Three years later, after changing his title from "General" to "President" because it sounded better, this dictator was "elected" in an election boycotted by opposition groups and most voters, and considered by the rest of the world to be a complete farce.
His country is now considered one of the world's leading havens for Muslim fundamentalist terror groups; if Osama bin Laden is alive, it's thought likely he is here. Our dictator's intelligence agency trains and arms terror groups sympathetic to bin Laden, and the country's ongoing support of such groups in a campaign against its largest neighbor -- a secular democracy -- nearly led to full-blown war last year.
In that confrontation, this dictator threatened to use nuclear weapons. He has them. North Korea has gotten its nuclear weapons materials from this country, which is now believed to be only months away from developing the capacity to launch missiles with nuclear warheads.
The man is "President" Pervez Musharraf; his country, Pakistan. And today, Musharraf will probably ask for still more American weaponry while visiting the White House for an amiable chat with Pres. George W. Bush.
Publicly, Bush is likely to praise the Pakistani strongman for his assistance in America's "War on Terror," particularly its ongoing war in neighboring Afghanistan. Privately, Bush is likely to press for more such cooperation, and for pledges to cut off the North Korean nuclear connection (which Musharraf denies exists).
But there will be no saber-rattling, no thunderous condemnations of an evil dictator who poses a menace to democracy. Quite the contrary; since 9-11, America has become a much closer ally to Pakistan, dropping the sanctions that were imposed after Pakistan conducted public tests of its nukes in 1998, so that it could sell Pakistan its weaponry and use the country in its Afghan invasion. America's deepening friendship, and Musharraf's accompanying betrayal of the Taliban (who Pakistan helped bring to power), have enraged Pakistan's fundamentalists -- who maintain significant power, particularly within the country's military and intelligence services.
But cozying up to America and its money has also strengthened Musharraf's hand. It has enabled him to conduct a blatantly rigged election in May 2002 with a minimum of outcry -- i.e., none -- from Washington. That election came on the heels of a series of terror attacks in disputed Kashmir province -- and, in Dec. 2001, on India's parliament building in New Delhi -- that by June brought the two countries to what Washington and London intelligence agencies described at the time as a threat of nuclear war at least as grave as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Still, somehow, miraculously, Pakistan remains in Washington's good graces. Musharraf qualifies on virtually every one of the counts used by George W. Bush and his administration to justify deposing Saddam Hussein: the nuclear- equipped, terrorism-sponsoring dictator who represses his own people, threatens neighboring countries, and exports nuclear technology to America's enemies. When Bush wags his finger, or poses for photo-ops on aircraft carriers, so as to posture about such menaces, Musharraf is the dictator that Muslims around the world are most likely to point to as an example of America's double standard. The difference, they say, is that Saddam had oil. And didn't have nukes.
At home, Musharraf plays a tricky balancing act. He cannot rule without the support of his military and the ISI -- the intelligence agency laced with the people who helped launch and continued to support the Taliban. Kashmir has served as a front to which he can redirect religious (as well as nationalist) rage.
Otherwise, despite (and because of) his severe political repression, the fundamentalists threaten to turn on Musharraf himself. Musharraf is a dictator; political opposition, whether in writing or speech, is kept on a short leash, and Pakistan's notoriously brutal prisons have an ample supply of anti-Musharraf political prisoners. The famed Islamic training schools that produced a generation of Islamic radicals have been targeted at times by Musharraf's forces not just because of American pressure, but because he wants fundamentalist clerics to need to rely on his good will. India pushed its dispute with Pakistan to the boiling point last year in part because with Pakistan's new missile capacity, India sensed a window of opportunity closing. Once Pakistan is able to nuke any of India's cities, India loses significant leverage in its ability to stop Pakistani-sponsored terror. When last June's nuclear crisis de-escalated, it was in part because Musharraf himself ordered Kashmir-based Islamic terror groups to stand down from their cross-border incursions. There is little doubt his government continues to sponsor such groups; one of his protections against America's wrath is its fear that if he should be deposed, it would be the fundamentalists who would then control Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and a functional delivery system, one that can reach Afghanistan and Iraq as easily as India.
That, Washington argues, would be even worse, so Musharraf must be supported. But in Saddam's case, Washington did not simply wring its hands in public and proclaim, with alleged sorrow, a policy of lesser evilism and what used to be called "constructive engagement." It spent years isolating Iraq -- with sanctions far more severe than the ones imposed on Pakistan in 1998 -- and then, finally, invaded....
The War On Terror wasn't supposed to be more of the same. Born of 9-11, it was supposed to be about making the protection of Americans from terror groups a priority so urgent that money was no object. So why, today, is George Bush playing host to a man who sponsors terror? Why spend a small fortune and incur international wrath to go chasing after a dictator whose weapons and Al-Qaeda links didn't exist, and at the same time cozy up to a dictator whose nuclear weapons and Al-Qaeda links are common knowledge?...