The (Ex) Washington Realist

I have to love the faith of the Washington Post editorial board in "secular democrats." Apparently, the solution to our problems in Pakistan is to bring back the "secular democrats" overthrown by Pervez Musharraf--another Putin-esque dictator who is too close to the Islamists.

These are the secular democrats whose electoral fortunes have been falling; whose inability to govern led to the whole coup in the first place; and who presided over both the nuclear test and support for the Taliban in the first place.

It's nice that troublesome facts don't have to intrude on editorializing.

Anatol Lieven presented a challenge in the recent issue of TNI about Pakistan--one the Post's editorial doesn't answer:


Unlike most of the Arab world, Pakistan has had several prolonged experiences of democratically elected parliamentary governments in the past, from 1947 to 1958, 1971 to 1977 and 1988 to 1999. None of these democratically elected governments succeeded in lifting the country out of mass poverty, and some were economically disastrous. All civilian governments have been guilty of corruption, election-rigging and the imprisonment or murder of political opponents, in some cases to a worse degree than the military administrations that followed.All of these periods involved serious unrest in some or all of Pakistan. The losing parties in elections have, as a rule, denounced these elections as rigged (which admittedly they often were) and encouraged the military to seize power. When the army eventually did so, in all three cases this was initially at least welcomed by a large majority of the population, utterly fed up with the experience of "democratic rule."Given these three previous experiences, to argue that if formal democracy were to be reintroduced in Pakistan tomorrow it would be radically different and better, one must be able to present credible evidence that something fundamental about Pakistan has changed radically for the better since the 1990s.


Surprising, too, the consistency we Americans have in labeling parties and countries democratic or not--and simply ignoring inconvenient facts. Does the following point Lieven makes about Pakistan bear some resemblance to the democratic forces we keep hearing about in many parts of the former Soviet Union?


In Pakistan the only true national political parties are those of some of the Islamists. The parties routinely described in the Western media as "democratic" are in fact congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses vowing more-or-less temporary allegiance to some national leader like Benazir Bhutto. As noted, all have been more than willing to adopt highly undemocratic methods when necessary. Most Pakistanis have fully accepted the form of democracy but are still far from truly accepting the content.


On another note: my latest contribution to the foreign policy debate--No "No-Cost" Solutions--now up at National Interest online.