The Bush administration's tepid response to the victory of democratic forces in Pakistan's parliamentary elections last month suggests, at best, excessive solicitude for President Pervez Musharraf. The retired general has been a compliant partner in President Bush's war on terror, but Pakistani democrats have reviled him as a dictator since he dismissed the chief justice of the Supreme Court and his fellow jurists last fall so they could not rule Musharraf's reelection by lame-duck legislators invalid.
Now the United States must contend with the bitterness of Pakistani democrats. The moderate, secular parties that triumphed in the February election regard Bush's failure to show solidarity with their campaign for an independent judiciary and constitutional legitimacy as simple American hypocrisy.
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte confronted this fallout last week during a reception for Pakistani lawyers at the US embassy in Islamabad. Farrukh Saleem, executive director of a security studies research center, put a barbed question to Negroponte. "How is Pakistan different from Honduras?" he asked.
As ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, Negroponte professed ignorance about death squads under the notorious General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. The squads kidnapped, tortured, and murdered journalists, students, nuns, and priests suspected of left-wing sympathies. So Saleem had reason to ask whether Washington has any more respect for human rights now.
All historical analogies are inexact. Still, the question reveals a widespread Pakistani belief that Washington prefers to deal with an authoritarian general rather than an unruly coalition government of civilian parties.
American officials cannot claim to be defending democratic values against barbarism if they prefer to fight the barbarians with martial law rather than the rule of law.
