Seeker Blog

But, as usual, democracy has surprised us. And on this occasion it has been a pleasant surprise.

More insights on the electoral failures of Islamist parties comes from The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan. As typical of Sheridan, the entire article is recommended. I’ll highlight just the segment correcting a common media theme:

One line of analysis that is quite wrong is to see the repudiation of Musharraf as a setback for the US, because Washington had given him some support.

This is analytically just plain wrong. Washington often does have to co-operate with dictators. That’s the nature of the real world. After 9/11, the US got Musharraf to turn Pakistani policy, at least at the official level, on its head and to co-operate in the fight against terror. This was necessary to remove the totalitarian and savage Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks on the US.

However, the US is constantly slandered over its dealings with dictators. In every case, while the US may need to co-operate with a dictator for urgent strategic and often enough humanitarian reasons, it always urges the dictator to liberalise and to return to democracy.

It is highly likely that without US pressure Musharraf may not have held elections at all, and may have decided to suspend the constitution indefinitely.

In so far as Musharraf was ineffective in combating terrorism and extremism, and failed to develop a civil society to form the basis of a democracy, it is not because he was associated with the Americans but precisely because he so often purused policies opposite to American advice.

The Americans always wanted him out of his uniform if he was going to be president. They wanted extremism confronted, which he never really did. They wanted the military out of politics, the reverse of Musharraf’s direction. They wanted a clear constitutional path followed, whereas Musharraf ripped up the constitution.

The most pro-American politician in recent years in Pakistan was the late Benazir Bhutto, and her party has just won a slashing victory.

In this week of momentous events it is worth reflecting on the quality and purpose of American influence in the world.

Kosovo is a newly independent, Muslim-majority nation that won its independence from nominally Christian Serbia. Its independence, and the avoidance by its population of ethnic cleansing or genocide, are a result entirely of US military power.

Yet, isn’t the US on a crusade against Islam?

In Cuba, the chief non-Islamic voice of anti-Americanism over the past 50 years, Fidel Castro, has, in the way of socialist dynasties throughout the world, handed over power to his brother. Thus, five decades of one-man Stalinist rule ends only because of ill health and involves power being retained by the royal family of Cuban communism.

So American influence means limits on dictators, elections, self-determination and independence, and anti-American radical chic means 50 years of Stalinism and poverty.

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