What Nobody Wants to Talk About

The Bush administration's biggest failing, in some sense, is probably its continued inability to get its Pakistan policy straight. At the same time, this is the area of national policy where most people, myself included, are probably disposed to cut them some slack: I'm not hearing tons of bright ideas for alternative policies.

And there's the rub. In a different sense, one of the ways the country as a whole has gone most badly awry is that thanks to the Bush administration's decision to drag us into a giant conversation about first Iraq and now Iran, people are spending very little time thinking about the harder problems of the country that already has nuclear weapons, whose government seems both unstable and not genuinely in control of its territory, etc. At any rate, I'm incredibly sick and may not post much today, so I'll blame my inability to devise an appropriate five point plan for Pakistan on the illness and let the rest of you figure it out.

Comments

"I'm not hearing tons of bright ideas for alternative policies."

We could bomb them to get rid of their WMD program...

Posted by Petey | February 26, 2007 10:14 AM

I'm pretty sure that if John Edwards is elected (or just wins the Democratic nomination) this problem will magically solve itself.

Posted by washerdreyer | February 26, 2007 10:21 AM

Actually, what Nobody Wants to Talk About is phlegm. Seriously. Try it out on your housemates. Explain to them in detail about the thickness and amount of your phlegm production. They really won't be all that into talking about it.

Posted by Petey | February 26, 2007 10:26 AM

The good news about Pakistan is they hate India more than they hate us.

Posted by right | February 26, 2007 10:27 AM

As a start... What do India and China think about dealing with Pakistan?

Posted by MattF | February 26, 2007 10:53 AM

The sad part is that there seems to be no demand on politicians that they actually construct some part of intelligent Pakistan policy. You don't exactly see the candidates for prez running around trying to get advisors that speak Urdu. Musharraff has us right where he wants us, in part because anything we do risks getting him overthrown and killed in a coup by Islamic militants.

Posted by Reality Man | February 26, 2007 11:11 AM

One really bad idea is to bomb Iran. I bet that will lead to an Al Qaeda takeover of Pakistan and we will, sure enough, have a nuke go off shore of Tel Aviv or New York or in the Potomac.

Posted by Robert Hume | February 26, 2007 11:22 AM

Matt, you are right on target. I'd add Saudi Arabia in the same category -- an "ally" that poses a grave threat and has a fragile government.

Our response to 9/11 should have led to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Six years of lies and fear-mongering about Iraq and Iran tend to obscure this, but reality has a way of popping up again and again.

What to do about Pakistan? Maybe look for ways to help them get wealthier and happier? It strikes me as a very unhappy society, with a death wish to boot.

Saudi Arabia is more of a conundrum, as it's already rich, but about as badly governed as it's possible to be.

Posted by Hal Grossman | February 26, 2007 11:25 AM

Pakistan is a really, really crazy place; I was there for a while, and never shook the feeling that things were always on the verge of exploding (this was in the mid-90s, when Pakistan was just starting to notice this crazy "Taliban" phenomenon on the border with Afghanistan). The temptation, if one were president, to think about simpler problems in simpler places--like, say, Iraq--would be enormously seductive.

I think we need to start with the supposition that although Musharraf is clearly not a great guy, or even a straight shooter, he is very close to the ideal guy to be handling the Pakistan situation for us. The man knows how to surf the crazy waves of Pakistani politics pretty well. We will be well-and-truly fucked if the Islamists are able to gin up a coup, backed by ISI or otherwise.

Posted by dj moonbat | February 26, 2007 11:26 AM

"anything we do risks getting him overthrown and killed in a coup by Islamic militants."

Musharraf represents the consensus of the Pakistani military
and the supremacy of the Pakistani military brooks no challenge.
Even a Sadat-like assassination will do nothing to change
that.

Posted by Raj | February 26, 2007 11:32 AM

"We will be well-and-truly fucked if the Islamists are able to gin up a coup, backed by ISI or otherwise."

Pakistanis can correct me on this but I'd think an ISI-coup
against a sitting army chief-of-staff is about as likely
as a CIA coup against the American president.

Posted by Raj | February 26, 2007 11:38 AM

We could go back in time, to December 2001, and force Bush at gunpoint to have Tora Bora surrounded with as many U.S. military as possible. Or to early spring 2002, to likewise force him to not take the Special Ops forces in the Afghan/Pakistan theatre who were still hot on bin Laden's trail, and move them to Iraq to scout out the territory to prepare for our invasion. Or not invade Iraq, ever.

I know - it's an impractical plan. But the point is, it didn't have to be. It only got this way because we've got corrupt, malevolent fuckups running our country, who have a talent for taking manageable situations and turning them into colossal intractable messes.

And just like with Iraq, there's no good solution now, nor should one expect that there might be. The best way to avoid intractable problems is to stay out of situations that can turn into intractable problems. Like bombing Iran. Or turning the Middle East into one big Sunni-Shi'ite conflict.

Posted by RT | February 26, 2007 11:54 AM

The problem is that Pakistan ,despite being obviously and deeply problematic, is an ally and has been for various periods of post wwII history. Thus the usual black and white crap doesn't get Bush or conservative in general very far as an narrative.
Despite all this 'students of history' stuff, the Bush appartus doesn't really have even the slightest idea what kind of social change it needs to encourage and how it would do that. Soft, and subtle power just aren't in the playbook.

Posted by ChrisB | February 26, 2007 12:06 PM

I'd think an ISI-coup
against a sitting army chief-of-staff is about as likely
as a CIA coup against the American president.

I don't think you should go that far. There is no real stable tradition of the rule of law in Pakistan, and apparently the ISI has highly-placed people who are Al Qaeda backers--not simply tolerant of their presence in-country, but pro-Al Qaeda. (They didn't just stop having friends in the movement once the Soviets left.)

If Musharraf moved too far in our direction from his current straddle, I don't think it would be at all out of the question for such elements to take action. As you said, he is the consensus pick of the Pakistani military. But if he were to rule differently, that could change. Hence the intractability of the Pakistan problem.

Posted by dj moonbat | February 26, 2007 12:11 PM

The Pakistani military and the ISI are not uniform entities. They have their own Islamist factions within them. If Musharaff attacks their interests or policy preferences too much, why not have a coup? Just because a coup would not have a 100% chance of success hasn't exactly stopped coup attempts before.

The bigger danger, though, would be assassination by some armed non-state terrorist group. He has already survived multiple attempts on his life. Pakistan does not have the best history when it comes to non-violent succession. Who would replace him? Who would back his replacement and who would attack him? Would he be able to consolidate power? Would we want him to? What would be his policies toward Waziristan and Northwest Frontier Province? And in the meantime, what would happen to AQ Khan and Pakistan's nukes?

Posted by Reality Man | February 26, 2007 12:26 PM

From the mouths of -- what? the cold remedy addled? -- comes truth:
". . .one of the ways the country as a whole has gone most badly awry is that thanks to the Bush administration's decision to drag us into a giant conversation about first Iraq and now Iran, people are spending very little time thinking . . ."

Bush frames an issue, and we don't think outside his little box. Why? Because it makes us anxious?

Pakistan, an unstable dictatorship, actually has nuclear weapons, has given nuclear technology to North Korea and is hosting a resurgent Al Quaeda. But, Bush tells us the Iran, a stable Republic with elections, and a nuclear program, still as much as 10 years away from having a bomb let alone a way of delivering it, is an imminent problem.

And, no one has any ideas about how to deal with any of this? Of course, not. Because, step one is, we have to find a way to get rid of Bush.

There are errors of Type I, Type II and Type III.

Type I: If the U.S. doesn't know where Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons are, it doesn't bother me.
Type II: That the U.S. has a military plan to destroy Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons does bother me.
Type III: But, it should also concern all of us, if the U.S. does not know where Pakistan's nuclear weapons are, and if the U.S. does not have a plan to seize or destroy them, in the event of Pakistan's dissolution.

It is the same with the insurgency in Iraq. Bush frames the issue as one Iranian intervention and ill-intent, and the pundits examine the Type I and Type II errors, and ignore the Type III error. Type III error is that the Saudis are arming the Sunni insurgents, the U.S. is helping the Saudis.

Saudi Arabia is funnelling money and arms to the Sunni insurgents attacking our troops, and Bush points to Iran supplying money and weapons to the Shiites, who are our allys, and America's deep-thinkers are like deer caught in the headlights.

Rather than fabricating bad intelligence about Iran, while ignoring the dangers posed by our supposed allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we might open our eyes.

The U.S. needs to make sure that it has good intelligence on Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. That means both good "secret" intelligence and good "public" intelligence. We need to spend some serious money building up our academic centers, so that there are knowledgeable people available to inform the press. More Juan Coles, please. And, the CIA and the other agencies need to have their capabilities bolstered. Cheney's determined plan to destroy the CIA has gone way too far. And, the right-wing plan to destroy the independence of Academia and Big Media Journalism has also gone way too far.

Points 1 and 2 and 3 of any American five point plan should be, point 1, open our eyes; point 2, turn on the lights throughout the room; point 3, get a new eyeglass prescription to correct severe near-sightedness.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | February 26, 2007 12:38 PM

The beginning of wisdom

How about admitting that there is no grand plan for Pakistan that we could devise that wouldn't do more harm than good? I think most of us are not too clear on a grand plan for our own country, that we know so much better than we will ever know Pakistan. For our own country, we think it would be so wonderful an improvement on what we're doing now to just stop doing obviously stupid things like occupying Iraq, that we are content to plan very broadly on winging what comes after that. Not very awe-inspiring in its transcendent brilliance and command of global geo-politics, but don't you think that we've given the world a bit more than our share of command and transecendent brilliance at global politics lately, and that perhaps we could give that a rest for a few centuries?

Let's pose the question another, sounder way, than what you propose. What harm would befall us and the wider world if there were no particular US foreign policy position on Pakistan and its problems, and a lack of intervention to match that lack of clarity? I mean, no policy beyond the standard of paying attention to what's going on in that country (we have a State Department for a reason), and winging it from there, when and if circumstances, as they very rarely do, actually seem to present some opportunity to actually intervene in a way that won't do more harm than good. You see, in foreign policy as in any human endeavor, having premature ideas of "what needs to be done", interferes fatally with the ability to actually perceive those rare instances in which we actually ought to be doing anything.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | February 26, 2007 8:59 PM

I just second Glen Tomkins. Or, to put it another way, I think our Pakistan policy should be focused on US port security.

Posted by mattsteinglass | February 26, 2007 11:04 PM