How
Pakistan’s president is scamming the West.
By Fatima Bhutto
President
Asif Ali Zardari, less than a year into his reign, has managed to engage
Pakistan’s armed forces, the seventh largest army in the world, in a guerrilla
war with the newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, our very own Taliban, in
the North West Frontier Province. Rumors of Talibanization air daily on
Pakistani television, radio and print media: The barbarians are at the gate, we
are told, and warned that if there was a time to rally around the nation’s
oleaginous president, a man known locally as “President Ghadari” or traitor in
Urdu, this is it. However, the time for scaremongering has past -- it is
precisely President Zardari’s politically expedient use of national hysteria
that has seen American drones welcomed over Pakistan’s airspace and has birthed
a war that this government cannot win.
In
the aftermath and fallout of 9/11, Pakistan saw its elite -- the power brokers
of the country’s politics and economy -- turn against their traditional allies,
the United States for the first time. As U.S. forces occupied first Afghanistan
and then Iraq, Pakistan’s elite took an unexpected turn; they welcomed
resistance to American foreign policy and supported, as they had never quite
done before, Islamic parties that took control of local government and
provincial cabinet positions in the North West Frontier Province.
Islamic
parties in Pakistan traditionally perform poorly in national elections --
garnering only a handful of seats in the assembly, but the 2002 elections saw
them enter coalitions and alliances that brought them to power on the national
level. For the nation’s elite, a powerful but small minority and the stronghold
of Western interests, this was a dangerous turn of events.
In
2008, months after taking power in a hastily organized parliamentary election,
Zardari drew upon Pakistan’s overwhelmingly anti-American sentiment and
empowered the nascent domestic Taliban, which entered prominence roughly at the
same time that the president did, by capitulating to their demands for sharia law in the Swat Valley (the very
same region that the government is now, one month later, bombarding with
American assistance).
With
one hand, Zardari gave the militants what they wanted -- no vote or referendum
was held -- and Taliban law was imposed on the Swat Valley by force. With the
other, Zardari pointed a crooked finger at the rise of fundamentalism and
capitalized on a golden opportunity to bring the nation’s elite back into the
government’s obsequiously pro-American fold.
The
Taliban were pointed out as the largest threat facing the urban elite of
Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore -- they threatened our values, our dress, our lives, and they had to be dealt with
for us to remain safe. While the Taliban have certainly made inroads into
Pakistan in the last year, there is no doubt that they were only able to do so with
the consent of the government, a very powerful backer. Without the government
aiding and abetting the Taliban (as in the Swat Valley), they have a long way
to go before they can exercise power in any cohesive manner.
Zardari’s
double game may have brought him billions more in American aid and assistance
-- U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke being the president’s loudest champion in
Washington, warning Congress that if billions of dollars are not delivered
immediately to Pakistan the war on terror will be in mortal danger -- but it
has lost him Pakistan. As we watch the number of internally displaced people
rise steadily toward two million our army kills our own citizens, it should
come as no surprise when the BBC Urdu service reveals that the government
controls only 38 percent of the NWFP province -- a number that is sure to fall
as the weeks go on.
Fatima Bhutto writes
for the New Statesman and the Daily
Beast. She is working on a book on
Pakistan to be published in 2010. She is a niece of Benazir Bhutto, who was married to Asif Ali Zardari.
Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
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