US, Pakistan: Personality politics

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto brought to an abrupt end the Bush administration’s policy of arranging a shotgun marriage between the slain leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the country’s president, Pervez Musharraf.

The former prime minister’s return to Pakistan after eight years of exile was accompanied by strenuous efforts from Washington to broker a power sharing agreement between Bhutto and Musharraf. Bhutto was regarded in Washington as more secular, more moderate and more determined to fight Islamic extremists than any of Pakistan’s political alternatives, including the other principal opposition leader, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Even after the power-sharing talks broke down, Musharraf and Bhutto could still have come to an accord after the parliamentary elections, originally scheduled for 8 January and now postponed until 18 February.

Personality vs process

The Bush administration’s efforts in Pakistan - and their ultimate failure - illustrates the problems associated with a policy based on personality rather than process.

In November, President George W Bush described Musharraf, much to the consternation of administration critics, as "truly somebody who believes in democracy." This, after Musharraf imposed emergency rule, shut down media outlets, dismissed the judiciary and jailed thousands of lawyers and activists.

Support for Bhutto was also based more on name recognition than on the advancement of democracy in Pakistan. The reins of her PPP were assumed by her 19-year-old son after her death, indicating the continuation of personality-based politics and the lack of political depth offered by her movement.

With Bhutto’s demise and, more so, with the end of the Bush administration on the horizon, many Washington policy thinkers are pushing for a different kind of strategy towards Pakistan, especially as it regards the structure US aid.

Change advocates would dial back all-purpose military aid and instead direct aid toward the promotion of economic and social development, education reform and free elections. The process of leveraging aid to achieve political results is already under way.

“Bush placed nearly all his eggs in Musharraf’s basket and now that basket is badly leaking,” Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, told ISN Security Watch.

Nor is the administration excited about the prospects of a return of Nawaz Sharif.

“Sharif cozied up to religious conservatives and supported the passage of a shari’a law in the 1990s,” Hathaway added. “He also moved against the media and judiciary and conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1988. The administration believes Nawaz would not enthusiastically fight Islamic extremists.”

Tortured relations

The US-Pakistan relationship has been a tortured one, characterized, critics say, by ad hoc, reactive and short-term thinking.

During the 1980s, Pakistan was regarded as a US strategic ally for its support of anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan. But with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1988 and the end of the Cold War, US aid dropped from US$726 million in 1988 to US$24 million four years later. This on-again, off-again history of US assistance has left Pakistan’s leaders and its people with serious concerns about the depth and reliability of the US commitment.

After 9/11, the relationship was on again, once Musharraf perceived that his better interests lay in cooperation with Washington than in continued support of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Since then, US aid has surged, mostly in the form of massiv