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When pet dictators go bad

Washington’s big plan for dealing with its favorite dictator pretty much amounted to whistling past the graveyard. Well, the boogeyman has done jumped out, and we’re…well, still whistling.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of martial law was a wake-up call for Washington, leaving the future alliance with the Pakistani president in question.

Even before Saturday’s crackdown, U.S. State Department officials said they had struggled with what to do if Musharraf went through with his threat. They didn’t know then, and they don’t know now.

“Frankly, it ain’t easy,” one official said. “We are looking at our options, and none of them are good.”

Hmp. So much for the U.S. Understatement Department.

For the past six years, I have been unable to read any reference to Musharraf, Pakistan, and what used to be called the global war on terror without thinking of a 2001 column by Bill McClellan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In that column, McClellan quoted liberally from a letter written by a left-leaning acquaintance. The subject was the freshly-made American alliance with Pakistan, a topic that left the letter writer deeply troubled. This is the money quote about Musharraf, the one that has always stayed with me:

If he and President Bush claim to be in agreement it can only be because they aren’t talking about the same thing.

And that much should now be clear to everybody.

I hope McClellan revisits that prescient column. It would be, well, timely.

Addendum: Juan Cole helps clarify the whole “not talking about the same thing” part of all this:

See the important string of live-blogging posts by Barnett Rubin at our Global Affairs site. Rubin is in Islamabad. He points out that Musharraf has been invoking the need to fight Muslim extremism as a pretext for his coup. But in fact, he made the (further) coup because the Pakistani Supreme Court had unanimously decided that he was ineligible to run for president, and he hasn’t cracked down on the radio station of Fazlur Rahman in the north (one of the Pakistani clerics who trained the Taliban and who denies that al-Qaeda exists). He has cracked down on civilian Supreme Court justices, on lawyers, and other distinctly secular, middle class forces in Pakistani society (along with officials of the Jama’at-i Islami, the Pakistani equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has not for the most part been violent).

In fact, the Muslim extremists are in the tribal areas, and in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the hardscrabble towns and villages of northern Punjab. If you were worried about the extremists, you’d declare martial law in the NWFP and the tribal areas. Instead, Musharraf is said to be planning to give in to the demand in these northern areas that sharia or Islamic canon law be implemented! This is a defender of secularism?

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