Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I know I’m a bit late to this – forgive me, I was debating all weekend – but I feel compelled to comment on the Pakistani elections.  The major bit of news coming out was that Musharraf got his ass handed to him, with Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League N getting a very clear majority:

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers.

Official results are expected Tuesday, but early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a Parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him.

Early results showed equal gains for the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose leader, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated on Dec. 27, and the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the faction led by Nawaz Sharif, like Ms. Bhutto a former prime minister. Each party may be in a position to form the next government.

While, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to worry about how election results in a fracticious country with awful democratic institutions affects US policy, Bush’s constant support for Musharraf has made that impossible.  In general, the best way to garner influence in a country is not to support a dictator who has little to no popular support, and then try to implant a corrupt, Western educated political scion who was kicked out of the country because her husband embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars.  Also, it’s often times not best to support said military dictator because you believe that without him, the country and its nuclear weapons would be overtaken by Islamist hoards.  But, this is exactly the policy the US has pursued.

The results were interpreted here as a repudiation of Mr. Musharraf as well as the Bush administration, which has staunchly backed him for more than six years as its best bet in the campaign against the Islamic militants in Pakistan. American officials will have little choice now but to seek alternative allies from among the new political forces emerging from the vote.

While handing Musharraf this massive defeat is certainly a repudiation of six years of Bush administration policy, the pitiful vote totals that the Islamist parties received are even a starker example of just how wrongheaded the approach to Pakistan has been.  While one could interpret the defeats Islamist parties in the North-West Frontier Province as a victory for the anti-terror/Islamist strategy, the truth is that the poor results were just part of a larger trend of Islamist parties never being particularly popular in Pakistan, having peaked at 12% of the vote a few years ago.

What worries me about Musharraf’s defeat is that Bush administration, and really by extension the US no matter who the next president is, has put all its eggs in the Musharraf basket.  It should have been obvious why this was a bad idea when he implemented heavy handed anti-terror policies, refused to provide Bhutto with enough security for her campaign stops or when he sacked and arrested the chief justice of the supreme court.  Because, despite the Bush administration’s both ham and open fisted policy towards Pakistan (some 1 billion dollars in unaccountable military aid in 9/11, much of which was spent to arm against India) there really are compelling national and international interests at stake in Pakistan.  The problem of an open corridor between Afghanistan and Pakistan is really a threat to stability in the region and is an incubator for terrorist groups.  But just because our interests are compelling in Pakistan doesn’t mean that our policy has to be so simple minded, and frankly, so typically American.  I though we learned our lessons from supporting dozens of nasty dictators as bulwarks against communism, but I guess some things never change.