Pakistan is a semi-failed state, not a burgeoning democracy

2007 ended with the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. In the twilight of 2008, the country barreled its way into our consciousness as the potential base for the terrorists that seized Mumbai, India, last week. Surrounding these events, Pakistan held an important place on the Democrats’ path to the White House.

More than Iraq, Pakistan was President-elect Obama’s strongest foreign policy issue. He was the first primary candidate to advocate military action to go after al Qaeda members, allowing him to break out of the one-dimensionality of an anti-war campaign. This stance deflated Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) efforts to run as the muscular foreign policy choice, stealing what had been reliable thunder for GOP presidential candidates since 1980.

The complexity of Pakistan was best exemplified by Vice President-elect Joe Biden. He argued, during a primary debate, that Pakistan’s nuclear threat was more pressing than that of Iran, yet emerged as a lead proponent of ending the reign of former dictator-turned-President Pervez Musharraf. (Conversely, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., stated that “while Gen. Musharraf is no Thomas Jefferson, he may be the only thing that stands between us and having an Islamic fundamentalist state in that country.”)

Musharraf’s legacy wasn’t one of Platonic statesmanship. Before his 2008 resignation, he did nothing for human rights, including women’s rights. Musharraf’s 2002 election victory merely transferred his dictatorship from the de jure to the de facto. And in what catalyzed his political end, he sacked the Supreme Court to secure his rule.

Nevertheless, Musharraf did increase control of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, which had featured al Qaeda and Taliban sympathizers and a history of co-opting militant groups to fight in the disputed Kashmir region, like the one that may have been responsible for the Mumbai onslaught, Lashkar-e-Taiba. He improved relations with India, deepened Islamists’ role in the political system as a form of moderation and aided in high-profile arrests.

The new Pakistani government, however, displayed more recalcitrance for policing militant groups than Musharraf did after the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. concerns over the lack of control of the ISI spiked after the new government took over. And because militants have operated more freely at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, you can chart the descending trajectory of the Afghanistan mission to the new leadership.

None of these realities has been mitigated by an upsurge in democratic norms. The governing partnership that supposedly embodied a return to the rule of law, President (and Bhutto’s widower) Asif Ali Zardari and the now-departed Nawaz Sharif, collapsed due to a disagreement over Zardari’s refusal to reinstate the same judges who were ousted by Musharraf.

Meanwhile, supporters of Pakistan’s political turn would have us believe that the fact that power has been transferred from one Bhutto family member to another (this during the country’s “democratic” periods) over the last 30-plus years and that the military has as much say in national security policy as the civil government are irrelevant. The fundamentals of the Pakistani democracy are anything but strong.

If last week’s events lead to the hardliner Hindu nationalist BJP party’s victory in India’s 2009 parliamentary elections, and the emboldening of Pakistani militants, the period when Musharraf and Singh headed these nuclear states will be seen as one of relative peace.

Our personal Sept. 11 lesson was that a near-sighted practice of supplanting democracy for geo-strategic interests could spawn a lethal threat in the unforeseeable future. Pakistan is far from the only country with significant obstacles to its democratic potential. Nevertheless, because it’s the likely source of the next attack on our soil and possesses nuclear weapons, Pakistan embodies the most complicated application of this rule.

This isn’t about what U.S.-Pakistan policy needs to be but what lens U.S.-Pakistan policy needs to be seen through. The Obama administration must showcase equal rights, an effective judiciary and an education system as a real option to the madrassas as non-negotiable tenets. But given Pakistan’s singular place as a security threat, or until there is more arable ground for democracy, every decision will have to run through the filter of immediate national security over long-term democratization.

As impolitic as it is to say, our security rests on seeing Pakistan as the semi-failed state that it is, not the burgeoning democracy that it isn’t.

Pakistan was the stage for candidate Obama’s foreign policy teeth. It will soon be the test of President Obama’s judiciousness: his ability to appropriately balance interests and to know when important rules don’t necessarily apply. Pakistan helped get him into the White House. And now it will help determine whether he stays.

Mikhail is a former staff writer for The Hill.
E-mail: davidmikhail@hotmail.com