Facing the real threat

Facing the real threat

By Richard Bulliet Published: November 5, 2007




In Tehran, a crowd performs its tired annual march past the former American embassy and chants anti-American slogans left over from the hostage crisis 28 years ago.

Meanwhile, next door in Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf declares a national emergency, suspends the Constitution and detains hundreds of lawyers and opposition figures.

Yet which country do would-be American presidential candidates focus on as a potential threat to American interests in the Muslim world? The correct answer is Iran. We know this because it was declared a part of the "axis of evil" back in 2002, and the words "World War III" have recently passed the presidential lips.

A second question: Which country in actuality poses the greater threat to U.S. interests in the Muslim world? The correct answer is Pakistan.

Iran may or may not harbor anti-American terrorists. But Pakistan's borderlands are unquestionably teeming with Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters whom the Pakistani Army cannot dislodge without provoking local rebellion.

Iran may or may not acquire a nuclear weapon during the coming decade. But Pakistan has openly tested atom bombs, and as late as February, 2003. Musharraf has seen fit to laud Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the architect not only of Pakistan's bomb but also of an international black-market in nuclear technology: "Allah Almighty answered the nation's prayers, had mercy on our situation and made a miracle happen. In walked a giant of a man, none other than Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who would give Pakistan a nuclear capability single handedly."
Moreover, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a modern country with a young, well-educated, politically aware population that takes less interest in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's international showboating on the Holocaust-Israel issue than in "Zero Degree Turn," a government-financed television documentary about an Iranian diplomat who saves his French Jewish girlfriend during World War II.

Pakistan, on the other hand, teeters on the edge of becoming a failed state; and its hundreds of religious schools, which flourish because the state educational system is inadequate, are well known for their advocacy of jihad against the West.

The question today is whether the regime in Islamabad has finally passed an irrecoverable tipping point. During a visit to that capital last March, I found that Pakistan's well-educated elite felt that the threat of a Taliban-like takeover of their country was as remote as the frontier areas the militants train in. But they were greatly excited by the tear gas some of them had sniffed during demonstrations against Musharraf's dismissal of the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The tension in the air related to democracy, not terrorism.

The Pakistani political situation is not a simple one. The Bush administration holds Musharraf to be a pro-American bulwark in the war on terror. The Pakistani elite, now with Benazir Bhutto in a position to articulate their feelings, deem his efforts to prolong his military rule an offense against democracy. Supporters of the Taliban look upon his recent - and from an American viewpoint much belated - measures to increase army control in the frontier provinces as a threat to true Islam.

And the Pakistan Army, especially its secretive ISI (for Inter-Services Intelligence) branch, requires the cover of his military rank to pursue in Afghanistan the strategic policies it thinks are best for Pakistan. Including, apparently, support for the rejuvenated Taliban.

In a classic Mexican standoff, groups of enemies point their guns at each other, but no one fires because no one knows who will win.

The coming days and weeks will tell whether Musharraf has just fired the first shot, and there is little the United States can do but wring its hands and watch.

A Musharraf tactical victory will further fray the threadbare fabric of Pakistani democracy and set the scene for ongoing protests and disorder. A reversal of the measures he has announced may please the democracy crowd, but exhaust the patience of his fellow generals and prod them to take more militant action. Pro-democracy agitation and/or aggressive military intervention will spread the sort of disorder that favors Muslim militancy, and sap the determination needed to control terrorist activities on the frontier.

The worst scenario imaginable visualizes a Taliban-like movement wreaking havoc in the streets and somehow getting its hands on a nuclear weapon, or even on the presidential palace itself. And this in a country that with a population half the size of that of the United States is far too large for the Iraq-depleted American armed forces to attack.

The immediate peril of an imploding Pakistan will not drive talk of war with Iran from the presidential debate in the United States.

The Bush administration has proven again and again that it holds all the cards in telling Americans whom to be afraid of. But in the real world where people demonstrate and die, and where nuclear weapons may be under uncertain control, today's Pakistan is surely a far greater threat to American interests than tomorrow's Iran.

Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and author of "Islam: The View from the Edge" and "The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization." This article was distributed by Agence Global.