# Posted 8:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN, AND WHAT WOULD ORWELL DO: Kevin and Daniel have both raised the question of Pakistan in recent posts. I’m hesitant to wade in too precipitously, as I’m still coming to my own thoughts, wading through my notebooks and drafting my first writing based on my experiences there, a time maddening and interspersed with moments of touching humanity, and full of unexpected poignance.

I tend, though, and at some admitted risk of sacrificing nuance in service of moral clarity, to favour a comparatively full withdrawal of support from the present military regime in Islamabad. My reasons are personal and vivid. The travels I undertook through that country were peppered by meetings with both opposition politicians and more humble ordinary folk who, for their pains in speaking against army rule, were rewarded by time in an insipid network of (the term is cruel) safe houses and torture chambers scattered through the country with a density far exceeding anything the CIA in its darkest moments has ever been alleged to mount or imagine. Some withdrew, fearing consequences upon their families; others went on to secure election to the Senate, adolescent fecklessness and political arrogance being changed in them for a humility, depth and soft-spokenness that one sees in Mandela and others who have been broken for their beliefs. It is deeply humbling, to one whose most perilous exertion in favour of the norms of democracy and decency has been to sit before a computer and push buttons on a keyboard. No decent western journalist could speak with them without deep unease about a policy of support for their government.

This is not to say the civil and diplomatic services, and yes, the officer corps as well, are not fitted with many people of decency and intellect. It is neither to deny that, by the league tables of military dictators who have controlled Pakistan in the majority of the six decades since its political separation from the country in which I live, Musharraf is not by far and a bit the best. Yahya Khan inaugurated the incursions of the barracks into politics without much to show for it, apart from the dismemberment of his country and the mind-boggling atrocities of 1971, to include the genocide of Bangladeshi intellectuals; Zia from his political weakness as much as any personal faith dabbed the country and its laws with religion, making it at least in form an Islamic Republic to win the support of Jamaatis to his generals. Musharraf does have the interests of his country at heart; he has furthermore chosen the cause of the West. Neither of these facts do I deny. But both liberals and those whose political tradition is not liberal but religious view America as manipulator of their affairs; and to America they impute responsibility for the actions of Musharraf its client. I do not wish to oversimplify matters; only to point out that is dangerous, very dangerous, for America to pursue the course that it is taking. Rather than view it as an inspiration of liberty enlightening the world, Pakistanis see it as complicit in their oppression. When Musharraf leaves, the next government to be led from the PPP or the PML-N – and it will be flawed, corrupt and imperfectly democratic – will have less sympathy for the United States than if it had behaved during their time in the wilderness as a friend to them and such democrats who exist in Pakistan – and moving beyond Nawaz and Benazir, they are many. There is democracy there to nurture. On my first day, I went to attend a world social forum in Karachi, on which I was able to report for the BBC; it was full of civil society actors who previously had not met, badly organised, but full of idealism, and a mirror of the present state of a Pakistani civil society which must someday be made the base of a democratic politics. The country’s press is free – freer under Musharraf, it must be said, than under Benazir. (Though a friend from the new cable news network Geo, who unlike me has suffered for his trade, points out that freedom of press isn’t quite the same as freedom after press - whether from pressure upon editors to fire dissenting journalists, or introduction into the network of Cavaradossian torture which has always been the refuge of those who will not submit their power to the approval of those they control.) Their civil service is the child of our own, and professional even if in these days it is coming, like the economy, academy and social sectors, perilously under the control of retired brigadiers at its highest levels. If there are as many people as indeed there are like the tortured democracy activists with whom I spoke, then we of the west must be sufficiently true to our principles to support the seed of democracy even where dust and the impression of it are everywhere.

That America has some justification to pursue an alliance with a comparatively enlightened military dictator, helping to maintain him in power and through him wage its war on terror in the shorter-term of its operational horizons, is undeniable. That such a strategy does not, if subject to indefinite extension, pose grave dangers is absurd to believe. America has been the principal supporter of an army which now controls a quarter of its country’s discretionary budget, whose sway over other spaces of national life is great and increasing. Only in Pakistan, of all South Asia, is the amount of national spending invested in education of its youth and its future measured in real terms in decrease. Pakistanis, it must be noted, hold America complicit in all this. It is not, in Pakistan, viewed as a friend of democracy. I do not impugn its intentions, only the forwardness of its thought, and the length of its strategic horizons. If there are no easy answers, at least let us sound an Orwellian note of disquiet. (16) opinions -- Add your opinion