Spencer Ackerman’s been taking a look at how American aid gets delivered to Pakistan and it basically amounts to handing over billions of dollars of cash stuffed into garbage bags. More specifically, “the U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers.” That’s basically untraceable, unaccountable money. Over a billion a year goes direct to the Pakistani military in what CSIS’s Rick Barton characterizes as “a sort of a handshake deal between militaries” in which we “we don’t have a lot of record-keeping.”

Keep that in mind, and then flip back to Joshua Hammer’s recent Pakistan article for The Atlantic:

Ayesha Siddiqa, a well-known analyst in Islamabad and the author of Military Inc.: Inside the Pakistani Military Economy, says that the armed forces are major players in real estate, agribusiness, and several other industries. The empire includes banks, cable-TV companies, insurance agencies, sugar refineries, private security firms, schools, airlines, cargo services, and textile factories. The Fauji Foundation, for instance, is a “welfare trust” that is run by the defense ministry and spans 15 business enterprises. It provides cushy jobs for hundreds of retired officers (many retire in their late 40s), pays few taxes, and channels profits into a fund that is intended to benefit retired military personnel. And it is just one of several giant military-run foundations and companies that were set up decades ago and have grown steadily ever since.

The military’s intrusion into commerce is quite visible in Islamabad, if you know what to look for. The logos of the Fauji Foundation and other military-run conglomerates appear on trucks, boxes, and buildings throughout the city. As Hood­bhoy told me, “They own gas companies. They make fertilizer, cement, soap, bottled water. They even make cereals, so when I have breakfast, I can’t get away from them.”

Basically, this money could be going anywhere for any purpose — it’s just a kind of giant bribe to Pakistan’s military and political elite (and in a military dictatorship it’s not such a key distinction) not something that goes to support particular programs.

The overwhelming consensus is that people want fewer posts that just link to interesting things I’ve read on the internet, but Trita Parsi’s article for The Nation outlining eight principles for thinking about Iran is too good not to link to.

I think David Ignatius’ column on Pakistan today is pretty insightful. He makes the Iran analogy, and also makes the point that even with 20/20 hindsight it’s really not clear how Jimmy Carter should have handled that situation. Similarly, “changing Pakistan is a job for Pakistanis, and history suggests that the more we meddle, the more likely we are to get things wrong.”

The trouble, though, is that while it would be easy for us to not “meddle” if political protests started to rock Laos or Belarus, we’re already eye-deep in Pakistan-related meddling in the form of our huge post-9/11 aid packages. To pull the aid carpet out from under Musharraf would be a kind of meddling. To continue the unconditional aid policy, however, is a different kind of meddling. And to continue the aid but attach more strings to it — to make it clear that a violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators would result in aid cuts, say — would also constitute a kind of meddling. Similarly, if Pakistani officials ask American diplomats what they think about the situation and they don’t say anything, that’ll likely be read as a green light for harsh measures.

Basically, we’re in a position where “don’t meddle” doesn’t mean anything. In the medium-term, what we need to do is shift our overall posture to one where we’re doing less meddling in other countries’ internal political problems (as Ignatius says, we don’t seem very good at it) but we’ve meddled so much in Pakistan that there’s no non-meddling option for the short-run.

Several smart correspondents have made the point that one of the other oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she’s a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power.

The Bhuttos, naturally, claim that all of this is politically motivated, but if you look at John Burns’ account from early 1998 when the investigations were going down you can see that it’s grounded in some pretty solid evidence and involves lots of European banks and corporation that are hardly going to be under the control of her political rivals in Pakistan. And we’re not talking small change here, either, this one scam seems to have netted tens of millions of dollars. Back in the late 1990s, she even had Swiss authorities looking to get her indicted which, again, seems like a beyond-the-ordinary level of corruption rather than domestic political gambits. That’s not to deny that she has a real constituency in the country, but Pakistani politics shouldn’t be reduced to Bhutto versus Musharraf as there’s more forces in play than just that:

Sharif urged the West to abandon Musharraf but also ruled out teaming up with Benazir Bhutto, another key opposition leader, unless she cut off talks with Musharraf. Sharif told The Associated Press that Pakistan was heading deeper into chaos and his archenemy had outlived his usefulness in fighting terrorism.

I’m not sure what the takeaway is here, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

I’ve made this argument in the past, but this old campaign poster for William McKinley’s 1900 re-election campaign makes the point better than anything I could say. What you see here — “the American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for HUMANITY’S SAKE” — would be perfectly recognizable as a neoconservative slogan. And yet, it comes from the period we now think of as involving precisely the effort to plant the American flag to acquire more territory, specifically colonies in Puerto Rico and the Philippines plus informal empire elsewhere.

And there’s the rub; the much-vaunted “idealism” of the neocons is nothing new. And, indeed, I don’t even think we should view it — or the rhetoric of a William McKlinley — as necessarily insincere. Rather, it’s an example of the boundless human capacity for self-justification and self-deception. If you decide that military domination is the policy you want, you’ll swiftly find a way to convince yourself that military domination is best for the world. Kipling called it the white man’s burden, the French called it la mission civilitrice, and it’s all equally meaningless however you want to phrase it.

One of many things I don’t really understand about Pakistan but that seems worth commenting on if only to point out, is that Benazir Bhutto’s strong personal connections inside the West seem to be an important factor here. Bhutto, let’s recall, wasn’t driven from power by Musharraf’s coup. Rather, she simply lost power to a rival political party led by Nawaz Sharif in a democratic manner. It was Sharif who Musharraf deposed.

Nevertheless, it’s Bhutto who went to Oxford and Harvard, it’s Bhutto who once made People‘s most beautiful people list, it’s Bhutto who the Bush administration tried to push Musharraf into agreeing to share power with, it’s Bhutto who pens op-eds for The New York Times, and so on and so forth. These things are all interrelated and it should probably be kept in mind that an opposition leader’s popularity among western elites whose institutions of higher education she attended and her popularity on the ground aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Vali Nasr offers a troubling analogy:

The longer Musharraf stays in power the more Pakistan will look like Iran in 1979: an isolated and unpopular ruler hanging on to power only to inflame passions and bring together his Islamic and pro-democracy opposition into a dangerous alliance.

I keep veering between a sense that since this Pakistan business is one of the most important things going on right now I should write about it, and a sense that there’s no reason for me to play fake Pakistan expert.

On the other hand, I do think this kind of talk from Nasr throws into sharp relief the nonsensical nature of the Bush administration’s democracy-talk. If you want to create a reasonable interpretation of the “lack of democracy causes terrorism” theory then the one Nasr’s bringing up here seems like by far the best candidate. You have your American-backed dictatorship, you have your popular anger at the dictatorship, and you have some of that anger being displaced onto the United States. Something like that certainly seems to have happened in Iran in the 1970s and it’s a plausible account of at least some of what’s going on in places like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia today.

But even if you want to credit the Bush administration with a great deal of sincere belief in the desirability of spreading the blessings of democracy to Iraq, nothing they did ever addressed that dictatorship problem. Instead, democracy was always and everywhere seen as a tool to be used to displace troublesome regimes — Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, North Korea. These weren’t governments that were disfavored because they were undemocratic, they were targeted for democratization because they disfavored.

Now “reward your friends and punish your enemies” isn’t a crazy approach to world affairs. But in this case it does run directly contrary to the entire theory of why democracy mattered. After all, you’d have to be a real idiot to turn into an anti-American radical because you didn’t like Saddam Hussein or the Assads or the Mullahs in Iran. Opposition groups in those places you can expect to be friendly to America. It’s in Egypt and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that you need to worry. Those are the countries where lack of democracy can, in principle, lead to an anti-American backlash. But those are precisely the countries where Bush never did anything other than tinker around the edges always leaving it clear that incumbent regimes’ red lines would be respected. That, though, is just backwards and stupid and has nothing to do with the nominal problem at hand.