Pakistan brings a return of the neocons

Opinion Journal:

Whatever Pervez Musharraf's failings in Islamabad, his impact in Washington has been nothing short of miraculous. With his declaration of emergency rule, the Pakistan President has single-handedly revived the Bush Doctrine. The same people who only days ago were deriding President Bush for naively promoting democracy are now denouncing him for not promoting it enough in Pakistan.

"We have to move from a Musharraf to a Pakistan policy," declared Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden on Thursday. "Pakistan has strong democratic traditions and a large, moderate majority. But that moderate majority must have a voice in the system and an outlet with elections. If not, moderates may find that they have no choice but to make common cause with extremists, just as the Shah's opponents did in Iran three decades ago."

Joe Biden, neocon.

The Senator's epiphany underscores that Pakistan has long been the playground not of democracy promoters but of the foreign-policy "realists." General Musharraf may have taken power in a coup, but when Colin Powell famously gave him the for-us-or-against-us choice after 9/11, the general chose "for." He is a U.S. ally in a rough neighborhood, his government captured such al Qaeda bigs as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and as an authoritarian he was of the moderate kind. The Bush Administration did push Mr. Musharraf to restore democratic legitimacy, but quietly and without great urgency. Brent Scowcroft would have approved.

We don't summarize this history to deride it the way Mr. Biden and many neocons-come-lately are. There are exceptions to every foreign-policy rule, and sometimes democracy promotion must compete with other American interests, such as the need to pursue al Qaeda. In the Cold War, Americans often had little choice but to support authoritarian rulers who were allies in the larger struggle against Communism. Sometimes the alternatives are worse, and Pakistan is a hard case.

Clearly, however, this calculation has to change after Mr. Musharraf's "emergency" declaration. His arrest of lawyers, human-rights activists and political opponents shows that his main targets aren't Islamists. They are the pro-Western parts of Pakistan civil society that oppose Islamism more than the general does. He is making a heavy-handed play to avoid a Supreme Court ruling against his recent Presidential election, and he has undermined the talks he was having with opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on a transition to democracy. As a national leader, he has made himself even less legitimate.

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There are signs that Musharraf is already backing down. CNN reports that Bhutto is free to demonstrate agains and that the country's attorney general has said the the emergency declaration will be lifted within one month. That is a much shorter time frame than the Pakistani government originally predicted.

I think President Bush is largely responsible for the change in attitude. One of the interesting aspects of the demonstrations in Pakistan is the lack of any anti American stage craft that usually goes with these affairs in Pakistan. I think Bhutto and her followers sensed that the US was their best hope to restore democracy.

Musharraf really hurt his case when he said the emergency measure was needed to crack down on Islamist, then proceeded to ignore them and cracked down instead on lawyers and the courts. It has been his failure to crack down on the Islamist that has brought his government to crisis. You would think that we be the area he would focus on in his emergency.