Everyone can see that George Bush’s “war on terrorism” is coming to grief in Iraq. Now things are going awry in Afghanistan, too. The United States drove out the Taliban regime in order to deprive al-Qaeda of a safe haven. Nearly six years on, this aim has not been realised. In large tracts of southern Afghanistan the writ of the elected government of Hamid Karzai does not run and Taliban fighters operate more freely than the NATO forces that prop him up. Worse, this hostile territory crosses the border into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), home to some 3m people, where the writ of Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, hardly runs either. And now the general may be losing his grip on Pakistan as a whole. Far from being caught in a pincer between pro-American governments in Kabul and Islamabad, al-Qaeda and its fellow travellers have consolidated a stronghold that encroaches on the territory and may in time threaten the survival of both. It is important to stress that neither government is in immediate peril. The NATO force in Afghanistan is harrying the Taliban in the south and can certainly protect Kabul. The prospect of Pakistan, a country of 160m people, falling to Islamist extremists is still just a nightmare. But if America and its allies fail to take remedial action now, or if they take the wrong action, the danger of exacerbating the enmity of millions of Muslims in both countries is acute. To see General Musharraf as lone defender against the Islamic tide is to misread Pakistan. It is not the Islamists but the moderate mainstream that has lost faith in him. His sacking of the chief justice (since reinstated) and his desire to have himself re-elected by the existing legislatures before the next general election have disgusted voters. America should not give uncritical support to a military ruler who is blocking the return of the democracy that Pakistan appears now both to want and to need. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, was right last week to talk him out of declaring a state of emergency. Democracy will not cure all Pakistan’s ills: the democratic decade from the late 1980s was ruinous. Nor would an elected government necessarily find it any easier to tame the tribal areas. But with authority deserting the general, Pakistan is hungry for a way forward. A democratic government would have to cohabit with the army and maybe also with a (downsized) President Musharraf. It may not do much more to help the West in Afghanistan. But it might start to tackle the grievances that have helped spread al-Qaeda’s poison at home. Excerpted from ‘The Economist’, August 16
