Faint echoes
David Ignatius finds echoes of Iran in Pakistan. The analogy casts president Musharraf as the Shah, and wonders in hindsight whether we should have pressed the Shah to reform and switched horses if he wouldn’t agree, or whether we should have encouraged him to crack down harder against protesters?
The answer depends, I think, on the time frame. In 1967, the first option might have made sense. But in 1977, it seems clear that we should have supported the crackdown option because by that time the movement for change had already been captured by extremists, and there was no viable middle option. I base this claim in part on conversations with people, including my wife, who lived in Iran during that period, and with my wife’s uncle, a French diplomat and student of Iran who served in that country though not during the revolution. In addition, history teaches us that once a country is on the verge of a revolution, the extremists invariably have, or pretty quickly obtain, the upper hand.
If we apply the Iranian model to Pakistan, then, the question becomes: is it "1967" or "1977." The sense one gets is that it’s the latter (and later) date.
The analogy, though, is probably inapt. For one thing, Musharraf isn’t a tyrant the way the Shah was. For another, there are well-developed democratic alternatives to Musharrah that didn’t exist in Iran. These two differences are a function of Pakistan’s fairly substantial recent experience with democracy, which Iran was lacking. In addition, the Pakistani government already confronts armed revolutionaries who control parts of the country, which was not the case in Iran. Finally, of course, Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
Some of these differences seem to cut in favor of supporting (or at least not interfering with) Musharraf’s crackdown; others cut against such complicity, express or tacit. On balance, I think they counsel in favor of non-interference at least for now, as we wait to see how Musharraf deals with al Qaeda and how long he plans to continue his state of emergency.
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