It's not often that one's jaw actually drops while reading the newspaper, but I had that experience Sunday afternoon as I read a piece on The New York Times op-ed page by Richard Armitage and Kara Bue about how we must, as the title says, "Keep Pakistan on Our Side." Armitage has the distinction of being one of the few competent officials to have worked on foreign policy for the Bush administration, but he and Bue have turned out one of the most transparent pieces of nonsense I've ever had the displeasure of seeing on the Times' op-ed page -- and this comes from someone who's read most of what Stanley Fish has penned for the paper.
Referring to connections between Pakistan and the alleged participants in the terror plot in London, Armitage and Bue write, "While the arrests may serve as proof to some that the country cannot be relied on as an ally in our fight against Islamic extremism, we would argue that the recent events should harden our resolve to support it." They go on to emphasize some of Pakistan's supposed assistance in the war on terror; to downplay the ways in which Pakistan has acted directly counter to our strategic interests; and to completely ignore or misrepresent a number of facts crucial to understanding and assessing the merits of continuing, in its current form, our relationship with the country.
For starters, nowhere do Armitage and Bue mention that Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, came to power in a military coup in 1999. After trying to hold elections that pretty much everyone acknowledged were rigged, Musharraf finally managed to engineer a constitutional amendment retroactively legalizing his transparently illegal rise to power. The closest Armitage and Bue come to acknowledging these facts is by writing, in one of the grossest understatements I've ever seen in print, that "much remains to be accomplished [in Pakistan], particularly in terms of democratization." That's it.
Meanwhile, President Bush -- who insists that the spread of democracy... |
Ankush Khardori: Fun Facts About Pakistan! (August 20, 2006)
