Opinion

Bring Back American Ideals in Pakistan Debate
By Professor Akbar Ahmed
Washington, DC

The images on TV of lawyers being thrashed in President Musharraf's Emergency are for me extremely disturbing and evidence of a serious breakdown of society. Pakistan was created by M.A. Jinnah, the quintessential lawyer. He created what in 1947 was the largest Muslim nation on earth within the confines of the law and without ever going to jail or engaging in violence of any kind. He founded the country on the basis of democracy, human rights, minority and women's rights.
So what happened? How has Pakistan degenerated from a Muslim democracy founded on women’s rights and religious freedom (Jinnah spent the last Christmas before he died with the Christian community) to a military dictatorship with (despite massive levels of US military aid) some of the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the world?
Growing up in Pakistan as a young boy I looked up to America as a land of giants, standing up for freedom and liberty, a land that produced John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X. I saw many similarities in Jinnah’s and America's vision of the world. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated I mourned. For us, Kennedy was not just an American but a giant of the world who vowed to fight poverty, injustice, and send man to the moon.
During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s Pakistan and the US were closely allied in the fight against the USSR in the Cold War. In 1962 Khrushchev drew a circle around Peshawar and threatened to nuke the city after it was discovered that the U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union had originated from a US airbase there. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, Muslims in Pakistan were grateful to their American friends for helping them to defend Afghanistan and bleed the "Evil Empire." (The image of Ronald Reagan at the White House hailing a ragtag group of bearded mujahideen from Afghanistan was for me one of the most enduring images of the Cold War.)
Today people in Pakistan contemptuously call Musharraf "Busharraf" because he is seen as too close to the Americans. Militancy is out of control in the tribal areas, and increasingly in settled areas like the Swat region. Churches and girls’ schools are being attacked. Earlier this year a Member of Parliament in Islamabad said that the nation should declare a jihad against US forces. This was not a firebrand mullah, but a member of government. It was unprecedented.
After 9/11 the US had a clear choice. Should it respond with anger or take a high moral ground and put money into health and education, addressing the root causes of the anger that had spurred 19 individuals to launch those horrific attacks. The US chose to respond in anger, venting its fury first on Afghanistan, then Iraq. It supported military dictators such as those in Egypt and Uzbekistan in the hopes they would capture and kill "terrorists," a murky and undefined enemy. Pakistan was given billions of dollars for this mission; President Bush designated the country America's number one non-NATO ally. Perhaps America should have heeded Benjamin Franklin's warning: "Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame."
Remarks in the American media defaming Islam -- popular after 9/11 as Islamophobia hit the roof in the West -- only served to make America's job more difficult. After the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson called the Prophet Muhammad a pedophile and a terrorist, mullahs in Pakistan’s Frontier Province swept the 2002 elections by claiming that America was defaming Islam. (Previously they had gotten no more than 5-10% of the vote.) Today Talibanization and anti-Americanism are rampant in the Province.
The US is scoring an “own goal” in its fight against terrorism by blindly supporting Musharraf at the expense of true democracy in Pakistan and in other Muslim countries. That struggle is beamed throughout the Muslim world on satellite television and the Internet. Pakistan needs more money for health and education programs and fewer guns and missiles, which Pakistanis complain are used to kill them. It also needs a more robust American diplomacy based on notions of honor, respect, and dignity.
All we've heard recently in both the US and the Muslim world are debates about water-boarding, torture, and rendition - all of which fly in the face of the American founding fathers' bold vision of a new kind of tolerant society. That old, tolerant vision is why Pakistan and other countries in the Muslim world were once staunchly pro-American. The US must recapture those ideals, which match with the ideals of Islam and encourage Muslim countries like Pakistan to rediscover them in their own societies. Instead, the US seems only interested in bombs and propping up corrupt and violent governments at the expense of alienating entire populations. But with 1.4 billion Muslims living in 57 states, with Pakistan nuclear and more countries on the way, with China and Russia emerging as global rivals, this is something the US just can't afford to do.
These are the first and most important steps to be taken by Washington: to clearly and unambiguously move Musharraf towards unfettered democracy, a signal to all dictators everywhere. He must prepare for and ensure free and fair elections, lift the emergency, reinstate the judges he has sacked, reinstate a free media and the Constitution and take off his military uniform. A failed Pakistan will mean the collapse of America’s war on terror on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and global consequences. Failure in Pakistan is therefore not an option.
Professor Akbar Ahmed is Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University and is author of Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (Brookings, 2007).

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