Pakistan certainly presents a challenge to Bush’s manichaean worldview. What are we to make of the fact that our payments for counterterrorism activities go on unabated even though Musharaff called off his dogs months ago? How do we process this information?
There is also at least one American report that Pakistani security forces have fired in support of Taliban fighters attacking Afghan posts.
Looks like Pakistan cannot decide whether they are with us or they are with the terrorists. Sounds like they are harboring terrorists. And we all know that Pakistan not only has nuclear weapons but that they were the biggest proliferators of nuclear technology in the world. Under the Bush Doctrine that should be a three strikes and you’re out scenario…no?
Things are not so simple. I actually agree with the following explanation.
“Pakistan’s cooperation is very important in the global war on terror and for our operations in Afghanistan,” Mr. [Gordon] Johndroe, [a spokesman for Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser] said. “Our investments in that partnership have paid off over time, from increased information sharing to kills and captures of key terrorist operatives. There is more work to be done, the Pakistanis know that, and we are engaged with the Musharraf government to ramp up the fight.”
That makes sense. Under the theory that we should keep our friends close and our enemies closer, our strained and contradictory relationship with President Musharraf makes perfect sense. But this very complexity explains why the overall Bush Doctrine policy is such a profound failure. Time and time again, the neo-conservatives have substituted theory and blind optimism for sound analysis. In May 2001, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote an essay for the Project for a New American Century, entitled imperatively ‘Liberate Iraq‘. Watch him identify the real risk of invading Iraq only to sweep it under the carpet with an appeal to hope.
Even so, Iraq’s fissiparous inclinations might well come to the fore. Apart from Israel, and maybe Egypt and Iran, the Middle East has no real nation-state. Once freed of Saddam, Iraq will need an institution, untouched by the Ba’ath, through which its diverse people can begin to restore communal ties and reconstruct a national identity. Given the savage police-state they have endured, reestablishing even minimal trust among communities will be extraordinarily difficult. Yet Saddam’s and the Ba’ath’s indescribable brutality has given all Iraqis a common denominator. We may hope that their experience with barbarism has sharpened their desire to find compromises short of killing.
Yeah, how did that work out? Our policy of paying Pakistan billions to do nothing springs out of a realist analysis, but it only became inevitable through the bungling of U.S. foreign policy over the last six years. Even Americans are now exhausted with Bush’s policies. How can expect Muslim populations to tolerate them? A coalition of the bribed, the coerced, and the disrespected will not hold for long. And it won’t hold if the policy isn’t working and doesn’t change.
Any serious person would demand a change in administration, and there is only one way to do that under the constitution.