his Jekyll-and-Hyde alternation of military and Savile Row gear suggests, is a dictator with a gentleman’s itch. He’s playing for time. The United States must use his vulnerability to get more of what it wants.
There are hopeful signs. Only a sophisticated society could produce an opposition so grounded in constitutional law. Unlike Palestine-dawning, Pakistani democracy does not equal Islamist electoral victory: radical parties are weak. The U.S.-mediated Bhutto-Musharraf pact that brought Benazir home suggests civilian-military compromise is possible.
But is Musharraf part of the problem or the solution? The more isolated he becomes, the more he will resemble what Dan Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations called “a completely diminished asset.”
Musharraf is not yet that. Given the nuclear-charged risks, the U.S. must stick with him and maintain aid for now, but with the insistence he move rapidly toward promised elections, restore an independent judiciary, work with Bhutto and get real about quashing the Taliban.
U.S. failure to harmonize Afghan and Pakistani policy has been disastrous. You can’t beat the Taliban in Afghanistan alone. You can’t stabilize Pakistan within a democratic system — guided or not — while developing Islamism for export and alienating the professional middle class.
These lessons must be learned — by Musharraf and Bush. As Khalilzad put it to me: “Afghanistan and Pakistan need each other. The moderates of both countries must work together.”
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