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Published in Japan Times Jan.4th 2008
Article for The Japan Times
By David Howell
The Real Lesson from Pakistan
LONDON – The tragic killing of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan has sent a raft of
shockwave messages round the world.
Most of these have been carefully and lengthily noted and analysed – such as the
concern that Pakistan, labelled a frontline state in the fight against
terrorism, could now collapse into chaos, or that Islamic fanatics could take
overt in the vacuum left by her death and would then have control of Pakistan’s
nuclear bomb, or the broader lesson that all political campaign exposure is now
becoming impossibly dangerous, with deep consequent damage for open democracy
everywhere. Mr. Sharif, a rival candidate in the Pakistan elections, puts this
last point with chilling candour when he says that it is now ‘impossible to
campaign’.
But there is one deeper lesson so ugly, and so awkward, that it has scarcely
been discussed at all, or even realized in some quarters.
This is quite simply that Benazir Bhutto had become the candidate for election
favoured by the American Washington administration, and as such most almost
certainly doomed, the moment this became apparent.
This is another failure for the Bush Presidency and for American diplomacy on a
grand scale and shows vividly how senior figures in Washington have simply not
grasped how the world now works.
Whereas once upon a time America was seen as an unquestionable force for good,
and the blessing and backing of genial Uncle Sam was eagerly sought, today it is
the opposite. Today, American backing is a liability for any political leader
and America’s once fine reputation lies in tatters.
If, despite this sad development, it was still the case that American firepower
and sheer military and economic might could master events, deliver results and
safeguard its protégés, that would be understandable and people would just have
to put up with American unpopularity whilst welcoming its secure embrace.
But asymmetric warfare has put paid to all that. The microchip, the
communications revolution and the miniaturisation of weaponry have levelled up
killing power in a terrifying way.
Having thirteen carrier fleets and countless missiles and warheads no longer
counts. Tiny gangs and groups, operating below the radar screen of normal
warfare, can now sabotage or destroy with ease the most expensive and elaborate
military hardware ever constructed. While determined bombers and suicide squads
can penetrate to the very heart of a society and paralyse it in a way that
conventional weaponry can no longer do.
The American mistake goes back to the initial colossal error after the 9/11
horror –namely that there was a ‘war’ to be waged world-wide against terrorism
and that various states would have be either ‘for or against’ this American-led
crusade.
But of course there is no ‘war’ in the conventional sense and deploying American
backing for certain states as front-line allies merely guarantees that they will
be destabilised.
The mistake is to believe that ideological Islamism, which has developed like a
monstrous cancer out of the wise and balanced religious Islam of the past, can
be taken on and beaten by Western power. It cannot be. As the late Benazir
Bhutto shrewdly observed just before she died, fanatical and violent Islam ‘will
have to play itself out’. What she probably meant was that the ideological and
politicised versions of Islam being promoted by Al-Qaeda and others, and taught
by ill-trained preachers in many mosques and cells in Western countries as well,
will eventually be shown to be against true Islamic values, and totally against
the teachings of the Koran and the Prophet .
To bring that reversal about requires not declarations of war but the most
subtle and patient respect for the true religion and its leaders. It is good
news, for example, that Christian religious leaders in the Anglican and Catholic
faiths are now meeting, on completely equal terms, with some of the most
influential Muslim leaders. This is the way to the eventual marginalisation of
the fanatics. Patience is also needed to wait for the time when the inner groups
of extremists turn against each other, as always eventually happens in
revolutionary movements.
Almost all the leaders of Al-Qaeda will eventually meet violent deaths- probably
at the hands not of the American military but of their rivals and sometimes
intimates.
The central question of course is how long the world can wait for all this to
happen and what is meant by ‘eventually’.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there had to be agonisingly long
periods of waiting while the worst and most lethal ‘isms’ burnt themselves out.
Nazism lasted fifteen years, other Fascist doctrines longer and hideous
Communism took seventy evil years to crumble into disaster.
In the faster-moving twenty-first century a guess would be that the crazed
Islamic deviations now prevalent might blow themselves out in a decade. What is
certain is that frontal American and Western attempts to wage ‘war’ on the
extremists, and to line up favourite leaders and states in this war, will
actually prolong the struggle, weaken the religious moderates and slow down the
internal divisions in Islam.
That is one lesson that Western strategists should at last learn out of respect
for the courageous lady who died in Rawalpindi so violently.
Ends
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