[R-G] Bush-Musharraf Alliance Under Growing Attack

[Anthony Fenton]

PAKISTAN-US:  Bush-Musharraf Alliance Under Growing Attack
By Jim Lobe

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38516

WASHINGTON, Jul 12 (IPS) - Despite the media's and official  
Washington's focus on Iraq and Iran as the most urgent challenges to  
U.S. foreign policy, a growing chorus of voices is calling for a  
major shift towards what they regard as the "central front in the war  
on terror" -- Pakistan.

In their view, not only has the increasingly beleaguered president,  
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and particularly his "double game" in  
supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and providing it safe haven in  
Pakistan's tribal areas along the border, become a serious liability  
to the furtherance of U.S. interests in the region.

But the entire military institution, the recipient of almost all of  
the ten billion dollars in aid Washington has lavished on Islamabad  
since 9/11, is also increasingly seen as a source of popular  
discontent and long-term instability of the kind that could only  
benefit al Qaeda and its radical allies.

As a result, a growing number of regional specialists here, including  
many in the government, are arguing for increased pressure on both  
Musharraf and the military -- through the use of sanctions, if  
necessary -- to cooperate with a genuine, if gradual, transition to  
democratic rule.

Such a policy is unlikely to be adopted, however, under the current  
administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. U.S. officials  
clearly hope that this week's storming by Pakistani commandos of  
Islamabad's Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, against Islamist militants and  
students who had held it for some six months signaled a new  
determination on the part of Musharraf not only to crack down on  
radical clerics in Pakistan's so-called "madrassa belt", but also to  
try to take back tribal areas which his government had virtually  
surrendered to the Taliban over the past two years.

"Mr. Musharraf is a strong ally in the war against these extremists,"  
Bush said earlier this week as the battle for the mosque got  
underway. "He's been a valuable ally in rejecting extremists. And  
that's important -- to cultivate those allies."

That, indeed, has long been the line from the White House, which  
since 9/11 appears to have persuaded itself that Musharraf's  
departure would most likely bring to power -- and, with it, control  
over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal -- either a more Islamist-inclined  
general or Islamist parties that have been the main beneficiaries of  
military rule.

"I've heard Gen. Musharraf...tell American presidents that if you  
don't support me, the next person will be the 'bearded ones'," Bruce  
Reidel, a former top South Asia specialist at the Central  
Intelligence Agency (CIA) who served on the National Security Council  
under both Bill Clinton and Bush, told National Public Radio this week.

That "nightmare scenario" has been particularly compelling to Vice  
President Dick Cheney and other hard-liners in the administration  
who, according to the well-connected Pakistani journalist Ahmed  
Rashid, have repeatedly rejected the advice of regional specialists  
in the State Department, CIA and even the Pentagon to exert real  
pressure on Musharraf to comply with his own promises both to move  
toward a democratic transition and dismantle terrorist networks  
associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Those voices have been strengthened in recent months, however, as  
Musharraf, has been besieged by a number of challenges, ranging from  
the mounting protests over his suspension of the Supreme Court's  
chief justice to the siege of the Red Mosque, that have dramatised  
his loss of popular support, among both secularists and Islamists.

At the same time, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, the  
"Talibanisation" of much of the tribal belt in the wake of the army's  
withdrawal, and the growing consensus in the U.S. intelligence  
community that al Qaeda's planning and operational capacity has grown  
steadily stronger due in major part to the safe haven in those same  
tribal areas have persuaded even Musharraf's former defenders here  
that his "double game" poses a serious threat to U.S. national security.

Evidence of a major change in elite opinion here has accumulated over  
the past month with a spate of newspaper editorials and columns and  
think-tank briefings urging Washington to distance itself from  
Musharraf and seriously engage the opposition, including its exiled  
leadership, former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

"What we need to be doing now is reach out to the civilian political  
centres in Pakistan, including the exiled leaders, and the democratic  
movement that has emerged in the last several months," said Reidel.  
"Washington has been too preoccupied with the nightmare scenario. I  
think there is a real opportunity for a return to democracy, and the  
United States should be outspoken in support of that."

Indeed, the well-attended release of a major policy paper by the  
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here this week that called  
for the U.S. and the European Union (EU) to jointly put forward a  
"non-negotiable package" under which sweeping sanctions targeted  
against the military would be imposed if Musharraf and the military  
fail to comply with its past commitments on fighting terrorism and  
restoring democratic rule provided additional testimony to the shift  
in opinion.

The paper by French analyst Frederic Grare, "Rethinking Western  
Strategies Toward Pakistan," argued that the West should, among other  
measures, impose an arms and commercial embargo against the army and  
all military-controlled companies and foundations, if Musharraf  
retains his presidential and army posts in violation of the  
constitution and fails to carry out free and fair parliamentary  
elections with international observers this fall.

The same sanctions would also be imposed if Musharraf failed to  
follow through on previous commitments to prevent all infiltration  
into Afghanistan and Kashmir and "immediately" dismantle the  
"terrorist infrastructure" within Pakistan, including organisations  
linked to al Qaeda.

The "strategic imperative," according to Grare, should be to "break  
the link between the military and politics in Pakistan" a goal also  
endorsed by Stephen Cohen, a veteran Pakistan expert at the Brookings  
Institution. In a Washington Post column last week, he argued that  
the army must seek "a systematic withdrawal from politics" because it  
"cannot rule the state of Pakistan by itself."

"The United States is paying lip service to a regime that is  
collapsing before its eyes and that may yet turn truly nasty," warned  
Cohen, who, during the Carnegie session, predicted that the current  
administration was unlikely to adopt Grare's approach.

The administration's view, he said, was "Musharraf is our man, and  
we're going to go down with him."

(END/2007)