<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> WorldTribune.com: Mobile Ñ As if Pakistan didn't have enough problems, it has now become a top U.S. priority

As if Pakistan didn't have enough problems, it has now become a top U.S. priority

Monday, March 23, 2009   E-Mail this story   Free Headline Alerts

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

There is an old bitter-sweet joke about relations with the U.S. among the smaller Asian countriesÕ diplomatic corps: God help you if you do get the attention of the U.S.! That is, no one Ñ friend or foe Ñ in the business of international relations has any illusions about the importance of a countryÕs bilateral relations with what the French used to call Òthe hyperpowerÓ. But when you move up to the top of WashingtonÕs list of those countries wherein the Americans think they have a peculiarly important and urgent interest, all sorts of things happen. It may be to the profit of the smaller country, but it also sure makes life extremely difficult. ThatÕs where Pakistan is now.

Islamabad airport at the moment must be like the Pyongyang airport which I visited many years ago in a group of non-official Americans to go there for ÒtalksÓ: there was more traffic through the VIP lounge than through the public corridor of the little airport. The list of American officials being waived through the Pak customs in the past few weeks is a long one. ItÕs impossible to make the count ø some, even CIA Director Panetta Leon Panetta ø might even have come and gone without a coterie of accompanying fawning journalists, without making public statements, without dissertations on the importance of that part of the world to American, European, and world politics at the moment, and pronouncements on forthcoming policy, etc., etc., ad nauseum. But they have been very few.

To the locals, especially that very small circle of the sophisticated literates, what might be called the political class in another country but in Pakistan is a virtually a feudal liege, every word spoken by these official tourists is of the utmost importance. That plus anything they may say in other climes before or after their visit ø especially in the neighboring capital of New Delhi ø is also put under a microscope for dissection. It is quoted, misquoted, scrutinized, analyzed, repeated in the local English and Urdu and other vernacular media, dissected, praised or railed against [or both simultaneously]. Alas! Pakistan, as a few other Third World countries, is unique, too, in that English is an official language and widely spoken Ñ if often in ways that defy translation and in forms that have been abandoned since 18th century Britain. That complicates the furor which now constitutes as much a part of the political problem of the moment in crisis-ridden South Asia as the military confrontations and the increasing terrorist episodes.

On the eve of a formal announcement of a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan by the Obama Administration, a new theme has emerged in the pronouncements of the various Ñ and there are so many Ñ spokesmen for the U.S policymakers in the region. That is that Pakistan is not only integral to the American commitment and any solution Ñ Obamaspeak does not permit the use of the word ÒvictoryÓ Ñ in Afghanistan, but, indeed, that it may be the most important element as Washington ups the ante in a deteriorating situation with additional troops.

But just as now Central Commander Gen. David Petraeus has acknowledged.that Afghanistan is not Iraq, and that his apparent success on the Tigris-Euphrates may not be a template for Afghanistan, Pakistan is, too, a very different place.

The heritage of British India, for example, hangs heavy in Islamabad, in some ways even more than in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, the other successor states to the Indian Empire. That derives in no small way from the fact that the Pakistan Army carries on Ñ despite a totally new environment and more than a halfcentury later Ñ some of the most cherished British Indian Army traditions. And it is the Pakistan military, more than any other institution in the country, which has a national ethos and a unifying role in holding a large and very disparate group of ethnicities together on one of the worldÕs most impoverished pieces of real estate.

It was therefore a forgone conclusion that when the corrupt and feckless Pakistani civilian politicians Ñ the successor regime to the semi-military dictatorship of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf Ñ reached an impasse threatening violence/chaos in March, that it would be the army which would be the principal mediator Ñ again. Yes, there was considerable Washington pressure and not a little British carping from the sidelines Ñ alas! far too much of it semi-public in an atmosphere of growing anti-Americanism.

But the feuding civilian leaders, President Asif Ali Zardari and the longtime rival of the Bhutto family party, the Mia Nawaz brothers, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with his Saudi sponsors, were brought to heel and compromise by Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvaz Kayani. That Kayani has been advertised as notoriously apolitical Ñ or was until this crisis Ñ only adds to the significance of his role as the military leader who would have to make the fix. Kayani continues to say, apparently, to anyone who will listen, including the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, that the army does not want to take over the government again. [Pakistan has been ruled more than half the time since it was created by its military directly.]

It could well be, as some commentators have argued, that the deteriorating situation in Pakistan is even more serious than recent ugly events in Afghanistan. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan [but not India at their request] Richard C.A. Holbrooke in another of those bizarre stream of consciousness outpourings which seem to afflict American officials dealing with the region, this time in Brussels, has said so. Holbrooke spoke on the eve of NATOÕs 60th anniversary summit where Ñ if he had not already been waved off Ñ President Barack Obama would ask for more European reinforcements for Afghanistan. Now, apparently, the Americans would be pressing their European allies for more help in the paramilitary aspects of the Kabul problem, for example, training police and financing civilian aid projects. It would also help, the Americans may dare hint, if the German military contingent [the third largest] would leave off a bit of the beer-drinking and take on some fighting tasks [even at night] and in the more threatened battlefields.

KayaniÕs day work, military problems, are growing increasingly difficult. With a growing U.S./NATO force in Afghanistan, sanctuary in the tribal areas along the border of the two countries is becoming an increasingly serious strategic problem. There are a few old soldiers around Ñ perhaps even Holbrooke when recalls his Vietnam experience Ñ who remember the problem of Laos, Cambodia and the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail during the long and bloody Vietnam years. With the Pakistani civil politicians often shading off into the Islamicist sympathizers if not collaborators of the terrorists, with a significant number of the Pakistan army recruited on the fringes of the tribal areas with emotional links to them, the political pendulum swings both ways. That is, deals such as one concluded a few weeks ago in what was once the princely state of Swat, a beaitufil mountain area within commuting distance of the capital, to try to bring in from the cold more moderate religious, could prove the answer to pacification. On the other hand, such deals could Ñ and the jury is still out in Swat despite HolbrookeÕs throwing out comments that were less than helpful Ñ simply reinforce the possibility of the terrorists have new safety to which to escape from their hit and run engagements with the Americans, the Pakistani military, and their allies. Earlier attempts by Musharraf for such deals went sour.

But the traditional alternate bribery and violence was the strategy of the British earlier and their Pakistani successors for decades. Now, of course, the poison spread by Al Qaeda and Òthe foreign fightersÓ Ñ everything from Chechens to young British Muslims Ñ is what has to be weeded out before such compromises would work.

The use of armed drones by the Americans to chase down identified terrorists hiding in the nearly impenetrable terrain demonstrates the complicated process of trying to find political-military tactics that work. The U.S. command in Afghanistan, warned publicly and apparently privately by the Pakistani military and politicians that their polity would not suffer actual U.S./NATO ground forces in hot pursuit, has used the drones effectively. But there has apparently been Òcollateral damageÓ Ñ killing and wounding of civilians among whom the terrorist leadership and the foreigners hid. The weapon, perhaps precisely because it is so awesome, has come under fierce attack by Pakistani official spokesmen [at least for public consumption] and in the legislatures. It has even been presented by the terrorists and their sympathizers as evidence of the price Americans put on their own lives but do not accord to their opponents, that it is a cowardly way of fighting, etc., etc.

There are not going to be any easy answers to such questions and to the many more that arise as the war continues in Afghanistan/Pakistan. But what would be helpful would be if some of the tamasha, the noisy spectacle of the many cooks, left off. Even in Obamaspeak, there must be the possibility of an order, Shut up! It needs to be given to the growing number of U.S. participants in a difficult and demanding conflict that wonÕt be won by public relations officers and their favorite media outlets.

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