Our man in Pakistan: is Musharraf really doing everything he can to help the U.S.? Not even close, says a former Pakistani diplomat.

• Author: Hirsh, Michael
• Position: Book Review

Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military By Husain Haqqani Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, $17.95

Better than any other recent book, Husain Haqqani's brilliant Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military explains the Faustian bargain that the United States has struck with Pakistan in the war on terror. It also illustrates the occasional hypocrisy of George W. Bush's second-term commitment "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," as the president put it in his second inaugural address. For as Haqqani lays out in powerful, almost excruciating detail, the Bush administration has repeatedly looked the other way as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf--uncomfortably balancing the same competing interests of Islamic identity, military necessity and U.S. pressure as most of his predecessors in power--has trampled all over democracy in the service of "stability."

This critique is not by itself a novel one. But Haqqani, a former Pakistani diplomat and government advisor who is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, takes our understanding of the issue onto a whole new level by demonstrating that Musharraf, along with his predecessors among Pakistan's military coup-meisters, have made their own Fanstian bargain with the devil. In this case, the devil is the military-Islamist alliance that has defined Pakistani national identity since the country's founding.

While ostensibly cracking down on radical Islamists, Musharraf has--to maintain his power--cut deals with the religious parties that give these extremists succor, in particular the coalition called the Muttahhida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA, or United Action Committee). Musharraf has also barred the parties of his main democratic rivals, former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. As a result, in a nationwide referendum in October 2002, Pakistani Islamist parties--which had never earned more than single-digit support from the electorate--secured 11.1 percent of the popular vote and 20 percent of the seats in the lower house of Parliament. Musharraf, Haqqani writes, used "the MMA as his primary opposition to create the illusion that radical Islamist groups were gaining power through democratic means, thus minimizing the prospect that the international community--especially the United States while Pakistan offers support in the war against al...