WITH FRIENDS LIKE US. . .
Histog shows that General Musharraf
trusts the West at his own peril, says Andrew Roberts
IN serving the West, no good deed goes unpunished, for as the old Arab adage goes, 'Oppose the West and they'll buy you off; support it and they'll sell you.' In the past America has protected her local strongmen, but today, as Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf contemplates his long-term career prospects, modern history provides all too many examples to show that he will not last long once his usefulness to the West is over.
During the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Ford administrations, America tended to stand by her clients in the Third World, not displaying inquisitiveness into their domestic political arrangements so long as they delivered regional stability and pursued a doughty anti-communist agenda. Yet since the decline of Kissingerian realpolitik and its replacement by utopian liberal internationalism — particularly during the Carter and Clinton presidencies — there has been a long and sorry history of the United States letting down her clients, both in public and private, over small issues and large ones. Defending Western interests in the developing world has thus become a completely thankless task.
Although General Musharraf is now being feted by Washington, fawned on by Colin Powell, offered vast sums in debt relief by the US Treasury and boosted by a Britain that only six months ago wished to kick him out of the Commonwealth, he does not need to look too far either geographically or historically to see how fickle are the West's affections. Recent history is littered with the fates of regional strongmen who have been cast aside or worse — the moment they have served their purpose.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was crowned Shah of Persia in 1941, and kept his country resolutely pro-Western, capitalist, antifundamentalist and anti-communist until he was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini in January 1979. As is documented in William Shawcross's masterly The Shah's Last Ride. Washington then dropped him completely, and he died aged 60 in Cairo in July 1980, having been refused access to the best American healthcare. Doing America's dirty work for her in Central America at much the same time was Anastasio Somoza, who in July 1979 was forced to flee Nicaragua, where he and his father had been fighting communism for decades. He died in Asuncion, Paraguay, the following year after he, too, had been denied the right to reside in the United States. At least Ferdinand Marcos, the strongman who held the Philippines against communist insurgency for 20 years, was not banned from entering America after the US dumped him in 1986; he was allowed to go into exile in Honolulu, where he died three years later.
Occasionally, America's clients are merely left in situ, twisting slowly in the winds of change. Jonas Savimbi, the Unita rebel leader in Angola, had his CIA funding cut off soon after he had — on American urging — signed a peace agreement with the Marxist MPLA regime in November 1992. Only two months later, the MPLA attacked his headquarters in Huambo, since when he has been fighting on without any American support after almost a quarter of a century of defending Western interests in the region. And General Manuel Noriega has been serving a 40-year prison term since 1992 for something the CIA knew perfectly well he was guilty of before they took him up as an anti-communist tool.
But before Britons feel any smugness about this American predilection for letting down and often then turning on former clients, we should examine our own record. The end of empire furnishes plenty of examples of local movements in Burma, Kenya and Cyprus that were at first encouraged by Britain to oppose independence and were then left to the mercy of the nationalists as soon as it was granted. The Indian princes had, since Victorian times, been promised `paramouncy' with the crown, but were, in the end, left by Lord Mountbatten to fend for themselves in a unitary, Congress-dominated India after 1947. As recently as 1979 Bishop Abel Muzorewa was being set up to oppose Messrs Mugabe and Nkomo in Rhodesia.
Probably the most shameful betrayal of any friend of the West was committed by the Blair ministry between 1998 and 2000 when General Augusto Pinochet, who had saved Chile from communism and civil war in 1973 and voluntarily relinquished power in March 1990, was kept under house arrest here for a whole year pending possible extradition. The White House, which could and should have done much to make No. 10 see sense over this dreadful episode, did nothing. Gratitude for past services is forgotten in post-Kissingerian Western foreign policy, yet if the War on Terror is to be won, it had better be relearned.
It is not difficult to predict that even if he survives fundamentalist revolutions and al-Qa'eda suicide bombers, General Musharraf will one day be brought down by precisely those Western countries that are now his most ardent suitors. He is in far more danger trusting us than ever he was when operating behind enemy lines in the Pakistani version of the SAS during the India–Pakistan wars.
Imagine if either of Pakistan's recent former prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto — people whose careers were based on corruption and compromise — had been in charge in Islamabad rather than the rock-like war hero Musharraf. The story of Pakistan's support for the War on Terror would undoubtedly have been very different, and very much worse for us. Yet the prospects for the greatest man in the subcontinent, once the War on Terror has been won, look bleak. On past performance, the best that the West can offer her new best friend is the choice between exile, a jail sentence, multiple visa refusals, a year-long house arrest, an early grave, or a lonely struggle in the African jungle with no end in sight. Hardly a tempting prospect for those whose support we might want in any future conflicts. At present, we are feting General Musharraf, but it is in the nature of our feckless, ungrateful, modern foreign policy that one day we will bury him.
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