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The Pakistan mess, courtesy of the vaunted U.S. foreign policy establishment

Monday, April 27, 2009   E-Mail this story   Free Headline Alerts

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

'Don’t just stand there, do something!"

The Obama Administration has amended that old bromide: “Don’t just stand there, do everything and anything!” That appears to be the modus operandi of the Obama Administration in an effort to meet the challenge of a deteriorating military, economic, and political situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The cacophony coming out of the Obama Administration on Pakistan is ear-shattering — and nerve-wracking for some of us who remember the old slogan mounted on the U.S. National Archives portal, “the past is prologue”.

[The adaptation from Shakespeare needs at least its modest elaboration: “Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge.”]

Instead of recognizing the Bush Administration’s disastrous mistake of agitating and intriguing for the dumping of Pakistan’s benign dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the State Department is getting deeper into the briarpatch of Pakistan’s tribal, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and modernizing complications. The current dust-up between UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Pakistan government over what should be their routine if sensitive legal, migration and intelligence problems suggests that even with the background of several centuries of imperial rule, the vaunted Foreign Office, too, has difficulty navigating all these twists and turns.

To change the metaphor, there is no use beating a dead horse.

But the Bush Administration, with its once seemingly efficient clerk-administrator as traffic director of the National Security Council, Condoleeza Rice, was led around by the nose by the Foreign Service Establishment when she graduated to secretary of state. One test was seeking to “restore” democracy to Pakistan. It helped rescue decrepit, corrupt, discredited, incompetent politicians from Pakistan’s recent past to try to create Westminister-on-the-Karakorum.

Common sense would have told anyone but ‘seasoned diplomats” that restoring the status quo ante would not solve the problems which these politicians as much as anyone else had led Pakistan into a morasse. And, as always, the lugubrious American media, as ignorant and as ahistorical as they always are, climbed on, creating false villains and mock heroes. At the moment, these mavim are retailing preposterous stories about the growing strength of the Taliban as though the benighted terrorists are the hordes of Ghengis Khan descending on the Pakistan capital.

The index of the stupidity of those whom Washington — and the bazaar in Pakistan always ready to be agitated into direct action — chose to lead the poverty-stricken, near-failed state, back to “democracy” was Benazir Bhutto’s self intoxication with her own propaganda. That she exposed herself to assassination on the very site of two previous bombing attacks on Musharraf was the index of that — not to say her earlier presiding over her husband’s — and now widower-president — corruption and her complicity in the swapping of technologies with North Korea.

Only Freud [or Adler] can really divine what was in the minds of the American policymakers at that moment. But with a stroke, they helped bifurcate the Pakistan establishment between the so-called civilians and the military.

But it was — and is — the military which as the only functioning “national” institution with its tattered but modicum of memory for its best British Indian Army professional antecedents which can prevent Pakistan’s further destabilization and descent into chaos. It is symptomatic of its identification as the real source of power that when President Asif Ali Zardai and his leading contender for the spoils, Nawaz Sharif — incidentally the preferred candidate of the Saudis which tells you something — reached an impasse early in the “restoration’, the supposedly apolitical Chief of Staff Ashfar Parvez Kayani had to step down off his aloof Rajput throne to mediate.

And the military will have to come back in one form or another to take over the reins of power now flapping in the wind. That is the rationale that Washington ought to be working on rather than the endless appointment of still more U.S. officials to the region.

But that cannot be done if Washington continues not only to seize on one half-considered initiative after another, and even worse, accompany them with bumptious statements by a plethora of visiting officials. The public relations officers of U.S. civilians and military, alike, seem to be the only part of the Pakistan, Afghanistan U.S. regional bureaucracy which is functioning effectively and at fullblast.

Take a look at what the American Establishment has produced in recent weeks under the Obama rubric of “change”. Ambassadors to the three countries — always askew with a surfeit of young, relatively inexperienced, female emissaries whom the denizens discount habitually — are not enough. A coordinator for the area, Richard H.A. Holbrooke, with a notorious reputation for boorishness, is nominated. A constant flow of VIPs from Washington to and from follow these up. Then there are the military, not only the local US and NATO commanders, but star quality representatives such as Gen. David Petraeus of Iraq fame, and the chairman of the joint chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, almost as much in evidence in Islamabad as in Washington. Now another addition is to be added: a tsar for the huge economic aid programs that are being put in place, not a businessman or a former high government executive or even an economist, but an FSO with no administrative experience.

For once, Sen. John Kerry — arising from the dead — who has just been the area may be right that beneath of all this sound and fury, there may not be an Obama strategy for the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis. The summoning to Washington of leaders of both countries for a trilateral summit in May could be the occasion for such a coronation of a new approach, even if it could not be formulated there. But it needs to be in a more sanguine atmosphere than leaked stories from the Administration that because of “peak” with Islamabad, Washington was thinking of calling it off. For an Administration that crows constantly over its inordinate sense of public relations and its correct sensing the popular mood, these kind of leaked admonitions to friends and enemies are infantile.

Just now, after refusing to even talk about it in Islamabad, Washington appears to be bringing itself around to considering the issue of India’s direct participation in the South Asian equation.

It is not a propitious time. The long, complex Indian elections are underway with no obvious outcome. New Delhi could end up with a pro-business, “Western-oriented” Baharaitya Janata Party government. But the trouble with that is that its leadership cannot shake the stench of its regional participation in anti-Muslim pogroms and its origins in mythical Hindu revivalist politics.

Petraeus, and he may pay a price, has had the nerve to point out the obvious in public: that is, that unless the half-century issue of Kashmir is at least sublimated, India will not reduce its 750,000 security forces in that disputed Himalayan region which lies between the two countries. That means, that Pakistan intelligence rogue elements will continue to flirt with terrorists for their use in answering the Indian Occupation [with their often blowback effect on Pakistan itself], as New Delhi becomes less and less popular with what once were pro-Indian Muslim majorities. Furthermore, the deployment of the Indian troops along the Line of Control and in the Punjab plain are a constant threat to Pakistan security that no military commander in Islamabad can ignore. And that means troops that should be used — or more accurately retrained and refitted for the onerous tactics of cleaning out the foreign fighters and their progeny in the Afghanistan-Pakistant border tribal regions — will not happen. And that means that …

Perhaps with a new Indian government — although it is likely to be a relatively unstable and contentious coalition of one of the two major parties and regional caste and ethnically based minor groupings — may be able to move in that direction.

What Foggy Bottom should be concentrating on is convincing the Indians of the obvious; that is, that a disintegrating Pakistan — even an old enemy with whom it has fought three and a half wars — is not in New Delhi’s interest. The inability of Islamabad to maintain a stable state would be only a proof positive that India could not stabilize its western borders. A failed nominally Muslim state, however much it has offended through the years the Indian claim to be the hegemonic and secular big daddy to the whole of South Asia, would be a nightmare for the Indians with their own huge Muslim minority, probably larger than Pakistan’s population.

Washington knows, but has long looked the other way, at minor but debilitating Indian intrigues in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s huge and difficult western province of Baluchistan. Ending those, as a beginning, could be a start on an accommodation which must take place if victory is to come in the region against terrorism that threatens all the governments, Muslim and “secularist”, alike.

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