US “leadership” and Pakistan

Maybe I’m naive, but I have been amazed all over again to see the unthinkingly “imperial” way in which many or most US commentators have been writing and talking about the rising tensions in Pakistan… There they are, earnestly enquiring as to “Who might be better than Musharraf?”, in a context in which the main criterion of being “better” is simply assumed to be “better for us”… or turning their gaze back to Washington and asking self-referentially “Who lost Pakistan?”
Hey guys! Pakistan is not “ours” to lose! It belongs to its own people.
Yes, they have many internal political problems of their own. And yes, the US has been quite intentionally meddling in the country’s politics for decades* (and the Brits for even longer.) And yes, there are big issues in Pakistan that are justifiably of concern to the whole world community– nuclear weapons, and the possible prospect of a Taliban power-base providing a hospitable base to the global terrorists of Al-Qaeda in the future, as in the past (though this is not necessarily the way the Talibs would behave; and their inclusion or exclusion from locally-based peacemaking initiatives could do a lot to affect that question.)
But note that I said these concerns about Pakistan are ones the whole world community faces– and not simply the US, standing all on its own.
Over the past 15 years or so, ways too many US commentators and pols have fallen into what you might call the “Leadership representation fallacy”… That is, because they have just somehow assumed that the US exercises and by the natural order of things should continue to exercise “leadership” within (or over) the whole world community, then by extension, any development that affects the whole world community somehow affects the US uniquely.
Ain’t so.
In fact, I would be as bold as to say that in that part of the world– let’s say, for simplicity, the whole of the “arc of instability”– the US as an actor and as an idea is currently so toxic that our country is the last one on earth that should seek to exercise “leadership” in crafting solutions to the challenges arising from there that now face the whole world.
Actually, yes, the US is “unique”: right now it is uniquely unqualified to play any kind of a diplomatic “leadership” role anywhere in the Muslim world.
So please. Let’s have a little more self-awareness, and a lot less self-referentiality and self-aggrandizement in the way US commentators think and talk about these issues.
We should keep firmly in mind, firstly, that Pakistan’s governance is the responsibility of the country’s own citizens (and our first responsibility should be good governance in our country, which goodness knows, it certainly needs.)
And inasmuch as events in Pakistan do have an effect on the whole world, we should remember that America’s 300 million people are far from being the people most directly affected by it. India (one billion people), China (1.3 billion), Afghanistan, and the countries of Central Asia and the Middle East are all much more deeply affected than we are.
Think about it.
By the way: truly excellent reporting and analysis of China’s relationship with Pakistan is here, thanks to “China hand.” The opening line there:

“Americocentrism dies hard.”

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* See this good piece by Spencer Ackerman at TPM-Muckraker, on the gobs of accountability-free funding the Bushites have been shoveling over to Musharraf since 9/11. (Hat-tip J. Cole.) Ackerman writes:

Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse… [T]he U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end…

And of course, you can put that together with this post I put up here yesterday, reporting on the significant rise in the Taliban’s power in both Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past year.
US tax dollars well spent there? I’d say not. Let’s have some real accountability here at home! (Not of the “who lost Pakistan?” variety, but of the “who totally mismanaged the reaction to 9/11, wasted our federal budget, and sowed death and havoc throughout a large chunk of the world?” variety.)