Articles with the Tag Pakistan

Juan Cole on Pakistan

Manufacturing Consent, US foreign policy
Published on

Juan Cole agrees with me on the American view of Pakistan:

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

Like I said Saturday, mistrust of democracy has always been a staple of US foreign policy. It’s not surprising that US government sources consistantly overstate the dangers of the Taliban in Pakistan or the importance of the campaign against it; for the US government, the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan is the most important security issue there as it impacts on American operations in Afghanistan.

What is surprising is how far the western news media have internalised this attitude. Not only do they agree with this and present news from Pakistan in the context of the war against the Taliban, but the idea that this war might just be less important to Pakistan itself, that the Taliban is to the Pakistani state as the ETA is to Spain, an important security problem but not a fundamental challenge is almost never mentioned. Pakistan is constantly judged on whether it achieves American goals and nobody thinks this strange. As if we’ve lost the ability to understand any other viewpoint but the American one.

A democratic Pakistan is a failed state

Imperialism, US foreign policy
Published on

Manan Ahmed on the failed state rhetoric as used against Pakistan:

It was that under the rule of the military usurper Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan that Pakistan was adopted as a Cold War ally and held up as a model “developing nation”. During Khan’s tenure, Pakistan was said to enjoy the benefits of a so-called “developmental dictatorship” – many dams were built and much cement was poured.

The US even helped Ayub Khan engineer an election victory in 1965. But shortly thereafter, he foolishly went to war with India; his popularity plummeted, and his flashy foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, began a national campaign for a democracy based on socialist principles. Bhutto’s rise ran afoul of the “domino theory” intended to check the spread of Communism; it was in this context that Pakistan was first crowned a “failed state” – giving rise to decades worth of books and studies with titles like The Failure of Democracy in Pakistan (1962), The Failure of Parliamentary Politics in Pakistan, 1953-1958 (1967), Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1968), Ethnic Conflict and the Failure of Political Integration in Pakistan (1973), Pakistan, Failure in Nation Building (1977) and Pakistan On the Brink (2004).

[…]

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

It’s an old constant in US foreign policy to prefer the familiarity of military dictatorships above the uncertainty of democratically elected governments. They’re easier to deal with and easier to manipulate. It’s never about what’s good for Pakistan, just what suits the US best. Having Obama in the White House doesn’t change this.