Pakistan Becomes the Essential Keystone

Pervez Musharraf got the celebrity-blitz treatment in DC and NY last week, even going on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to broaden book sales.

Back in the eighties, while working for Denis Neal's lobbying operation [which you can read about in the excellent book "Charlie Wilson's War" about Afghanistan in the mujahideen era], I was commissioned to found a Political Action Committee which I dubbed South East Asia Peace Committee. My job was to scratch up funds which, Denis told me long afterwards, were needed to give to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which would get Pakistan the $475 million in "security assistance" that General Zia was asking for. My friend Arnie Raphel, US Ambassador to Pakistan, gave his blessing and Denis, in a moment of glee at the Xmas Party in the Neil & Co. offices, told me that Sens. Dodd and Kerry had voted along with all the Repubs in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get the Pak aid sent to the Senate floor, where it passed the Dem Senate even though most Dems were opposed to funding Zia, a military dictator. The sanctimonious Kerry was the originator of the funds for votes scheme, as he was the head of the DSCC. He is quoted in Wikipedia with his usual perfidious change of mind:

The United States Democratic Party Presidential nominee in 2004, Senator John Kerry, stated in 2003 that President Zia "purposefully misled" him on the issue of Pakistan's nuclear programme when he visited the country in 1985.

In those days, less than $100K to the right coffers leveraged umpty millions in arms sales. [Soon thereafter, Amb. Raphel died with Prez Zia in a C-130 explosion that has never been solved, though conspiracy theories abound].

I still have my Deputy Grand Marshal's green shoulder sash from the "Pakistan Day" parade in NYC. I met money-grubbing congressmen like Torricelli and Solarz during my rounds soliciting funds for the Pakis in homes and meetings, one in the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC that I still have a VHS of my uninspiring fund-raising speech.

The best part of the whole several years I spent to-ing and fro-ing from Pakistan was trying to peddle Gulfstream 4 private jets for the province governors of the country. Met a Deputy Minister of Defence who wanted to do business, which in that part of the world is always a shell game. Had a personal interview with the Dep Chief of ISI and a drunken dinner at the Russian Ambassador's home in Islamabad {Russia was still an uninvited guest in Afghanistan next door}. Also three weeks in "Shangri-la," a mountain resort in Azad Kashmir, near Nanga Parbat, which our plane flew way too close to on our flight to the tourist aerie.

My wife Marilyn and I got lost in the casbah back streets of Peshawar, as she was trying to get Edelman a client through our Paki friends. The NorthWest Frontier Province is the "wild East" and I once had the NWFP Finance chief tell me that western Pakistan was ready to peel off and become Iranian at the drop of a hat [as the Baluchis and Pushtuns were more Iranian-oriented than the Punjabis and Sindhis, who in turn preferred India to Pakistan, in his august opinion. The Pakis are free with their opinions and it is difficult to generalize such a voluble and friendly bunch, although their xenophobes can be verrry scary.

So I can understand why Musharraf has captivated a lot of the chattering-class illuminati and the neo-con Wilsonian atavists at the same time. Neighboring India can inspire all sorts of hyperbole, as Thomas Friedman demonstrates periodically. But Pakistan is fascinating and repulsive at the same time, with a necessity that has kept Americans at its side ever since Reagan [after Gen. Zia famously called Carter's aid package "peanuts."]