Loyal reader B directed me to an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that all but accuses Benazir Bhutto of assassinating one of her main political rivals in 1996.
The hook, as they say, is that the accuser is Bhutto’s niece and the alleged victim is her father—Benazir Bhutto’s brother.
My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.
My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority.
Things must be pretty tense around the Thanksgiving table at the Bhutto family reunion, that’s all I can say.
And it certainly makes the Democracy on the march in Pakistan narrative overly complicated, so I don’t expect to see a lot of follow-on.
My loyal reader also pointed out that the mechanics of the assassination attempt on Ms. Bhutto were similar to those employed in the murder of her brother.
VOA:
Ms. Bhutto said that there were circumstances about the attack that needed to be investigated, particularly why streetlights along her motorcade route were not working, forcing her guards to use floodlights to search the crowd for threats.
"And while I'm not blaming the government for the assassination attacks on me at this stage, nonetheless, we need to have an inquiry as to why the streetlights have been shut (off)," Bhutto said.
Witnesses along her route said security had been tight at the start of Ms. Bhutto's procession from the airport in Karachi following her return to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile. But they said the police cordon around her grew more lax after several hours.
Pakistan Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said officials had urged Ms. Bhutto not to drive through Karachi because of the difficulty of protecting her during the long exposure to crowds.
He said officials asked her repeatedly to fly by helicopter. He said, because the leadership of her Pakistan People's Party refused to agree to a flight, they bear some responsibility for the attack.
Did Bhutto stage the attack on herself?
A hostile Karachi blogger thinks so:
On 18th of October, everyone was asked to stay home. These were the orders from all the family members, and not just mine but my friends’ too. Everyone knew it was “NOT SAFE” to go out even on the eve of Bhutto’s return.
While watching the procession from the morning till late at night, everyone knew that something’s going to happen. It seemed they were all watching TV to see when it actually takes place. The tragedy moved us all. This is how this nation is made to bleed. All those people walking beside Ms. Bhutto’s “bullet-proof” and “rocket proof” were poor common people. Most of them were paid to be there. How many of those poor souls might have thought that the money would cost them their lives. More than 130 people died, more than 500 were injured!
I laughed out loud sarcastically when I heard on T.V that the attack was an assassination attempt on Bhutto. Hello… For me or others who have “BRAINS” know that if Bhutto really was the target, she was a clear shot. One sniper, and no one would have ever known where the bullet came from. The blast took place near her well-protected car when she was INSIDE, RESTING!
It took her a few minutes to reach her home right after the blast. The people were scattered everywhere when her car braved away from the scene to her well protected home in Clifton.
Everyone of us watched the tragedy on T.V. It’s like acid being poured inside our windpipes.
...
It hurts me to say this. But I will mercilessly be blatant into saying that people who were there were sacrificed to ensure that Bhutto has sympathy of the rest of the world.
Hmmm.
Maybe Ms. Bhutto didn’t plan an attack on herself that might provoke international outrage and the Full-Hariri—a hostile, destabilizing international investigation of the Musharraf government.
But she must have felt a familiar and perhaps guilty thrill of horror as she saw the lights go out in Karachi.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
How Dare They Taunt Us With Their Tolerance?
Here’s a story I expect will get a lot of play.
From Xinhua (Chinese) Nov. 14 article There are approximately 30,000,000 homosexuals in China:
一直从事性学研究的中国社科院社会学所研究员李银河日前向本社记者透露，在最新的一项“同性恋是否会影响工作选择”的调查中，回答“否”的中国人居然占到了九成，超过美国百分之八十六的数据。她欣然表示：“这是一个很大的进步，说明中国社会对同性恋更加宽容了。”
A researcher of sexuality at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Yinhe, revealed to our correspondent that in the most recent survey “Does Homosexuality Influence Job Selection” [presumably questioning employers-ed.], the reply “No” surprisingly reached 90%, exceeding the figure of 86% for the United States. She happily stated: “This is a big step, indicating that Chinese society is more tolerant of homosexuality”.
二十年前中国把同性恋视为犯罪、十年前将它看作一种精神疾病，现如今同性恋者最大的压力不是来自于社会，而是家庭，大多数父母都难以接受这个现实。
20 years ago, homosexuality was a crime, and ten years ago it was regarded as a mental illness. Today, the greatest pressure on homosexuals doesn’t come from society; it comes from the family, in most cases when parents find it difficulty to accept this reality.
The article has some more interesting nuggets, addressing the traditional Chinese abhorrence of homosexuality because it would cut off the line of descendants and citing the instance of two lesbians who had experimented (unsuccessfully) with in vitro fertilization.
Addressing the issue of gay marriage, Ms. Li was characterized as an advocate of minority rights. She stated:
“在中国，没有激烈反对的势力，同性恋人群争取权利的阻力比西方小得多，中国一直在进步。”
In China, there aren’t strong forces in opposition [to gay rights], the resistance to the struggle for gay rights is less than in the rest, and China is making continual progress.
This, I must say, is pretty neat.
The Chinese are certainly engaging in a bit of public relations kungfu, deflecting U.S. attacks on China’s human rights record and countering with a jab at America’s weak spot—the control by religious right (and the politicians that pander to them) of America’s public discourse on homosexuality.
Part of it is pre-Olympic posturing.
But if it produces articles like this in the official media endorsing enlightened public attitudes on homosexuality, it’s not a bad thing.
Sort of reminds me of how making America look good in the Cold War was an important factor in the federal government’s attitude toward civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.
Here’s the blurb from a book we should probably all read:
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America), Princeton University Press, 2000
In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson.
In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance--combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent of progress.
Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting the civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam.
Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and the Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs.
Here’s a link.
From Xinhua (Chinese) Nov. 14 article There are approximately 30,000,000 homosexuals in China:
一直从事性学研究的中国社科院社会学所研究员李银河日前向本社记者透露，在最新的一项“同性恋是否会影响工作选择”的调查中，回答“否”的中国人居然占到了九成，超过美国百分之八十六的数据。她欣然表示：“这是一个很大的进步，说明中国社会对同性恋更加宽容了。”
A researcher of sexuality at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Yinhe, revealed to our correspondent that in the most recent survey “Does Homosexuality Influence Job Selection” [presumably questioning employers-ed.], the reply “No” surprisingly reached 90%, exceeding the figure of 86% for the United States. She happily stated: “This is a big step, indicating that Chinese society is more tolerant of homosexuality”.
二十年前中国把同性恋视为犯罪、十年前将它看作一种精神疾病，现如今同性恋者最大的压力不是来自于社会，而是家庭，大多数父母都难以接受这个现实。
20 years ago, homosexuality was a crime, and ten years ago it was regarded as a mental illness. Today, the greatest pressure on homosexuals doesn’t come from society; it comes from the family, in most cases when parents find it difficulty to accept this reality.
The article has some more interesting nuggets, addressing the traditional Chinese abhorrence of homosexuality because it would cut off the line of descendants and citing the instance of two lesbians who had experimented (unsuccessfully) with in vitro fertilization.
Addressing the issue of gay marriage, Ms. Li was characterized as an advocate of minority rights. She stated:
“在中国，没有激烈反对的势力，同性恋人群争取权利的阻力比西方小得多，中国一直在进步。”
In China, there aren’t strong forces in opposition [to gay rights], the resistance to the struggle for gay rights is less than in the rest, and China is making continual progress.
This, I must say, is pretty neat.
The Chinese are certainly engaging in a bit of public relations kungfu, deflecting U.S. attacks on China’s human rights record and countering with a jab at America’s weak spot—the control by religious right (and the politicians that pander to them) of America’s public discourse on homosexuality.
Part of it is pre-Olympic posturing.
But if it produces articles like this in the official media endorsing enlightened public attitudes on homosexuality, it’s not a bad thing.
Sort of reminds me of how making America look good in the Cold War was an important factor in the federal government’s attitude toward civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.
Here’s the blurb from a book we should probably all read:
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America), Princeton University Press, 2000
In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson.
In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance--combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent of progress.
Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting the civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam.
Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and the Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs.
Here’s a link.
Motorized Goalposts, Pakistan Edition
The easiest and psychologically most satisfying solution for failure is to move the goalposts.
We saw it in Iraq, where a glorious end-zone to end-zone drive to save the world from a maniac armed with weapons of mass destruction shrunk incrementally until today success is measured by the America’s ability to reduce sectarian violence in Baghdad—a quarterback sneak on a field the size of a pool table.
Same thing in Pakistan, where the current line is that we’re handwringing spectators in a nasty scrap between Mr. Military and Mrs. Democracy:
Here’s today’s line (from the Nov. 13 WaPo):
Until recently, the Bush administration also had supported Bhutto's exploration of a deal with Musharraf in a bid to help stabilize the country...
That's not quite accurate. The abortive power-sharing deal between Bhutto and Musharraf was, unqestionably, Made in America.
But now that it's blown up in our faces, we're not so keen to admit it.
But those of us whose memories go way back—like maybe a month—will recall a time when the U.S. was unafraid to admit that we were pulling Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto’s strings for the sake of big plans for Pakistan:
From the October 20 New York Times :
The administration concluded over the summer that a power-sharing deal with Ms. Bhutto might be the only way that General Musharraf could keep from being toppled.
It began quietly nurturing the accord, under which Ms. Bhutto’s party did not boycott General Musharraf’s election last month, and the president issued a decree granting Ms. Bhutto and others amnesty for recent corruption charges, opening the way for her return.
Administration officials say that Ms. Rice stepped up her personal involvement last month, when it seemed possible that General Musharraf’s other political nemesis, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, would make his own bid to return to power, and upset the deal.
...
In their push to engineer a pact between Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf, American officials for several months held private meetings in Islamabad, New York and Washington.
...
John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, and Richard A. Boucher, the top State Department official for Pakistan, each went to Islamabad to press General Musharraf into the deal.
Now that things in Pakistan are going downhill, the goalposts haven’t just been moved.
They’ve been shifted onto somebody else’s field and now we’re not participants—we’re just spectators.
The most significant episode of goalpost shifting has been done by Benazir Bhutto, who upped the ante from her original demands—Musharraf’s retirement from the army and the end of the state of emergency—to a new demand that Musharraf step down.
In analyzing Bhutto’s motivations, I think the money grafs are in today’s LA Times :
Specifically, Bhutto has been unable to get Musharraf to commit himself to a date for stepping down as army chief. A Pakistani law passed several years ago requires that he shed his uniform by Thursday, but Musharraf has said he will do so only when the Supreme Court -- now stacked with his loyalists -- validates his reelection last month as president. A ruling could come this week [emphasis added]."
Until now, he's the one who had taken all the initiative," said Samir Puri, a defense analyst for Rand Europe. "Benazir realized she had to seize her own moment."
Let’s chew on that a little bit.
The power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto was based on Musharraf becoming president and resigning his military post and Bhutto becoming prime minister.
So, just as Musharraf is about to reach the safe haven of the presidency, take off his military uniform--in time to meet the Thursday deadline!--and, presumably, announce he’s ready to talk about the elections and the end of emergency rule, Bhutto moves the goalposts by insisting he step down.
That’s going to make for some interesting and awkward conversation between Musharraf and Negroponte in Islamabad this week, considering that Big John’s last visit was devoted to twisting Musharraf’s arm into accepting Bhutto and assuring him that everything was going to be OK.
The interesting question is whether this is just another example of Bush administration feckless incompetence, or part of some deeper plan.
Our stated aim was to strengthen Musharraf by injecting some of that popular civilian democracy mojo via Benazir Bhutto. That’s obviously not working. Pakistan is lurching into crisis and Bhutto’s behind a lot of it.
Conspiracy theorists will speculate that Bhutto was Trojan Horse, and the Bush administration wanted to get her into Pakistan under any pretext possible and rely on her to destabilize the country and push Musharraf out of the picture in favor of a civilian government led by Bhutto and backed by the much-beloved (at least by Western pundits) military strongman (and current number 2 to Musharraf) Ishfaq Pervaiz Kiyani.
Bhutto is a wildly ambitious, capable, and powerful politician. It would not be out of the question for her to game the Bush administration with reassuring protestations of her desire to work with Musharraf but then, once Washington was on the hook and she was inside Pakistan, doing everything she can to drop the hammer on Musharraf.
The best way to gauge her intentions and the plans of the Bush administration?
Let’s see where the goalposts are tomorrow.
We saw it in Iraq, where a glorious end-zone to end-zone drive to save the world from a maniac armed with weapons of mass destruction shrunk incrementally until today success is measured by the America’s ability to reduce sectarian violence in Baghdad—a quarterback sneak on a field the size of a pool table.
Same thing in Pakistan, where the current line is that we’re handwringing spectators in a nasty scrap between Mr. Military and Mrs. Democracy:
Here’s today’s line (from the Nov. 13 WaPo):
Until recently, the Bush administration also had supported Bhutto's exploration of a deal with Musharraf in a bid to help stabilize the country...
That's not quite accurate. The abortive power-sharing deal between Bhutto and Musharraf was, unqestionably, Made in America.
But now that it's blown up in our faces, we're not so keen to admit it.
But those of us whose memories go way back—like maybe a month—will recall a time when the U.S. was unafraid to admit that we were pulling Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto’s strings for the sake of big plans for Pakistan:
From the October 20 New York Times :
The administration concluded over the summer that a power-sharing deal with Ms. Bhutto might be the only way that General Musharraf could keep from being toppled.
It began quietly nurturing the accord, under which Ms. Bhutto’s party did not boycott General Musharraf’s election last month, and the president issued a decree granting Ms. Bhutto and others amnesty for recent corruption charges, opening the way for her return.
Administration officials say that Ms. Rice stepped up her personal involvement last month, when it seemed possible that General Musharraf’s other political nemesis, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, would make his own bid to return to power, and upset the deal.
...
In their push to engineer a pact between Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf, American officials for several months held private meetings in Islamabad, New York and Washington.
...
John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, and Richard A. Boucher, the top State Department official for Pakistan, each went to Islamabad to press General Musharraf into the deal.
Now that things in Pakistan are going downhill, the goalposts haven’t just been moved.
They’ve been shifted onto somebody else’s field and now we’re not participants—we’re just spectators.
The most significant episode of goalpost shifting has been done by Benazir Bhutto, who upped the ante from her original demands—Musharraf’s retirement from the army and the end of the state of emergency—to a new demand that Musharraf step down.
In analyzing Bhutto’s motivations, I think the money grafs are in today’s LA Times :
Specifically, Bhutto has been unable to get Musharraf to commit himself to a date for stepping down as army chief. A Pakistani law passed several years ago requires that he shed his uniform by Thursday, but Musharraf has said he will do so only when the Supreme Court -- now stacked with his loyalists -- validates his reelection last month as president. A ruling could come this week [emphasis added]."
Until now, he's the one who had taken all the initiative," said Samir Puri, a defense analyst for Rand Europe. "Benazir realized she had to seize her own moment."
Let’s chew on that a little bit.
The power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto was based on Musharraf becoming president and resigning his military post and Bhutto becoming prime minister.
So, just as Musharraf is about to reach the safe haven of the presidency, take off his military uniform--in time to meet the Thursday deadline!--and, presumably, announce he’s ready to talk about the elections and the end of emergency rule, Bhutto moves the goalposts by insisting he step down.
That’s going to make for some interesting and awkward conversation between Musharraf and Negroponte in Islamabad this week, considering that Big John’s last visit was devoted to twisting Musharraf’s arm into accepting Bhutto and assuring him that everything was going to be OK.
The interesting question is whether this is just another example of Bush administration feckless incompetence, or part of some deeper plan.
Our stated aim was to strengthen Musharraf by injecting some of that popular civilian democracy mojo via Benazir Bhutto. That’s obviously not working. Pakistan is lurching into crisis and Bhutto’s behind a lot of it.
Conspiracy theorists will speculate that Bhutto was Trojan Horse, and the Bush administration wanted to get her into Pakistan under any pretext possible and rely on her to destabilize the country and push Musharraf out of the picture in favor of a civilian government led by Bhutto and backed by the much-beloved (at least by Western pundits) military strongman (and current number 2 to Musharraf) Ishfaq Pervaiz Kiyani.
Bhutto is a wildly ambitious, capable, and powerful politician. It would not be out of the question for her to game the Bush administration with reassuring protestations of her desire to work with Musharraf but then, once Washington was on the hook and she was inside Pakistan, doing everything she can to drop the hammer on Musharraf.
The best way to gauge her intentions and the plans of the Bush administration?
Let’s see where the goalposts are tomorrow.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Subversion, American Style
Democracy and Its Discontents in Pakistan and Elsewhere
Benazir Bhutto has been pretty cautious and cagy in her dealings with President Musharraf, avoiding outright calls for his ouster.
Until now.
Maybe.
In an interview with the Times of London, Bhutto stated:
"[Musharraf's] two trump cards were the international community and the army. Now he's losing both. The only option he has is to step aside and hand over power to an interim government of national consensus that will oversee elections. His time is up."
But, in an example of the bold equivocation that dogs Bhutto, well, maybe not.
According to Reuters, on the same day:
But [Bhutto] has not ruled out further talks with Musharraf.
"We haven't shut the doors to negotiation," she said. "To move forward, Musharraf should retire from his army post, restore the judiciary, release the political activists and restore the constitution."
Let’s get back to bold talk with the Times:
"I face a difficult predicament," she said. "I've long been worried about creeping Talibanisation in Pakistan and if I don't take the lead there may well be extremist elements that come out. So I have no choice. First because we believe in democracy and second otherwise I will leave a vacuum that someone else might fill."
Sounding tired but elated, Bhutto vowed to go ahead with the three-day Long March planned for this week, despite government insistence that it will be blocked. The event will bring her into all-out confrontation with the regime.
However, I don’t quite buy Bhutto’s claim that, after 9 years as a self-exiled émigré and three weeks back inside Pakistan, she is the pivot upon which the destiny of Pakistan must turn.
And, contrary to her assertions, as yet neither the international community nor the army have racked up any points on the Bhutto side of the scoreboard.
The backing of the United States, her key overseas constituency, has been less than inspiring:
In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was a positive sign that Musharraf had set the stage for elections, but urged him to lift the state of emergency as soon as possible.
She said the role of the United States should be to persuade Pakistan that "it has to get back on the democratic road."
...
President Bush earlier described promises to restore civilian rule as "positive," throwing Washington's support firmly behind the Pakistani leader, who is considered to be a close ally in the so-called war on terror.
Ah.
It looks like, despite what Bhutto might have hoped or been told about U.S. support, an overt tilt toward the Bhutto camp by the Bush administration is not forthcoming at the present time.
The problem for her is that Musharraf sees it, too, and will be encouraged to redouble his efforts to isolate Bhutto, quash the protests, and ride out the crisis.
Bhutto is staking her chances on her Long March (from Lahore to Islamabad, concluding with a sit-in at parliament) to force the choice between her and Musharraf for Pakistan’s middle class and the United States.
We’ll know soon enough if it is a victorious triumph, glorious martyrdom, the last gasp of an ambitious politician who got a little too far in front of the parade and found herself isolated and vulnerable—or just another episode in the interminable maneuvering between two unscrupulous rivals who can’t seem to prosper either with or without the other.
Jane Perlez had a good take on Bhutto in the New York Times:
...skepticism... swirls around her here, less than a month after her return from eight years in exile to avoid corruption charges. And it has added to the speculation that, tense as the situation remains, she and her old nemesis, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, may yet have enough ambition in common to run Pakistan together.
Ms. Bhutto, 54, returned to Pakistan to present herself as the answer to the nation’s troubles: a tribune of democracy in a state that has been under military rule for eight years, and the leader of the country’s largest opposition political party...
But her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to General Musharraf, then next seeming to accommodate him, and never quite revealing her actual intentions — has stirred as much distrust as hope among Pakistanis.
...
She also faces deep questions about her personal probity in public office, which have resulted in corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.
...
Saturday night at the diplomatic reception, Ms. Bhutto showed how she could aggrandize. Three million people came out to greet her in Karachi on her return last month, she said, calling it Pakistan’s “most historic” rally. In fact, crowd estimates were closer to 200,000, many of them provincial party members who had received small amounts of money to make the trip.
Benazir Bhutto: Pakistan’s Ghandi, Joan of Arc, Parnell...or Ahmed Chalabi?
The United States seems to be revisiting its once-promising and potent strategy of regional transformation through democratization, but in a half-hearted and dangerous way.
Belatedly and in the midst of the crisis, the Bush administration may be deciding that wielding this powerful weapon on Pakistan, an ally in the volatile Middle East, is too risky a step.
If the Bhutto challenge fizzles, the United States—which decided to impose her on Musharraf—will suffer some major embarrassment.
Bhutto is clearly a U.S. client, with her injection into the Pakistan scene orchestrated by the Bush administration to provide Washington with an alternative to a military regime that kisses up to China, defines its mission, identity, and legitimacy by confronting India, and has little interest in squandering its resources of men, money, and prestige in bloody, inconclusive, and thankless counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism activities in the Northwest.
She is using the tactics of the color-coded revolutions--exploiting Pakistan’s partial democracy, non-state media, and Musharraf’s political difficulties and near-suicidal clumsiness with destabilizing demonstration, media relations, and psyops--to turn her political campaign for power into a mass movement.
But now it looks like Washington is letting her twist in the wind, instead of giving her the official and sub rosa support that might put topple Musharraf and put her over the top.
Makes you wonder if the Bush administration really thought this thing through.
Without question, the United States wanted Bhutto to re-align Pakistan’s politics toward civilian rule and a closer, more enthusiastic working relationship with the United States.
And, one would like to think, there was a strategy that included a riposte to the possibility that the power-sharing relationship might falter and Musharraf would escalate the struggle with Bhutto by declaring a state of emergency.
Or maybe, in the best style of dysfunctional organizations, we went ahead without a plan and there’s currently a behind the scenes cage match going on between Zalmay Khalilzad and David Addington to determine what our Pakistan policy actually is.
In any case, what makes this effort in U.S.—abetted democratization unique and dangerous is that Pakistan is our ally, not an ex-Soviet satrapy run by some strongman beholden to Moscow.
I think the U.S. public official ambivalence toward deposing Musharraf is not motivated by any tender feelings toward him per se—after all, we pushed Bhutto on him and pretty much created the crisis.
The reason that President Bush is not spreading the word that Musharraf must go from the Rose Garden podium and through his proxies in the media, and by systematic assistance to Bhutto and the lawyers in perpetuating their opposition is because he doesn’t want to admit to our other undemocratic allies—most conspicuously Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Jordan—that he repaid a client’s explicitly pledged fealty with treachery and subversion.
How could President Bush look Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah, King Hussein, and those other emirs in the eye and ask for their trust and support for our risky and destabilizing policies in the Middle East if he openly threw Perez Musharraf to the democracy wolves?
And what would happen if U.S. support for democracy in Pakistan energized democracy advocates inside our other allies, leading to a “Clean Break” of catastrophic democratization sweeping through the Middle East despotisms linked to us but leaving our enemies untouched?
Interestingly, events in Pakistan are coming to a head just as America’s other achievements in supporting democratization are being revealed as partial, transitory, and even counterproductive.
This report torn from the AP newswire today (November 11) much says it all as far as the U.S. sponsored “Rose Revolution” in (ex-Soviet) Georgia is concerned:
Georgians looking to the TV for information on the country's worst political crisis in years are out of the luck these days. They'll find soap operas and comedies but no independent news programs.
Four days after being put into place following clashes between police and demonstrators, President Mikhail Saakashvili's ban on news broadcasts has deprived most Georgians of their primary source of news about the unrest.
The decision to pull the plug has also deprived the opposition of a platform before presidential elections and raised questions about Saakashvili's commitment to democracy.
Saakashvili — a pro-Western leader whose own rise to power was fueled by independent media — ordered a 15-day state of emergency to defuse a standoff with the opposition. Government troops had used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to disperse thousands of protesters.
...
Though Saakashvili has been praised as one of the few post-Soviet leaders to champion democracy and freedom of speech, many Georgians say the media under Saakashvili are less free than under his predecessor, Eduard Sheverdnadze.
Great power exploitation of progressive political movements a.k.a. subversion is an interesting—and awkward—question.
Indeed, the most successful practitioner of communist subversion wasn’t the Soviet Union; it was Imperial Germany, which plunked Lenin on a sealed train to St. Petersburg with the intention of destabilizing Tsarist Russia and forcing its withdrawal from World War I, with spectacular results.
On the other hand, the Soviet-controlled Comintern, purportedly the gold standard of international subversion, was unable to do much more than foment transitory instability at enormous cost to its organization and adherents until the Red Army was added to its toolkit after the Second World War and Stalin switched to a strategy of conquest instead of subversion.
The great power that has been able to roll up a significant number of wins, particularly in the Great Game with Russia in the postwar era, has been the United States.
The U.S.pro-democracy effort operates like the Comintern wishes it had done—if it had a potent combination of attractive ideology, unattractive opponents, charismatic adherents, brains, money, and the freedom to operate freely and openly in its target countries with the explicit support of the World’s Only Hyperpower (TM).
The uneasy democracy coalition of patriots, opportunists, and fellow travelers works through an alphabet soup of “Gongos” ((government funded NGOs) and “Quangos” (quasi-non-government NGOs) dating from the Reagan era as described by journalist Sreeram Chaulia:
The watershed that brought INGOs to the forefront of global democracy promotion was the Reagan administration’s decision to create the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983 to roll back Soviet influence. With a stated raison d’etre of “strengthening democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts”, NED was conceived as a quasi-governmental foundation that funnelled US government funding through INGOs like the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and Freedom House.
These INGOs in turn ‘targeted’ authoritarian states through a plethora of programmatic activities.
NED’s first President, Allen Weinstein, admitted openly that "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”32 The organisation was a deus ex machina in the face of scandalous Congressional investigations into the CIA’s “soft side” operations to destabilise and topple unfriendly regimes that embarrassed the government in the late 1970s. “An NGO helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.”33
97 percent of NED’s funding comes from the US State Department (through USAID and before 1999, the USIA), the rest being allocations made by right-wing donors like the Bradley Foundation, the Whitehead Foundation and the Olin Foundation.34
Since its conception, and despite the bipartisan structure, “neoconservatives have held tight control over NED’s agenda and institutional structure.”35 Senior George W. Bush administration figures who are signatories to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which wears aggressive US foreign interventions on its sleeve, have officiated in NED.
Notwithstanding its claims to “independence” and “nongovernmental status”36, the US State Department and other executive agencies regularly appoint NED’s programme personnel. As one ‘Project Democracy’ (codename for NED in the Iran-Contra scandal) advocate put it, “These ‘private’ agencies are really just fronts for the departments they serve; the agency may prepare a report or a research project that it then gives to the private firm to attach its letterhead to, as if it were really a private activity or initiative.”37
A survey of NED’s partner INGOs reveals a similar pattern of public priorities forwarded by private agents. Freedom House, a neocon hub which succoured the Colour Revolutions, has a history of being headed and staffed by ex-CIA high-level planners and personnel.38 NDI is dominated by ‘liberal hawks’ or right-wing Democrats who find their way to prime foreign policy slots when their party is in power. IRI comprises a herd of far-right Republican politicians and representatives of major financial, oil, and defence corporations.39 IFES top brass belong to conservative Republican ranks, the CIA or military intelligence.40 IREX, the training school for Colour Revolution elite protagonists, is peopled by political warfare, public diplomacy and propaganda specialists from the news media, US Foreign Service and the US military.
The most signal successes of U.S.-supported democratic movements were scored in the nations of the ex-Soviet Union and Soviet bloc: the Orange (Ukraine), Rose (Georgia), and Tulip (Kyrgyzstan) Revolutions.
In each case, a half-hearted commitment to democracy by the local government led to a disputed election, allegations of fraud fueled by U.S.-funded NGOs, pollsters, and media, then mass protests and the installation of a pro-U.S. regime.
The United States made no secret of its participation—while defending its actions as imbued solely with the altruistic democratic spirit.
In the case of Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. embassy openly pitched in:
[A] handful of opposition newspapers that have been rolling off a truck-sized printing press marked "United States Government Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor," housed at a former laundry on a remote stretch of road in the capital, Bishkek.
The press has operated since November 2003 under a program of the New York-based rights and democracy group Freedom House. The project has received more than $1 million in U.S. government funding.
At least three of the printing press' 60-odd clients, project director Mike Stone said, were opposition papers that fueled growing public anger at Akayev amid the campaign for the late-winter parliamentary elections — a vote whose flaws fueled the opposition push for his ouster.
Those publications embroiled the printing press in a dispute with Akayev's government, which responded with a power cutoff, police surveillance, the confiscation of a truckload of papers and suggestions of censorship from board members close to the president.
The press, meanwhile, received generators rushed over by the U.S. Embassy after the electricity was cut off, allowing it to print 182,000 copies of an opposition paper ahead of the first round of voting Feb. 27.
The democratic movements in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan were to a certain extent genuine and received external assistance from genuinely philanthropic entities, but also there is no question that they were egged on by the United States, directly, and through our NGOs.
The sometimes heavy U.S. hand is more easily seen in places where democratic movements falter because the local strong man is doing a pretty good job.
Our ineffectual harrumphing on behalf of democracy in Belarus is described by retired Indian career diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar in the virtual pages of Asia Times Online:
The Guardian commented in the run-up to the Belarusian election: "Europe and the US are pouring in money. According to the New York Times, cash is being smuggled from the National Endowment for Democracy, Britain's Westminster Foundation, and the German Foreign Ministry directly to Khopits, a network of young anti-Lukashenko activists."
But as Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center in Washington, explained to the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, "Despite all the flaws in the Belarusian political system, it's clear that the criticism of Minsk isn't based on its domestic policies, but on the fact that Lukashenko isn't oriented toward cooperation with the West and the US - not even as a formality. He's more focused on an alliance with Russia.
How things going since those revolutions?
Well, not so good. Apparently, in many cases they brought opportunistic U.S. clients to power who exacerbated public dissatisfaction.
I came across this charming post about Kyrgyzstan datelined November 2006 on the blog of a world traveler:
When I travel for long periods of time (I’m almost at five months now), some places and even countries fade from my memory quickly. When I left Bishkek in September, and then again in early October, it was a peaceful place. But today I got an email from Nargiza, the girl who posed as my translator at the Uzbek embassy:
hi Megan, i stady in university, nou im not working, today is not good because revolition. do you have pictures?
Now, I never said she was the best translator, but she got the job done. Notice how she casually mentions revolution? The Kyrgyz “Tulip Revolution” was only a few years ago and it seems that the current government isn’t cutting it.
Bhadrakumar notes dyspeptically that the anniversary of the glorious Tulip Revolution is known by many as “Looter’s Day” for the street justice that the protesters meted out to the goods and furnishings of the presidential palace.
At Antiwar.com, Justin Romaindo asserted in 2006 with blowtorch rhetoric that after the democratic hubbub died down in Ukraine, the result has the same mixture of corruption and repression but with a democratic tinge replacing the previous Soviet hue:
In any case, the so-called Orange Revolution has faded to a pale pinkish hue, with the color almost completely washed out of it. Ukraine is still corrupt, poor, and owned lock, stock, and barrel by a nomenklatura of unusual avariciousness. All that has changed is the likelihood of NATO membership, and that's all the U.S. government ever cared about anyway.
According to Wikipedia, it looks like Ukraine’s democracy is certainly not in a good way:
In late March and early April 2007, the Ukrainian political system dealt with another constitutional crisis. President Viktor Yushchenko dissolved the Ukrainian parliament and ordered an early election to be held May 27, 2007. Crowds of about 70,000 gathered on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square of Kiev, and supported the dismissal of parliament, with 20,000 supporting Yanukovych's plan to keep the parliament together.[14] On April 3, 2007, President Yushchenko signed the bill into existence. Two hours later on Kiev's Maidan, it was announced to the crowds that Parliament no longer existed.
The Verkhovna Rada immediately called an emergency session and voted against Yuschenko's decree (255 votes in favor; opposition didn't participate). A group of members of the parliament took the case to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, challenging the validity of the president's decree, but the court closed the case without opinion. A political struggle ensued between the parliamentary coalition and the opposition. Later, a compromise between Yushchenko and Yanukovych was reached to hold early parliamentary elections.[15] The elections were held on September 30, 2007 and the coalition of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc gained the majority of votes.
The legal status of the previous parliament is unclear. Formally, the parliament has been dismissed, because more than a third of its members have resigned, and their parties cleared the reserve deputies lists. According to the constitution, this rendered the parliament inoperative. On the other hand, the Constitution states that the existing parliament is valid until the new parliament is sworn in.
How ‘bout that.
Add to that the Georgia situation described above, U.S. record in successful democracy promotion (as opposed to successful subversion of hostile regimes) is pretty dismal.
In other words, the Bush administration has been happy to stir the democracy pot to discommode the Russians, but unwilling or unable to fix the stew after it curdled.
U.S.-promoted democratization is perhaps a poison best given to our enemies rather than an elixir suitable for our friends.
Wonder how we’ll be looking at Pakistan a year from now.
Benazir Bhutto has been pretty cautious and cagy in her dealings with President Musharraf, avoiding outright calls for his ouster.
Until now.
Maybe.
In an interview with the Times of London, Bhutto stated:
"[Musharraf's] two trump cards were the international community and the army. Now he's losing both. The only option he has is to step aside and hand over power to an interim government of national consensus that will oversee elections. His time is up."
But, in an example of the bold equivocation that dogs Bhutto, well, maybe not.
According to Reuters, on the same day:
But [Bhutto] has not ruled out further talks with Musharraf.
"We haven't shut the doors to negotiation," she said. "To move forward, Musharraf should retire from his army post, restore the judiciary, release the political activists and restore the constitution."
Let’s get back to bold talk with the Times:
"I face a difficult predicament," she said. "I've long been worried about creeping Talibanisation in Pakistan and if I don't take the lead there may well be extremist elements that come out. So I have no choice. First because we believe in democracy and second otherwise I will leave a vacuum that someone else might fill."
Sounding tired but elated, Bhutto vowed to go ahead with the three-day Long March planned for this week, despite government insistence that it will be blocked. The event will bring her into all-out confrontation with the regime.
However, I don’t quite buy Bhutto’s claim that, after 9 years as a self-exiled émigré and three weeks back inside Pakistan, she is the pivot upon which the destiny of Pakistan must turn.
And, contrary to her assertions, as yet neither the international community nor the army have racked up any points on the Bhutto side of the scoreboard.
The backing of the United States, her key overseas constituency, has been less than inspiring:
In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was a positive sign that Musharraf had set the stage for elections, but urged him to lift the state of emergency as soon as possible.
She said the role of the United States should be to persuade Pakistan that "it has to get back on the democratic road."
...
President Bush earlier described promises to restore civilian rule as "positive," throwing Washington's support firmly behind the Pakistani leader, who is considered to be a close ally in the so-called war on terror.
Ah.
It looks like, despite what Bhutto might have hoped or been told about U.S. support, an overt tilt toward the Bhutto camp by the Bush administration is not forthcoming at the present time.
The problem for her is that Musharraf sees it, too, and will be encouraged to redouble his efforts to isolate Bhutto, quash the protests, and ride out the crisis.
Bhutto is staking her chances on her Long March (from Lahore to Islamabad, concluding with a sit-in at parliament) to force the choice between her and Musharraf for Pakistan’s middle class and the United States.
We’ll know soon enough if it is a victorious triumph, glorious martyrdom, the last gasp of an ambitious politician who got a little too far in front of the parade and found herself isolated and vulnerable—or just another episode in the interminable maneuvering between two unscrupulous rivals who can’t seem to prosper either with or without the other.
Jane Perlez had a good take on Bhutto in the New York Times:
...skepticism... swirls around her here, less than a month after her return from eight years in exile to avoid corruption charges. And it has added to the speculation that, tense as the situation remains, she and her old nemesis, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, may yet have enough ambition in common to run Pakistan together.
Ms. Bhutto, 54, returned to Pakistan to present herself as the answer to the nation’s troubles: a tribune of democracy in a state that has been under military rule for eight years, and the leader of the country’s largest opposition political party...
But her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to General Musharraf, then next seeming to accommodate him, and never quite revealing her actual intentions — has stirred as much distrust as hope among Pakistanis.
...
She also faces deep questions about her personal probity in public office, which have resulted in corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.
...
Saturday night at the diplomatic reception, Ms. Bhutto showed how she could aggrandize. Three million people came out to greet her in Karachi on her return last month, she said, calling it Pakistan’s “most historic” rally. In fact, crowd estimates were closer to 200,000, many of them provincial party members who had received small amounts of money to make the trip.
Benazir Bhutto: Pakistan’s Ghandi, Joan of Arc, Parnell...or Ahmed Chalabi?
The United States seems to be revisiting its once-promising and potent strategy of regional transformation through democratization, but in a half-hearted and dangerous way.
Belatedly and in the midst of the crisis, the Bush administration may be deciding that wielding this powerful weapon on Pakistan, an ally in the volatile Middle East, is too risky a step.
If the Bhutto challenge fizzles, the United States—which decided to impose her on Musharraf—will suffer some major embarrassment.
Bhutto is clearly a U.S. client, with her injection into the Pakistan scene orchestrated by the Bush administration to provide Washington with an alternative to a military regime that kisses up to China, defines its mission, identity, and legitimacy by confronting India, and has little interest in squandering its resources of men, money, and prestige in bloody, inconclusive, and thankless counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism activities in the Northwest.
She is using the tactics of the color-coded revolutions--exploiting Pakistan’s partial democracy, non-state media, and Musharraf’s political difficulties and near-suicidal clumsiness with destabilizing demonstration, media relations, and psyops--to turn her political campaign for power into a mass movement.
But now it looks like Washington is letting her twist in the wind, instead of giving her the official and sub rosa support that might put topple Musharraf and put her over the top.
Makes you wonder if the Bush administration really thought this thing through.
Without question, the United States wanted Bhutto to re-align Pakistan’s politics toward civilian rule and a closer, more enthusiastic working relationship with the United States.
And, one would like to think, there was a strategy that included a riposte to the possibility that the power-sharing relationship might falter and Musharraf would escalate the struggle with Bhutto by declaring a state of emergency.
Or maybe, in the best style of dysfunctional organizations, we went ahead without a plan and there’s currently a behind the scenes cage match going on between Zalmay Khalilzad and David Addington to determine what our Pakistan policy actually is.
In any case, what makes this effort in U.S.—abetted democratization unique and dangerous is that Pakistan is our ally, not an ex-Soviet satrapy run by some strongman beholden to Moscow.
I think the U.S. public official ambivalence toward deposing Musharraf is not motivated by any tender feelings toward him per se—after all, we pushed Bhutto on him and pretty much created the crisis.
The reason that President Bush is not spreading the word that Musharraf must go from the Rose Garden podium and through his proxies in the media, and by systematic assistance to Bhutto and the lawyers in perpetuating their opposition is because he doesn’t want to admit to our other undemocratic allies—most conspicuously Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Jordan—that he repaid a client’s explicitly pledged fealty with treachery and subversion.
How could President Bush look Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah, King Hussein, and those other emirs in the eye and ask for their trust and support for our risky and destabilizing policies in the Middle East if he openly threw Perez Musharraf to the democracy wolves?
And what would happen if U.S. support for democracy in Pakistan energized democracy advocates inside our other allies, leading to a “Clean Break” of catastrophic democratization sweeping through the Middle East despotisms linked to us but leaving our enemies untouched?
Interestingly, events in Pakistan are coming to a head just as America’s other achievements in supporting democratization are being revealed as partial, transitory, and even counterproductive.
This report torn from the AP newswire today (November 11) much says it all as far as the U.S. sponsored “Rose Revolution” in (ex-Soviet) Georgia is concerned:
Georgians looking to the TV for information on the country's worst political crisis in years are out of the luck these days. They'll find soap operas and comedies but no independent news programs.
Four days after being put into place following clashes between police and demonstrators, President Mikhail Saakashvili's ban on news broadcasts has deprived most Georgians of their primary source of news about the unrest.
The decision to pull the plug has also deprived the opposition of a platform before presidential elections and raised questions about Saakashvili's commitment to democracy.
Saakashvili — a pro-Western leader whose own rise to power was fueled by independent media — ordered a 15-day state of emergency to defuse a standoff with the opposition. Government troops had used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to disperse thousands of protesters.
...
Though Saakashvili has been praised as one of the few post-Soviet leaders to champion democracy and freedom of speech, many Georgians say the media under Saakashvili are less free than under his predecessor, Eduard Sheverdnadze.
Great power exploitation of progressive political movements a.k.a. subversion is an interesting—and awkward—question.
Indeed, the most successful practitioner of communist subversion wasn’t the Soviet Union; it was Imperial Germany, which plunked Lenin on a sealed train to St. Petersburg with the intention of destabilizing Tsarist Russia and forcing its withdrawal from World War I, with spectacular results.
On the other hand, the Soviet-controlled Comintern, purportedly the gold standard of international subversion, was unable to do much more than foment transitory instability at enormous cost to its organization and adherents until the Red Army was added to its toolkit after the Second World War and Stalin switched to a strategy of conquest instead of subversion.
The great power that has been able to roll up a significant number of wins, particularly in the Great Game with Russia in the postwar era, has been the United States.
The U.S.pro-democracy effort operates like the Comintern wishes it had done—if it had a potent combination of attractive ideology, unattractive opponents, charismatic adherents, brains, money, and the freedom to operate freely and openly in its target countries with the explicit support of the World’s Only Hyperpower (TM).
The uneasy democracy coalition of patriots, opportunists, and fellow travelers works through an alphabet soup of “Gongos” ((government funded NGOs) and “Quangos” (quasi-non-government NGOs) dating from the Reagan era as described by journalist Sreeram Chaulia:
The watershed that brought INGOs to the forefront of global democracy promotion was the Reagan administration’s decision to create the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983 to roll back Soviet influence. With a stated raison d’etre of “strengthening democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts”, NED was conceived as a quasi-governmental foundation that funnelled US government funding through INGOs like the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and Freedom House.
These INGOs in turn ‘targeted’ authoritarian states through a plethora of programmatic activities.
NED’s first President, Allen Weinstein, admitted openly that "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”32 The organisation was a deus ex machina in the face of scandalous Congressional investigations into the CIA’s “soft side” operations to destabilise and topple unfriendly regimes that embarrassed the government in the late 1970s. “An NGO helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.”33
97 percent of NED’s funding comes from the US State Department (through USAID and before 1999, the USIA), the rest being allocations made by right-wing donors like the Bradley Foundation, the Whitehead Foundation and the Olin Foundation.34
Since its conception, and despite the bipartisan structure, “neoconservatives have held tight control over NED’s agenda and institutional structure.”35 Senior George W. Bush administration figures who are signatories to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which wears aggressive US foreign interventions on its sleeve, have officiated in NED.
Notwithstanding its claims to “independence” and “nongovernmental status”36, the US State Department and other executive agencies regularly appoint NED’s programme personnel. As one ‘Project Democracy’ (codename for NED in the Iran-Contra scandal) advocate put it, “These ‘private’ agencies are really just fronts for the departments they serve; the agency may prepare a report or a research project that it then gives to the private firm to attach its letterhead to, as if it were really a private activity or initiative.”37
A survey of NED’s partner INGOs reveals a similar pattern of public priorities forwarded by private agents. Freedom House, a neocon hub which succoured the Colour Revolutions, has a history of being headed and staffed by ex-CIA high-level planners and personnel.38 NDI is dominated by ‘liberal hawks’ or right-wing Democrats who find their way to prime foreign policy slots when their party is in power. IRI comprises a herd of far-right Republican politicians and representatives of major financial, oil, and defence corporations.39 IFES top brass belong to conservative Republican ranks, the CIA or military intelligence.40 IREX, the training school for Colour Revolution elite protagonists, is peopled by political warfare, public diplomacy and propaganda specialists from the news media, US Foreign Service and the US military.
The most signal successes of U.S.-supported democratic movements were scored in the nations of the ex-Soviet Union and Soviet bloc: the Orange (Ukraine), Rose (Georgia), and Tulip (Kyrgyzstan) Revolutions.
In each case, a half-hearted commitment to democracy by the local government led to a disputed election, allegations of fraud fueled by U.S.-funded NGOs, pollsters, and media, then mass protests and the installation of a pro-U.S. regime.
The United States made no secret of its participation—while defending its actions as imbued solely with the altruistic democratic spirit.
In the case of Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. embassy openly pitched in:
[A] handful of opposition newspapers that have been rolling off a truck-sized printing press marked "United States Government Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor," housed at a former laundry on a remote stretch of road in the capital, Bishkek.
The press has operated since November 2003 under a program of the New York-based rights and democracy group Freedom House. The project has received more than $1 million in U.S. government funding.
At least three of the printing press' 60-odd clients, project director Mike Stone said, were opposition papers that fueled growing public anger at Akayev amid the campaign for the late-winter parliamentary elections — a vote whose flaws fueled the opposition push for his ouster.
Those publications embroiled the printing press in a dispute with Akayev's government, which responded with a power cutoff, police surveillance, the confiscation of a truckload of papers and suggestions of censorship from board members close to the president.
The press, meanwhile, received generators rushed over by the U.S. Embassy after the electricity was cut off, allowing it to print 182,000 copies of an opposition paper ahead of the first round of voting Feb. 27.
The democratic movements in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan were to a certain extent genuine and received external assistance from genuinely philanthropic entities, but also there is no question that they were egged on by the United States, directly, and through our NGOs.
The sometimes heavy U.S. hand is more easily seen in places where democratic movements falter because the local strong man is doing a pretty good job.
Our ineffectual harrumphing on behalf of democracy in Belarus is described by retired Indian career diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar in the virtual pages of Asia Times Online:
The Guardian commented in the run-up to the Belarusian election: "Europe and the US are pouring in money. According to the New York Times, cash is being smuggled from the National Endowment for Democracy, Britain's Westminster Foundation, and the German Foreign Ministry directly to Khopits, a network of young anti-Lukashenko activists."
But as Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center in Washington, explained to the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, "Despite all the flaws in the Belarusian political system, it's clear that the criticism of Minsk isn't based on its domestic policies, but on the fact that Lukashenko isn't oriented toward cooperation with the West and the US - not even as a formality. He's more focused on an alliance with Russia.
How things going since those revolutions?
Well, not so good. Apparently, in many cases they brought opportunistic U.S. clients to power who exacerbated public dissatisfaction.
I came across this charming post about Kyrgyzstan datelined November 2006 on the blog of a world traveler:
When I travel for long periods of time (I’m almost at five months now), some places and even countries fade from my memory quickly. When I left Bishkek in September, and then again in early October, it was a peaceful place. But today I got an email from Nargiza, the girl who posed as my translator at the Uzbek embassy:
hi Megan, i stady in university, nou im not working, today is not good because revolition. do you have pictures?
Now, I never said she was the best translator, but she got the job done. Notice how she casually mentions revolution? The Kyrgyz “Tulip Revolution” was only a few years ago and it seems that the current government isn’t cutting it.
Bhadrakumar notes dyspeptically that the anniversary of the glorious Tulip Revolution is known by many as “Looter’s Day” for the street justice that the protesters meted out to the goods and furnishings of the presidential palace.
At Antiwar.com, Justin Romaindo asserted in 2006 with blowtorch rhetoric that after the democratic hubbub died down in Ukraine, the result has the same mixture of corruption and repression but with a democratic tinge replacing the previous Soviet hue:
In any case, the so-called Orange Revolution has faded to a pale pinkish hue, with the color almost completely washed out of it. Ukraine is still corrupt, poor, and owned lock, stock, and barrel by a nomenklatura of unusual avariciousness. All that has changed is the likelihood of NATO membership, and that's all the U.S. government ever cared about anyway.
According to Wikipedia, it looks like Ukraine’s democracy is certainly not in a good way:
In late March and early April 2007, the Ukrainian political system dealt with another constitutional crisis. President Viktor Yushchenko dissolved the Ukrainian parliament and ordered an early election to be held May 27, 2007. Crowds of about 70,000 gathered on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square of Kiev, and supported the dismissal of parliament, with 20,000 supporting Yanukovych's plan to keep the parliament together.[14] On April 3, 2007, President Yushchenko signed the bill into existence. Two hours later on Kiev's Maidan, it was announced to the crowds that Parliament no longer existed.
The Verkhovna Rada immediately called an emergency session and voted against Yuschenko's decree (255 votes in favor; opposition didn't participate). A group of members of the parliament took the case to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, challenging the validity of the president's decree, but the court closed the case without opinion. A political struggle ensued between the parliamentary coalition and the opposition. Later, a compromise between Yushchenko and Yanukovych was reached to hold early parliamentary elections.[15] The elections were held on September 30, 2007 and the coalition of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc gained the majority of votes.
The legal status of the previous parliament is unclear. Formally, the parliament has been dismissed, because more than a third of its members have resigned, and their parties cleared the reserve deputies lists. According to the constitution, this rendered the parliament inoperative. On the other hand, the Constitution states that the existing parliament is valid until the new parliament is sworn in.
How ‘bout that.
Add to that the Georgia situation described above, U.S. record in successful democracy promotion (as opposed to successful subversion of hostile regimes) is pretty dismal.
In other words, the Bush administration has been happy to stir the democracy pot to discommode the Russians, but unwilling or unable to fix the stew after it curdled.
U.S.-promoted democratization is perhaps a poison best given to our enemies rather than an elixir suitable for our friends.
Wonder how we’ll be looking at Pakistan a year from now.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Third Time's the Charm?
Cross-posted at http://www.americanfootprints.com/
Zalmay Khalilzad Tries for Regime Change in Pakistan
Robert Cohen’s op-ed on Pakistan is, I think, pretty important.
Not necessarily for its content, a pundit-driven exercise in pseudo-realism that I would characterize as "muscular handwringing".
It's because Cohen gives center stage to the man who may well be the key actor in our Pakistan strategy--Zalmay Khalilzad.
In the opening grafs, Cohen writes:
When Zalmay Khalilzad was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he would clash with Colin Powell, then secretary of state, over whether General Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan was friend or foe.
Khalilzad saw a disingenuous Pakistan whose post-9/11 commitment to undoing its Taliban creation was ambivalent at best. Far from confronting the Islamist radicals, Musharraf's intelligence and security apparatus - or elements of it - abetted the reconstitution of the Taliban in the border areas.
It was clear enough to Khalilzad that the age-old Pakistani dream of a weak Afghanistan under Islamabad's sway endured.
Well, Powell is long gone and Khalilzad, currently our ambassador to the U.N. and previously America’s man on the scene in Kabul and Baghdad, looks like the architect of our current Pakistan policy.
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.
Here’s another piece of perspective on Khalilzad's none-too-edifying experiences with Pakistan, from Asia Times in 2005:
The outgoing US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, was a staunch critic of Pakistan's support for the Taliban. However, his anger was especially evident when he excoriated Pakistan a few weeks ago after a Pakistani television network was able to interview a Taliban commander named Mullah Usmani. Khalilzad questioned Pakistan's sincerity and wondered how a television network was able to talk to a Taliban commander even as Pakistani officials denied a Taliban presence in the country. What was left unsaid was that the US government soon came to know that Mullah Usmani gave the interview not from the tribal areas of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, but from the port city of Karachi.
If we try to construe our Pakistan policy as pro-Musharraf and structured by people keen to keep close relations with the Pakistani military, it makes no sense.
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.
A little recap.
In March, Robert Dreyfuss reported on Indian intelligence chatter that the U.S. had a Musharraf problem it wanted to solve:
A team of CIA operatives was subsequently sent to [Pakistan] to sort out pro-US army officers, one of whom could be considered Musharraf’s successor as the commander-in-chief. A vital skill required of the candidate was the capacity to enhance engagement with pro-democracy forces, which would eventually lead to the establishment of a civilian government.
In self-imposed exile since 1999, Bhutto has been patiently networking Washington for almost ten years to try to get U.S. backing, while we staked our hopes on Musharraf.
The tide turned this year, according to an informative New York Times backgrounder by Mark Mazzetti and Helen Cooper.
“The Bush administration for a long time decided that the only telephone number in Pakistan they were going to call was Musharraf’s,” said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Ms. Bhutto and a professor of international relations at Boston University. “But Bhutto made it clear to them that her phone number was available to call anytime.”
...
The administration concluded over the summer that a power-sharing deal with Ms. Bhutto might be the only way that General Musharraf could keep from being toppled.
Khalilzad was deeply involved in pushing the Bhutto power-sharing arrangement:
In their push to engineer a pact between Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf, American officials for several months held private meetings in Islamabad, New York and Washington. The sessions included a dinner for Ms. Bhutto in New York in August with Mr. Khalilzad, followed several weeks later by a shared ride on a private jet to Aspen, Colo., where both addressed a conference of corporate leaders.
With U.S. backing, Bhutto met with a resentful Musharraf in Abu Dhabi in July for negotiations.
The deal that was hammered out was that Musharraf could be president (Bhutto’s allies inside Pakistan would abstain from the vote and not oppose him), he would resign as army chief of staff and govern as a civilian, and Bhutto’s party would ally with Musharraf’s MPL-Q and, by dint of her reputed popularity and the army’s mastery of vote rigging, sweep the January 15 parliamentary elections and install Bhutto as prime minister.
As quid pro quo (caution: irony alert), Bhutto would receive amnesty for corruption charges outstanding against her, and a law that forbids third terms for prime ministers (she’s already had her two, albeit uncompleted) would be overturned.
After the negotiations, another meeting with Khalilzad, reported by Robert Novak in his August 20 column:
After meeting Musharraf, ...Bhutto also met in Manhattan with Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the UN, to discuss the complicated situation. This is not the time for her to criticize the Americans, but she is known to be impatient about the U.S. forbearance toward and persistent support of Musharraf.
The New York Sun covered the meeting in an unconvincing the “nothing to see here” vein, writing:
Ms. Bhutto's meeting with Mr. Khalilzad earlier this week was portrayed by her Pakistani opponents as part of an American grand plan — even as it was described as "private" by American officials. "They've been friends for years," Mr. Khalilzad's spokesman, Richard Grenell, said yesterday.
Meanwhile, in order to justify Washington’s enthusiastic support, Bhutto pretty much bent over backwards.
She visited Washington in September to speak before the Middle East Institute and emphasize not only that she was enthusiastic about the war on terror, but that it could be only fought if there was virtual regime change in Pakistan.
From Intellibriefs:
Bhutto said that under President Musharraf, Pakistan had become "the petri dish of the international extremist movement" and that only a new government with broad support could root out Islamic militancy.
Fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda "requires a national effort that can only flow from legitimate elections," she said on Washington's Capitol Hill, appealing to the United States to drop its deep-pocketed backing for Musharraf.
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.
As reported by the New York Sun:
[The] three-hour dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Midtown was attended by the exiled former prime minister of Pakistan, the Israeli ambassador, and a few associates. But Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Gillerman also conducted a private conversation during the evening, according to several sources familiar with the event, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ms. Bhutto initiated the meeting with Mr. Gillerman as she attempts to return to power in her homeland.
Even at the time, some observers thought the whole plan was crazy.
From the New York Times again:
“This backroom deal I think is going to explode in our face,” said Bruce Riedel, who advised three presidents on South Asian issues and is now at the Brookings Institution. “Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf detest each other, and the concept that they can somehow work collaboratively is a real stretch.”
Nevertheless, Musharraf went back to Pakistan, delivered on his side of the deal, and juggled some military appointments and promotions to ensure that, even when he was in civvies, his allies would control the military and provide him with a significant power base.
Then, after Musharraf had stage-managed the election, Pakistan’s refractory Supreme Court threw a spanner in the works, ruling the election was invalid because he had stood for office while still in uniform.
Today:
Musharraf’s in a tight spot. He’s supposed to quit his army job, but the civilian job he was supposed to slide into—the presidency—is blocked by the Supreme Court.
So he declares a state of emergency and packs the Supreme Court with flunkies who will reverse the decision and let him be president. Meanwhile, he can think about whether he’ll renege on the deal to step down as army chief of staff (as he already did once before) and maybe even back out of the unpalatable power-sharing deal with Bhutto.
He undoubtedly notices that he’s not getting a lot of love from Benazir Bhutto, who is still pushing him to resign from the army but is not anywhere near taking the unpopular stand of opposing those constitutional heroes in the Pakistani judiciary and supporting Musharraf for the presidency.
Musharraf’s been double-crossed.
He probably expected it and had been planning a few double crosses of his own. The immense bomb that greeted Bhutto on her return to Pakistan comes to mind as a possible example.
But now Bhutto’s in the country, President Bush is singing from the same songbook as she is, and Musharraf’s got his hands full trying to keep Bhutto from parlaying her backroom deal into a nationwide anti-Musharraf social and political movement.
Question is, was U.S. support of the Bhutto powersharing—seemingly disregarding the unlikelihood of successful cooperation between two political enemies and the widely-reported probability that the violently anti-Musharraf Supreme Court would overturn his election—just another example of Bush administration “hope is not a plan” fecklessness?
Or is the political crisis enveloping Pakistan a feature, and not a bug?
If one considers that the U.S. objective is not to bolster Musharraf with an unlikely to succeed power sharing relation...
...and our goal is instead to push not only Musharraf but the army out of its central position in Pakistani politics and replace it with a pro-U.S. civilian political party...
...then bringing Bhutto in under a power sharing pretext while anticipating a power struggle makes a lot of sense.
I think that the Bush administration has come to the realization that Pakistan’s army is not an enthusiastic participant in the war on terror, at least against its erstwhile buddies and strategic allies the Taliban, or even the dangerous pro-al Qaeda tribes in Pakistan’s mountainous west.
In true military-despot fashion, I also expect that the elite units are pampered in less-demanding assignments near Islamabad to ensure their loyalty and availability, while the under-equipped and demoralized Sad Sacks are sent on the dangerous and miserable hump through the mountains—and perform accordingly.
So the current arrangement by which the military controls deployment and tactics presents both doctrinal and structural obstacles to the conduct of a glorious crusade by which Pakistani troops enthusiastically sacrifice themselves in the ratholes of Waziristan to forward U.S. objectives in Aghanistan.
Musharraf’s importance to the United States has been his insistence that he and only he could overcome the army’s visceral aversion to the battle in the Northwest.
But Musharraf is scraping bottom, popularity-wise in the scuffle with the judges and because of his decision to storm the Lal-Masjid mosque in July.
So Musharraf has shown himself increasingly unable to deliver something that is an increasingly devalued asset—a Pakistani military following the U.S. lead—in an obtuse, foot-dragging way--in the war on terror.
I think the Bush administration made the decision that the Pakistani strongman+army model is too dysfunctional, and it wants to role the dice with Bhutto—get a civilian leader in there, presumably with an independent power base, and somehow remake the army into a more enthusiastic and responsive force against terrorism.
So Benazir Bhutto accepts the risky assignment of returning to Pakistan with a caseload of that miraculous Democracy elixir, expecting to push Musharraf aside as slowly or quickly as events and U.S. support permit.
You can hear Khalizad’s voice—and perhaps America’s strategy—in the conclusion of Cohen’s op-ed:
Given the nuclear-charged risks, the United States must stick with Musharraf for now, but with the insistence he move rapidly toward promised elections, restore an independent judiciary, work with Bhutto, and - not least - get real about quashing the Taliban.
Failure to harmonize Afghan and Pakistani policy has been disastrous. You can't beat the Taliban in Afghanistan alone; you can't stabilize Pakistan in a guided democracy while developing Islamism for export and alienating the professional middle class.
These lessons must be learned - by Musharraf and Bush. As Khalilzad put it to me: "Afghanistan and Pakistan need each other. The moderates of both countries must work together."
For this strategy to work, the United States would have to provide a lot of help and shrewd judgement—two qualities that we do not possess in the infinite quantities that we assume.
I may be reading too much into it, but the Bush administration’s seemingly clumsy diplomacy in South Asia—selling F15s (promised but not yet delivered) to Pakistan, then riposting with the ridiculous nuclear giveaway with India—may be part of an effort to establish Washington as an “honest broker” who can mediate with India to deliver a new, Bhutto-led government a tangible victory on Kashmir, and provide the civilian regime the political breathing space to shift military focus away from the Indian border to the mountains facing Afghanistan.
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.
The Times of India (consider the source, of course) provided a picture of the Pakistan army’s misery that is persuasive:
Under mounting pressure from the US, Pakistan has deployed well over 100,000 soldiers in the volatile tribal areas - inhabited by fiercely independent tribes who resist outside interference in their matters - to take on the Taliban, Al-Qaida and other extremist outfits who have created safe havens there.
"These outfits were once nurtured by ISI, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Our estimates show around 1,000 Pakistani soldiers have been killed in the fighting. Casualties in 'Operation Al Mizan' in north Waziristan have been particularly high," said an [Indian] official.
"As per our intelligence inputs, Pakistani officers are jostling with low morale among their troops. The abductions and killings of soldiers by militants have only added to the disenchantment among troops, which is being reflected in a large number of desertions, suicides and AWOL (absent without leave) cases," he added.
...
In fact, reports of soldiers even refusing to obey orders have begun to emerge from Waziristan now, in what is being seen as a blow to the otherwise well-disciplined Pakistani Army.
That’s a nasty situation. It’s going to take more than stern fingerwagging from Bhutto to get enthusiasm and results out of the army. I hope we’re supporting Bhutto because of her clout in Pakistan and not because of her indefatigability on the Washington party circuit—and friendship with fellow Muslim member of the great-and-good club Zalmay Khalilzad.
From the Times backgrounder:
For Ms. Bhutto, years of relentless networking among America’s political, diplomatic and media elite also helped to vault her back into position to lead one of the United States’ most critical allies. “She is a networker par excellence, and she’s been keeping her contacts,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, the former assistant secretary of state for South Asia who dined across the table from her at a dinner party during her last swing through Washington, in September.
Politico reports that Washington is perhaps a key battlefront, with Pakistan upping its retainer to its PR firm, and Bhutto is not lagging behind:
Meanwhile, the Pakistani opposition party, led by Bhutto, has retained public relations giant Burson-Marsteller and its affiliates, the lobbying firm BKSH & Associates, and the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. The firm declined comment on its activities, which it is charging an initial $75,000, to be followed with monthly payments of $28,500. 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.”
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?
Zalmay Khalilzad Tries for Regime Change in Pakistan
Robert Cohen’s op-ed on Pakistan is, I think, pretty important.
Not necessarily for its content, a pundit-driven exercise in pseudo-realism that I would characterize as "muscular handwringing".
It's because Cohen gives center stage to the man who may well be the key actor in our Pakistan strategy--Zalmay Khalilzad.
In the opening grafs, Cohen writes:
When Zalmay Khalilzad was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he would clash with Colin Powell, then secretary of state, over whether General Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan was friend or foe.
Khalilzad saw a disingenuous Pakistan whose post-9/11 commitment to undoing its Taliban creation was ambivalent at best. Far from confronting the Islamist radicals, Musharraf's intelligence and security apparatus - or elements of it - abetted the reconstitution of the Taliban in the border areas.
It was clear enough to Khalilzad that the age-old Pakistani dream of a weak Afghanistan under Islamabad's sway endured.
Well, Powell is long gone and Khalilzad, currently our ambassador to the U.N. and previously America’s man on the scene in Kabul and Baghdad, looks like the architect of our current Pakistan policy.
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.
Here’s another piece of perspective on Khalilzad's none-too-edifying experiences with Pakistan, from Asia Times in 2005:
The outgoing US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, was a staunch critic of Pakistan's support for the Taliban. However, his anger was especially evident when he excoriated Pakistan a few weeks ago after a Pakistani television network was able to interview a Taliban commander named Mullah Usmani. Khalilzad questioned Pakistan's sincerity and wondered how a television network was able to talk to a Taliban commander even as Pakistani officials denied a Taliban presence in the country. What was left unsaid was that the US government soon came to know that Mullah Usmani gave the interview not from the tribal areas of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, but from the port city of Karachi.
If we try to construe our Pakistan policy as pro-Musharraf and structured by people keen to keep close relations with the Pakistani military, it makes no sense.
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.
A little recap.
In March, Robert Dreyfuss reported on Indian intelligence chatter that the U.S. had a Musharraf problem it wanted to solve:
A team of CIA operatives was subsequently sent to [Pakistan] to sort out pro-US army officers, one of whom could be considered Musharraf’s successor as the commander-in-chief. A vital skill required of the candidate was the capacity to enhance engagement with pro-democracy forces, which would eventually lead to the establishment of a civilian government.
In self-imposed exile since 1999, Bhutto has been patiently networking Washington for almost ten years to try to get U.S. backing, while we staked our hopes on Musharraf.
The tide turned this year, according to an informative New York Times backgrounder by Mark Mazzetti and Helen Cooper.
“The Bush administration for a long time decided that the only telephone number in Pakistan they were going to call was Musharraf’s,” said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Ms. Bhutto and a professor of international relations at Boston University. “But Bhutto made it clear to them that her phone number was available to call anytime.”
...
The administration concluded over the summer that a power-sharing deal with Ms. Bhutto might be the only way that General Musharraf could keep from being toppled.
Khalilzad was deeply involved in pushing the Bhutto power-sharing arrangement:
In their push to engineer a pact between Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf, American officials for several months held private meetings in Islamabad, New York and Washington. The sessions included a dinner for Ms. Bhutto in New York in August with Mr. Khalilzad, followed several weeks later by a shared ride on a private jet to Aspen, Colo., where both addressed a conference of corporate leaders.
With U.S. backing, Bhutto met with a resentful Musharraf in Abu Dhabi in July for negotiations.
The deal that was hammered out was that Musharraf could be president (Bhutto’s allies inside Pakistan would abstain from the vote and not oppose him), he would resign as army chief of staff and govern as a civilian, and Bhutto’s party would ally with Musharraf’s MPL-Q and, by dint of her reputed popularity and the army’s mastery of vote rigging, sweep the January 15 parliamentary elections and install Bhutto as prime minister.
As quid pro quo (caution: irony alert), Bhutto would receive amnesty for corruption charges outstanding against her, and a law that forbids third terms for prime ministers (she’s already had her two, albeit uncompleted) would be overturned.
After the negotiations, another meeting with Khalilzad, reported by Robert Novak in his August 20 column:
After meeting Musharraf, ...Bhutto also met in Manhattan with Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the UN, to discuss the complicated situation. This is not the time for her to criticize the Americans, but she is known to be impatient about the U.S. forbearance toward and persistent support of Musharraf.
The New York Sun covered the meeting in an unconvincing the “nothing to see here” vein, writing:
Ms. Bhutto's meeting with Mr. Khalilzad earlier this week was portrayed by her Pakistani opponents as part of an American grand plan — even as it was described as "private" by American officials. "They've been friends for years," Mr. Khalilzad's spokesman, Richard Grenell, said yesterday.
Meanwhile, in order to justify Washington’s enthusiastic support, Bhutto pretty much bent over backwards.
She visited Washington in September to speak before the Middle East Institute and emphasize not only that she was enthusiastic about the war on terror, but that it could be only fought if there was virtual regime change in Pakistan.
From Intellibriefs:
Bhutto said that under President Musharraf, Pakistan had become "the petri dish of the international extremist movement" and that only a new government with broad support could root out Islamic militancy.
Fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda "requires a national effort that can only flow from legitimate elections," she said on Washington's Capitol Hill, appealing to the United States to drop its deep-pocketed backing for Musharraf.
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.
As reported by the New York Sun:
[The] three-hour dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Midtown was attended by the exiled former prime minister of Pakistan, the Israeli ambassador, and a few associates. But Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Gillerman also conducted a private conversation during the evening, according to several sources familiar with the event, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ms. Bhutto initiated the meeting with Mr. Gillerman as she attempts to return to power in her homeland.
Even at the time, some observers thought the whole plan was crazy.
From the New York Times again:
“This backroom deal I think is going to explode in our face,” said Bruce Riedel, who advised three presidents on South Asian issues and is now at the Brookings Institution. “Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf detest each other, and the concept that they can somehow work collaboratively is a real stretch.”
Nevertheless, Musharraf went back to Pakistan, delivered on his side of the deal, and juggled some military appointments and promotions to ensure that, even when he was in civvies, his allies would control the military and provide him with a significant power base.
Then, after Musharraf had stage-managed the election, Pakistan’s refractory Supreme Court threw a spanner in the works, ruling the election was invalid because he had stood for office while still in uniform.
Today:
Musharraf’s in a tight spot. He’s supposed to quit his army job, but the civilian job he was supposed to slide into—the presidency—is blocked by the Supreme Court.
So he declares a state of emergency and packs the Supreme Court with flunkies who will reverse the decision and let him be president. Meanwhile, he can think about whether he’ll renege on the deal to step down as army chief of staff (as he already did once before) and maybe even back out of the unpalatable power-sharing deal with Bhutto.
He undoubtedly notices that he’s not getting a lot of love from Benazir Bhutto, who is still pushing him to resign from the army but is not anywhere near taking the unpopular stand of opposing those constitutional heroes in the Pakistani judiciary and supporting Musharraf for the presidency.
Musharraf’s been double-crossed.
He probably expected it and had been planning a few double crosses of his own. The immense bomb that greeted Bhutto on her return to Pakistan comes to mind as a possible example.
But now Bhutto’s in the country, President Bush is singing from the same songbook as she is, and Musharraf’s got his hands full trying to keep Bhutto from parlaying her backroom deal into a nationwide anti-Musharraf social and political movement.
Question is, was U.S. support of the Bhutto powersharing—seemingly disregarding the unlikelihood of successful cooperation between two political enemies and the widely-reported probability that the violently anti-Musharraf Supreme Court would overturn his election—just another example of Bush administration “hope is not a plan” fecklessness?
Or is the political crisis enveloping Pakistan a feature, and not a bug?
If one considers that the U.S. objective is not to bolster Musharraf with an unlikely to succeed power sharing relation...
...and our goal is instead to push not only Musharraf but the army out of its central position in Pakistani politics and replace it with a pro-U.S. civilian political party...
...then bringing Bhutto in under a power sharing pretext while anticipating a power struggle makes a lot of sense.
I think that the Bush administration has come to the realization that Pakistan’s army is not an enthusiastic participant in the war on terror, at least against its erstwhile buddies and strategic allies the Taliban, or even the dangerous pro-al Qaeda tribes in Pakistan’s mountainous west.
In true military-despot fashion, I also expect that the elite units are pampered in less-demanding assignments near Islamabad to ensure their loyalty and availability, while the under-equipped and demoralized Sad Sacks are sent on the dangerous and miserable hump through the mountains—and perform accordingly.
So the current arrangement by which the military controls deployment and tactics presents both doctrinal and structural obstacles to the conduct of a glorious crusade by which Pakistani troops enthusiastically sacrifice themselves in the ratholes of Waziristan to forward U.S. objectives in Aghanistan.
Musharraf’s importance to the United States has been his insistence that he and only he could overcome the army’s visceral aversion to the battle in the Northwest.
But Musharraf is scraping bottom, popularity-wise in the scuffle with the judges and because of his decision to storm the Lal-Masjid mosque in July.
So Musharraf has shown himself increasingly unable to deliver something that is an increasingly devalued asset—a Pakistani military following the U.S. lead—in an obtuse, foot-dragging way--in the war on terror.
I think the Bush administration made the decision that the Pakistani strongman+army model is too dysfunctional, and it wants to role the dice with Bhutto—get a civilian leader in there, presumably with an independent power base, and somehow remake the army into a more enthusiastic and responsive force against terrorism.
So Benazir Bhutto accepts the risky assignment of returning to Pakistan with a caseload of that miraculous Democracy elixir, expecting to push Musharraf aside as slowly or quickly as events and U.S. support permit.
You can hear Khalizad’s voice—and perhaps America’s strategy—in the conclusion of Cohen’s op-ed:
Given the nuclear-charged risks, the United States must stick with Musharraf for now, but with the insistence he move rapidly toward promised elections, restore an independent judiciary, work with Bhutto, and - not least - get real about quashing the Taliban.
Failure to harmonize Afghan and Pakistani policy has been disastrous. You can't beat the Taliban in Afghanistan alone; you can't stabilize Pakistan in a guided democracy while developing Islamism for export and alienating the professional middle class.
These lessons must be learned - by Musharraf and Bush. As Khalilzad put it to me: "Afghanistan and Pakistan need each other. The moderates of both countries must work together."
For this strategy to work, the United States would have to provide a lot of help and shrewd judgement—two qualities that we do not possess in the infinite quantities that we assume.
I may be reading too much into it, but the Bush administration’s seemingly clumsy diplomacy in South Asia—selling F15s (promised but not yet delivered) to Pakistan, then riposting with the ridiculous nuclear giveaway with India—may be part of an effort to establish Washington as an “honest broker” who can mediate with India to deliver a new, Bhutto-led government a tangible victory on Kashmir, and provide the civilian regime the political breathing space to shift military focus away from the Indian border to the mountains facing Afghanistan.
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.
The Times of India (consider the source, of course) provided a picture of the Pakistan army’s misery that is persuasive:
Under mounting pressure from the US, Pakistan has deployed well over 100,000 soldiers in the volatile tribal areas - inhabited by fiercely independent tribes who resist outside interference in their matters - to take on the Taliban, Al-Qaida and other extremist outfits who have created safe havens there.
"These outfits were once nurtured by ISI, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Our estimates show around 1,000 Pakistani soldiers have been killed in the fighting. Casualties in 'Operation Al Mizan' in north Waziristan have been particularly high," said an [Indian] official.
"As per our intelligence inputs, Pakistani officers are jostling with low morale among their troops. The abductions and killings of soldiers by militants have only added to the disenchantment among troops, which is being reflected in a large number of desertions, suicides and AWOL (absent without leave) cases," he added.
...
In fact, reports of soldiers even refusing to obey orders have begun to emerge from Waziristan now, in what is being seen as a blow to the otherwise well-disciplined Pakistani Army.
That’s a nasty situation. It’s going to take more than stern fingerwagging from Bhutto to get enthusiasm and results out of the army. I hope we’re supporting Bhutto because of her clout in Pakistan and not because of her indefatigability on the Washington party circuit—and friendship with fellow Muslim member of the great-and-good club Zalmay Khalilzad.
From the Times backgrounder:
For Ms. Bhutto, years of relentless networking among America’s political, diplomatic and media elite also helped to vault her back into position to lead one of the United States’ most critical allies. “She is a networker par excellence, and she’s been keeping her contacts,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, the former assistant secretary of state for South Asia who dined across the table from her at a dinner party during her last swing through Washington, in September.
Politico reports that Washington is perhaps a key battlefront, with Pakistan upping its retainer to its PR firm, and Bhutto is not lagging behind:
Meanwhile, the Pakistani opposition party, led by Bhutto, has retained public relations giant Burson-Marsteller and its affiliates, the lobbying firm BKSH & Associates, and the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. The firm declined comment on its activities, which it is charging an initial $75,000, to be followed with monthly payments of $28,500. 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.”
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?
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
In the Shadow of Lal Masjid
The China Factor in Pakistani Politics
Americocentrism dies hard.
So it’s difficult for us to appreciate that the things we care about—like the global war on terror —may not be the most important factors in Pakistani affairs.
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.
I think the professionals in the Bush administration understand the strategic dynamic of China moving toward the center of Asian affairs even as our disliked and counterproductive policies push us to the margins.
So I would not be surprised if Washington’s muted official response to date on the constitutional crisis in Pakistan is attributable to acquiesence to China’s insistence that Washington not add to the difficulties of its loyal ally, Musharraf.
Officially, therefore, we're not doing anything for now.
Unofficially may be another matter.
Encouragement of a coup by Musharraf's Number 2, General Ishfaq Pervaiz Kiyani is coming from somewhere, including the time-honored technique--at least familiar to readers of Chinese historical fiction--of trying to force his hand by announcing he had executed the coup even before it happened.
Even as Benazir Bhutto gauchely auditions for the role of America’s client, announces her confidence in Kiyani, and promises to divert Pakistani military energy and lives away from the heartland--and the Indian border—the wastes of Waziristan, I wonder how well she’ll fare in a country where Osama bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush, India is despised and the Taliban is honored, China is a core strategic and economic partner—and the United States and its concerns are unpopular and on the periphery.
For good reason, China is never far from the mind of Musharraf and Pakistan’s military elite.
China’s presence and interests in Pakistan dwarf America’s.
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.
It was, after all, the provocative kidnapping of 7 PRC nationals that compelled Musharraf—reportedly under heavy Chinese pressure—to abandon a policy of appeasement and compromise with Islamic militants at the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad and, in July of this year, launch a bloody assault that revealed the extent of the security crisis at the heart of the Pakistani military regime and displayed to the U.S. Musharraf’s—and Pakistan’s--wholehearted reliance on China.
In the speech announcing the state of emergency, Musharraf broke into English to tell us what he hoped we wanted to hear, evoking Lincoln as he tried to justify his move to the United States, the EU, and the Commonwealth as a response to judicial activism.
On the other hand, in his remarks in Urdu directed to the local audience as translated by Barnett Rubin , Musharraf cited the Lal Masjid mosque crisis--not the pursuit of al Qaeda and its allies in the border regions--as the primary instance of terrorism and extremism afflicting Pakistan.
And when he commiserated with the victims of terrorism, he took the opportunity to give a heartfelt shout-out to the Chinese, not to the United States:
Now. We saw the event of Lal Masjid in Islamabad where extremists took law into their own hands. In the heart of Pakistan - capital city - and to the great embarrassment of the nation around the world... These people - what didn't they do? - these extremists. They martyred police. They took police hostage. They burned shops. The Chinese, who are such great friends of ours - they took the Chinese hostage and tortured them. Because of this, I was personally embarrassed. I had to go apologize to the Chinese leaders, "I am ashamed that you are such great friends and this happened to you".
Now, about the standoff at the mosque.
One could describe it as Pakistan’s Waco—if Waco had taken place in the heart of Washington, D.C.
It didn’t get the attention it deserved. As the Times of India dryly observed of the attack that claimed at least 100 and perhaps 1000 lives:
...the week-long stand-off that ended in a massacre on Tuesday attracted little attention in the US, where focus is more on the debate over a pullout from Iraq. In fact, a news channel on Tuesday cut into a story on Lal Masjid to bring breaking news of a small airplane crash in Florida.
Lal Masjid was controlled by militant clerics who not only proclaimed their interpretation of sharia law—they enforced it.
An otherwise sympathetic observer declared:
One cannot have any objection to the Lal Masjid just preaching implementation of Sharia in Pakistan. So many organizations are doing so, one more cannot be objected to. The right of any Muslim to preach adoption of Sharia is one thing but to take the powers of implementing his own version of Sharia is another, and the latter is a function of the State.
...
Lal Masjid stands in revolt when it establishes its own Sharia courts, it passes judgments, and imprisons Pakistanis and foreigners.
Musharraf’s administration had its hands full with the militant, confrontational, and well-connected (to the intelligence services) cleric who ran the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz.
The difficulties involved can be seen from this excerpt from a timeline of the mosque crisis compiled by B. Raman, an Indian China-watcher who is assiduous in washing Pakistan’s dirty linen on the site Intellibriefs:
January 22, 2007: Female students of the Jamia Hafsa madrasa attached to the Lal Masjid in Islamabad occupied a Children’s Library adjacent to their madrasa to protest against the demolition of seven unauthorised mosques constructed on roads in Islamabad by which President Pervez Musharraf often travels. The mosques were demolished on the advice of his personal security staff.
February 13, 2007: The authorities agreed to rebuild one of the demolished mosques to end the library standoff, but the students refused to vacate the library.
March 27, 2007: The female students, along with their male colleagues from the Jamia Faridia, another madrasa attached to the mosque, raided a house near the mosque and kidnapped a woman, her daughter-in-law and her six-month-old granddaughter for allegedly running a brothel. They were released after they “repented”.
March 28, 2007: Some students of the two madrasas took three policemen hostage in retaliation for the arrest of some students by the police. The hostages were released on March 29.
March 30, 2007: Some madrasa students visited CD and video shops in the capital and warned the shop owners that they should either switch to another business or face the “consequences”.
April 6, 2007: The Lal Masjid set up its own Sharia court. The mosque’s chief cleric, Abdul Aziz, warned of “thousands of suicide attacks” if the Government tried to shut it down.
April 9, 2007: The Sharia court issued a fatwa condemning the then Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar after newspapers pictured her hugging her parachuting instructor in France.
You get the picture. Escalating confrontation, with the government conciliating, accommodating, and backing down.
After exposing the skydiving outrage, the students of Lal Masjid turned their attention to another font of impurity—a Chinese-run massage parlor in Islamabad.
The epic was reported in great detail in Pakistan Today:
First, the abduction:
Male and female students of Jamia Faridia, Jamia Hafsa and Beaconhouse School System, in a joint operation, kidnapped the Chinese women and Pakistani men shortly after midnight Friday from a Chinese massage centre, working at House No 17, Street 4, F-8/3, alleging that they were running a brothel. ...
...
Riding in three vehicles, the students ... raided the massage centre located in the posh Islamabad sector. They overpowered three Pakistani males and guards posted there after thrashing them.
They, later, entered the building and ordered those present there to accompany them. On refusal, the students thrashed them and forcibly took them to the Jamia Hafsa compound. They accused the abducted people of rendering un-Islamic and unlawful services.
...
Ghazi [of Lal Masjid] said the China massage centre was involved in sex trade and complaints were being received about it since long. "Even housewives used to tell us by phone that the centre charges Rs 1,000 for massage while by paying Rs 500, something else was also available," he said.
Then the anxious confab with the Chinese:
President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were earlier given minute-by-minute reports of the negotiations regarding the release of the hostages. ... The prime minister was in contact with the Islamabad administration and the Interior Ministry and getting minute-by-minute reports from State Minister for Interior Zafar Warriach.
...
The Chinese ambassador contacted President Hu Jintao two times during the 15-hour hostage drama, sources said. The ambassador called his president while holding talks with Pakistan Muslim League chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain at his residence.
... Sources quoted President Hu Jintao, expressing shock over the kidnapping of the Chinese nationals, has called for security for them. The ambassador informed his president about his talks with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. The PML leader also got telephonic contact established between the hostages and the ambassador.
The ignominious conclusion:
The release came only after Deputy Commissioner Chaudhry Muhammad Ali and Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Zafar Iqbal, who held talks with the Lal Masjid administration, beseeched it for five hours and even touched the knees of some leading clerics while begging for the freedom of the abductees.
Finally, the tellingly sleazy detail:
The administration quietly let two "big shots", Pakistani customers, go and released their vehicles, seized from outside the massage centre... The identity of these clients is not being disclosed.
Beyond President Hu Jintao’s tender regard for the security and livelihood of Chinese masseuses, there was obviously a larger issue at stake. 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.
Once more from the Intellibriefs timeline:
June 29, 2007: The "Daily Times" of Lahore wrote in an editorial as follows: "During his visit to Beijing, Sherpao got an earful from the Chinese Minister of Public Security, Zhou Yongkang, who asked Pakistan for the umpteenth time to protect Chinese nationals working in Pakistan. The reference was to the assault and kidnapping of Chinese citizens in Islamabad by the Lal Masjid vigilantes. The Chinese Minister called the Lal Masjid mob “terrorists” who targeted the Chinese, and asked Pakistan to punish the “criminals”.
One factor that would have intensified Chinese alarm and exasperation was a report that the attack on the massage parlor revealed a tie-up between Pakistan’s Islamic militants and Uighur separatists:
Mr.Sherpao also reported that the Chinese suspected that the raid on the massage parlour was conducted by some Uighur students studying in the Lal Masjid madrasa and that the Chinese apprehended that Uighur "terrorists" based in Pakistan might pose a threat to the security of next year's Olympics in Beijing.
In early July Musharraf apparently was able to invoke China’s anger to overcome resistance within his armed forces, and move against Lal Masjid.
Even so, he was forced to employ troops personally loyal to him, as the Weekly Standard reported:
China applied enormous pressure to Musharraf. His previous attempts to order military strikes against the Lal Masjid had met with rebuffs. In late January, after the Pakistani army refused to raid the mosque, Musharraf ordered his air force to do so--only to see this order refused as well. Musharraf's eventual solution was to send in 111 Brigade, which is personally loyal to him.
The mosque was encircled by 15,000 troops and the siege proceeded in a dilatory fashion...until three Chinese were murdered in remote Peshawar, apparently in retaliation for the siege.
China Daily reported:
Police officer Abdul Karim said that it was a robbery attempt. 
But one witness said that attackers with face covered were shouting religious slogans when they opened fire on four Chinese nationals in a three-wheel auto-rickshaw factory at Khazana, a town some eight kilometers from Peshawar, the capital city of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.
The Chinese outlets splashed the story all over the media, including their embassy websites, complete with atrocity photos—a treatment that the unfortunate demise of rickshaw factory employees doesn’t usually attract.
Tarique Niazi describes the denouement:
On July 2, barely a week after the abduction, the government ordered 15,000 troops around the mosque compound to flush out the militants. On July 4, it arrested the leader of the militants, Maulana Abdul Aziz ... After apprehending the leader, government troops moved to choking off the militants’ supplies of food, water, and power. But as soon as word of the revenge killing of three Chinese on July 8 reached Islamabad, it created a “perfect storm” for Gen. Musharraf. Embarrassed and enraged, he reversed the troops’ strategy and ordered them, on July 10, to mount an all-out assault at the mosque, in which Aziz’s brother and his deputy, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, together with as many as 1,000 people, was killed.
Let’s recapitulate:
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.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Brave New World
Book Review: China: People Place Culture History
In a dangerous and exciting experiment, China’s rulers have allowed large segments of the country’s economy and society develop ab novo, absent the restraint of a comprehensive legal structure, devoid of the guidance of a deeply rooted and widely respected ideology, and without the feedback loop of a democratic process.
New frontiers are opened and the past is rediscovered and repurposed.
China’s brave new world is beautifully documented in a lavishly illustrated large format book China: People Place Culture History (Dorling Kindersley Ltd., New York, DK Publishing, 2007) published by Dorling Kindersley, the people behind the Eyewitness guidebook series.
In the signature DK style, the visuals are stunning. The first 60 pages are a gorgeous photo essay using double-page images to depict majestic Chinese landscapes—many of which will be unfamiliar to travelers or students of China--from the Far West to the coast.
The rest of the book is illustrated with hundreds of images, large and small, that reflect both wide-ranging work in the photo archives of the world and the efforts of photographers Christopher Pillitz and Chester Ong, who spent months in China getting the shots.
As is typical with DK, the text, though often ignored by coffee table book aficionados, is also first rate.
Authoring duties were split between four top flight academics--Alison Bailey of the University of British Columbia, Ronald G. Knapp of SUNY New Paltz, J.A.G. Roberts of the University of Huddersfield, U.K.; and Nancy Steinhardt of the University of Pennsylvania—and an experienced guidebook writer, Peter Neville-Hadley.
The History section offers more than the customary overview. Drawing on recent scholarship and archaeology, it uses text and graphics to highlight the flux within tradition and ventures away from the traditional Sinocentric narrative to portray China within its Asian context.
The Culture section, though forced into the “Han China’s Greatest Hits” format by the need to cram 4000 years of artistic and intellectual achievement into 45 pages, makes a lot of smart choices with text, illustrations, and excerpts to evoke for the reader the emotion as well as the sophistication underpinning these great works. In this respect, the poetry section is exemplary.
As befits a book co-authored by two heavyweights in the field, Professors Steinhardt and Knapp, a big chunk of the book—75 pages—is given over to a review of Chinese architecture. The text is authoritative and accessible at the same time, and the pictures, of course, are superb. The essay on Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower—an 88 story head-on collision between traditional Chinese architecture, the Chicago School, and commercial feng shui culture—is fascinating.
Nevertheless, I wish the editors and authors had followed up on the apparent organization of the photo essays into residential, official, and religious structures and done more to provide a narrative framework placing the 16 essays—running the gamut from Hakka roundhouses to the Great Wall to Daoist temples and the majestic Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar--in a social and human context.
The heart of the book, both physically and emotionally, is a section entitled People: A Day in the Life. As the title implies, it consists of profiles of 14 contemporary Chinese individuals practicing occupations traditional (cricket seller, calligrapher) to modern (entrepreneur).
Most of the occupations—like “Festival Host”, a trusted, energetic local figure who works his cell phone, motorbike, and social connections to pull together the yearly procession of a Buddhist idol--are depicted as a combination of past and present that goes beyond the usual exoticizing Orientalism.
This commingling of old and new is the most evocative element of the book.
China’s history, culture, and future are all in play in a way they didn’t seem to be a few years ago.
So the sections of the book on history, culture, and the physical setting came together for me in a way that they wouldn’t have in the old days, when we regarded China’s physical and mental context as artifacts of a past time as China marched on to socialism, capitalism, or whatever.
The sense of excitement and uncertainty that pervades China today and its attitude towards its past is very much on display in this book.
For the inevitable cavils:
With the extensive amount of new photography, this book was necessarily prepared with the acquiescence if not assistance of the Chinese government (on its website for the book, DK makes a point of thanking their local “fixer” for getting the necessary approvals and cooperation during the three-month photo shoot).
Therefore in the modern history section we get an obligatory nod to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as well as a somewhat jarring reference to the government’s “mishandling” of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations.
For a full picture of Chinese society, it would have been fascinating to see additional photo essays on representative contemporary figures like Factory Girl, Sex Worker, Underground Christian, Tibetan Loyalist, Army Officer, Corrupt and Lascivious Bureaucrat, Seriously Disgruntled Peasant, and The Thug Who’s Always Hanging Around the Railroad Station.
But, for the time being at least, we’re not going to get that.
So we will have to be satisfied with a snapshot of China’s astounding diversity, and not the whole picture.
Fortunately, DK’s snapshot is beautiful, informative, and evocative.
Overall, China: People Place Culture History is a model of conception, rigor, aesthetics, design, and production. It is a superb guide for an armchair voyage to China and its future.
It can be purchased—at a discount!— here .
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