What is Pakistan to do with Musharraf?

I changed the title of this piece by Charles Krauthammer which was originally headed "What is American to do about Pakistan?" at Real Clear Politics. I am not sure of his premise which implies that Pakistan is ours to do something with.

Islamist barbarians are at the gates. The president declares de facto martial law. The country's democratic forces of the center and left, led by well-dressed lawyers and a former prime minister, take to the streets.

What is America to do about Pakistan? Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto knows just how to appeal to America. In a New York Times op-ed, she quotes President Bush back to himself: "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Bhutto (Harvard '73) is a good student of American politics. She caught Bush's democratic messianism at its apogee, the same inaugural address in which he set "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Universal democratization is lovely but it cannot be a description of day-to-day diplomacy. The blanket promise of always opposing dictatorship is inherently impossible to keep. It always requires considerations of local conditions and strategic necessity.

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President Pervez Musharraf was a good bet in 2001 when, under extreme pressure from the Bush administration, he flipped and joined our war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But like Marcos and Pinochet, he has now become near-terminally unpopular, illegitimate and destructive to his own country. Is it time to revisit the 1980s and help push him over the edge?

That depends on whether we think Benazir Bhutto is Corazon Aquino, and whether Bhutto and her allies can successfully take power, which means keeping both the army and the country intact. Heightening the risk of dumping Musharraf is that external conditions today are not like the relatively benign conditions of the 1980s. The Taliban and their allies are gaining in strength, and waiting to pick up the pieces from the civil war developing between the two most Westernized, most modernizing elements of Pakistani society -- the army, one of the few functioning institutions of the state, and the elite of civil society, including lawyers, jurists, journalists and students.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attempted to engineer a marriage of these two factions by trying to orchestrate Bhutto's return to Pakistan under a power-sharing agreement that Musharraf has just blown to pieces.

Our influence should not be overestimated. But we need to make clear our choices. The best among the awful ones Musharraf has presented us is to try to broker a truce between the two forces before the blood starts to flow, keep Musharraf to his promise of holding early parliamentary elections -- which Bhutto will win -- and then guarantee him a dignified and gradual exit that assures his protection while Bhutto and her allies claim legitimate authority and try to reach accommodation with Musharraf's successor as military chief.

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We must first look at what our interest in Pakistan is. Right now it is having them on our side in the war against the Islamist religious bigots who have a sanctuary in parts of Pakistan. Unfortunately, Musharraf appears to be largely AWOL in at least the public face of that battle. While he used the terrorist as an excuse for his latest crackdown, he has not cracked down on them, but on the lawyers and the judiciary which he deemed the most direct threat to his power. They and Bhutto probably were the most direct threat, but the question for the US is whether they were a threat to our primary interest, and the evidence so far is that they were not. That is one reason why the Bush administration's push for elections coincided with Bhutto's call for democracy.

Right now our real interest in Pakistan is in defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda units in the tribal areas. The Pakistan army's effort in that regard have been disastrous in recent days yet they refuse to invite us in to help. What Pakistan needs to know is that their continued failure will become an invitation for our intervention.