The bombing of a Shiite Muslim religious procession in Pakistan’s largest city Monday killed at least 30 people as U.S.-backed President Asif Ali Zardari warned of a “conspiracy” against the country’s democracy.
The fourth attack on Pakistan’s Shiite minority in recent days fueled fears that a sectarian conflict alongside the nuclear-armed country’s battle with the Pakistani Taliban and other Sunni Muslim extremist groups could topple Zardari’s fragile civilian government, which was elected last year after eight years of military-led rule.
The “conspiracy” against the country’s democracy comes, of course, from radicals like the Taliban and their allies. I wonder, however, whether Zardari believes that India has anything to do with the turmoil in Pakistan. The two countries been enemies from the very moment they were founded. They both have one major rival: the other.
In any case, Islamabad’s real enemy nowadays are the Taliban and Al Qaeda. These radicals have created so much chaos, a senior intelligence official with the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said, that the civilian government can “fall on a given day.”
If so, the West is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The Obama administration and its Western allies are growing anxious that political upheaval is imminent in Pakistan, and that the collapse of Zardari’s government could force the U.S. and its allies to choose between defending democracy and opting for whatever stability that outright or implicit military rule could provide in a crucial anti-terrorism partner.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a difficult choice to make: the West has to do whatever is necessary to prevent radicals from seizing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. If that means supporting a military dictatorship (temporarily), so be it. Of course that doesn’t make me happy either, but such petty emotions have nothing to do with politics. Politics, and especially foreign policy, should be based on reason, not emotions.
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