We Don't Select Pakistan's President

We Don't Select Pakistan's President

by Mark Luedtke

You wouldn't know it from the media coverage of Pakistan, but Pakistan is not a US colony. Pakistan is a sovereign nation. Americans do not determine Pakistan's president, Pakistanis do. Somebody should tell that to Washington and media elites.

The first time I ever saw Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in a suit was after 9/11, right before we invaded Afghanistan. Before then, I'd only seen then General Musharraf in his Pakistani military uniform. The Pakistani military was the most trusted institution in a country renowned for radicalism and corruption, and Musharraf wore his uniform as a symbol of stability. Then the US pressured him to wear a suit for American consumption, trying to remake Musharraf in our image.

George Bush acted as if he had appointed, and the Senate had approved, Musharraf as territorial governor of the US colony of Pakistan. And liberals, who claim with one side of their mouths that our intervention in Iraq is a doomed mistake, use the other side to continually call for ever more interference in Pakistani affairs. Our interference in Pakistan has destroyed the Pakistani people's trust in the military, and with no trust in any government institutions, Pakistan is degenerating into chaos.

President Bush has adopted the liberal dream of forcing democracy on the rest of the world whether the world is ready or not. Never mind that democracy is another name for mob rule, a tyranny of the majority, but this shallow ideology worships elections at the expense of reason and consequences.

It takes more than an election to empower people to self-rule. A case in point is Musharraf's 2002 election as president. It takes democratic institutions including security, economic freedom, an educated electorate, control of borders and tolerance. The latter 4 are in short supply in Pakistan (and disappearing in America as well) as is security. Building democratic institutions in Pakistan will take time.

But our government wanted to impose its will on Pakistan immediately, so it promoted the fiction that an election in Pakistan would create stability. Fiction turned to fantasy when the US pressured Musharraf to repatriate Benazir Bhutto, whose corruption during her 2 terms as Prime Minister was historic even by Pakistani standards, and Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister who attempted to banish Musarraf in 1999, only to have Musharraf oust him in a coup and subsequently banish him instead.

The reason this sounds more like a Shakespearean play than a modern democracy is, despite modern technology and pockets of enlightenment, Pakistani culture is basically medieval. But that doesn't stop Washington from fantasizing that one election will magically transform this aristocratic government into a modern, self-governing state.

We have obtained crucial intelligence support from Pakistan in the War on Terror, but American hubris has undermined our interests in the region. The Taliban and al Qaeda continue to use the lawless regions of northwest Pakistan as a safe haven. Intelligence reports claim al Qaeda is gaining strength. It's commonly reported that Osama bin Laden is hiding in the same region. Pakistan's nuclear weapons are more vulnerable than ever. Pakistan has increased violence, a weakened military, a weakened leader, and popular Benazir Bhutto is dead. The details of the investigation of Bhutto's assassination have been washed away by fire hoses and political pressure in an obvious cover-up, but of what, we'll probably never know.

I have no idea if Pervez Musharraf should resign. He may well be the best man to keep a lid on the powder keg and eventually lead Pakistan to self-government. Or he may be too weakened to be an effective leader. He may well have ordered Bhutto's murder, or she could have been killed by the fundamentalist radicals she helped take power in Afghanistan.

Whether Musharraf resigns or not is not up to us. What we control is our foreign policy. A humble foreign policy focused on our national security interests would achieve greater results: insuring the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, disrupting the Taliban, al Qaeda and terrorist plots, and hunting Osama bin Laden. We should promote self-government in Pakistan by helping bolster democratic institutions as invited, treading lightly all the while. Fantasies of an election next month creating stability should be left to fiction writers. But the hubris of Washington and its media echo chamber is inconsistent with treading lightly, so any change for the better is unlikely.

Government is force. In order to restrict government, the founding fathers enumerated severely limited powers in the Constitution. They further expected government to be limited by citizen-representatives, spending most of their time working in the real world in their home districts, invested in the success of working class America, not in imperial Washington. Because we've abandoned Constitutional limits, allowed government to grow to titanic proportions and overwhelm our daily lives, we've allowed the development of a political class - America's lords and ladies. The hubris of this aristocratic class knows no limits at home or abroad, and our government is destroying countries overseas even faster than it's destroying America.

The solution is for free people to take back their freedom and power from government, to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government to Constitutional limits, to abolish the political class and re-empower citizen-representatives, and then to carry out a humble foreign policy limited to our interests while providing a model for freedom for everybody else in the world.