Ross, on Moveable Feast, writes:
Despite the prevailing opinion, Benazir’s death may offer new hope for democratic values: rights, the rule of law, and law enforcement.
Benazir Bhutto gave Pakistan false hope of these enlightened values two decades ago. In a shocking display of ineptitude, Pakistan’s first woman prime minister failed to pass a single piece of major legislation during her first 20 months in power. According to Amnesty International, Bhutto’s particular brand of democracy while in office - in the words of historian William Dalrymple, “elective feudalism” - brought some of the world’s highest numbers of extrajudicial killings, torture, and custodial deaths. Transparency International characterized hers as one of the world’s most corrupt governments.
Your post was objectively correct, but incomplete. It doesn’t look at the big picture.
The PPP was formed by her father with a socialist program. People perceive the PPP as the party that represents the poor.
My comrades are in parliment, representing the PPP, fighting for its old program. Pakistani progressives can’t go to the next step, until illusions about the PPP are dealt with.
I have two reactions:
1. Ends and Mean and populism.
All hail Bhutto, fallen martyr of democracy! No, she wasn’t much of a democrat in life, but so what? She’s dead. Now we can use here characters to write our own fanfic, and use her reputation to promote our own agendas.
Populist demagoguery makes me despair for democracy. But it seems unavoidable, so why not use it when you can? John Kennedy could talk a good game for civil rights, but never really did much. But allegedly his martyrdom was no small factor in getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act adopted.
Ends justifies the means, no?
2. How strong should the US’s commitment to democracy be?
The fight to build and preserve a pluralistic government in Afghanistan is indelibly linked to the US. And the US ain’t all that popular in the world right now. The US has managed to taint the vary causes it purports to espouse.
I understand international law to establish the Tiffany’s Principle: where other nations are concerned, if you break it you bought it. The international community – under the US’s leadership, to be sure – broke up the old Afghanistan regime, the Taliban. So we have some moral (and putatively legal) duty to support the creation of a new regime here.
But given the fact that Afghanistan’s regime is associated with the US, and the US has made itself unpopular the world over, it may well be the case that a truly democratic regime in Pakistan would be a rabidly anti-American with sympathies toward the Taliban.
So imagine we face the following choice:
A. Support democracy in Pakistan, even if this leads to the rise of Taliban-type regimes in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
B. Support the status quo in Pakistan (secular military dictatorship with the form of a democracy) that supports the rise of stable, plural regime in Afghanistan, a nation to which we own a moral and legal duty.
Whadaya say?
Few thoughts.
I think it’s silly to view our Pakistan policy in the light of Afghanistan. Pakistan is much more important to us than Afghanistan. It’s a much larger and more influential country, and it’s got nuclear weapons. If Pakistan goes to pieces, it could mean regional war with India and catastrophe; I think that Afghanistan is just a lot less important.
Afghanistan is highly disorganized and wretchedly poor. I think it’s very hard to have a functional state in a place with pervasive illiteracy, powerful warlords, deep ethnic tensions, and no real wealth to pay for a central government. I don’t think there’s any real chance of turning Afghanistan into a modern nation-state within a generation. Realistically, the best we can hope for is to suppress the most overt and nasty enemies of the central government, and hope to contain the civil war to a point where the government can establish a reasonably quiet balance of power.
So if we had to pick one, it should clearly be Pakistan.
That said — I’m not sure we have real options here. Any democratic politician who needs our help to get elected probably can’t hold on. If there isn’t enough of a constituency for constitutional government, we can’t really impose it. I think our best bet is to make clear that we’ll deal with whoever’s in charge over there, without getting to enmeshed in Pakistan’s domestic politics. Also, pragmatically, I don’t think we have enough insight into Pakistani politics to do this without blundering badly. Better to leave well enough alone, and not intervene except to prevent real catastrophe.