Former Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf urges resumption of US military aid during Baker Institute speech

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, said the recent U.S. decision to suspend military assistance to Pakistan would be counterproductive. Speaking to an overflow audience at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy July 11, Musharraf said, “It is not in the interest not only of Pakistan, but also not in the interest of the United States, I think. If Pakistan is weakened, how do you fight terrorism?”

	Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, said the recent U.S. decision to suspend military assistance to Pakistan would be counterproductive.

Musharraf, who took power in a 1999 coup and ruled until 2008, gave a historical overview of U.S.-Pakistani relations in an effort to account for the current “antipathy” and “trust deficit” between the two countries. Pakistan and the United States were on the same side during the Cold War, Musharraf said, even joining forces to oppose the presence of Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That cooperation ebbed in the following decade, Musharraf said, with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the growing conflict in Kashmir, the testing of Pakistan’s first nuclear weapons and what he described as a U.S. “strategic policy shift toward India.”

After the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the two countries again found themselves cooperating against a common foe: Islamic militants. Musharraf spoke fondly of his close ties with former President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell during that period. However, he said, the window of opportunity for a comprehensive solution in Afghanistan — roughly from 2002 to 2004 — was squandered, and today Afghanistan faces a resurgent Taliban movement that threatens Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

Musharraf also charged that India was partly to blame for Afghanistan’s instability. “I know for a fact that India is trying to create an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan,” he said, pointing to India’s role in training Afghan diplomats, military and intelligence forces as evidence.

Pakistani concerns about India were a recurrent theme in Musharraf’s address. Pakistan’s decision to pursue nuclear weapons, for instance, was designed to provide “minimum defensive deterrence against India,” he said. Moreover, “Pakistan’s nuclear and missile capability is the pride of every Pakistani in the streets of Pakistan,” Musharraf said, making it unlikely that any government would agree to its dismantling.

Musharraf blamed the latest downturn in U.S.-Pakistani relations on a lack of U.S. sensitivity to and awareness of Pakistani interests. He cited concerns that the United States is not actively pressuring India to resolve the Kashmir dispute. And attacks inside Pakistan by unmanned U.S. drone aircraft, along with the clandestine operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden in May, have stoked fears in Pakistan that the United States does not respect Pakistani sovereignty, according to Musharraf.

The former Pakistani leader insisted he was unaware of the presence of bin Laden, who purportedly moved to the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad in 2006 — when Musharraf was still in power. “For two years, I can for sure, with 100 percent guarantee, tell this audience — whether you believe it or not — that I didn’t know,” he said. He also discounted the possibility that members of the Pakistani military or intelligence service may have misled him about bin Laden. “I personally believe very strongly that it’s a case of negligence” rather then complicity, he said.

Forced to step down as president in 2008, Musharraf acknowledged to the Baker Institute audience his desire to run for the presidency of Pakistan in 2013. He said he is prepared to drop his comfortable life abroad to help form a “functional government, concentrating on the welfare of the people and the development of the state.”

He said his previous experience running the country would help break the status quo. “At the moment on the political horizon there is a leadership vacuum and a political party vacuum to handle the situation. Therefore we need to create another political alternative,” he said.

To view a webcast of the entire speech, go to http://bakerinstitute.org/events/pakistan-a-reality-check.