Here a General, there a General

Everywhere, it's Musharraf but Vajpayee doesn't have to feel left out.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee arrived in Washington on Thursday evening. There wasn’t a line acknowledging it in The Washington Post. Pervez Musharraf is landing a day later. But the papers are already loaded with stories about his travels. Today he hogged prime-time on television networks. He even held forth at the House of Commons. Nobody needed to be reminded that it was just the other day that Britain wanted Pakistan thrown out of the Commonwealth because Musharraf had usurped power through a coup. Vajpayee, however, need not feel so victimised. In the West, Pakistan is the flavour of the fortnight. In Washington, particularly in the foreign policy and defence establishments, as in the think tanks, there is a sense of excitement, even nervous tension about Musharraf’s arrival.

He is the new kid on the block. He holds the key to Osama’s hideout. Only he can find George Bush a safe passage out of the Afghan blind alley. The US forces cannot operate from Iran. The Central Asian Republics are too far, and ethnically even more distant from the southern Pushtun areas where the Taliban are concentrated. India’s disadvantages as an ally are geographical, political, even religious. A predominantly Hindu India cannot be an active accomplice in a war against radical Islam.

Musharraf’s type impresses the US establishment. They like his soldier’s walk, his straight-talking manner and extroverted style. They may laugh in private about the way he puffs up his chest when he talks to a foreigner. Or about his cliched English, which reminds you of an instructor in a subcontinental military academy. “Take the bull by the horn (note the singular, as if he confuses the bull for a rhino or vice versa) and put the horse before the cart,” is by now a familiar Musharrafism. When the last US President (Clinton) met him, he wagged his finger at him in public. This one will fete him as probably no Pakistani leader has been, ever. He is like the favourite approver of the sheriff.

The wisdom of the Washington veteran, however, is that this shouldn’t worry India too much. Washington has a history of toasting despots and dictators. Except some of them then come to grief simply because their own countrymen begin to see them too much as American bunnies than their own leaders. It doesn’t work forever even in a poor country, particularly one like Pakistan where the population has already experienced active politics. There are now those in Washington who believe that the short-cut of patronising dictators, particularly in Islamic countries, has been self-defeating for the US. “Why is it that most Muslims around the world resent our bombing of Afghanistan? Why are they not convinced by our evidence against Osama?” asks one expert taken particularly seriously by the establishment. Is it because Muslims around the world see us as the backers and patrons of despotic and corrupt regimes that oppress and brutalise them while enjoying the most decadently lavish lifestyles?

Happy routine, sombre punchline

If Vajpayee has any quibbles over the kind of play Musharraf is getting, he is not showing it. Vajpayee is a happy traveller. He seems happier still in America and particularly so in front of an audience of doting NRIs. At a reception in Washington on Friday evening, he had them in splits, with the nonchalance of a stand-up comedian. But he concluded on a sombre note, a sadder variation on his familiar main geet naya gaata hoon (I sing a new song). He wrote this, he said, for times when he gets disillusioned and fed up with the venality and cynicism of our system, when he feels like throwing it all and walking away. The refrain then is, main geet nahin gaata hoon (I refuse to sing a song).

Those who saw his sullen, angry mood just two months ago when he, unable to withstand his own people’s barbs, had threatened to quit, knew exactly what he was talking about. A pity the performance came so far away from the eyes of those it must have really been directed at. This particular bit was lost on the NRIs, who had come to be entertained, and took some time even realising the mood had turned so serious.

Until a few months ago, the Americans used to ask, what is wrong with your prime minister? He is such a terrific public orator and yet so uncommunicative in person. Now they have a theory. Vajpayee, they say, is the master of the set-piece. Give him an audience of admirers and he would charm them as nobody else could. Put him in Parliament and he might floor even the opposition. But put him across the table, one-on-one and his immune system is in overdrive. Musharraf, on the other hand, loves to talk, theorise, pontificate even if he has the intellectual depth of a battalion commander.

Vajpayee is the master of the broad brush. Musharraf is simplistic and linear in his step-by-step thinking. Odds are the Americans would love him for a little while and then get so exasperated as to suggest putting some De Bono on the list of his bedtime reading.

Steve South Asia Cohen

Funnily, just as Musharraf is the toast of the town, the part of the world Washington is most obsessed about is, for once, our very own South Asia. There is more interest in South Asia now than even in the Middle-east and one collateral transformation it has brought about is in the fortunes of academics and experts. This is personified (!) stunningly by three professors named Stephen Cohen. My favourite — and the only one of the three I know actually — is now the top of the pops. In the past, the “Soviet” Cohen (a friend of Gorbachev’s) and the “Middle-east” Cohen got much of the attention in the US while the “South Asia” Cohen (formerly of University of Illinois and now at Brookings) continued to accumulate scholarship, known better in the subcontinent than in the US. Now the tables have turned.

Having been one of his disciples I may be accused of bias. But nobody knows more about South Asian security, particularly the militaries, than he. And he is now in demand, hopping from one television channel to another, fitting radio interviews in between. “Maybe now, we should hold a conference comparing the Middle-east and South Asian peace processes and we can have all three Steve Cohens attending it,” he suggests.

There also isn’t another foreigner who knows the Pakistani generals as well as Cohen does. How would he compare Musharraf with Zia? There is no comparison he says. Zia was clever, cunning, a man who trusted no one but himself. “How would you describe him? May be, as they say in Yiddish, a mensch (approximately translated as a savvy gentleman).” Musharraf, on the other hand, needs people around him he can trust. But he thinks Musharraf has a great opportunity not only to turn the fortunes of his own country but to also help bring peace in the region. His situation, he says, could be a bit like Harry Truman’s, a man of average abilities but placed in opportune circumstances. But it won’t be easy, he says, for the picture in the region is so incredibly complicated. That is the problem with Pakistan, he says, cursed by history, but blessed by geography. Always in the right place at the wrong time.

As with so many others who specialise on the subcontinent, Steve is often a victim of competitive affections or resentments. Many Indians see him as being overly friendly to the Pakistanis. Many Pakistanis similarly say he has flipped to India’s side. Cohen, however, has written landmark books on both armies and loves them. Can you imagine, he asks, if India had not been partitioned and this was one army? He recalls Field Marshall Auchinleck telling him in an interview more than three decades ago that his greatest regret was that Mountbatten had partitioned such a fine army. “If India had not been partitioned,” Cohen says to me, “I would have been sitting here not with you but with a Chinese and we would be talking about how to contain this mighty India that straddles all the oil routes, dominates central Asia and so on.”

We chat while dining in a small, cheap, but exquisite Vietnamese restaurant in suburban Virginia. Cohen says the Vietnamese are the brightest students in US schools today, like the Indians, even if they have the initial drawback in English. But his wife, Bobby, who teaches English as a second language predominantly to immigrants, settles the issue. “At a dinner a Chinese and a Japanese guest asked me who were the brightest Asian students in English classes. They were shocked when I told them it was not the Chinese or the Japanese but the Vietnamese.”

The mall, dotted with Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants and shops, is a tribute to immigrant enterprise. But so is the rest of America. In the hotel, the waitress is Hungarian, the bellboy Slovak, the lobby manager Lebanese and the bartender Czech. This diversity, the multi-culturalism, is the very antithesis of Talibanism. It will be such a pity, therefore, if the post-Sept 11 trauma persuades Americans to tighten their immigration laws further.

 

The vast UN-employed

Later on Saturday, the bandwagon moves to New York as so many heads of states gather for that annual performance in competitive boredom, the speech at the UN General Assembly. Musharraf speaks a day after Vajpayee and will be dined by Bush. I suspect he will choose a sherwani over the khakis. I suspect also that this time there will be no breakfast invitations for us although the schedule for all of Sunday is blank for us. But probably that is because of the kind of place the UN is. There is the favourite old joke about the child who is being shown around the UN building by his father who is employed in a high position there. “How many people work in the UN building, dad,” he asked.

“In the UN, actually, no one really works,” said the very honest father. The joke may be too anodyne to make the SMS grade but it is so true. For evidence, see how irrelevant, inactive and indifferent the UN has been to the war against Osama and the Taliban.