Could Pakistan fall to extremists?
Analysts say Washington's fears that Islamic extremists will take control of Pakistan are overblown.
from the June 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Pakistan's history of religious moderation
For its part, the United States has stood by Mr. Musharraf. In recent days, two top State Department officials, Richard Boucher and John Negroponte, visited with Musharraf in Islamabad on Saturday. Both officials said they trust him to address one of Pakistan's most controversial issues: whether Musharraf can run for president again while remaining Army chief.
"I think this is something that President Musharraf himself is going to want to decide and this is a matter that is up to him," said Mr. Negroponte.
But the change of power in Congress this year has brought new scrutiny to the idea that Musharraf is the only man who can prevent Pakistani-sponsored nuclear terrorism.
To maintain his rule, some Congressional democrats say, Musharraf has had to marginalize Pakistan's largest parties, which are secular, and instead rely on religious parties to give him some patina of support. In doing so, however, Musharraf has suppressed the moderating elements of Pakistani society.
The shift comes as extremism in Pakistan has reached unprecedented levels during the past two years. For the first time, Taliban-linked militants have targeted government ministers and Army personnel in suicide bombings and ratcheted up violence in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.
Yet Pakistani analysts overwhelmingly say that the best way to combat terrorism here is not with military force, but with a true democracy. Pakistan has been a democracy for 30 of the 60 years since it gained its independence. During those years, religious parties never won more than 12 percent of the vote in any election.
"As impressive and worrying as this total appears to some, the Islamist vote remains limited to slightly more than one-tenth of the electorate despite heavy manipulations in its favor by the state machinery," writes Frédéric Grare in a 2006 report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The statistics play against common perceptions of Pakistan abroad. Some 70 percent of the population of Pakistan comes from the lowland areas of Punjab and upper Sindh, where cultural traditions and economic aspirations hew to those of moderate India. Likewise, more than 84 percent of the Army officer corps comes from Punjab and Sindh.
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