By PLS
It seems that some American officials have fastened upon another Great White Hope for Pakistan. A General by the name of Kayani. He's the guy handpicked by retiring General cum President Musharraf to lead the military once he (finally) donned mufti. Reading about him, I was fascinated to discover that I too felt a thrill of hope. He’s had experience with the American military.
His career has included repeated military education in the United States. He received training in Fort Benning, Ga., and graduated from the Command and General Staff College run by the United States Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He also attended a 13-week executive studies course at the Asia Pacific Center of Security Studies in Hawaii in the late 1990s.
So he’s our man. He’ll act like an American.
Whoops! How easy it is to slide into that cozy mode, even for me. Fortunately I recovered pretty quickly, remembering the hellhouse that was the School of the Americas, which helped to produce some pretty vicious military leaders in Latin America. Guatamala, the scene of a genocide directed toward indigenous peoples of Maya-descent, is one such example—and one example should be enough. Of course, there was also some previous American influence on the Argentine military who specialized in the magic of making people disappear. Well, not magic. People got dumped, dead, into the ocean, which does tend to prevent the embarrassing appearance of a corpus delicti.
On the other hand, and this is a very new and very depressing thought, maybe these Latin American murderers weren’t the aberrations that some of us wanted to believe they were. The United States, under the Bush Administration, is on record as favoring “harsh interrogation techniques” aka torture and the administration also condones the disappearing of inconvenient people under “special rendition” programs. Remember Chile? We backed Pinochet, the one who rounded up the opposition, tortured them and rendered them defunct.
But even if we weren’t (and aren’t) purposely training monsters, there’s also this: smart people who are recruited for American exposure aren’t idiots. Doesn’t it ever occur to our military attachés that the shining stars they recruit as future tools of American policy will be out to use us, that they might have as a goal learning more about how to manipulate us to their ends? I often felt that in Pakistan. Pakistani leaders with American experience knew us far better then we knew them. They were very suavely manipulating us, and it often seemed to me that our diplomats in Pakistan didn’t realize that.
So maybe we are a shining light unto the world, but not always unto the human rights supporters some of us would prefer to inspire. US exposure is no guarantee of democratic, US-favoring or even of civilized behavior by foreign military personnel. Gaining long term friendship is worth a try, of course, but US recruiters’ hopes for future influence should be realistic, if not modest.
But there’s another reason to be concerned about US reactions to the identity of the new Pakistani Chief of Staff: the administration evidently expects this guy to be a force for “stability” in Pakistan. Evidently there’s also an expectation that he will not quickly work to undermine his recent superior who is now the more or less legal President of Pakistan. Well, Zia ul-Haq, another military dictator is an excellent example of what happens when you expect loyalty of those you appoint to high position. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir’s father) made Zia Chief of Staff. Zia hung Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The result was stability of a sort. A repressive military dictatorship that ended only with a still mysterious helicopter crash.
Over and over again in Pakistan’s history generals have aborted the democratic process and American officialdom has responded with relief. The messy business of democracy is over! Things have been simplified. We know who to deal with. But the “problem” of Pakistan has never been solved, perhaps because American policy makers are attempting to make a very different country into a mini-America, which will never happen.
Meanwhile, in our time, military regimes are, at best, intermissions. Sooner or later the bloody play must go on. And these days it is going to be sooner, not later. The hope for Pakistan does not lie in the character of the new Chief of Staff, who for all his supposed good qualities is unfortunately reputed to be loyal above all to the army itself, but in the working out of the messy business of democratic politics. This may result in a regime we don’t like. But rejecting or resisting a popularly chosen regime is not as easy these days as it was when the CIA was toppling regimes like ten pins. Otherwise Hamas would not still be in power in the tiny patch of land known as Gaza.