They silenced a voice, but they can’t kill an idea
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan has global consequences. It was a major strike in the war of ideas.
Here’s one version of the deeper meaning of the attack. First, look at the region and the people.
A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.
Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.
We need to understand the real Pakistan, not the one painted by media feeds.
The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.
In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.
This is one person’s analysis, but he is an expert analyst on democracy. And democracy is the underlying issue at the epicenter of this war.
It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.
Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.
Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism.
If he’s right, this is scary.
They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.
So what does this mean? At least, according to McCarthy…
The regime, unreliable and at times infuriating, is our only friend. It is the only segment of Pakistani society capable of confronting militant Islam — though its vigor for doing so is too often sapped by its own share of jihadist sympathizers…
For the United States, the question is whether we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly.
And there’s the question at the heart of it all. How to bring freedoms to people ruled by regimes. After all, critics point out…
Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.
The idea of democracy has been planted in the movement that swelled around Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. It will have to survive the immediate future of chaos and confusion. And as Pope Benedict said today, “peace further removes itself” from the people.