U.S. Embrace of Musharraf Irks Pakistanis
Bush's insistence on embracing Musharraf, despite his firm rejection by the Pakistani electorate, is leading to a wave of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.
As I've always said, Bush has no Pakistani policy and has only a Musharraf policy. But watching him cling to Musharraf's coat tails after Musharraf has been rejected by the electorate is to watch Bush set fire to his own legacy which was supposed to include a love of democracy.That support has rankled the public, politicians and journalists here, inciting deep anger at what is perceived as American meddling and the refusal of Washington to embrace the new, democratically elected government. John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, said Thursday during a Senate panel hearing that the United States would maintain its close ties to Mr. Musharraf.
Pakistanis say the Bush administration is grossly misjudging the political mood in Pakistan and squandering an opportunity to win support from the Pakistani public for its fight against terrorism. The opposition parties that won the Feb. 18 parliamentary elections say they are moderate and pro-American. By working with them, analysts say, Washington could gain a vital, new ally.
The American insistence that Mr. Musharraf play a significant role, they say, will only draw out a power struggle with the president and distract the new government from pushing ahead with alternatives to Mr. Musharraf’s policies on the economy and terrorism, which are widely viewed here as having failed.
“I’ve never seen such an irrational, impractical move on the part of the United States,” said Rasul Baksh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. “The whole country has voted against Musharraf. This was a referendum against Musharraf.”
Pakistan's newspaper editorials are full of requests that the Americans back off:
The truth is that Bush wants Musharraf because he knows him and, as we have seen with Rumsfeld and various other members of his own administration, Bush likes that with which he is familiar and is, therefore, highly resistant to change.Typical of the outrage was an editorial published Sunday by The News, an English-language newspaper, with the headline “Hands Off, Please!”
“No further efforts must be made to intervene in the democratic process in Pakistan,” the editorial read. “The man who the U.S. continues to back has in many ways become a central part of Pakistan’s problems.”
But the notion that the US is not interfering here and that it is operating a "neutral" policy, as they are claiming, is simply laughable on it's face.
During his Senate hearing on Thursday, Mr. Negroponte said, “I think we would, as a general proposition, urge that the moderate political forces work together, and of course President Musharraf is still the president of his country, and we look forward to continuing to work well with him as well.”Well, he'd to fire the judiciary to stop them overturning that piece of political theatre, as I'm sure Negroponte is well aware. However, the Bush administration - these self styled lovers and exporters of democracy - have airbrushed that inconvenient fact out of their Pakistan fact sheet. Now he's simply the President, an immovable fact, and we should not bother ourselves with trifles like how he came to be re-elected.
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