| By Nikolas K. Gvosdev Senator Barack Obama has delivered his major address on coping with global terrorism today at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Several of his paragraphs touch on the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. The Senator had this to say:
"As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.
"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.
"And Pakistan needs more than F-16s to combat extremism. As the Pakistani government increases investment in secular education to counter radical madrasas, my Administration will increase America's commitment. We must help Pakistan invest in the provinces along the Afghan border, so that the extremists' program of hate is met with one of hope. And we must not turn a blind eye to elections that are neither free nor fair – our goal is not simply an ally in Pakistan, it is a democratic ally."
This is the Washington consensus on Pakistan. Musharraf can do more. He should democratize. He should go after Al-Qaeda and related elements with greater vigor.
Many of these people apparently didn't read Anatol Lieven's essay on Pakistan in the summer 2006 issue which was deliberately titled, "A Difficult Country." Anatol, of course, is not writing about an abstract Pakistan but a country with which he is extremely familiar.
Let's first get to the question about "dealing with the terrorists." Anatol wrote:
"On January 13, [2006], a U.S. missile strike on the Pakistani village of Damadola, intended to kill Al-Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, missed its target but killed at least 17 other people, probably including Al-Qaeda members but certainly including local women and children. If it had succeeded, this would have been a notable coup in the struggle against Al-Qaeda. Instead, this violation of Pakistani territory has humiliated the administration of President Pervez Musharraf and compromised his government's assistance to the United States.
"The Damadola incident illustrates a central dilemma in the War on Terror. It seems not only necessary but also just that the United States should retain the right to strike against acknowledged terrorists in those areas of the world where states cannot or will not take action.
"There are, however, two central problems with this approach.
"First, most of the countries where large-scale terrorist activity is occurring are like Pakistan, where governments do control the greater part of their territory--just not all of it. They are not failed or even failing states, but functioning states suffering from certain weaknesses. Moreover, while their governments are allied with Washington, their populations are largely unfriendly to the United States.
"The second, even more obvious point is that the United States and its allies cannot in fact invade and control such territories themselves. In the case of Pakistan, the United States will never have any choice but to work with and through a Pakistani government--almost any Pakistani government--if it wishes to exert any wider control over the fight against terrorism and extremism in Pakistan. This is especially true of the indirectly administered tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
And what about democracy? He posed this question:
"… to argue that if formal democracy were to be reintroduced in Pakistan tomorrow it would be radically different and better, one must be able to present credible evidence that something fundamental about Pakistan has changed radically for the better since the 1990s. …
"Lack of political progress in recent decades has been generally attributed in the West, and by Pakistani liberals, to the military's repeated seizures of power. There is an element of truth to this, but it is also true that those interventions have usually occurred because the civilian political order has already broken down. …
"The nature of Pakistani society, and the weakness of real democratic development, is shown above all by the lack of real, modern, mass political parties. Without such parties, democracy is bound to be more or less a sham or facade for oligarchic rule--just as it has been in so much of Latin America. In Pakistan the only true national political parties are those of some of the Islamists. The parties routinely described in the Western media as "democratic" are in fact congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses vowing more-or-less temporary allegiance to some national leader …"
Pakistan is an excellent example of a foreign policy problem where we are not dealing with a good choice and a bad choice, but between a series of bad choices. And many of the problems Pakistan faces are not subject to or under Washington's control to fix, no matter what he or anyone else is "preapared to do" as President. |
