Some people in the US have started comparing US support to Pak generals to pre-1979 Iran.
http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=10938
News Analysis
Like Musharraf, Iran’s Shah was a pivotal US ally
Afp, Washington
The United States backs the unpopular autocratic ruler of an Islamic country for too long, and then is caught on the wrong side of history when he is overthrown.
Not Pakistan today, but Iran in the 1970s. Some observers fear the US government risks repeating its mistake by not exerting more pressure now on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
“The United States has backed the wrong horse in Pakistan and that’s like the situation with the Shah in pre-revolutionary Iran,” said Syed Hasnat, a Pakistani scholar at Washington’s Middle East Institute.
“It’s not too late to amend policy, but this is the crunch time for the United States,” he said.
Washington was wrong-footed by the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran and ushered in the Islamic republic, having backed the monarch for decades despite rising popular anger against his dictatorial rule.
The Shah was seen as a valuable anti-communist ally, a friend to Israel and sympathetic to US strategic and commercial interests in oil-rich Iran.
Musharraf meanwhile has been an “indispensable” ally for the US-led “war on terror,” according to US officials, even if there is deep disquiet about his imposition of a state of emergency last weekend.
The White House welcomed Thursday the fact that the military ruler had “clarified” the date for Pakistani elections, now scheduled to take place by mid-February, but urged him to take further steps toward democracy.
While Iran’s clerical regime today is accused by the West of pursuing nuclear weapons, Pakistan under Musharraf indisputably has them already, which makes the stakes even higher.
The US government is “locked in much the same kind of policy vise that bedevilled the US in Iran,” Gary Sick, a Middle East professor at New York’s Columbia University, wrote in a recent opinion piece.
“We have bet the farm on one man – in this case Pervez Musharraf – and we have no fall-back position, no alternative strategy in the event that does not work.”
Successive US administrations, bent on containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, were accused of failing to nurture voices of democratic moderation in Iran under the Shah’s rule.
The result was that when he was swept into exile, the United States was tainted by association in the eyes of ordinary Iranians and was powerless to prevent the extremist regime that eventually took over.