He Really Is Our Man In Pakistan
Yesterday, I blogged on why the US was unable to do much about the crisis in Pakistan. It's clear that I'm not the only one who has noticed just how badly our foreign policy is skewed towards the support of oppressive/repressive regimes. An editorial in Mexico's La Jornada provides a rather nice analysis of the continuing US failure in this area.
For its part, the condemnation of Musharraf's decision by the United States and United Kingdom is a profound hypocrisy. The biography of the Pakistani dictator contains sufficient elements for him to have been included in Washington's so-called axis of evil: Coming to power undemocratically in a military coup, he financed Islamist terrorist groups in the context of the India-Pakistan confrontation over Kashmir, and as if that weren't enough, he has also developed weapons of mass destruction.
But Musharraf was not included on that list and instead became an indispensable White House ally in the so-called “war on terror.” Perhaps now he'll have to settle accounts for the delicate balance he has been forced to maintain for the past six years, a period in which he was at the service of Washington and broke off official dealings with the Taliban, while tolerating the presence and transit of fundamentalist Afghans on Pakistani soil. [Emphasis added]
As I noted yesterday, General Musharraf had something we wanted: the means to crack down on Islamists the administration wanted crushed. Of course we wouldn't include him in the Axis of Evil claim. Instead, we gave him the weapons and the dollars to do the job for us. That he would crush his internal opposition with no ties to the terrorists we were told were on the way to the US didn't matter then, and apparently doesn't matter now.
That's one heckuva foreign policy for the long term. One that I fear will haunt us for another generation.
For its part, the condemnation of Musharraf's decision by the United States and United Kingdom is a profound hypocrisy. The biography of the Pakistani dictator contains sufficient elements for him to have been included in Washington's so-called axis of evil: Coming to power undemocratically in a military coup, he financed Islamist terrorist groups in the context of the India-Pakistan confrontation over Kashmir, and as if that weren't enough, he has also developed weapons of mass destruction.
But Musharraf was not included on that list and instead became an indispensable White House ally in the so-called “war on terror.” Perhaps now he'll have to settle accounts for the delicate balance he has been forced to maintain for the past six years, a period in which he was at the service of Washington and broke off official dealings with the Taliban, while tolerating the presence and transit of fundamentalist Afghans on Pakistani soil. [Emphasis added]
As I noted yesterday, General Musharraf had something we wanted: the means to crack down on Islamists the administration wanted crushed. Of course we wouldn't include him in the Axis of Evil claim. Instead, we gave him the weapons and the dollars to do the job for us. That he would crush his internal opposition with no ties to the terrorists we were told were on the way to the US didn't matter then, and apparently doesn't matter now.
That's one heckuva foreign policy for the long term. One that I fear will haunt us for another generation.
Labels: Foreign Policy, Pakistan
posted by Diane at 12:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home