The Bush administration is pushing Pakistan into a corner.
It’s not a happy place.
]
It’s called Musharraf = Shah of Iran territory.
And it really doesn’t have to be that way.
After all, the opposition to Musharraf comes from respectable, clean-shaven democratic, dollar-worshiping moderates, not the bearded religious fanatics of our dark fantasies.
On Tuesday, I wrote oooh so presciently:
The deep thinkers of the State Department could look at the election results, decide that we did our honorable best by Musharraf, our loyal but terminally inept strongman, and give our backing to his peaceful departure.
The PPP would be spared the suicidal role of appearing as Musharraf’s protector, and be able to form a governing coalition with the PML-N in a subordinate position inside the government, instead of throwing rocks at it from the outside.
The U.S. has always abhorred a situation in which the PPP and the PML-N formed a coalition.
Washington fears that a PPP coalition under the influence of the PML-N would...adopt policies popular with the Pakistani people i.e. decouple from the U.S. war on the Taleban and al Qaeda just at the time that the prospect of losing Afghanistan has started giving U.S. policymakers some serious heartburn.
[But] No matter who’s in power, we’re not going to unearth some miracle race of Pakistani crusaders ready to kill their own Muslim citizens so NATO can destroy Pakistan’s natural Pashtun allies in Afghanistan.
Better to settle for a popular, stable PPP/PML-N government in Pakistan without Musharraf but with Kiyani (the new, improved army strongman) and hope that all that money we’re throwing at Pakistan buys us some grudgingly-acknowledged leverage for anti-extremist initiatives that suit both U.S. policy and the Pakistani national mood.
Of course, accepting half a loaf is not really what the Bush administration is about. Its usual response to a setback is to blame it on a deficiency of will and vigor, and double down when the facts on the ground are screaming Change Course! instead.
So we’ll see whether Washington casts its vote in favor of the PPP+Musharraf, continued division and drift in Pakistani politics and security doctrine, and eventual dominance by Nawaz Sharif and a PML-N grown more overtly anti-American.
According to Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of McClatchy, the returns are trickling in from Washington, and it doesn’t look promising:
The U.S. is urging the Pakistani political leaders who won the elections to form a new government quickly and not press to reinstate the judges whom Musharraf ousted last year, Western diplomats and U.S. officials said Wednesday. If reinstated, the jurists likely would try to remove Musharraf from office.
Representing the despised minority from the state of sanity is, as usual, the State Department:
Bush's policy of hanging on to Musharraf has caused friction between the White House and the State Department, with some career diplomats and other specialists arguing that the administration is trying to buck the political tides in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.
Officials in the White House and the intelligence community fear that the longer Pakistan remains without a new government, the deeper the gridlock, threatening the progress made in the elections toward greater stability and helping the country's Islamic extremists.
One Western diplomat said, however, that the strategy could backfire if Pakistanis feel betrayed after voting to kick Musharraf from office.
"This is dangerous," said the diplomat.
The officials spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss internal government debates.
The effort to persuade Pakistan's newly elected parliament not to reinstate the judges could be perceived in Pakistan as a U.S. attempt to keep Musharraf in power after voters overwhelmingly rejected his Pakistan Muslim League-Q political party.
"There is going to be an uprising against the people who were elected" should opposition parties agree to the plan, warned Athar Minallah, the lawyer of ousted Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, whom Musharraf has under house arrest.
Frikkin' diplomats. Frikkin' specialists. Frikkin' lawyers. Frikkin' voters. Frikkin' people who love their country, democracy, and the rule of law.
How are we supposed to get anything done over there with all these troublemakers?
In a separate post, Pakistan: It’s Not Over Yet, I write on the impending political crisis, both between the PPP and the PML-N and inside the PPP itself, provoked by the U.S. insistence on working with Musharraf.
Showing posts with label Bush administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush administration. Show all posts
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Rewriting the History of the Sudan Calamity
Winners write history.
Losers rewrite history continually as bills come due, consequences surface, newly revealed errors and shortcomings must be excused, and heavier blame must be shifted onto backs sturdy enough to bear it.
Case in point: Michael Abramowitz’s insider-propelled backgrounder in the Washington Post, U.S. Promises on Darfur Don’t Match Actions tries to explain why, despite its brave talk, the Bush administration isn’t getting anything done on Darfur.
A considerable effort is made to make President Bush look good on this issue by painting him as the guy who wants to do the right thing but was thwarted by distracted, risk averse bureaucrats.
At one point, one senior official said, Bush wanted action to crimp Sudan's booming oil business, a move that would have severely aggravated relations with China -- and that no one else in the government favored.
There was stunned silence in the room, the official said, when Hadley disclosed Bush's idea to other government officials. Hadley made clear he was not interested in having a discussion, but the administration never went as far as the president seemed to be demanding. Instead, Treasury officials came up with a sanctions plan aimed at tracking and squeezing key individuals and companies in the Sudanese economy, including the oil business.
At an appearance in Tennessee this summer, Bush raised a question many have asked about the situation in Darfur: "If there is a problem, why don't you just go take care of it?" But Bush said he considered -- and decided against -- sending U.S. troops unilaterally. "It just wasn't the right decision," he said.
Unable to compel the attention and obedience of his advisors, unwilling to resort precipitously to military action, and bereft of an outlet for his idealism.
Doesn’t sound like our President Bush, does it?
Actually, I think there’s a good argument that, on Sudan, President Bush was guilty of doing too much, not too little. Not in Darfur, but in another, more strategically important area of the country that receives one-tenth of the attention the Darfur sideshow does: the South.
A full understanding of Mr. Bush’s problem can be seen in the context of the twenty-plus year civil war between the oil-rich South and Khartoum that claimed two million lives.
The president commendably invested considerable prestige, attention and energy to broker a peace deal that, after hopeful beginnings, is now on the point of collapse.
The ironic legacy of the North-South deal may turn out to be that it only provided the template for the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur--and demonstrated the limits of unilateral foreign policy, even by the world's only superpower, in one of the world's more intractable trouble spots.
This gives me a chance to unpack a long piece I wrote last year, The Twisted Triangle: America, China, and Sudan .
I argued that the Bush administration was hostage to the policy of rapprochement with the Sudan regime that had brought about the cessation of the North-South civil war;
that, because of the outcry over Darfur, President Bush had not been able to deliver on the deal promised to Sudan’s President Bashir in return for accepting a risky power-sharing arrangement;
that Bashir was extremely unhappy with the Bush administration as a result;
and that the United States nevertheless, in its best “hope is not a plan” mode, incorrectly assumed it still possessed the leverage to act unilaterally and outside the UN and other mechanisms to impose a Darfur settlement that turned out to be dead on arrival;
and that therefore the Bush administration’s efforts—as further retailed in the Abramowitz article—to blame the U.N. and China for the lack of progress on Darfur is supreme example of sour grapes and hypocrisy.
I wrote:
Rather ironic that Sudan, which was supposed to serve as the keystone of Bush administration engagement with Africa, has turned into an exclusive sandbox for the Yellow Peril.
More to the point, it should be recalled that the United States has consistently pursued Sudan as its exclusive Great Power trophy, most recently when it decided that it would pursue its Darfur diplomacy directly with Khartoum and use the African Union as its vehicle, excluding China and bypassing the UN.
But that didn’t quite work out....
Its credibility and clout diminished by the failure of its DPA initiative, the U.S. government is reduced to impotent table pounding by its media proxies and indignant finger wagging by humanitarian and evangelical groups trying to somehow coerce China into helping out.
Talking about Darfur also gives me an opportunity to present the acme of Bush administration second term hubris to a new audience:
Anticipation of the juicy [North-South] deal coming down the pipe had evoked this remarkable headlinein the Sudan Tribune on the occasion of the 2004 U.S. presidential election:
Sudan prayed for Bush victory.
Israel’s Debkafile is perhaps not the most accurate reporter of news. But it is a faithful chronicler of grandiose neo-con fantasies and this report from 2004 catches some of the giddy enthusiasm of the Bush White House over the new Sudan policy:
Sudan would not only be reclaimed for the Christian God and Big Oil.
It would also help exorcise the guilt of the GOP’s white southern base for its slaveholding past, and place the onus firmly on the backs of those troublesome but ultimately contrite Muslim Arabs.
Now, that’s a peace deal for the ages!
None of that stuff ever happened, of course.
Read the rest of the piece to find out what really happened to what, under different circumstances, could have been a genuine achievement in Bush administration diplomacy. It’s a perspective on Sudan that is pretty much absent from the major media and, I’m afraid, Mr. Abramowitz’s article.
Losers rewrite history continually as bills come due, consequences surface, newly revealed errors and shortcomings must be excused, and heavier blame must be shifted onto backs sturdy enough to bear it.
Case in point: Michael Abramowitz’s insider-propelled backgrounder in the Washington Post, U.S. Promises on Darfur Don’t Match Actions tries to explain why, despite its brave talk, the Bush administration isn’t getting anything done on Darfur.
A considerable effort is made to make President Bush look good on this issue by painting him as the guy who wants to do the right thing but was thwarted by distracted, risk averse bureaucrats.
At one point, one senior official said, Bush wanted action to crimp Sudan's booming oil business, a move that would have severely aggravated relations with China -- and that no one else in the government favored.
There was stunned silence in the room, the official said, when Hadley disclosed Bush's idea to other government officials. Hadley made clear he was not interested in having a discussion, but the administration never went as far as the president seemed to be demanding. Instead, Treasury officials came up with a sanctions plan aimed at tracking and squeezing key individuals and companies in the Sudanese economy, including the oil business.
At an appearance in Tennessee this summer, Bush raised a question many have asked about the situation in Darfur: "If there is a problem, why don't you just go take care of it?" But Bush said he considered -- and decided against -- sending U.S. troops unilaterally. "It just wasn't the right decision," he said.
Unable to compel the attention and obedience of his advisors, unwilling to resort precipitously to military action, and bereft of an outlet for his idealism.
Doesn’t sound like our President Bush, does it?
Actually, I think there’s a good argument that, on Sudan, President Bush was guilty of doing too much, not too little. Not in Darfur, but in another, more strategically important area of the country that receives one-tenth of the attention the Darfur sideshow does: the South.
A full understanding of Mr. Bush’s problem can be seen in the context of the twenty-plus year civil war between the oil-rich South and Khartoum that claimed two million lives.
The president commendably invested considerable prestige, attention and energy to broker a peace deal that, after hopeful beginnings, is now on the point of collapse.
The ironic legacy of the North-South deal may turn out to be that it only provided the template for the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur--and demonstrated the limits of unilateral foreign policy, even by the world's only superpower, in one of the world's more intractable trouble spots.
This gives me a chance to unpack a long piece I wrote last year, The Twisted Triangle: America, China, and Sudan .
I argued that the Bush administration was hostage to the policy of rapprochement with the Sudan regime that had brought about the cessation of the North-South civil war;
that, because of the outcry over Darfur, President Bush had not been able to deliver on the deal promised to Sudan’s President Bashir in return for accepting a risky power-sharing arrangement;
that Bashir was extremely unhappy with the Bush administration as a result;
and that the United States nevertheless, in its best “hope is not a plan” mode, incorrectly assumed it still possessed the leverage to act unilaterally and outside the UN and other mechanisms to impose a Darfur settlement that turned out to be dead on arrival;
and that therefore the Bush administration’s efforts—as further retailed in the Abramowitz article—to blame the U.N. and China for the lack of progress on Darfur is supreme example of sour grapes and hypocrisy.
I wrote:
Rather ironic that Sudan, which was supposed to serve as the keystone of Bush administration engagement with Africa, has turned into an exclusive sandbox for the Yellow Peril.
More to the point, it should be recalled that the United States has consistently pursued Sudan as its exclusive Great Power trophy, most recently when it decided that it would pursue its Darfur diplomacy directly with Khartoum and use the African Union as its vehicle, excluding China and bypassing the UN.
But that didn’t quite work out....
Its credibility and clout diminished by the failure of its DPA initiative, the U.S. government is reduced to impotent table pounding by its media proxies and indignant finger wagging by humanitarian and evangelical groups trying to somehow coerce China into helping out.
Talking about Darfur also gives me an opportunity to present the acme of Bush administration second term hubris to a new audience:
Anticipation of the juicy [North-South] deal coming down the pipe had evoked this remarkable headlinein the Sudan Tribune on the occasion of the 2004 U.S. presidential election:
Sudan prayed for Bush victory.
Israel’s Debkafile is perhaps not the most accurate reporter of news. But it is a faithful chronicler of grandiose neo-con fantasies and this report from 2004 catches some of the giddy enthusiasm of the Bush White House over the new Sudan policy:
Let’s highlight a truly wonderful passage:For the first time ever, American diplomacy will have succeeded in converting a country dominated by radical Muslims – in Sudan’s case since the 17th century -into a secular democracy – in a period, moreover, when fundamentalist Islam is at its most militant and only a few years after Khartoum played host to Osama bin Laden’s headquarters.
Bush also has a special occasion in mind with an eye on the African American vote where his support is relatively weak. He will step forward as the first US president to plunge deep and head-on into problems endemic to the African continent. The Sudan peace will show the way to accommodations of other conflicts. He has allocated liberal sums for the fight against AIDS and steps for raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Africans.
On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.
If the US president has his way, the White House lawn will be fully booked this year with ceremonies centering on the Sudanese reconciliation, which he rates more highly than the Israel-Palestinian handshake hosted by Bill Clinton eleven years ago.
“It has to be a ceremony even more impressive than the 1993 White House signing of declarations of principles by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat,” said a senior US official preparing the event. “It will be an ‘African Camp David’, but one that will not fail.”
Bush’s advisers are preparing to stage a truly gala reception for the two Sudanese leaders, the first of a series showcasing the presidency’s breakthroughs in Africa in full sight of the American electorate and culminating in a splashy signing ceremony in March or April.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has set up a committee with heads of the African American community. Working out of an undisclosed location in Los Angeles, they are assess the next moves on Sudan and their impact on voting patterns in November.As Danforth’s mission draws to a successful conclusion, the president’s senior political adviser Karl Rove is taking charge of strategy on Sudan and its exploitation as campaign fodder.
On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.
Sudan would not only be reclaimed for the Christian God and Big Oil.
It would also help exorcise the guilt of the GOP’s white southern base for its slaveholding past, and place the onus firmly on the backs of those troublesome but ultimately contrite Muslim Arabs.
Now, that’s a peace deal for the ages!
None of that stuff ever happened, of course.
Read the rest of the piece to find out what really happened to what, under different circumstances, could have been a genuine achievement in Bush administration diplomacy. It’s a perspective on Sudan that is pretty much absent from the major media and, I’m afraid, Mr. Abramowitz’s article.
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