Saying the right thing, Armitage-style

Pervez Musharraf is everywhere: Last night Washington went to bed after watching him on The Daily Show, this morning we woke up to him on Morning Edition, and tonight he’s dining

at the White House. This burst of activity is not to promote U.S.-Pakistani relations, but his new book, currently No.5 on Amazon.

What has garnered the book more publicity than anything else is his claim that Dick Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the “stone age.” This has prompted the usual complaints about American bullying, the cowboy nature of the Bush administration, etc. But what these critics ignore is that Musharraf’s own testimony proves that Armitage’s language was both necessary and effective.

I made a dispassionate, military-style analysis of our options, weighing the pros and cons. My decision was based on the wellbeing of my people and the best interests of my country — Pakistan always comes first. I war-gamed the United States as an adversary. There would be a violent and angry reaction if we didn’t support the United States. Thus the question was: if we do not join them, can we confront them and withstand the onslaught? The answer was no, we could not, on three counts.”

The clear implication of this is that if the United States hadn’t threatened to destroy Pakistan unless it cooperated fully, Pakistan wouldn’t have cooperated at all. The two other things that Armitage’s critics forget is that he was speaking to the head of the very agency that had created the regime that was harboring the terrorists who attacked America. At this point, Pakistan wasn’t neutral in the war on terror, it was on the other side. It is also nonsensical to criticize Armitage for poor public diplomacy, when he made the threat in private. The only reason the world knows about it is because the president of Pakistan decided to reveal it for the oh-so diplomatic reason of generating some pre-publicity excitement. Maybe he should have just had a book party instead.