Why Pakistan Matters

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Who Lost Pakistan?
Modern Pakistan has been strained to its breaking point by three opposing forces: feudal dynastic politicians who have only a casual acquaintance with democracy; a corrupt, ineffective army; and religious extremists, who at least know what they want, even if the vast majority of Pakistanis find their vision of Islam unpalatable. All three have played their parts in undermining Pakistan's foundational promise as a modern, democratic Muslim nation. But they have had plenty of outside help. A succession of administrations in Washington have backed a series of wrong horses in Islamabad: military dictators like Musharraf or feudal aristocrats like Bhutto. "We have a bad habit of always personalizing our foreign policy," says P.J. Crowley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Little effort has ever been made to look past individuals and encourage or engage with the institutions of Pakistani civil society. The most recent example of this neglect came last summer when Pakistani lawyers and judges protested Musharraf's summary sacking of an independentminded Supreme Court judge; they received little more than lip service from Washington, which was more concerned about Musharraf's survival.

Nor has the cause of Pakistani democracy been helped by the U.S. habit of giving more money to Pakistan's military leaders than to its civilian ones. Husain Haqqani, a former diplomat and political confidant of Benazir Bhutto's, told Congress last October that since 1954 the U.S. has given Pakistan about $21 billion in aid, of which $17.7 billion was given under military rule, and only $3.4 billion to elected governments.

Ironically, American support for military dictators has been in the pursuit of U.S. interests not in Pakistan but in neighboring countries — to balance Soviet influence in India or to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the U.S. has rarely kept its eye on the ball. In the 1980s, Washington aided the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, using Pakistan as a fulcrum to help pry the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. The policy succeeded — but when victory was assured, the U.S. lost interest, while thousands of young Muslim extremists who had been armed to combat the communists turned their weapons against Pakistan and the U.S. With perverse timing, Washington deserted the elected but unstable governments that followed Zia and imposed economic and military sanctions on Pakistan for its effort to develop nuclear weapons. "That's where we began to lose Pakistan," says Zinni. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the U.S. has cozied up to Pakistan once more, though with uncertain effects. More than $10 billion in U.S. aid has flowed into Pakistan since 2001, most of it intended to fund the fights against al-Qaeda and remnants of the Taliban. But U.S. officials acknowledge that much of the cash has been diverted to defense programs aimed at India, itself now a U.S. ally.

Pakistani leaders, for their part, insist they never get the respect that is their due. The military has lost hundreds of soldiers battling extremists along the Afghanistan border. But terrorist groups continue to thrive in the lawless tribal areas; Musharraf says they are being protected by sympathetic locals in terrain that is impossible to police. Many Pakistanis — and some U.S. officials — believe Musharraf has been indulging in the most dangerous form of triangulation, balancing U.S. interests with Islamist sympathies to keep himself in power. "Musharraf uses the threat of the extremists to prove his utility and indispensability to the Western world," says Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, a veteran politician and former government minister.

If that is indeed the plan, it has backfired spectacularly. The extremists have spread out from the border region, attacking government buildings in Pakistan's cities. More recently, al-Qaeda-linked groups have launched suicide attacks against military and civilian targets. Such attacks have undermined Musharraf, who had long portrayed himself as the one man capable of keeping Pakistan stable and safe from extremism. But instead of coming down harder on extremists, he suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who threatened to derail Musharraf's bid for a second term as President on constitutional grounds. Within weeks, a nationwide protest movement sprang up, with tens of thousands of middle-class professionals taking to the streets. Musharraf lost his case against the judge in the Supreme Court, and Chaudhry was reinstated. Suddenly the strongman seemed vulnerable.