Pakistan Beyond Musharraf: Let the Radiating Worries Begin

Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, finally and largely discredited after almost 10 years of heavy-handed misrule and failed promises, has resigned to avoid impeachment. But it’s not a brighter day for Pakistan. Musharraf’s departure lays bare the immense challenges facing this nation of 165 million Muslims and 60 nuclear bombs.

In 1998, the Clinton administration imposed economic and military sanctions on Pakistan for conducting nuclear tests. A year later, Pervez Musharraf took power in Pakistan in a coup, ousting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and putting him on trial. Musharraf was an ardent supporter and enabler of the Taliban in Afghanistan and a protégé of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the feared and wily ISI (Intyr-Services Intelligence).

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration embraced Musharraf as its best friend and ally in the so-called “war on terror” in south Asia. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell flew to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, with a set of demands from Pakistan, including stopping its sponsorship of the Taliban stopping al-Qaeda operatives from using the Afghan-Pakistan border like a revolving door, giving the United States military blanket overflight and landing rights, giving the United States intelligence and immigration information, stopping Pakistani volunteers from joining the Taliban, and ending support for the Taliban in any form.

“In so many words,” as Bob Woodward reported on Powell’s mission in Bush At War (2002), “Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage would be asking Pakistan to help destroy what its intelligence service had helped create and maintain: The Taliban.”

It was a wild bet that the Bush administration spent the last eight years pretending to have won. But Musharraf never switched sides. He played on both, never withdrawing Pakistan’s support for the Taliban entirely or reining in the ISI. The Taliban’s autonomy and insurgency in Pakistan’s northwest provinces has mushroomed as a result. The Taliban’s power in Afghanistan has spread again.

All this even though Pakistan has benefited from $12 billion in mostly military aid from the United States since 200—without producing more than a handful of results in the so-called war on terror. Yet on July 29, 2008, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to increase aid to Pakistan, to $1.5 billion a year over 10 years “We can’t keep jumping from one crisis to the next, relying on exceptional diplomats and military officers to save us from disaster,” Committee Chairman Joe Biden, the Delaware Democrat, said. “We need a new strategy, to set the relationship on a stable course.” But the United States has no such “new strategy,” and Pakistan isn’t volunteering one.

Pakistan itself is in a mess, its future made bleaker by a coalition government that seems incapable of governing.

Here’s a full analysis: "Pakistan Beyond Pervez Musharraf: Risks and Challenges."