Month: November 2007

Washington’s continued coup preparations for Pakistan

So here’s the deal: The Bush administration, which until recently has been pushing Pakistan’s Prez Musharraf very hard to “take off his uniform” and rule as a civilian, has become frustrated with his unwillingness to do that to order. So now they are moving a lot closer to trying to topple him– with a military coup.
Go figure.
A gang of three NYT reporters are currently the administration’s leakees of choice in this campaign. Is the goal to use these always-anonymous leaks to put additional pressure on Musharraf– or, to encourage their chosen successor-general to him, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to finally launch this posited coup against him? Hard to tell.
But not hard to tell that there is a concerted campaign of leaks on this subject to these NYT reporters, who use a three-headed byline on today’s story– “This article is by Helene Cooper, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde.” How’s that for diluting the responsibility of the individual reporter? Just like the sleaziest practices of Time magazine, etc..
This reporting, I should note, looks a near-total reprise of some of Judith Miller’s wildest days of anonymous Cheney-channeling over there at the NYT.
The story leads thus:

    Almost two weeks into Pakistan’s political crisis, Bush administration officials are losing faith that the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can survive in office and have begun discussing what might come next, according to senior administration officials…

A few grafs down, we are told that:

    More than a dozen officials in Washington and Islamabad from a number of countries spoke on condition of anonymity because of the fragility of Pakistan’s current political situation.

Not a single administration source is named in the whole piece. Do I need to repeat that?
Then, there is the question of whether this tricephalous reportorial unit has its own “point of view” regarding the complex political judgments that their piece purports to “report”. The NYT has a separate category of articles that, though they appear on the “news” pages also contain the authors’ analytical judgments. Those pieces are clearly titled “News Analysis.” This piece is not titled thus. Therefore, it is supposed to contain only reporting. (And good, thorough, reporting, too; which this piece notably does not.)
Buried one-third way down in the piece we have this:

    the State Department and the Pentagon now say they recognize that the Pakistani Army remains a powerful force for stability in Pakistan, and that there is little prospect of an Islamic takeover if General Musharraf should fall.

Note that verb “recognize”. It is one of those supposedly “reportorial” verbs that also carries the author’s own judgment about the truth-value of the judgment being reported: namely, that it is a correct judgment. Good neutral ways to convey the same bit of reporting would be to say that these official bodies “judge”, “say”, or “claim” that the Pakistani Army remains a powerful force, etc etc. Not that they “recognize” that this is the case.
Well, the unintentionally revelatory writing style of these three reporters is only a secondary aspect of this story, with its main aspect being that there evidently does seem to be an increasingly strong tendency in the Bush administration that’s urging a military coup in Pakistan.
Here is the scenario laid out by the Gang of Three, citing, presumably, some or all of their “dozen” anonymous administration sources:

    If General Musharraf is forced from power, they say, it would most likely be in a gentle push by fellow officers, who would try to install a civilian president and push for parliamentary elections to produce the next prime minister, perhaps even Ms. Bhutto, despite past strains between her and the military.
    Many Western diplomats in Islamabad said they believed that even a flawed arrangement like that one was ultimately better than an oppressive and unpopular military dictatorship under General Musharraf.
    Such a scenario would be a return to the diffuse and sometimes unwieldy democracy that Pakistan had in the 1990s before General Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup.

So now, the game plan seems to be that, instead of pushing for a Musharraf-Bhutto two-handed power-play, they are switching to an Army-Bhutto two-handed power play, with hopes for the coup pinned, for now, on Kayani, whom they describe thus:

    General Kayani is a moderate, pro-American infantry commander who is widely seen as commanding respect within the army and, within Western circles, as a potential alternative to General Musharraf.

They do note, however, that Kayani has already been designated by Musharraf as his the man who will head the army after, as Musharraf still promises, he steps down as Chief of Staff within the coming weeks… No surprise, then, that the NYT Three describe him as a bit reluctant to move against Musharraf at this time.
What effect might the publication of this “news” report be expected to have on Kayani? H’mm. Maybe increase his reluctance?
Meanwhile, I’d like to also note that nearly all the US MSM is continuing to report the Pakistan crisis as one that, among non-Pakistani powers, involves only the US. Given Pakistan’s lengthy history of close relations with China, and it position in Southwest Asia between Afghanistan and India, this is a very myopic view of the matter, indeed.
China Hand has had another couple of good posts on her/his blog, about Pakistan. Here and here.
 Definitely always worth reading CH’s non-US-centric commentary.

US Quaker activists gather

This past weekend was the annual
conference of the Friends Committee on
National Legislation.
Veteran Quaker activists on
peace issues and other issues of intense social concern had come to a
conference center in Washington DC from all
around the US. I have gotten to know quite a few members of FCNL’s
national headquarters staff in the months I’ve had the affiliation of
“Friend in Washington” with them; and of course, from my home Quaker
meeting (congregation) back home in Charlottesville Virginia, I’ve had
one small grassroots view of how FCNL operates. But what was new and
energizing this weekend was to experience this critical mass of engaged
social-activist energy all in one place at one time.

I heard many great stories of what FCNL’s mainly– but by no means
exclusively– Quaker supporters have been doing around the country:
contacting their members of Congress; writing to local papers;
organizing peace vigils; working on pro-green projects; delving deep
into the challenges of peacemaking and peacebuilding; etc, etc.

The keynote speaker, on Saturday night, was Congressman John Lewis
(D- Georgia), who was honored with FCNL’s Edward F. Snyder Award for
National Legislative Leadership in Advancing Disarmament and Building
Peace.  Lewis was born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama, the son of
African-American sharecroppers.  At a young age he became one of
the historic leaders of the US civil rights movement.  When he was
23 he was the head of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), and in that capacity he was one of the speakers at the
important “March on Washington” along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He told us that he had been just 17 when, as a student at the
historically Black Fisk University in Knoxville, Tennessee, he first
made the acquaintance of Quakers, who were organizing workshops on
nonviolent social action in a nearby church.  He started
participating in the workshops which, he said, moved him very deeply.
Soon enough, he and his colleagues from Fisk and elsewhere in the
still-segregated south started a campaign of going to sit down at
“Whites Only” lunch counters:

We sat in at the lunch counters and
people would come up and spit on us, or put lighted cigarettes in our
hair or down our backs.  And we wouldn’t react.  We wouldn’t
get angry.  We kept our
eyes on the prize.

Lewis has been a member of the
US House of Representatives since 1987 and the senior chief deputy
whip in the Democratic caucus since 1991.  He has been a
consistent and strong voice in the anti-war caucus in Congress, too.

He told us on Saturday,

Nothing has troubled me more than the
war in Iraq and the prospect of military engagement in Iran. 
These would both be wars of choice, not of necessity.

… Sometimes I feel like crying out loud for our nation, for what the
administration has done in our name!

He recalled the occasion when he and Dr. King spoke to the March on
Washington.  And he said,

We hear a lot about the Rev. Martin
Luther King’s speech there that day: the ‘I have a dream’ speech. 
But we don’t hear nearly enough about the important speech
he made at Riverside Church in New York City, just a year before he
died, in which he spoke out against the Vietnam war and said the US was
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

If he could speak here tonight, he would tell us that war is not the answer; war is
obsolete.

Seeing and listening to this historic figure was incredibly
inspiring.  Lewis had a wonderful, down-to-earth charm.  At
one point, he recalled the time he had spent in his youth helping his
parents raise chickens– and how even as a boy he had gathered the
chickens and some of his younger cousins together in the hen-house, and
practised “preaching” to them. He commented,

Continue reading “US Quaker activists gather”

New blogging gig on urban transportation systems

I have a new little blogging gig— a periodic feature called “Eyes on the Street” over at The City Fix, which is a blog published by the Washington DC-based World Resources Institute on Exploring Sustainable Solutions To The Problems of Urban Mobility.
While I was working on my new book over the summer, it became clear to me that the emergence of the climate change challenge is one of the two or three big issues in world politics that the US political class has been largely “out to lunch” over, over the past 4-5 years, because of the country’s quite understandable focus on developments in Iraq.
No, I’m not going to stop writing about Iraq or any of the other issues I’ve been dealing with here at JWN. But I am a long-time train-freak; and in general I like and value urban public transportation systems, because of the tenor and context they give to public life.
Ethan Arpi, the editor of TCF, suggested the name for my little feature there as a tribute to the great American/Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs, who argued in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities that:

    A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. But how does this work, really? And what makes a city street well used or shunned? … A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
    First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space…
    Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street…
    And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers…

Well, I’m honored and inspired to think I can play a little part in keeping Jacobs’ great heritage alive.
One of my other big goals doing this new gig is to try to wake more Americans up to the idea that not having a car can be a quality-of-life enhancement, rather than its opposite. This is, of course, particularly the case in well-planned cities.
Finally, a small confession. I have always regretted a little that I didn’t become an engineer or city planner. Or maybe an architect. So this way I get to indulge in a little bit of urban criticism, at least… (I’m writing this from Boston, where I’ve already planned out my subway-plus-walking routes for the next few days.)

Hamas “military” upgrading in Gaza?

Gideon Levy had a fascinating article in Haaretz yesterday, reporting this:

    The group of reservist paratroopers returned all astir: Hamas fought like an army. The comrades of Sergeant-Major (Res.) Ehud Efrati, who fell in a battle in Gaza about two weeks ago, told Amos Harel that “in all parameters, we are facing an army, not gangs.” The soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces were impressed by their enemy’s night vision equipment, the tactical space they kept between one another – and their pants even had elastic bands to make them fit snugly around their boots.

Levy’s very sensible reaction to this is unequivocally that this is good news for Israelis:

    the news the soldiers brought is … encouraging on several other levels. According to their descriptions, a Palestinian Defense Force has emerged. Instead of a rabble of armed gangs, an orderly army is coalescing that is prepared to defend its land. If it makes do with a defensive deployment against Israeli incursions, we will again have no moral claim against them: Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel.
    The coalescence of an army also ensures that if Israel tries to reach an accord with the Hamas government – the one and only way to stop the firing of Qassams – there will be someone in Gaza to prevent the firing. An armed and organized address in the chaos of Gaza also means good news for Israel. But the respect the reservists felt for the way Hamas fought is liable to trickle down deeper. “The Palestinians never looked like this,” the surprised soldiers told Haaretz. Perhaps we will finally stop calling them “terrorists” and refer to them as “fighters.” A bit of respect for the Palestinians and, in particular, an end to our dehumanization of them is liable to mark the beginning of a new chapter.

Well, I certainly hope he’s right that an increased “respect” for the Palestinian Hamas forces will trickle through to larger number of Israelis (though I would not as yet bet my farm on it.)
I do recall that back in 1982, an earlier generation of IDF reservists also discovered a “new” level of respect for the Palestinians fighters who were dug in around Beirut, during the punishing siege the IDF maintained around that city for ten long weeks. (Q.v., the Schiff and Yaari book, “Israel’s Lebanon War”, or any number of other contemporary sources.)
And then, during the first intifada, many Israelis expressed some grudging respect for the Palestinians who maintained a largely nonviolent, mass civilian uprising against the occupation for many years, despite Rabin’s “Iron Fist” and other brutal punishments.
Recently, however, it has been mainly the forces of Hizbullah who’ve won some “respect” from the Israelis, not particularly any Palestinians.
Levy makes an excellent point, though, about the need for a coherent force to be able to maintain order in Gaza– especially under today’s extremely stressed (and distressed) circumstances there.
I suspect, though, that very few of Levy’s countrymen will immediately agree with him that “Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel,” though that is certainly a courageous, fairminded, and generally admirable sentiment. (Of course, “defending” both territories through nonviolent means on both sides of the line would be highly preferable to having them both use of military force.)
Levy writes:

    Perhaps the reservists’ reports will dissuade the defense minister from carrying out his plan to conquer Gaza and will motivate Israel to try, for the first time, a different approach with Hamas – negotiations. [One would certainly hope so, though I am less hopeful of this than Levy seems to be. ~HC] Only the recognition of Hamas’ strength is liable to persuade Israel to be cautious about another operation, and only its military buildup will make us understand the full stupidity of the boycott policy that was designed to weaken Hamas…

In his ending, he eerily echoes some of the arguments I made in this recent JWN post, about the problematic absence of any “mutually hurting stalemate” between the Israelis and Palestinians at the present time. He writes:

    Ours is a country that has been ready to make concessions only after blood is spilled. Since the interim accords following the Yom Kippur War and through the withdrawal from Lebanon and the disengagement, Israel has needed a relatively strong enemy to get its act together. If not for Hezbollah, we would still be in Lebanon; if not for Hamas, we would still be in Gaza.
    Now the time has come for the next chapter: Did we think leaving Gaza and imprisoning it was enough for life in Israel to be hunky-dory? Hamas comes along and reminds us that this does not suffice. The West Bank is quiet in the meantime? Until an organized and strong resistance movement is revived there, we will not consider evacuating even one little outpost. We will conduct talks every two weeks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, we will go to Annapolis, but we will not discuss, heaven forbid, the “core” issues there. And our terrific lives will continue, while in the West Bank the masses will crowd together at the checkpoints for hours, be subject to humiliation and risk their lives every time they go outside.
    These words are not meant to encourage another wave of Palestinian terror. They are intended to try to motivate us, for the first time, to move beyond our usual habits and reach the conclusion – this time without bloodshed – that the occupation cannot continue forever. Perhaps the news about the elastic bands on the Hamas men’s pants will do it for us, and the next cycle of violence will be averted.

Anyway, regardless of Levy’s possibly over-optimistic prognosticating, I think many of the analytical points he makes in the piece are valid… And the facts he reports– about the impressions those seasoned IDF soldiers had of Hamas’s upgraded organizational capabilities– are extremely important.
One depressing prospect is, of course, that instead of reacting to these reports the way Levy clearly hopes, the Israeli political leadership will react in exactly the opposite way: that, egged on by Elliott Abrams and the rest of the Bushites, they will argue instead that Hamas is engaged in a “dangerous, Iranian-backed military buildup in the heart of Gaza that needs to be snuffed out immediately.”
(In March 2006, when I talked with the hawkish Israeli figure Dore Gold in Jeruslaem, that was almost exactly the tenor of the argument he made to me about Hamas’s then-recent victory in the parliamentary elections… Except that in his extremely fevered and fearmongering version of the matter, the Hamas people– along with their alleged Iranian “backers– were also on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons… Are we scared enough yet?)

Bush and Blair: sufferers from Hubristic Syndrome?

Through an interesting and happy concatenation of events, I ended up at a small-ish lunch yesterday along with former British Foreign Secretary David Owen. He recently released– but only, alas, in the UK book market– a book called The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power.
The first thing to remember is that David Owen was also– long before he became a Labour MP, and even longer before he became Foreign Secretary, or a leader of the SDP breakaway from Labour, or the EU’s chief negotiator on former Yugoslavia– he was a medical doctor. And he seems quite serious about having identified an actual clinical condition that occurs in some leaders in politics or business, called Hubristic Syndrome.
As lunch wound down we had a short conversation about the book, and the whole theory of what, I’m afraid, we will have to call “HS”. He said it’s important to distinguish it from bipolar disorder (which, I gather, he thinks W. Churchill probably suffered from.) He said HS often occurs in individuals who also have some form of adult ADHD or propensity to addictions.
I haven’t gotten ahold of the book yet, but this is from the “Synopsis” published on the Amazon.co.uk website:

    For many politicians, power seems to go to their head, and becomes a heady drug affecting every action they take. The Greeks called it hubris, where the hero wins glory, acclaim and success – but it is often followed by nemesis. David Owen suggests George Bush and Tony Blair developed a Hubristic Syndrome while in power. He provides a powerful analysis, looking at their behaviour, beliefs and governing style, in particular the nature of their hubristic incompetence in handling the Iraq War. Both of them, and in her last year in office, Margaret Thatcher, developed many of the tell-tale and defining symptoms. A statesman, politician and medical doctor, with personal knowledge of the war in the Balkans, David Owen has unique insight into Blair’s premiership, including several meetings and conversations with Blair from 1996-2004. With his long political experience, Owen has written a devastating critique of the way that Bush and Blair manipulated intelligence and failed to plan for the aftermath of taking Baghdad. Their messianic manner, excessive confidence in their own judgement, and unshakeable belief that they will be vindicated by a ‘higher court’, have doomed what the author believes could have been a successful democratic transformation of Iraq.

It seems like an interesting move, to “medicalize” what we might otherwise regard simply as extremely bad behavior in these leaders. To me, at first blush, it doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation of what has gone on with these two men (and Maggie T. in her last year in power.) I guess I’ll need to read the whole book to see whether the concept of HS has any explanatory power, or simply a degree of descriptive power.
Also, if what they’re suffering from is a medical condition, does that– or should that– decrease the degree of actual responsibility we should attribute to them in connection with actions and decisions regarding the war that certainly did seem to involve a high, possibly even criminal, degree of both recklessness and dereliction of duty– including the duty of “due diligence”?
On the other hand, as a Quaker-Buddhist, I do hold fast to the two ideas that (1) There is that of the divine in everyone, regardless of how much I might disapprove of her/his actions; and (2) Harmful behaviors spring from lack of awareness of the truths about the human condition, not from any intrinsic badness in the perpetrator’s personality… And certainly, one of the main symptoms of HS would seem to be a very serious divorce from awareness of reality.
One further note: At the lunch David made the point– as alluded to in the publisher’s synopsis above– that he had supported the original decision to invade Iraq. As longtime JWN readers are aware, I never did. I disagree with David Owen that the outcome of the invasion “could have been a successful democratic transformation of Iraq.” From that point of view, if I were to subscribe to his general diagnosis of Bush’s (and perhaps also Blair’s) condition, I would probably tend to date the onset of HS in both men to a time considerably before March 2003… And yes, in Bush’s case, there is plenty of evidence of that– including many of the conversations described in Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial”, and the materials in the Paul O’Neil/ Ron Susskind book on Bush.
But, as noted above, I really do need to read David’s book before I comment too much more.

UN expert on prospects for “Annapolis”

(Note: On 11/21/07 I revised the text of this post just a little, to increase the accuracy of my portrayal of the USIP event. ~HC )
Because of my continuing interest in the politics of peacemaking and conflict transformation (as I recently explored the topic a little, here), I went to a panel discussion at the US Institute of Peace yesterday on the topic of “Constructing an Effective Ceasefire.”
Now, I know that what the Palestinians and the Bushites are hoping for from the upcoming “Annapolis” meeting is something of considerably greater impact than merely a ceasefire. Indeed, the PA still avers it is insistent on tangible and monitorable progress towards the final peace agreement with Israel that is, surely, the desire of the vast majority of the people in the world. The government of Israel– consistent with many years of foot-dragging now– wants to move much slower than that.
(That foot-dragging has allowed government-subsidized Israeli colonial corporations to implant large numbers of illegal colonies inside the occupied Palestinian territories. Coincidence, or what?)
But still, even though I recognize there are differences between a ceasefire and a final peace agreement, I thought it would be good to trek along to USIP and catch up with some state of the art in negotiations theory. The theorists on hand were:

    Dr. Ranabir Samaddar, head of the Calcutta Research Group, who has completed research on three ceasefire-negotiating experiences he was earlier actively engaged in, in Sri Lanka, Nagaland, and Nepal; and
    Nita Yawanarajah, a staff member of the Policy Planning and Mediation Support Unit, at the UN’s Department of Political Affairs, described as “involved in UN negotiations and assessments of ceasefires in the Balkans and Sudan and …developing guidelines for ceasefire negotiations.”

It was a good refresher course. Particularly refreshing and illuminative for me because they focused mainly on situations well outside the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions I’m most familiar with.
Both took a cool, analytical look at what makes peace negotiations (in general, and not just those aiming at temporary ceasefires) effective.
Both looked dispassionately at the political components of successful peace negotiations. Samaddar noted, for example, that in government-insurgent conflicts, the governments have a strong interest in using the ceasefire to bring about the complete demilitarization of the insurgent side without opening up any of the insurgents’ grievances, while the insurgents seek strongly to use the ceasefire to get their political issues onto the table without, if possible, disarming.
Nothing new there. (Except perhaps to the people across in the US State Department who continue to parrot the Israeli line that all of Israel’s opponents need to disarm completely– at both the military and the ideological levels– before they can even be admitted to any negotiation.)
A successful negotiation would, the two panelists said, be one that laid out and won agreement to measurable, monitored steps being taken in parallel by each of the parties, so that neither would end up feeling taken advantage of by the negotiating process itself.
“But the prospects for peace are harmed if the government side insists too hard on the rebels’ demilitarization at the very beginning,” Dr. Samaddar underlined at one point. He also judged that governments frequently seem to have a self-serving and unhelpful understanding of why the rebels in any situation have accepted a ceasefire. “It is a queer understanding,” he said. “They frequently think that the rebels have agreed only because they are weak… And so instead of listening to the rebels’ grievances, the governments use the ceasefire to try to drive home a military advantage over the rebels. But that doesn’t build peace.”
But the most telling moments came when both he and Yawanarajah laid stress on the fact that, to be successful, a peace negotiation requires that both sides are experiencing a “mutually hurting stalemate.”
In question time, I asked Yawanarajah whether, in view of her analysis– which was considerably longer and more sophisticated than I’ve had time to describe here– she thought that the negotiators in “Annapolis” had “any hope in hell of success.” I mentioned, in particular, the fact that there very evidently is not a situation of a mutually hurting stalemate there. (This is a feature of the Palestine-Israel conflict that I have noted several times in recent years, including in my comments last year about Israelis sipping lattes in elegant malls in North Tel Aviv.)
Yawanarajah’s response– which she stressed she was giving in her personal capacity as an analyst and not as a UN official– was to concur with the judgment I’d expressed that they “didn’t seem to have a hope in hell” of succeeding.
H’mmm.
In her earlier presentation, she had noted that this whole question of “needing” a mutually hurting stalemate” raises thorny ethical questions. Should we, indeed, seek to impose hurt on the Israelis so that they would be hurting as much as the Palestinians? Probably not.
However, I would also note the following:

    1. To equalize the amount of “hurt” each side is suffering, we could also seek to decrease the amount of hurt being intentionally inflicted by the Israelis and the US on the Palestinians– in both Gaza and the West Bank. This route should certainly be followed. The total economic lockdown imposed on the Palestinians is anti-humanitarian and quite possibly illegal under international law; and it should be ended.
    2. The US, and much of the rest of what some people claim is an “international community”, is meanwhile actively involved in both maintaining the level of harm being inflicted on Palestinians and in providing continuing lovely benefits to Israel, through generous aid packages, trade preferences, etc etc.
    3. To cut back on those generous benefits would not involve the imposition of any real harm on the Israelis. They could still have a fairly nice lifestyle. (But oh, could the government still pay for overseas travel for Israeli seniors, and for in-home indentured labor from Third World countries for infirm Israelis? Could it continue, in sum, to give benefits to older and infirm Israelis that are far, far in excess of what the US government for its own citizens? Perhaps not…) But cutting back on the benefits that the US and other outsiders currently heap onto Israelis would perhaps signal to them that they cannot simply continue with their land-grabbing project in the occupied areas, with its concomitant harsh repression of Palestinian rights, and continue to drag their feet in peacemaking, and still be treated with generosity by the outside world.

Just a couple of suggestions there. But I do think that at the moral level, there is a significant difference between “withholding benefits” and “inflicting harm”, especially if the withholding of benefits does not result in any real harm… And meantime, the continued and intentional inflicting of harm on the Palestinians should be ended.
Finally, if anyone thinks that a party that has been actively colluding with Israel’s anti-Palestinian project for many years now could realistically be considered to have the moral authority and the neutrality required to act as lead negotiator on this issue, I would love to hear their arguments.
Go on, Condi: Persuade me!
Until now, though, I see neither morality nor realism in the “Annapolis” set-up.

Pakistan: Khalilzad’s third target?

China Hand had another very informative post yesterday about the US and Pakistan. S/he was looking specifically about the role that Zal Khalilzad may well have been playing in pushing forward the “Benazir Bhutto” option. As in his previous post on Pakistan, CH has marshalled a good array of serious evidence and uses it well to make a point.
CH writes:

    Khalilzad’s fingerprints are all over the events surrounding Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and the ongoing political crisis there.
    That’s bad news for Musharraf.
    … If we interpret our Pakistan policy as pro-Bhutto and structured by Khalilzad, with Musharraf as a devalued asset well on the way to becoming collateral damage, it makes a lot of sense.
    At this point in the lame-duck Bush administration, it would seem risible that the U.S. would even consider, let alone implement any grand plan for regime change.
    But Khalilzad, the only U.S. player to emerge from the smoking crater of our Middle East policy with his stature and mojo enhanced, a man of undeniable energy and ability, and, as an Afghan, with a visceral stake in the fate of his homeland’s would-be suzerain, Pakistan, is the guy who might try to pull it off.

Oh, and Benazir took the following obligatory step on the road to winning Washington’s endorsement of her candidacy:

    In a move reminiscent of Ahmad Chalabi’s extravagant promises to the neocons of intimate Iraq-Israeli friendship after he took power, in August Bhutto also initiated a meeting with Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., presumably to demonstrate that she would not be intimidated by Islamic fundamentalists inside Pakistan.

CH posits that the Khalilzad/Bushist game-plan may be as follows. First, they shoe-horn Benazir into power. Then they persuade India to make some concessions on Kashmir, strengthening BB politically within Pakistan and allowing her to turn the army more fully to battling the pro-Taliban insurgents in the north…

    Then the United States can open the military and economic aid spigots and win hearts and minds in a big way—a possibility that the Chinese are now presumably considering and planning for.
    After all, for Washington the opportunity to wean Pakistan away from the army and from the army’s major supporter and ally, China, is something that might make the whole venture worth risking by itself.
    A grandiose plan. If true. But workable?
    I don’t know how good a read on the pulse of the army or Pakistan Ms. Bhutto has after almost a decade of exile.
    Pakistan’s security establishment has ties to the Taliban dating back to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
    Beyond that, the war on the borders is, in a word awful. The Pakistani army doesn’t want to fight it. The army is built to fight India, not chase tribesmen. And no army in the world likes to do counterinsurgency…

CH notes that, along with maintaining her longstanding ties to Khalilzad, BB has also been laying out some big money on “inside Washington” consultants… (Uh-oh. More shades of Chalabi here.) CH cites this piece from the new Washington political tabloid The Politico, which tells us that DC p.r. giant Burston-Marsteller and its lobbying and polling affiliates recently signed a contract with BB’s party, whereby the party pays them $75K upfront and then $28.5K monthly after that. No term mentioned there for the contract.
The names of all these firms are a sort of dizzying and frequently changing melange of names half-remembered from Congressmembers past, second-rate pundits, etc etc. But I think the polling firm is the same as the one Hillary Clinton’s using. (Can someone check that and confirm?)
Politico gives us these details:

    The contract filed with the Justice Department does, however, give some insight into what all of the money buys. Among the promised services: surveys of “100 American political, journalistic, and business elites in Washington, D.C., and New York”; an “internal brainstorming session”; and setting up meetings for Bhutto in Washington “with an eye towards convincing U.S. officials that Prime Minister Bhutto is still relevant to further the democratic process in Pakistan.”

CH’s very realistic-looking conclusion regarding all this:

    If the battle for control of Pakistan is going to be fought over hors d’oeuvres and aperitifs in Washington, Pakistan might be in for a rough time.
    Khalilzad has shown himself to be a natural and able ally of the educated, pro-Western elites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.
    But until now, the regimes he has fostered have been unable to square the circle between the rulers he installed and the impoverished, suspicious, and anti-American masses they’ve tried to lead into the U.S. camp.
    Will the third time—with Pakistan’s larger middle class and a society as yet not devastated by war and extremism–be the charm?
    Or will Pakistan serve as another example of what happens when the resistible force of democracy promoted by U.S. clients collides with obdurate nationalism fueled by anger and fear of the United States?

Good questions.
Can commenters here please stick to the topic at hand.

Pakistan in world politics

“China Hand” has a truly great post on “The China Factor in Pakistani Politics” over at her/his China Matters blog. I had noted it briefly toward the end of (the revised version of) this JWN post this morning, but it’s worth a lot more attention.
CH notes– correctly in my view– that, “China’s presence and interests in Pakistan dwarf America’s” and judges that,

    Pakistan’s alliance with China, which supports Islamabad’s confrontation with India and underpins its hopes for economic growth in its populous heartland, is probably a lot more important to Islamabad than the dangerous, destabilizing, and thankless task of pursuing Islamic extremists on its remote and impoverished frontiers at Washington’s behest.

So the question I’m wrestling with now is What role is the present unrest in Pakistan playing in the broader drama of global politics? (That is, the withering of US power on the dessicated vine of the Bushites’ incompetence, and the concomitant rise of China onto the world scene.)
I should note that in the past couple of days, some Chinese officials have done quite a lot to spur the current run on the dollar. As part of a “grand plan” by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, or not?
Not at all clear.
WaPo’s Neil Irwin echoed a lot of other reporting on the currency markets story when he reported in today’s paper,

    Top Chinese officials suggested at a conference yesterday that they would direct more of their future reserves into European assets — that the euro, not just the dollar, would increasingly be a currency of choice…
    “We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones and will readjust accordingly,” said Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of China’s National People’s Congress. Another official said the dollar was losing its position as the world’s default currency.
    The words were consistent with signals the Chinese have been sending about wanting to move away from pouring all their reserves into dollars…

The Economist’s always-anonymous writers cast doubt on the “Beijing grand plan” theory when they noted that the “mid-ranking Chinese officials” concerned were “not actually responsible for foreign-exchange policy.”
So we by no means have enough evidence yet to conclude that a 1956 moment is at hand. (That’s a reference to the train of events in late-October 1956 when Eisenhower decided to pull the plug on the US’s support of the pound sterling, in an attempt– successful, as it turned out– to “persuade” the Brits to withdraw from Egypt… a development which by 1970 had led to the dismantling of the entire British military presence east of Suez and curtains for Britain as any kind of an independent global power.)
But regarding the current Chinese-US tussle for power, who yet knows what is actually happening? My judgment is that the Chinese are nowhere near ready yet to “move in” on the task of global governance that US hegemony has been performing with such disturbing results in recent years. Though some adjustment in the global power balance, as between Washington, Beijing, and a number of lesser players, is by now inevitable.
We should remember, too, that in the always-jittery and risk-ridden world of international financial and currency transactions– which has become a lot more potentially risky in the 51 years since 1956– it wouldn’t necessarily require a central “grand plan” from the CCCCP for extremely deep damage to be done to the global financial system. Sometimes, in the horrendous game of poker that international finance has now become, rumors can become self-fulfilling prophecies; what is “traded” internationally often has no relationship to any underlying reality; graft, speculation, and hyper-profits are rampant; and hundreds upon hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people stand to get hurt very badly indeed…
So while we all ponder these matters more, let me just return to China Hand’s blog post, and tease some more of the interesting portions of that out for you…
S/he writes:

    Beijing and Islamabad’s strategic priorities—countering India and nurturing economic development before confronting extremists in the hinterland—are in perfect sync.
    The two nations grew even closer when the Bush administration abandoned the Pakistan-centric order of battle of the Global War on Terror and opted for closer ties with India in the service of what looks like a different strategic objective—an attempt to counter China’s growing influence in South Asia.
    So, it would be rather ironic if the road to President Musharraf’s downfall began at a Chinese massage parlor in Islamabad.

Actually, not particularly ironic, as such. Intriguing, possibly. Titillating, perhaps…
But CH then goes on to lay out– with lots of good hyperlinked sources– how the actions that the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) Islamist extremists took against Chinese citizens working in that massage parlor back in June prompted Musharraf to launch the big crackdown on the Lal Masjid people… and that led to the security crisis.. that led (later) to last Saturday’s suspension of portions of the Pakistani constitution by Musharraf.
Well, CH doesn’t really adequately describe for us the last link in that causal chain. But s/he does cites this report from the June 22 edition of Pakistan Today as noting that,

    The Chinese ambassador contacted President Hu Jintao two times during the 15-hour [Chinese masseuse] hostage drama, sources said… The Chinese president expressed confidence that the Pakistan government would find out a peaceful solution to the hostage crisis. Sources quoted President Hu Jintao, expressing shock over the kidnapping of the Chinese nationals, has called for security for them.

China Hand notes this:

    China did not want to see its citizens and interests to become pawns in Pakistan’s internal strife.
    It’s a non-trivial point for China, which lacks the military reach to effectively protect its overseas citizens itself, but does not want to see them turned into the bargaining chip of first resort for dissidents in dangerous lands like Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and etc. who are looking to get some leverage on the local government–or Beijing.
    It looks like China demanded that Pakistan draw a red line at the abduction, extortion, and murder of its citizens.
    A week after the kidnapping incident, Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister was in Beijing…

So in early July, handpicked units of the Pakistani security forces finally went in to storm the Red Mosque. Three Chinese workers at an auto-rickshaw factory in the North West Frontier Province were killed in revenge– and as CH notes, the story was “splashed all over the Chinese media.” (As, here.)
CH sums up:

    A trusted ally demands real, meaningful, and risky action by Pakistan against terrorism. Because of the importance of the ally, the proximity of the threat to the political and economic heart of the country, and the tactical and strategic merits of the action, Pakistan responds positively.
    That ally is, of course, China.
    Not the United States.
    And that’s probably not going to change even if Benazir Bhutto takes power.

Tangled webs, huh?
Here, by the way, is what China’s Xinhua News Agency was writing about Pakistan on Tuesday:

    China is highly concerned about the situation in Pakistan, and believes the country has the ability to solve its own issues, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao Tuesday.
    “Pakistan is one of the important neighbouring countries of China. We believe the Pakistani government and people have the ability to solve their own problems and hope Pakistan could maintain stability and development,” Liu told a regular press conference.

By the way, as always, I’d love it if any JWN readers who can throw more light on these issues than I can would contribute their own analyses, hyperlinks, etc. to the Comments section here.

US “leadership” and Pakistan

Maybe I’m naive, but I have been amazed all over again to see the unthinkingly “imperial” way in which many or most US commentators have been writing and talking about the rising tensions in Pakistan… There they are, earnestly enquiring as to “Who might be better than Musharraf?”, in a context in which the main criterion of being “better” is simply assumed to be “better for us”… or turning their gaze back to Washington and asking self-referentially “Who lost Pakistan?”
Hey guys! Pakistan is not “ours” to lose! It belongs to its own people.
Yes, they have many internal political problems of their own. And yes, the US has been quite intentionally meddling in the country’s politics for decades* (and the Brits for even longer.) And yes, there are big issues in Pakistan that are justifiably of concern to the whole world community– nuclear weapons, and the possible prospect of a Taliban power-base providing a hospitable base to the global terrorists of Al-Qaeda in the future, as in the past (though this is not necessarily the way the Talibs would behave; and their inclusion or exclusion from locally-based peacemaking initiatives could do a lot to affect that question.)
But note that I said these concerns about Pakistan are ones the whole world community faces– and not simply the US, standing all on its own.
Over the past 15 years or so, ways too many US commentators and pols have fallen into what you might call the “Leadership representation fallacy”… That is, because they have just somehow assumed that the US exercises and by the natural order of things should continue to exercise “leadership” within (or over) the whole world community, then by extension, any development that affects the whole world community somehow affects the US uniquely.
Ain’t so.
In fact, I would be as bold as to say that in that part of the world– let’s say, for simplicity, the whole of the “arc of instability”– the US as an actor and as an idea is currently so toxic that our country is the last one on earth that should seek to exercise “leadership” in crafting solutions to the challenges arising from there that now face the whole world.
Actually, yes, the US is “unique”: right now it is uniquely unqualified to play any kind of a diplomatic “leadership” role anywhere in the Muslim world.
So please. Let’s have a little more self-awareness, and a lot less self-referentiality and self-aggrandizement in the way US commentators think and talk about these issues.
We should keep firmly in mind, firstly, that Pakistan’s governance is the responsibility of the country’s own citizens (and our first responsibility should be good governance in our country, which goodness knows, it certainly needs.)
And inasmuch as events in Pakistan do have an effect on the whole world, we should remember that America’s 300 million people are far from being the people most directly affected by it. India (one billion people), China (1.3 billion), Afghanistan, and the countries of Central Asia and the Middle East are all much more deeply affected than we are.
Think about it.
By the way: truly excellent reporting and analysis of China’s relationship with Pakistan is here, thanks to “China hand.” The opening line there:

    “Americocentrism dies hard.”

—-
* See this good piece by Spencer Ackerman at TPM-Muckraker, on the gobs of accountability-free funding the Bushites have been shoveling over to Musharraf since 9/11. (Hat-tip J. Cole.) Ackerman writes:

    Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse… [T]he U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end…

And of course, you can put that together with this post I put up here yesterday, reporting on the significant rise in the Taliban’s power in both Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past year.
US tax dollars well spent there? I’d say not. Let’s have some real accountability here at home! (Not of the “who lost Pakistan?” variety, but of the “who totally mismanaged the reaction to 9/11, wasted our federal budget, and sowed death and havoc throughout a large chunk of the world?” variety.)