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Title: The Freedom Agenda FizzlesHow George Bush and Condoleezza Rice made a mess of Pakistan.
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Published: Nov 5, 2007
Author: http://www.slate.com/id/2177249/
Post Date: 2007-11-05 20:01:52 by tom007
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Views: 103
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The Freedom Agenda FizzlesHow George Bush and Condoleezza Rice made a mess of Pakistan. By Fred Kaplan Posted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 7:18 PM ET Condoleezza Rice and George Bush. Click image to expand.Condoleezza Rice and George Bush Now we've really got problems. The state of emergency in Pakistan signals yet another low point in President George W. Bush's foreign policy—a stark demonstration of his paltry influence and his bankrupt principles. More than that, the crackdown locks us in a crisis—a potentially dangerous dynamic—from which there appears to be no escape route. For much of last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top U.S. officials had been urging Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not to declare martial law. He not only ignored these pleas; he defied them. Last month, Rice persuaded Musharraf to let exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto back in the country—and persuaded Bhutto to go back—as part of a power-sharing deal. The idea was that Musharraf, who doubles as army chief of staff, would retain control of the military in the fight against terrorism, while Bhutto would attract the loyalty of Pakistan's increasingly discontented democrats. That ploy, too, turned out to be illusory: Bhutto was attacked the moment she got back; Musharraf showed no interest in sharing power. Musharraf is portraying his suspension of the constitution as a necessary step to stabilize Pakistan and fend off Islamist terrorists. Yet the timing suggests it was, for the most part, a power grab. Pakistan's Supreme Court was about to rule that Musharraf's reign as both president and army chief of staff was unconstitutional. That meant the coming elections (which may or may not now be called off) would have ended his reign. And so he dissolved the court. He also arrested many democratic activists and shut down the nation's independent media. It should now be clear, if it wasn't already, that Musharraf has been diddling Bush & Co. the past three years or longer. In exchange for his promises to root out Taliban terrorists on the Afghan border and within Pakistan's own intelligence service, Bush has supplied Musharraf with at least $10 billion in aid. Yet while Musharraf has rendered considerable assistance in the war on terrorism, the Taliban—and possibly Osama Bin Laden himself—retain their sanctuary in Pakistan's northwest territories. In exchange for Musharraf's promises to be a good democrat someday, Bush has declared Pakistan to be a "major non-NATO ally." Yet, with his strategically timed state of emergency, Musharraf has revealed he's not at all interested in democratic transitions. But what can Bush—or his successor—do about it? The problem is that there's some truth to Musharraf's official reason for his crackdown. He has been going after al-Qaida jihadists, especially those inside his own country, though not so much Taliban fighters on the border of Afghanistan. And he is in a genuinely tight spot. On the one hand, he fears what some Western officials call the "Talibanization of Pakistan." On the other hand, he can't go after them too avidly, for fear of sparking a backlash from some of his own officers who have Islamist sympathies and who don't want to be seen as fighting America's war. As Daniel Markey, a former State Department specialist on south Asia, wrote last summer in Foreign Affairs magazine, the army is "Pakistan's strongest government institution and the only one that can possibly deal with immediate threats of violent militancy and terrorism." If the United States were to respond to this power grab by cutting off aid to the Pakistani army, the army would turn elsewhere—and the Islamist factions would be strengthened. If the United States were to cut its links to Musharraf … well, Musharraf is the face of the Pakistani army. If he goes, probably some other strongman would take his place, but the tenuous coalition he has assembled could fall apart in the process, with unpredictable—but almost certainly unpleasant—results. And let's not forget the ultimate unpleasant fact: Pakistan has a test-proven nuclear arsenal. Someone was speculating this morning on the BBC that the Bush administration might have a secret ally, an agent of sorts, within the Pakistani military command, poised to step in and serve U.S. interests if Musharraf fell. This is very doubtful. First, there are the obvious reasons (Bush's intense commitment to Musharraf and the military's relative impenetrability). Second, if Bush did have some fallback leader, it's unlikely Rice would have put so much effort—however fruitless the gesture now seems—to getting Bhutto back in the country for a power-sharing gambit. Nor, by the way, are there any civilian politicians in whom the United States could put its hopes; as Daniel Markey indicates in his article (and he is far from alone in this view), there are no civilian politicians, parties, or other entities that could exercise power without the military's nod. This is why the Bush administration's response to the clampdown has been, as they say, "muted." The fact is, the United States needs Musharraf more than Musharraf needs the United States. And the fact that he's rubbing our noses in it doesn't make it any less true. We can't do much about this now, but we might have been able to do something about it two years ago or six months ago. The fact that we didn't is a grave indictment of Bush's foreign policy, both its practices and its principles. For instance, nearly all of the $10 billion in U.S. military aid to Pakistan has gone to its military. Bush could have at least tried to funnel a larger portion of the aid to democratic institutions. This crisis was triggered last March when Musharraf fired the chief justice of the Supreme Court for criticizing his rule. That set off the unprecedented street rallies by the nation's lawyers. That emboldened the Supreme Court, which started to take its duties seriously. That gave rise to the near-certainty that the court would rule Musharraf's reign illegal. That tipped Musharraf to suspend the constitution—and, with it, the courts. Since Bush officials stay in touch with Musharraf quite frequently, and since they are known to pay at least lip service to democracy, someone could have at least advised Musharraf to get off this track. No one could have expected him to turn democrat, but he could have taken palliative measures—or cynical ones: for instance, paying off the justices—to ward off a crisis. The Bush foreign policy was neither shrewd enough to play self-interested power politics nor truly principled enough to enforce its ideals. One consequence of this crisis is that Bush's "freedom agenda" is finally bankrupt. He will never again be able to invoke it, even as a rhetorical ploy, without evoking winces or laughter. In his second inaugural address, where Bush first declared that the main aim of his foreign policy would be to spread democracy and topple tyranny all around the world, he warned dictators that good relations with America "would require the decent treatment of their own people." Musharraf's proclamation is the definitive proof that no dictator takes—or ever will again take—that warning seriously. In the same address, Bush spun an appealing but specious syllogism: Tyranny breeds discontent; discontent breeds hatred and terrorism; terrorism threatens U.S. security; therefore, promoting democracy enhances U.S. security. Or, as he put it, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." Musharraf's proclamation, and Bush's muted response to it, proves that interests and ideals, alas, still sometimes clash. But the most dismaying contradiction appears in the 2006 edition of the official document titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America." In his introduction, Bush wrote, "We seek to shape the world, not merely be shaped by it; to influence events for the better instead of being at their mercy." Musharraf's proclamation reveals that we are not the "sole superpower" that Bush and his associates thought we were; that sometimes the combination of vital interests and mediocre diplomacy put us all too desperately at the mercy of events.
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
(cough)
Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today!
Remember when Bush was running for the first time and a Boston Globe reporter asked him who the heads of state were for various countries. For Pakistan, he answered, "that dictator guy." He is probably not much more informed today. Keith Olbermann had a great rant tonight, implying that Bush was headed for a war crimes trial for defending torture and, more to the point, ordering it performed. Things are getting way freaking out of control.
Honi soit qui mal y pense
from p m carpenter's blog: The Badass Karma of George & Co. It is the law of unintended consequences, or unexpected 180s, or grand paradoxes, or just plain karma, if you like. But whatever you choose to call it, every passing day corroborates the thesis that Bush-Cheney's nearly exclusive reliance on hard-power muscularity has doomed the United States to the status of a whimpering beggar, of a global laughingstock, of a besieged bad boy, of an overstretched and impotent giant. If fear, as opposed to respect, was what the Machiavellian duo had in mind, they're coming up stupendously short. China has us by the financial short ones; the Russian bear is seeing U.S.- cultivated opportunities everywhere; the Middle East speaks for itself; Latin America is toasting rabidly antiAmerican but effective demagogues; Europe is little more than puzzled by, and barely tolerant of, our bad-boy immaturity; and large swaths of Africa remain defiantly adrift in unaligned turmoil. We are, simply put, increasingly an international joke. Still dangerous and unpredictable, of course, but more in the sense of an untrained monkey with a machine gun. The monkey, however, is about out of bullets -- and the world knows it. The latest to embrace the joy of Bush-Cheney's imperial impotence is that sterling ally and irrepressible dictator, Generalissimo and Presidente Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Our friendship in the vast currency of military hardware has indeed kept him propped up, but that friendship was also about to bring him down. We took the world's extraordinary good will of the post-9/11 period and promptly launched a religio-ideological assault on it, and fewer Middle East populations took kindly to our rudeness than that of Pakistan's. All of which, to understate matters, has put the general at risk. So Pervez had a choice: continue kissing the imperially befuddled who fed him and maintain the illusion of righteous democrat as actual democracy proceeded to string him up; or tell the Bushies to shove off, knowing they could do no such thing in all their splendiferous frailty. Naturally it wasn't much of a choice. One's hanging in the public square isn't normally a dictator's preferred course. It was the behind-the-scenes contours of Bush-Cheney's mighty powerlessness, however, that made Musharraf's actions yesterday so intriguing, and telling. The administration frantically begged and coerced and cajoled the little dictator not to do what he did. The Bushies were everywhere in and around Islamabad, like a jilted lover, calling and dropping by to plead for one more shot at the old romance. Closest was "Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American military commander in the Middle East," reported the New York Times, who "told General Musharraf and his top generals ... on Friday that he would put [his $10 billion in] aid at risk if he seized emergency powers." The admiral's looming threat struck such terror in the heart of Musharraf, 24 hours later he seized emergency powers. Condi was in the neighborhood, and she too had pleaded with Pervez. But after his rejection she was reduced to bawling about how "highly regrettable" the whole break-up thing was. But not to worry, is Musharraf's attitude. He'll always have Bill and Condi and Dick and George, because he has them all by the balls. For Musharraf's is one of those tolerable, lovably huggable nuclear-armed regimes, no matter how intolerably Musharraf acts. Whether good boy or bad, he's pretty much all we've got -- considering we've alienated everyone else. Thus the Bush administration is "stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.... Inside the White House the hope is that the state of emergency will be short-lived and that General Musharraf will fulfill his promise to abandon his post as Army chief of staff and hold elections by Jan. 15." Good luck with that. But "hope" isn't policy. It is, rather, the pathetic manifestation of a United States as the most gossamer of paper tigers -- the once-baddest bully on the block, inexorably reduced by overexertion to sniveling impotence. I, for one, choose to call it karma.
Things are getting way freaking out of control. PBS will be showing a Frontline program on Tuesday evening 11/06 entitled: "United States: Extraordinary Rendition" I think it will be a keeper. I heard Air America interviewing the investigative journalist,Stephen Grey. who said that there are currently US laws on the books that prohibit US citizens from approving or participating in foreign renditions. But I'm not sure if the 10/06 passage of the Military Commissions Act gave protection from prosecution for renditions previously prohibited by law. What was interesting to learn from Mr. Grey was that renditions took place before 9/11. Also he said renditions are approved at the high levels of government - that Bill Clinton used to sign off on them as they came up and GWB just gave the CIA a carte blanche approval -"Go get them."
Kiki, that was one incredible post. POST OF THE MONTH!!!!
Honi soit qui mal y pense
In the same address, Bush spun an appealing but specious syllogism: Tyranny breeds discontent; discontent breeds hatred and terrorism; terrorism threatens U.S. security; therefore, promoting democracy enhances U.S. security. Or, as he put it, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."
#2. To: tom007 (#0)
#3. To: tom007 (#0)
#4. To: Mekons4, All (#2)
Keith Olbermann had a great rant tonight, implying that Bush was headed for a war crimes trial for defending torture and, more to the point, ordering it performed.
#5. To: kiki (#3)
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