IT might have been possible, in different circumstances, to feel sorry for John Negroponte. The US deputy secretary of state’s weekend mission to Pakistan was never likely to bear fruit. Apart from everything else, there’s no evidence that Negroponte has any experience as a prenuptial counsellor.

 

Before his present assignment, he served as George W. Bush’s envoy to the United Nations and proconsul in Baghdad, and neither of those roles is likely to have contributed much towards expertise in shotgun marriages. Long before that, Negroponte earned his spurs as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, a capacity in which he is accused of having turned a blind eye to death squads and other human rights abuses sponsored by the Honduran military junta.

 

That isn’t particularly surprising, given that his brief at the time was not to enhance democratic prospects in Honduras but to undermine them in neighbouring Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had spearheaded a popular uprising and overthrown a longstanding US client, Anastasio Somoza – the every same Somoza, mind you, for whom Franklin Roosevelt had decades earlier had coined a crude canine epithet that was recently regurgitated by Britain’s Daily Telegraph in reference to the Pakistan, leading to the expulsion of its correspondents.

 

Anyhow, the point is that Negroponte oversaw the US plan to destabilise revolutionary Nicaragua via infiltration by the CIA-trained and Washington-funded Contras, a naked act of terrorism for which Honduras served as a staging post. That particular instance of ideological profligacy by the US coincided with its supposedly covert support, on a considerably larger scale, for the so-called jihad against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, for which the staging post was Pakistan, with the army under General Zia-ul-Haq an eager – albeit not consistently efficient – collaborator.

 

The foregoing history lesson wasn’t intended purely as an aside. The current Islamist insurrection in the northern areas is clearly a form of blowback, and the forces behind it – or at least their antecedents – once enjoyed the wholehearted backing of US agencies as well as the Pakistan army. The refusal on the part of both to acknowledge that this was a cardinal error undercuts the coherence of their current concerns and throws them open to the charge of hypocrisy.

 

Negroponte’s purported efforts to persuade General Pervez Musharraf to lift the emergency he imposed, in his capacity as military chief, on November 3 produced no miracle, and there is no reason to believe that Condoleezza Rice would have fared better in his stead. She had apparently succeeded on a previous occasion in staving off authoritarian excesses, but this time Musharraf had dismissed her concerns as mistaken, and Negroponte appears to have encountered a well-rehearsed mantra to the effect that the emergency was essential for fair and free elections.

 

The fact that even the biased – and, lately, somewhat bewildered – US administration does not buy this claim obviously adds to the scepticism surrounding it. Nor is anyone inclined to accept the proposition that what Musharraf has confessed was a violation of the constitution was essential to step up combat operations in Swat, which had become an easy hunting ground for the Fazlullah fanatics. The Supreme Court under Iftikhar Chaudhry, for instance, wasn’t probing the government’s failures on the northern front, nor was any political party outside the Islamist coalition particularly perturbed by military offensives in the tribal areas.

 

The trouble, in part, is that these offensives haven’t exactly been stupendously successful. The approximately 250 soldiers who were held hostage until Musharraf, after imposing his emergency, agreed to free a bunch of potential suicide bombers, had reportedly given up the fight without a shot being fired. That poses a problem – but not one that can be solved by cracking down on dissidence on the supposedly liberal front. Bhutto was released from house arrest shortly before Negroponte landed, but Imran Khan remains incarcerated on terrorist charges.

 

In his prime as a fast bowler, Imran undoubtedly terrorized many a batsman. That was long ago. His foray into politics initially involved close co-ordination with the likes of retired general Gul Hamid. But then, he was also supportive of Musharraf at the inception of the latter’s rule. He has lately been talking sense. The popular support he enjoyed on the pitch is unlikely ever to be replicated in the political field. But that does not make him a terrorist suspect. He should be freed forthwith, and the role played in his arrest by Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba goons – the shock troops of the oldest reactionary force in the country – ought not to be ignored.

 

Negroponte made no effort to make contact with Imran, and a phone call to Bhutto apparently sufficed for his purposes. It is intriguing, nonetheless, that he spent more time with Ashfaq Kiyani, the deputy chief of the army, than he did with Musharraf. Should Musharraf decide to discard his uniform, Kiyani is expected to take over as military chief – and he reputedly does not favour a political role for the army.

 

If that is indeed the case, it is a hopeful sign. A temporary military withdrawal from politics won’t suffice, though. The very culture of the army, whereby it deems itself the ideal ruling force, will need to decisively be overturned. It is far from clear that Benazir – or, for that matter, Nawaz Sharif, who has been sent back to his gilded cage in Saudi Arabia – is up to the task of reversing this unfortunate trend.

 

 Both of them are evidently inclined towards reviving their erstwhile alliance with the aim of dispensing with Musharraf’s services. That’s a mildly hopeful sign, given that Pakistan’s salvation probably lies in a multi-party initiative supported by the army, with the latter willing to accept a crucial but subservient role in salvaging national unity.

 

It is interesting to note that Negroponte’s mission followed a report in The New York Times which suggested, on the basis of quotes from anonymous administration sources, that Washington was contemplating a post-Musharraf scenario. Even more intriguing was an opinion column in the NYT that hinted at the possibility of an American invasion in the event of a threat to Pakistan’s nuclear assets, which included the reminder that a million or so troops would be required to pacify Pakistan, given that its population is much larger than that of Iraq.

 

Frederick W. Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon, representing deeply conservative and supposedly liberal thinktanks respectively , also hinted at the possibility of neutralizing Pakistan’s weapons. Their joint comment coincided with a report on which the NYT had sat for three years, at the Bush administration’s behest, to the effect that the US was had been helping Pakistan since 2001 to keep its nuclear weapons secure.

 

There is a better way of dealing with this contingency. Nuclear weapons were always a bad idea for Pakistan. They are now evidently threatening its sovereignty. It could – and should – set an excellent example by doing away with them altogether.

 

In the short run, an all-party alliance geared towards supplanting the status quo is an acceptable idea, provided it does not crumble immediately afterwards into an incoherent mess. In the longer run, keeping Uncle Sam’s grubby paws off Pakistan is more likely to help Pakistan than anything that the Bush administration can devise.

 

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