Let's be honest

The events of the last week in Pakistan have been unsettling to say the least. We went to war in Iraq to effect "regime change" and to end the rein of a brutal dictator. We have supported the current government of Musharraf. Yet we have hedged our bets by also supporting the return of Benazir Bhutto. It is clearly a mess, and now this political drama is spinning into a security drama.

This is not our first venture into the political and military affairs of Pakistan. We supported Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq, the man who executed Benazir Bhutto's father. The stated policy of backing whomever we think will yield the greatest U.S. interests dates back to George Kennan's 1948 State Department planning study which stated, "We should cease to talk about vague ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." This was the defacto State Department position for many years as the United States supported dictator after dictator. It was continued in the Reagan years and articulated by U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick who stated that it was better for the United States to deal with authoritarian regimes than communist regimes.

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The problem is that the Bush administration has painted itself into a corner. The U.S. trumpets support of democracy, (as in "one man one vote"), voices support for human rights as a fundamental policy of this government and then turns around and supports mini-dictators who put popular leaders under house arrest.

The fundamental Bush premise that democratically elected governments will be pro-U.S., is wrong. Take the Palestinian elections for example. Anyone with even modest Internet skills could have predicted that the result of the elections was not going to be on the side of the United State's interest.

We are less than honest as to our interests. The truth is that we want to crack down on the Pakistan insurgency and the radical brand of Islam that breeds al-Qaida soldiers, and we could care less if Pakistan has free elections. In fact, we would prefer they don't have free elections, because if they did, the most popular guy in Pakistan, AQ Kahn, the "hero" of Pakistan, would be elected by an overwhelming majority. Kahn, if you recall, developed Pakistan's nuclear program and is known throughout the world as the developer of the first Muslim atomic weapon.

We'd like for Dr. Kahn to stay under house arrest. We'd also like to question him as to who is on his nuclear recipe list, but we have not been allowed to question him despite the fact that the U.S. has given Pakistan more than $10 billion in military aid. Ironically, we are on the brink of war with Iran over the chance that they may be thinking of developing nuclear weapons, meanwhile, who knows what Dr. Khan has done with his knowledge. We'll never know because we're afraid of pushing our friend Gen. Musharraf.

Our policy toward Pakistan reminds me of someone who borrows on a credit card to pay the monthly home mortgage. They keep doing it, digging a hole deeper and deeper, with the hope that somehow it is going to get better in the future. The situation is likely to get worse. There have been well over a dozen attempts on the life of Musharraf. Benazir Bhutto isn't going to replace him to reign in peace and prosperity either. She returned to Pakistan, and there were more than 150 people killed while walking beside her motorcade within hours of her arrival. The Western provinces of the country are not even really governed by Musharraf. It would be like having Oregon, Washington and Idaho as independent states and expecting to have control over what takes place there.

The problem is that the United States has engaged in a form of imperialism that assumes that our form of democracy works as well in Islamabad and the West Bank as it does in Toledo. We support it and then we don't like what we get; we support a questionably elected "president," and we don't get stability or security from that either.

The only thing we can really do now is to stop pretending we support democracy and human rights and have an honest debate in this country. What are our real interests? Are our interests in preventing another 9/11, or in building up support for multi-national corporations to keep oil flowing? Do we really care about democracy and human rights? Who and what should we support and why? The risks are too great to not have this debate. We decided to "stop the Russians" in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and it spawned Osama Bin Laden. We risk the same situation now in Pakistan. We have spent a lot of money, turned a blind eye to the suppression of democracy, and pretended like their nuclear weapons and technology are in perfectly secure and capable hands. In short, we've empowered radical Islam while propping up another authoritarian leader whose days may be numbered. Sound familiar?