Does Anyone Know What They Are Doing?
Among many people who actually know something about Pakistan (like Brian Katulis or Juan Cole) , the emerging CW is that the US strategy of trying to install Bhutto as Prime Minister so as to provide Musharraf with a bigger base of support was bound to fail. More broadly, our strategy of making Musharraf our guy in Pakistan, when much of his governance is driving the instability and turmoil we so fear, is widely agreed upon to not only be a failure, but a predictable one. This really begs the question, in the Bush administration’s security and diplomatic apparatus, is the only way they know to relate to Muslim countries picking one or two prominent leaders and just supporting them, regardless of how many people they represent or whether people in their country really like them?
So much of the conservative commentary about Iraq or Pakistan is driven by this noxious rhetoric of supporting “our guy” in X country. First it was Chalabi in Iraq, then Allawi, and when we realized that those who actually individuals who actually weilded influence in Iraq weren’t exactly so into being the US’s “guy” (Sadr), this type of rhetoric on Iraq petered out.
What’s really disturbing in Pakistan is how much the President has adopted Musharraf as “our guy.” Despite the fact that since he eviscerated secular leaning parties and thus had to align with Islamists and Baluchi separtists to hold on to power, despite the fact he squanders our hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, despite the fact that after crushing independent political sources of power, he went on to crush the independent judiciary and media, Bush made a total ass of himself by saying that Musharraf “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.”
Like so many foreign policy clusterfucks, it turns out you can blame Dick Cheney. Ahmed Rashid, reporting in June, explained that not only was Cheney essentially running Pakistan policy but that there were few to none Pakistan experts in the government:
The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney’s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American “drugs and thugs”; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. “They know nothing of Pakistan,” a former senior U.S. diplomat said.
Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department.
No one in Foggy Bottom seems willing to question Cheney’s decisions. Boucher, for one, has largely limited his remarks on the crisis to expressions of support for Musharraf. Current and retired U.S. diplomats tell me that throughout the previous year, Boucher refused to let the State Department even consider alternative policies if Musharraf were threatened with being ousted, even though 2007 is an election year in Pakistan.
So, we have the State Department desk on Pakistan staffed with hacks who know nothing of the region, Cheney being in charge of Pakistan policy and stubbornly sticking with Musharraf and refusing to hear any dissent. While this is just so typical of the administration’s approach to foreign policy, it is still a bit shocking to hear it explained so vividly.
What’s even more interesting about Rashid’s article is that the agencies with actual Pakistan and South Asia expertise, the DOD and the CIA, had already started to sour on Musharraf, “With Cheney in charge and Rice in eclipse, rumblings of alarm can be heard at the Defense Department and the CIA. While neither agency is usually directly concerned with decision-making on Pakistan, both boast officers with far greater expertise than the White House and State Department crew. These officers, many of whom have served in Islamabad or Kabul, understand the double game that Musharraf has played — helping the United States go after al-Qaeda while letting his intelligence services help the Taliban claw their way back in Afghanistan. The Pentagon and the CIA have been privately expressing concern about the lack of an alternative to blind support for Musharraf.”
It’s hard to believe (well, it actuallly isn’t) that even today, this type of denigration of expertise is so widely accepted in the administration and among conservatives in general. Like when we were told that the military and State Department were too dovish on Iraq, specifically that the State Department were just Arabists, we are now reaping the fruits of having our Pakistan policy consist of picking “our guy.” While supporting Bhutto made it an “our girl and our guy” policy, it was still more of the same. Katulis put it best, “US policymakers should resist the temptation to see the situation in simplistic, black-and-white, freedom-versus-terror terms. Past experience in Pakistan and elsewhere demonstrates that putting our hopes on a single leader or a single election rarely makes Americans safer or advances stability and prosperity in other countries.”
