No real strategy in Af-Pak

Just saw Presidents Zardari of Pakistan and Karzai of Afghanistan on the late-night repeat of "Meet the Press." I'll give Karzai credit for acting as if he is really an independent president of an independent country and taking the U.S. to task for a "strategy" that too often involves bombings that kill innocent civilians. But the fact is -- and maybe I'll soften when he wins the next election -- he was chosen and installed by the west, and however personally impressive he is (I want a cape like his!), his writ does not run much beyond Kabul, and probably nopt there after dark.

Perhaps he deserved the question David Gregory seemed so obsessed with, whether Afghanistan passed a law that permits husbands to rape their wives (I suspect it's not so simple). When a country becomes completely dependent on another country for security, etc., it can expect citizens of that country to expect it to live up to the subsidizing country's values, indeed to think nothing much of imposing values. He who pays the piper and all.

Andrea Mitchell and Steve Coll, who "analyzed" the appearances, were especially lame. They have no idea what sensible objectives would be, though Steve Coll insists we simply have to be there.

I spent most of yesterday with a friend who is slated to go to work in the press section of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. He didn't try very hard to persuade me that the U.S. knows what it's doing there. Good thing. Beyond wanting to make sure the Paki nukes are secure, there's little we should do and even less we can realistically accomplish. But despite all our sour experiences, too many Americans continue to think we have to intervene and build nations in our image whenever other countries get into trouble.

AfPaks just want more

At a forum in Washington, the ambassadors to the US from Afghanistan appeared together and agreed on one thing: they want the U.S. government to send more of everything. More troops, more money, more school construction, more training, more weapons, more aid, ad infinitum. Nice try, Obama, but no cigar. Our needs will be endless as long as you decide the U.S. has to be the one that confronts the various bad guys on the ground. We;'ll never be satisfied.

I wonder just when the world will begin to understand that Uncle Sugar is not only out of money but deeply, deeply in debt and going further into debt by the millisecond. China, which is holding so much of that debt, is starting to get worried, but other countries seem to think the basket of bounty is bottomless. Well, as long as U.S. leaders keep acting as if they can just keep on spending endlessly, perhaps you can't blame them.

Obama will see foreign policy crises too

I know Barack Obama sees the economic crisis as his first priority. As I suggest in this article from the Register's Sunday Commentary section, however, he won't be able to ignore foreign policy or postpone some fairly consequential decisions early on. I mentioned the still-widening implications of the Mumbai terrorist attack -- India and Pakistan are edging closer to outright war -- and the crisis in Gaza. I thought it was a pretty balanced article. For my trouble, of course, I got several phone messages saying I was an Israeli dupe who is oblivious to Palestinian suffering, and a couple saying I was utterly unfair to Israel and maybe am a secret Palestinian. Ah, well. Judge for yourself.

Mumbai attacks: consequential and shrewd

The more I think about them (and write about them, which to me is a bit like breathing for normal people) the more I think the terrorist attacks in Mumbai Nov. 28 were the most consequential and shrewd actions by the jihadist movement (whatever the true perpetrators turn out to be) since the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Pakistan and India had been edging toward something approaching a rapprochement, but that's off the table for quite a while. It will intensify Indian-Pakistani hostility, always bubbling under the surface, introduce or intensify divisions in India and perhaps destabilize the shaky Pakistani civilian government, such as it is. And it complicates things in Afghanistan.

Here's the piece I did on the attacks for Antiwar.com. And here's the Register's editorial on the attacks, which ran yesterday.

Time for a new Pakistan policy

Here's a link to my most recent column for Antiwar.com, arguing that the present U.S. policy toward Pakistan just isn't working for the U.S., and that it's time for reconsidering the relationship from the bottom up. I argue that the possibility of strategic disengagement -- proper diplomatic relations, but no aid, military or economic, except what is needed to help the Pakistani military keep the nukes out of terrorist hands. Those nukes are pretty well protected now, but things could get more unstable in Pakistan in the post-Musharraf era. Some have argued for economic aid, but that's likely to have little effect. It might be well-intentioned, but as Christine Fair of Rand told me, the way it's delivered is a big problem.

The U.S. typically hires contractors who hire sub-contractors and so on, and before you know it the money is eaten up and we're lucky if Pakistan gets ten cents on the dollar in schoolhouses, hospitals or whatever, and the construction usually turns out to be shoddy to boot, sometimes creating resentment rather than gratitude. We can't do much that's effective about al-Qaida in Pakistan with our current approach anyway, so we have to live with the knowledge that they're there and cope with things at the possible-attack end -- and do financial disruption and some real intelligence, which we don't do now.

Of course I would prefer an overall policy of strategic disengagement with the world outside North America -- proper relations, trade, tourism and whatnot unrestricted, but no military aid or meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, no matter how nasty their dictators. Maybe when I finish my book and get it published more people will see it that way.

Pakistan a real problem

There have been developments just since this Register editorial on Pakistan was published, but the fundamentals don't seem to have changed. Following a secret order signed by Bush, the U.S. has decided to conduct cross-border attacks against suspected al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Pakistan, including crossing the border from Afghanistan.

A raid Sept. 9 has been acknowledged, but the Pakistani government has said it will forcibly prevent further foreign fighters from coming into its sovereign territory, and there may even have been a shots-in-the-air confrontation between the Paki and U.S. militaries. Joint Chiefs chief Mike Mullen went over to reassure the Pakis, but an attack occurred anyway. We suggest stopping the attacks, and say the next president will have to do a ground-up reassessment of our relationship with Pakistan, with the option of a strategic withdrawal that would include an end to aid on the table. We're unlikely to neutralize al-Qaida the way we're going anyway. It's very complicated, and I'll expand on it for this weeks Antiwar.com column.

I particularly enjoyed talking to Christine Fair of RAND for this piece. She's a pretty clear-eyed realist. Sovereignty, she scoffed, is a concept used only when it's convenient. Is Hamid Karzai really the sovereign ruler of Pakistan when he wouldn't last five minutes without foreign troops to bolster him? No Pakistani government has had effective control over the laughably named Federally Administered Tribal Areas, so is it really sovereign there? The Durand Line that marks the Afghan-Paki border was drawn by a British colonial official who probably didn't know that it ran right through a Pashtun tribal area. It not only might not deserve to be treated as sacred, it almost certainly creates conflict.

Musharraf's latest troubles

Here's a link to the Register's editorial on the situation in Pakistan, where the two more-or-less opposition parties (Sharif's and Bhutto's) that got most of the votes in the recent parliamentary election are forming a coalition government and could very well end up impeaching Musharraf. It's actually rather weird that the U.S. is still insisting that Musharraf is the key in Pakistan despite all the evidence of his deep unpopularity. I suspect strongly that it's the Bushlet, who like many ignorant but powerful people still has a faith in his ability to size people up, and also seems to think that international relations is about personal relations. I can't wait for that twit to be gone!

Recent blogging elsewhere

I've been blogging quite a bit the last few days on the Register's Orange Punch blog, discussing Putin, Pakistan, the stalled Israeli/Palestinian peace process (there's an evergreen headline) and the eco-terrorism in Seattle.

Jihadists lose big in Pakistan

Here's the piece I did last week for Antiwar.com, on Pakistan in the wake of the recent parliamentary elections. It noted that while the headline was the defeat of the pro-Musharraf party, perhaps the most encouraging news was the decline in support for Islamist or jihadist-sympathetic parties, including the defeat of a Taliban-like party that had actually won control of one province. Such parties had averaged 11 percent support last election and 4 percent in this one.

Now 4 percent of a population can wreak havoc with suicide bombings and the like, but the bogeyman of there being a great danger of jihadists getting control of the government and getting access to nukes, often used to justify the U.S. staying and subsidizing pretty much forever, is extremely unlikely. (There are already Taliban sympathizers in the military and the ISI secret police.)

It's also the case in Iraq, where the war whoopers talk about al-Qaida in Iraq taking control of the country if we leave -- McCain said it almost exactly that way in his recent long-distance campaign trail colloquy with Obama. Most unlikely. More likely is that without U.S. troops as a target it would be harder to recruit AQI members, and the Iraqis themselves would suppress it, probably more brutally and thoroughly than the U.S. would even think of doing.

Pakistan before the election

Here's a link to the column I wrote for the Register a day or two before the election in Pakistan. I thought it summed up the situation fairly well. As to the American interest in Pakistan, I wrote that there are two -- making sure that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are secure and there's little or no danger that terrorists could grab one or gain control of them, and hoping that the resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida forces in the Northwest Provinces can be neutralized or contained. That doesn't require huge subsidies or U.S. troops or trainers. The election results show that jihadists in Pakistan command almost no support among the people, although small bands of determined people can certainly be mightily disruptive.

Doing "Webitorials"

The Register has begun putting what we call Webitorials on its Web site -- consisting of having an editorial writer summarize a current editorial he has written on video for a couple of minutes. I've done them recently on the Pakistani election and on Ralph Nader's announcement that he is (sigh!) going to run for president again, further tarnishing his legacy.

Pakistan: provisional hope

Here's a link to the Register's editorial on the recent parliamentary election in Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf's party got trounced. Apparently the government understood that getting from 14% (Perv's party's poll standing) to 51% would be difficult and not a bit credible, so it didn't seem to try to fix the election. What's come out clearly since then has been that the Islamist parties lost support -- down to about 4% -- seriously. That demonstrates that the idea of the Islamists taking over Pakistan and getting access to nukes is something of a bogeyman. The U.S. really ought to reduce its presence in (and U.S. taxpayer support of) Pakistan. Don't expect to see serious improvement in Pakistan; some expect Perv to be impeached.

Pakistan digging out

Here's a link to the Register's editorial this week on the rioting in Pakistan that finally has seemed to settle down a little in the wake of the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Poor Pakistan, which some have called an essentially ungovernable country (not necessarily a bad thing, but in Pakistan's case it is). The significant U.S. interest is that Pakistan's nuclear weapons remain secure. It has been reported that U.S. special forces are standing by to grab Pakistan's nukes in the event the government falls or a civil war erupts. Not a bad use of those forces, though opne naturally hopes they won't be needed for that mission.

Pakistan: the bed Bush made for us

Here's a link to the piece I wrote last week for Antiwar.com. It argues that Pakistan is like Iraq in one sense: once the Bushies decided to get so deeply involved -- $11 billion of our tax money -- it became difficult to get out, even though doing so makes a lot of sense. But one thing is sure. If anyone ever hears Bush yap about his yen to intervene here and there having anything to do with promoting democracy, the only proper response is a horselaugh.

Bush's policies set up the Pakistan crisis

Almost all the news out of Pakistan these days is discouraging, with former prime minister and great American Hope Benazir Bhutto (who in some ways is no great prize; the corruption charges that led to her being exiled were not without substance) under house arrest again and the demonstrations she has tried to lead quashed. One of the sharper analyses of how Pakistan came to such a sad pass comes from Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute. He says the Bush administration exacerbated Pakistan's problems by occupying not one, but two Muslim countries. That created the best recruiting tool al-Qaida ever had, and the recruiting has easily outpaced the various campaigns against al-Qaida.

Stability won't be reached (and maybe not for quite a while even then) until we let Afghanistan be run by Afghans and reduce or end subsidies to Pakistan. In the early stages, around 2002, Musharraf gave us a tacit green light to go after al-Qaida and Taliban forces in the northwest provinces, but the administration was already focused on Iraq and dropped the ball. Since then our lavish subsidies have made most Pakistanis think Musharraf is a U.S. puppet, making him unpopular, ineffective and desperate. Nice work.

Cutting off Musharraf

It's a little dated now, what with calls from Dubya and the house arrest of Benazir Bhutto and continuing protests, but here's a link to the Register's editorial on Pakistani President Musharraf's decision to impose a wholly unnecessary state of emergency in Pakistan. It suggests that U.S. aid should not continue to a tyrant, no matter how "vital" to a "war on terro" the U.S. doesn't seem to take seriously anyway, what with so many resources being tied down in Iraq.

Bhutto determined after asassination attempt

Well, Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan was eventful enough, what with a suicide bombing that might well have killed her if she hadn't been tired and ducked down into the truck carrying her. Unfortunately, the Islamist rebels (some al-Qaida, some Taliban, some homegrown) are armed, dangerous and determined. Pakistan has been described as the most ungovernable country in the world, and it may have become even less governable.

Bhutto back in Pakistan

What struck me watching CNN's coverage of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan was the air of what almost amounted to hero worship. She may turn out to be an effective counterweight to the Islamic militants who are making so much trouble lately, and perhaps to the more dictatorial impulses of President Musharraf, but she's not quite a secular saviour. The corruption charges against her when she left eight years ago, involving millions of dollars and Swiss bank accounts and all were pretty serious and fairly well documented. Considering that Pakistan has nukes it's prudent to wish her well, but really!

Eye on the Empire

Here's a link to the "Eye on theEmpire" blog I do for the Register. Commented today on Musharraf, developments in Burma, and how the Israeli airstrike on Syria (still denied by some in Syria) may be dividing the administration.

Critical time for Pakistan

My friend Muazzam Gill, an international affairs analyst for UPI, didn't have much doubt when I talked to him. The crash of a Pakistani army helicopter escorting Pres. Pervez Musharraf on a tour of earthquake reconstruction in the Kashmir is most unlikely to have been an accident. Muazzam thinks it wasn't an assassination attempt on Musharraf this time, but a broad signal from some of his many enemies: you are in our sights and we are this close to you. Expect maintenance workers to be investigated.

Musharraf, of course, has been focused more on finding a way to get another term as president than on what else is going on in his country. Because he came in via a coup and has continued to be the head of the military throughout his tenure, he has still not made the effective alliances among Pakistan's political class he would have had if he had come up through the political end of things. That seems to be one of the reasons he is so eager to have former prime minister Benazir Bhutto return and be involved in government as prime minister. He apparently had to turn Nawaz Sharif, the other former prime minister who tried to return, away. Bhutto and Sharif are fierce rivals, and he had cast his lot with Bhutto.

Another result of the focus on succession is that little attention has been paid or leadership exercised in the struggle with the various militants, al-Qaida cells, tribal factions and other malcontents in the Federally Administered Tribal Regions and North West Provinces, along the Afghan border, where the writ of the central government has never run. Since July more than 250 of the security forces have been killed in fighting, with 45 killed in a several-day running battle this week. Government troops have been reactive rather than offensive, just holding on. That's partly because even without political turmoil, the government doesn't really know what it wants to do with those territories. The U.S. wants them to go after the Qaida/Taliban camps, but Pakistani public opinion seems to favor trying to find some kind of workable truce.

If, as and when Musharraf gets his second term in a way that confers a semblance of legitimacy, his troubles may have just begun.