Pakistan's Musharraf Sacks the Prime Minister

America's big ally in the Muslim world, Pakistan, remains a dictatorship with only the trappings of democracy. President Musharraf, who came to power in a coup d'etat replaced the prime minister apparently because he felt like it. It would be funny if it weren't so serious.

The Bush administration's Keystone Kops regime in Baghdad, and its half completed war in Afghanistan (where elections may be further postponed due to poor security) have left the Islamic world under the impression that American democracy is a nebulous thing at best. At worst, it is a pretext for crass imperialism. In short, they are suspicious of it.

In most parliamentary democracies, which Pakistan is in theory, the president is a titular head (e.g., Israel, Germany, India, Italy, Spain) with about as much power as the Queen of England. President Musharraf's actions prove that, whatever the constitutional arrangements in Pakistan, he is sovereign and not parliament.

That he has been a good ally to the Americans is beyond dispute. In the war against the Taliban, he actually made it possible to reach Afghanistan by permitting American forces to pass through Pakistani airspace. He has stood firm against his own security forces who helped the Fascislamists in Kabul create the nightmare regime that made the Soviet occupation look good. But he is not a democrat.

During the Cold War, the US backed some rather vicious regimes not because they were democratic but because they were on Washington's side (Augusto Pinochet in Chile comes to mind). And in the short-term, they were tolerable strategic decisions. In the long-run, though, they undermined America's claim to supporting freedom and democracy and gave life to nasty tweakers of the giant's nose like Fidel Castro.

As Yogi Berra, the baseball great, said, "It's deja vu all over again."


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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