Pakistan: The Movie

The undoing of the Pakistani polity reminds me of 1979 when another bulwark of the U.S. geopolitical strategy was coming apart at the seams: Iran. You old-timers will recall that Jimmy Carter’s administration imploded when he defended the appalling Shah right down to the last minutes of his frightening regime and spirited him out of Teheran to safety even though no country on earth wanted to receive the tyrant. That led directly to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, the seizure of the diplomats, the year-long hostage crisis and the collapse of the Democratic Party’s credibility, from which it has never recovered.

This is the same J Carter, let us not forget, who brought the human rights discourse into vogue and has sounded like such a decent sort after being thrown out by the Reaganites. But when it came to defending U.S. interests, Carter was just as capable of turning a blind eye to the monsters in the Shah’s SAVAK as Dick Cheney is in conspiring with their counterparts in the Pakistani ISI. How ironic that Carter ruined his presidency defending a criminal who represented the exact opposite of his alleged doctrine and Weltanschaaung.

I draw that parallel only to illustrate the way that events sometimes take on their own momentum and reduce the personality traits of this or that leader to irrelevance. I find the avuncular Carter persuasive these days, and I think Cheney's a traitor. But I wonder if either one of them presiding over the U.S. policymaking apparatus would have much influence over whether Pakistan blows up, becomes an Islamic republic, or wins the world cricket championship. Things have been building to a head in that country for decades and only accelerating in the last six years. My impression is that Musharraf has now set in motion a process that has taken on a life of its own.