Neo-cons have it wrong on Pakistan

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IL04Df01.html

Just as a flicker of hope emerged to bring back elected civilian rule to Pakistan, the ideological warriors of neo-conservatism are up in arms to douse it. Having supported President Pervez Musharraf as the stalwart general in America's "war on terror", US neo-conservatives are panic-stricken at the prospect of his political demise. No sooner did he decide to relinquish his army post to become a civilian president last week, than fear of Pakistan's collapse and of loose nuclear weapons gripped Musharraf's backers in the United States.

Neo-conservative analysts are hatching plans to raid the country and nick the nukes before it sinks into chaos. Others, less inclined to use the military option just now, have come up with puerile analyses of how a "Westernized core" of the military and Pakistani civil society can be used to thwart the worst-case scenario of Islamists taking over the country and, with it, the dreaded weapons.

An exasperated Charles Krauthammer attempts to untie Pakistan's "tangled knots" and wonders, "What is America to do about Pakistan?" He mumbles through an ill-informed analysis of a post-Musharraf Pakistan, where he says, "Islamic barbarians are at the gates". Frederick Kagan, a leading light at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, foresee Pakistan's collapse and propose two fantastic methods of direct military intervention to secure the country's nuclear arsenal, which should ideally be shipped to "someplace like New Mexico". (Why New Mexico? Because "given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them" in Pakistan.)

And speaking at an AEI forum to launch his new book, Surrender is Not an Option, former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton described the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal as "the principal American strategic interest". Conceding that the Pakistani president "is no Jeffersonian democrat", Bolton insisted: "We should support Musharraf. His control of the army is most likely to hold the nuclear arsenal in a secure place."

Three basic assumptions underpin these writers' opinion that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is in jeopardy. One, that Pakistan without Musharraf and the military at the helm is bound to disintegrate and likely to be taken over by Islamic extremists. Two, that Pakistan's polity consists of three active factions: the Taliban-like religious zealots, and "the two most Westernized, most modernizing elements of Pakistani society - the army ... and the elite of civil society, including lawyers, jurists, journalists and students", as Krauthammer puts it, also asserting that the Taliban "are waiting to pick up the pieces from the civil war developing between" the last two elements.

The third, equally ill-founded premise of the neo-con view of Pakistan is that military intervention by the United States and its allies would not only ensure security of the nuclear arsenal, but also help the military "hold the country's center" - Islamabad and populous areas like Punjab - in Kagan and O'Hanlon's words.

Let's take these three assumptions one by one and see if these Pakistan "experts" have any contact with the reality of the country whose future they would shape.

The myth of barbarians at the gates

[PDJane]

1. The neo-cons have everything wrong,

And have had from the beginning.

They are the barbarians inside the gates.