Notes from Evil Bender

The crisis in Pakistan is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, and one thing’s for sure, the U.S. won’t be putting any real pressure on General Musharraf.

The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president.

In carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments about the limits of American leverage over General Musharraf, the man President Bush has called one of his most critical allies, the officials argued that it would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with their best hope of ousting Al Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from the country’s mountainous tribal areas.

American foreign policy in the region is a complete clusterfuck, of course, and let’s not forget we need Musharraf to help deal with terrorists who are still operating thanks largely to the shift in resources to Iraq. But that’s just the start of it, and the Pakistanis know exactly why they have nothing to fear:

“They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the minister of state for information. “Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose.”

You see, U.S. foreign policy decisions, from Chile to Pakistan and at all points in between, has consistently had little to do with actually supporting democracy, and indeed we only do so when it happens to coincide with our imperialist aims. The U.S. consistently supports dictators over democracies, because we can dump money on the dictators and–we think–keep them in line. Actual democracy, as Bush discovered in 2000, is less convenient.

Musharraf is a petty thug holding on to power as thugs do, with complete disregard for the laws he supposedly upholds (sound familiar?). And the U.S., despite protestations, could put great pressure on him if we wanted to. But we won’t, and Musharraf knows it, because our fractured imperialist policies have made us dependent upon him. So Rice can make hugely ironic pronouncements like

I think it would be quite obvious that the United States would not be supportive of extra-constitutional means.

But everyone knows she doesn’t mean it, because what the U.S. really wants is Musharraf to continue to oppose religious extremists and we can’t let little things like freedom and justice stand in the way of the War on Terra.