The Bengal Frontier and Beyond



Pervez Musharraf's quixotic twilight struggle against the Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court is symbolic of the tyrant's natural aversion to the Principle of Law. Tyrants abhor objective realities that inconvenience the free reign of their compulsions to enact destructive scenarios, oftentimes mirroring their bleak inner landscape, ravaged from a war-torn childhood. Reason #7,432 to do something about international conflicts and their effects on children, no? However, whether by History's Dark Irony or by the careful machinations of the Boys at Langley, Benazir Bhutto -- no stranger to corruption, she -- is back, and may be the saving grace of the rapidly disintegrating political scene in Pakistan. And that, quite frankly, is not a bad thing.

Allow us to explain (The Corsair pours a glorious glass of Chateau D'Yquem). Nuclear Pakistan in free-fall is a puzzle of unimaginable geopolitical concern. Musharraf, true to his low-grade-piece-of-ass psychology, is playing The Great Game most modern dictators play in the last quarter of the match with the clock running out on their Idiot Regimes (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment). And that game, alas, is Nuclear Brinkmanship.

If a tyrant doesn't have "The Bomb," he will seek the shortest distance towards its acquisition (For further reference, see Il, Kim-Jong) If said Tyrant has already acquired it, and there is no "trustworthy" political opposition (They've usually all been systematically disposed of), then, well, we are generally fucked and the regime is secure. If the only alternative to a nuclearized tyranny is the vacuum of political chaos then we have to support the Tyrant. Real grown up stuff, this; why don't politicians fix us with a level gaze and speak frankly about these things? The alternatives are too horrible to imagine --rogue nuclear weapons sold openly on the black market to the highest bidder; the breakdown of civil order into Civil War; a nuke fired off, amid the chaos, at India, thus precipitating an Indo-Pakistani War on China's doorstep. We paint this stark portrait in skeletal reds and burnt umbers.

The West, quite simply, cannot let Musharraf get thrown out of Power, like Milton's Lucifer. Of course we'd love to supply the population with the means to do so, but we cannot. Dealing with Musharraf is not unlike wrestling with a pig; no one is going to come out of that encounter clean. But compromises must be made -- for the time being -- for the common good.

Enter: Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto is not entirely politically filthy. Only partly. We can deal with the former Prime Minister. One, Bhutto was educated in the West, and, two, she has a tarnished reputation and a chip on her shoulder. Benazir's self-interests and ours could coincide. Bhutto's primary focus in this new incarnation is to make a difference in the sphere of the everyday lives of women. This, too, is one of our largest political objectives in the region. A Musharraf-Bhutto collaborative regime is in our strategic self-interest in that: a) such a regime provides a clear line of succession to Musharraf in the event of an assassination (not an unlikely scenario in South Asia), and b) It gives us a lever to play against Musharraf ("If you can't find Bin Laden, then perhaps -- ass -- we shall turn to Bhutto"), which we presently don't have.

But we could.