Steven Taylor has the latest on Pervez Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian attempts to hold onto power in Pakistan, which—as Taylor points out—hardly seem to be directed at the Islamist extremists he seems to believe are an existential threat to Pakistani society. Indeed, given the sordid history of support by the Pakistani security forces for Islamist guerrillas fighting Pakistan’s proxy wars in Indian-controlled Kashmir and pre-9/11 Afghanistan, ties that do not seem to have been fully extinguished, continued army control of the government could in the end strengthen the extremist groups.

That said, I’m not exactly sure what Radley Balko is getting at in this post when he claims that events in Pakistan indicate “why ‘spreading democracy’ is such a foolish foreign policy objective.” It is not all clear that a democratic Pakistan would be any less of an effective ally of the United States in its conflict with al Qaeda and the Taliban—while, presumably, the U.S. would have to respect local sensibilities more in terms of military operations in the border regions, it’s not like Musharraf’s regime has been a particularly effective ally in that regard either. A democratic Pakistan that incorporates nonviolent Islamists in the government could actually serve to delegitimize terrorists and their extremist allies and increase popular support for building an effective state in the lawless border regions.

And, if the point is that we wouldn’t be in Afghanistan still if we weren’t committed to “spreading democracy,” I think that’s hogwash. Even if the goals of the Afghan mission were simply confined to obliterating al Qaeda and their Taliban allies, the ineffective Pakistani government would be an obstacle no matter what form of government we decided to impose in Afghanistan. And if we’re in Afghanistan to obliterate the old government anyway, I can’t think of any good reason to go against our national principles to prop up some Cold War-style authoritarian regime that we’d have to support indefinitely as a client state to ensure that the Taliban and their buddies didn’t return to power. Restoring the old order wouldn’t have actually fixed anything.