Crossposted from Dependent Arisings:
Six years of sustained hyper-alarmist rhetoric from the Bush Administration has created a malaise in the American public. Simply put, we no longer believe what we’re told by our government. While a healthy does of skepticism from the public isn’t necessarily a bad thing (could’ve used more of it in the run up to the current war in Iraq), our thankful dismissal of the neoconservatives’ Manichean worldview, I fear, may be accompanied by a desire to live in a willful ignorance to potential security threats that should be acknowledged, although not under the specious rubric of the war on terror.
It has become apparent, in fact, that the single most threatening country to U.S., and perhaps international security, is Pakistan, a country we are ostensibly allied with. Home to close to 165 million people, the world’s only Muslim-majority nuclear state, run by a "modernizing" dictator with a restive populace, Pakistan presents a unique challenge to American foreign policy wonk: it has a radical Islamist population, including Taliban, that all but runs peripheral areas of the country. It is almost positively where Al Qaeda leadership is hiding, if not reorganizing. Worst of all, it has an intelligence agency (the ISI) that is actively supporting Islamist elements. Imagine if parts of the CIA supported militant Christianists that were actively working to overthrow the American government and plot attacks abroad. It’s that bad.
The current dictator-president Pervez Musharraf, has survived numerous attacks on his life. Recently, a major Islamist mosque in Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, the Lal Masjid, was the site of a siege that pitted Islamists versus the Pakistani army. Over 40 militants were killed. Suicide attacks, a rare occurrence even in strife-ridden Pakistan, have become more and more common. Sectarian Sunni/Shia violence is not uncommon. And then, or course, there’s Kashmir, because of which Pakistan has waged three wars against India since the states’ simultaneous cleaving in 1947.
Yet Pakistan also possess a secular, highly educated elite. The recent furor over General Musharraf’s dismissal of the chief justice of Pakistan’s supreme court brought thousands of lawyers to the streets. It was a strange site indeed. Contrary to Musharraf’s wishes, the chief justice was recently reinstated to his position. Opposition to Musharraf ranges from the Islamists to secular democrats.
We have unfortunately become so myopic because of Iraq that we have failed to see the potential crumbling of an incredibly important piece of the geopolitical puzzle. A conflagration there would completely reconfigure the U.S.’s, and indeed the world’s, foreign policy priorities. But there are no easy answers to this very complex nation: what is apparent, however, is that the Bush Administration’s propping of Musharraf may very go the way of our relationship to the Shah of Iran. And before you object that the majority of Pakistani’s are far less radical then the fringe Islamists, I implore you to look, once again, at the case of the Iranian revolution: the theocrats, well organized, rode to power on the backs of secular, democratic opposition to the the inefficient, corrupt Shah, who was perceived as a U.S. puppet. It would behoove us to make delicate contact with some of the democratic opposition in Pakistan, before the Islamists consolidate their power any further.