It would be wrong to call this a civil war. Accurate, but wrong. Better not to talk about it at all.
A senior Pakistani government official has urged residents of the Swat valley to flee the troubled region in the northwest where a peace deal with Taliban appears to be crumbling amid intense fighting.
Khushal Khan also said that the authorities in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) had issued an appeal for help to house tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting between government troops and Taliban fighters in Buner.
I mean, just because Taliban fighters want to institute their own radical and brutal version of Sharia law and are killing official government forces and civilians whenever they feel like it is no reason to get concerned about the future of a country with ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons in its arsenal.
And raising questions about the stability of Pakistan’s government? That is so over the top. It is undoubtedly a direct violation of Pakistani sovereignty even to mention it. Better to just give their government the military aid it wants without any questions asked.
Zardari is in the United States preparing for talks with Obama on Wednesday, hoping to secure a massive US aid package to better equip the military and boost development in his cash-strapped nuclear power sector.
I think we should just approach the situation in Pakistan in exactly the same way we former Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chair Bernanke handed out money to failing financial institutions in the closing days of the Bush administration: just give them the money and don’t ask for any reassurances about anything. In particular, we have no right to inquire about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or exactly how US aid money will be distributed. For example, it’s not President Obama’s job to insist that we receive a quid pro quo for funding Pakistan’s military and its nuclear program, after all. What’s the phrase I’m looking for to describe how we should conduct our foreign relations with Pakistan? Oh yes: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
I mean, to do otherwise would be so uncivilized. Better that Pakistan fall into chaos risking either (1) a nuclear conflagration with India (worst case) or (2) transfer nuclear technology to terrorists or (3) creating a terrorist haven for Islamic extremists like the ones who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 and killed hundreds in the attacks on Mumbai over the last few years (arguably already the de facto situation there) or 4) all of the above, than we attempt to influence the situation to prevent such outcomes.
Then again, we could actually try to take steps that lessen the risk of these potential catastrophic scenarios. Stuff like this perhaps:
[I]n the past month Pakistan suddenly has seemed to tip toward collapse as the Taliban rapidly expanded toward Islamabad while the country’s army and weak civilian government dithered.
This is the sort of trouble U.S. administrations have often ignored until it was too late — as in neighboring Iran before its Islamic revolution. So it’s been notable how quickly how many senior Obama administration officials have concentrated on Pakistan. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has almost camped out in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of Pakistani army commander Ashfaq Kiyani, visiting twice in the past month alone. President Asif Ali Zardari has been invited to Washington this week for a trilateral summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The administration organized a pledging conference in Tokyo three weeks ago that raised $5.5 billion in new civilian aid for the government. It is meanwhile talking to Congress about quickly approving $400 million in training money for Pakistani security forces fighting the Taliban, in addition to the billions in military and economic aid in future budgets.
Admittedly, Obama’s efforts may fail. American power to influence events for the benefit of all nations and peoples involved in the region, including Pakistanis, is severely limited these days. And I do not agree that continued predator drone flights over Pakistani territory is a prudent action, even in areas controlled by the Taliban. However, to stand idly by and watch Pakistan disintegrate when the consequences of such a catastrophe would cause far more harm to the people living there, much less increasing the risk to our own security and to the security of the world at large, seems far more foolish in my opinion. In the past we have turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s support for Islamic extremists and terrorists, failed to halt their nuclear proliferation efforts and generally acted as a drunken sugar daddy for Pakistan’s military and intelligence forces, because we calculated we needed their support as an ally in the Cold War. Well, the Cold War is over, and regardless of how one assesses past US involvement and interference in Pakistan (bad when we supported dictators like Musharraf, good when we prevented a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in the mid 90’s), the “do nothing” approach is not really a viable option. That is essentially what Bush did for the most part over the last eight years.
