Background On Pakistan:”Why Bhutto and the Elites Hate Musharaf”
December 28, 2007
From the WSJ, January 14, 2007.
Why Bhutto and the Elites Hate Musharaf
As prime minister of Pakistan, Ms. Bhutto proved to be one of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia and was dismissed in November 1996 by Pakistan’s president for what he called her regime’s “nepotism, corruption” and “mismanagement.” During her chaotic administration in the mid-1990s scores of people were being murdered in the streets of Karachi every day.
Her return to power, or that of her Pakistani People’s Party, would almost certainly trigger a return to anarchy and open the door to a Taliban-style fundamentalist coup. Ms. Bhutto dismisses this possibility as “nonsense,” asserting that “more than two-thirds of Pakistanis are distinctly moderate” in their religious views.
The same appeared true of Iranians in 1979 as well. But when Iranian liberals and human rights activists convinced the U.S. to withdraw support from the shah, just as today’s Pakistani liberals are urging us to do to Gen. Musharraf, the result was Ayatollah Khomeini.
Khomeini’s Tehran successors would do anything to bring a similar radical Islamic republic to power across the border in Pakistan — especially if it meant gaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
The current hatred of Gen. Musharraf has little to do with the nature of his government. His real “crime” is that he is a Muhajir, the son of one of millions of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan during partition in 1947. Although it was Muhajirs who agitated for the creation of Pakistan in the first place, many native Pakistanis view them with contempt and treat them as third-class citizens.
Ms. Bhutto herself, as prime minister in the summer of 1995, referred to Pakistan’s Muhajirs as “rats” and said they had “bad blood.” In an interview with India Today, a Muhajir spokesman responded that “we have bad blood; it was this blood that built this country.”
Even for Western-educated Pakistanis like Ms. Bhutto (the scion of an elite Sindhi family), the sight of a common Muhajir like Gen. Musharraf as Pakistan’s supreme power holder is intolerable. Pushing for his fall has little to do with “a return to democracy.” It is far more a matter of restoring Pakistan’s equivalent of Jim Crow.
Gen. Musharraf has not only been a good ally for America, he has been good for Pakistan: Per-capita wealth and income have advanced significantly; tensions with India over Kashmir, which at one point in 1999 led Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war, have eased. At considerable risk to himself, Gen. Musharraf has tried to rein in the forces of jihadism and end foreign support for fundamentalist madrassas.
His regime has hardly been perfect. However, compared with the Maliki government in Iraq, its record is impressive, especially in fostering a safe, relatively open and secular Pakistan. Yet it is precisely that Pakistan that the country’s liberal elites now want to put at risk, thanks to their hatred of Gen. Musharraf. Ms. Bhutto’s column is not only an exercise in hypocrisy, it is a display of short-sightedness on a massive and tragic scale.
The article was written by Arthur Herman.
See Fausta’s complete Bhutto roundup. It’s a great resource.
December 29, 2007 at 9:35 AM
I’m getting worried about the dianization of Bhutto. Hillary is attacking Bush for not being tough enough on Musharrif, but what was the co-president doing while the Bhutto clan was deposting Pakistan’s wealth into private Swiss accounts? Was she working to beef up our intelligence services to meet the threat of emerging jihadis? Well no; the previous administration was cutting budgets. Was she encouraging the Pakistan governments to set up alternatives to the madrassas? I don’t remember hearing about it. What was she doing? Oh, I almost forgot, there were all those bimbo eruptions.
Neither Bush nor America created the problems in Pakistan. They were created by Pakistanis, including the elites who learned how to game us with talk about democracy while they were building mausoleums to their family martyrs instead of schools with lunch programs. I am not about to beat my breast over America’s mistakes. They are miniscule compared to those of the home-grown Rodeo Drive-clad feudal tyrants.
December 29, 2007 at 10:30 AM
Regardless of who Benazir Bhutto was or what kind of crimes she may have committed, we are now dealing with her absence and with what people expected of her, rightly or wrongly. We are not dealing with her, but with the person people expected her to be. If that’s an impossible situation, then the sooner we get away from it the better, and that means focussing our attention and theirs on the current situation.