The Mess that is Pakistan
This New York Times article ("Pakistan Rounds Up Musharraf’s Political Foes") is refreshing in its relative candor as to the true intent of Pakistan's political and military leader. Any thought that President Musharraf was really interested in preventing a Muslim fundamentalist takeover appears to be naive. Musharraf has arrested his secular opponents, pressured various Supreme Court Justices to resign (likely Justices who might have found Musharraf's electoral victory to be illegal) and has pursued a policy of "zero tolerance" with regard to any political dissent.
Instead of preventing a Muslim fundamentalist takeover, such actions help to further legitimize Muslim fundamentalists as they are most likely to survive and thrive in such an atmosphere of repression--as happened in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s when the Shah exiled or killed many secular opponents, leaving the crazies to represent the voice of an oppressed people.
posted by Mitchell J. Freedman @ 6:04 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I would add Indonesia to the list. Sukarno and then Suharto ruthlessly put down all "political" opposition, thus turning a very secular and pacifist oriented syncretistic culture (cf. Clifford Geertz's books) into one rife with Islamic fundamentalism, as the latter has been the only thing able to survive the political oppression precisely because for many years it's not overtly political, but "merely" social.
Agreed.
The pattern of the Cold War foreign policies of successive US presidents was to support the destruction of secular oppositions (and also fairly pro-open government oppositions) so that only the religious fanatics, mostly Muslim, were left as an outlet for populist frustration or worse, rage.
Sigh.
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