U.S. Role in Bringing Pakistan to the Abyss By Ivan Eland - Independent

November 19, 2007

Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf is now teetering on the edge of the abyss, just as I predicted in the spring of 2007. He was pushed there by U.S. policy, and worse yet, his country is armed with nukes. To prevent the Pakistani Supreme Court from declaring him ineligible to serve another term as president, a role he won last month in dubious elections, the autocratic Musharraf has declared martial law and ousted the Supreme Court’s chief justice.

Although President George W. Bush has asked Musharraf to set an end date for the state of emergency, to hold elections, and to give up his powerful position as head of the armed forces, Bush has continued U.S. aid and recently described Musharraf as an ally America needs in order to fight al Qaeda. These signs of continued U.S. support have emboldened the spent Musharraf regime. Although Musharraf has set parliamentary elections for January, 2008, they will hardly be fair, unless martial law is lifted prior to the plebiscite. Meanwhile, the Pakistani population smolders with anger against the unpopular dictator, and in Pakistan’s northwest, Islamic militants are ascendant.

How did the Bush administration help create this mess? It all started in 2002. The Bush administration decided U.S. forces should stay and occupy Afghanistan after their successful invasion to oust the radical Islamist Taliban movement from power. Meddling in and occupation of Muslim lands by non-Muslims is what drives Islamists to violent acts—guerrilla warfare and terrorism. For example, American support for the corrupt Saudi Arabian regime, and U.S. military presence in holiest lands of Islam, led Osama bin Laden to launch his terrorist campaign against the United States. Similarly, continued U.S. and Western occupation of Afghanistan and the failed attempt to eradicate opium, the primary crop of the poor Afghan people, have led to Afghan disillusion with the West and increased support for a resurgent Taliban movement.

That’s where Pakistan comes in. The Pakistani intelligence services, in order to dominate Afghanistan, supported the Taliban in its original quest for power, and during its despotic rule. Although Musharraf, under intense pressure to switch sides after 9/11, rhetorically supported the U.S. “war on terror” and pocketed $10 billion in American aid, he needed the support of those same Islamists to survive in power. Thus, he never made a real effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, suspected to be hiding in northwest Pakistan. On the contrary, he pledged not to attack the Islamists in that area. Meanwhile, as with the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, U.S. backing and military assistance to the Musharraf government has fueled an Islamic resurgence in Pakistan, too.

Now it is within the realm of possibility to have a repeat of the 1978 situation in the Shah’s Iran. The population could become so enraged at a brutal dictator supported by the United States, that eventually a hostile radical Islamist government would take power. But this time, in Pakistan, it would be a regime with nuclear weapons—in short, an Islamic bomb. So the Bush administration may yet hand us the worst of all worlds: bin Laden and company still on the loose and again guarded by an Islamist regime, this time with nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration has continually exacerbated the threat of radical Islamism by refusing to see that U.S. meddling in Islamic nations is fueling the problem. Overt U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, along with U.S. backing and aid to Musharraf in Pakistan, have inflamed the entire region.

So after 9/11, what would have been a better U.S. policy? After the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States should have called a conclave of all Afghan groups and stated that Afghan governance was the business of Afghans; but if any Afghan government gave anti-U.S. terrorists sanctuary, the U.S. military would return with a vengeance. If the U.S. had employed such a policy, the Taliban likely would not be resurgent today.

As for Pakistan, for an entire year after 9/11, Musharraf quietly gave the United States free reign to nab bin Laden. But instead of using its covert forces quietly to take full advantage of this offer, the U.S. provided ostentatious diplomatic support and military aid, turning Pakistan—in the eyes of the Islamists—into an American puppet.

The first step toward a smarter policy in the region is to recognize that the United States is part of the problem. In Afghanistan, the United States still could do what it should have done after 9/11; withdrawing its forces would extinguish the fire of the Taliban resurgence. In Pakistan, Musharraf is likely to fall, but such a close U.S. hug for him makes it more likely that Islamists could eventually win power. So the U.S. should use Musharraf’s declaration of martial law as a reason to terminate all aid to his regime. The United States is so unpopular in the region that supporting a governing alliance between Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto would probably delegitimize even the middle ground in Pakistan. For moderate forces to have the best chance in that nuclear-armed nation, the United States, paradoxically, should refrain from supporting them, and stay out of Pakistani politics.

Instead of taking its eye off the ball and continuing to take actions that make radical Islamism and anti-U.S. terrorism worse, the Bush administration should content itself with obtaining better intelligence on the whereabouts of bin Laden and his associates. If such information is found, the United States should take quiet, unilateral action to capture or kill them.

Randal R. Rucker is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University, and co-author (with E.C. Pasour, Jr.) of Plowshares & Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture.

Charles V. Peña is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute as well as a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, senior fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, and an adviser on the Straus Military Reform Project.

William Ratliff is Adjunct Fellow at the Independent Institute, Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a frequent writer on Chinese and Cuban foreign policies.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office, and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Full Biography and Recent Publications

Jonathan J. Bean is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the forthcoming book, Race and Liberty: The Classical Liberal Tradition of Civil Rights.

Anthony Gregory is a Research Analyst at The Independent Institute. He earned his bachelor's degree in American history from the University of California at Berkeley and gave the undergraduate history commencement speech in 2003. In addition to his work with the Independent Institute, he regularly writes for numerous news and commentary web sites, including LewRockwell.com, Future of Freedom Foundation, and the Rational Review.
Full Biography and Recent Publications

Dominick T. Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford (Connecticut) and a research fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. He is author of Antitrust & Monopoly (Independent Institute, 1998).

Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics. He is widely published and has lectured on world economic and political issues including at the Mont Pelerin Society, Naumann Foundation (Germany), FAES Foundation (Spain), Brazilian Institute of Business Studies, Fundación Libertad (Argentina), CEDICE Foundation (Venezuela), Florida International University, and the Ecuadorian Chamber of Commerce. He is the author of the Independent Institute books The Che Guevara Myth and Liberty for Latin America. Full biography and recent publications.

Pierre Lemieux is an economist and co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Université du Québec en Outaouais and a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

Alexander Tabarrok is research director at The Independent Institute, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, editor of the Independent Institute books, Entrepreneurial Economics, The Voluntary City (with D. Beito and P. Gordon), and Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, author of Against Leviathan and Crisis and Leviathan, and editor of the scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. Click here for a bio on Dr. Higgs, the noted economist and historian.

William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Atlantic University.

David T. Beito is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and co-editor of the book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society.

William Marina and David T. Beito belong to "Liberty and Power," a group blog at the History News Network.

For further articles and studies, see the Center on Peace & Liberty and OnPower.org.

Nicolas Heidorn is a public policy intern at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

New from Ivan Eland!
THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed
Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Buy It Today.