Pakistan Can Care for Itself
“Everyone always says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.” - Homer Simpson
The death of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan has thrown our media a bit off kilter (really, who has the temerity to up and die before the New Year but after everyone has done their 2007-in-review pieces?). Still, most of them are far too professional to let anything as inconsequential as a major assassination really affect them and so we’ve been treated to the usual mile wide, inch deep type coverage. The hell of it is, there isn’t any point in blaming or chastising our journalistic overlords for their typically shoddy performance. Pakistan is an extremely complicated country that has baffled people far more capable than American pundits for its entire existence.
If you want to get a decent outline of Pakistan I highly recommend this recent Tariq Ali piece in the London Review of Books. It’s concise, informative, and very well written but it’s still almost 8,000 words long and amounts to little more than a sketch of the deep complexities of Pakistani politics. And that was before the political earthquake on Thursday; the situation is probably even more unsettled and fluid now.
Pakistan is currently run by an unpopular man who may or may not still be a military dictator and may or may not have ordered or somehow green lighted Thursday’s killing. Up until this week it had two ex-Prime Ministers, neither one of whom was a particularly effective or honest leader in the past, running around in preparation for an election of dubious credibility. Now it has one ex-Prime Minister running around and the election of dubious credibility will likely be postponed at the very least. In short, it is a very big mess. Here’s the good news though, it isn’t our mess. Thinking that it is, or that we can have anything but minor influence over how it is resolved, amounts to little more than arrogant masturbation.
Indeed, any involvement on our part is likely to be both clumsy and ineffective. The American government and its agents are not Pakistanis and do not have the best interests of Pakistan or its people at heart. Our interest in that troubled country has largely been restricted to furthering our own geopolitical goals. This is not a recent development, it goes back decades from a time when we saw Pakistan as a bulwark against a more socialist leaning India through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the prick waving nuclear tests with India and right up to today. Pakistan’s government and Pakistan’s people are far more aware of that history than any American and they have no trouble differentiating between offers of aid made out of genuine friendship and self interested meddling. Any actions we take now, and for a long time to come, will inevitably and correctly be seen as the latter.
Pakistan and its people are not threats to global stability or American security or any other grand sounding justifications for interference, nuclear weapons and Osama bin Laden or not. Islamic government, in a Taliban style, isn’t something that they want or will get; after all these are people who have had front row seats to the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan.
Leave Pakistan alone. Trust them to sort out their own affairs. This is not some failed state like oh, say, Iraq or Afghanistan. This is a country with a history, albeit a troubled one, of democracy. This is a country that possesses an established court system, a raucous press and multi-party politics. Those institutions aren’t perfect and have certainly gone through a lot of hard times but they are indigenous and they’ve fought hard for themselves. They’ve fought harder than we could ever motivate them to through bribery or trickery because, unlike us, they actually care about the long term future of their country.
The Law of Unintended Consequences ensures that any actions we do take will not have the desired outcome; Bhutto was in country at least partly at our behest. Now she’s dead and matters are worse. We cannot guarantee a good outcome in Pakistan though force, diplomacy, economic pressure or voodoo. We can only stand by and watch and hope for the best.
