WASHINGTON: In a move that has surprised many foreign policy analysts here, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has appointed a prominent neo-conservative hawk and leading champion of the Iraq war to the post of State Department Counsellor. Eliot A. Cohen, who teaches military history at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) here and has also served on the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board (DPB) since 2001, will take up the position next month that was left vacant late last year by Rice’s long-time confidant and “realist” thinker, Philip Zelikow.

A close friend and protégé of former Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and advisory board member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Cohen most recently led the harsh neo-conservative attack on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton.

Like his fellow-neo-cons, he was particularly scathing about its recommendations for Washington to directly engage Syria and Iran and revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — recommendations which Rice herself has explicitly endorsed in the last few weeks.

“This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war,” Cohen wrote in column entitled “No Way to Win a War”, published by the Wall Street Journal the day after the ISG released its report in early December.

“A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results,” he went on in a wholesale dismissal of the relevance of what he called the “Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s...”

“Eliot brings a lot to the table in terms of being a counsellor, being somebody who can be an intellectual sounding board for her (Rice),” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack in confirming Cohen’s appointment on Friday.

Some analysts here, however, said they thought the appointment was designed instead to reduce or pre-empt criticism from neo-conservatives and other hawks in and outside the administration for the direction she hopes to take US policy, particularly in the Middle East. With no operational responsibilities, the State Department Counsellor can be used — or ignored — at the secretary’s discretion.

“Condi may feel she needs to have a neo-con right next to her to protect her flanks,” said Chris Nelson, editor of the widely read Washington insider newsletter, The Nelson Report. “And, if she’s really planning to put her foot down on the Israelis, which (Washington) will have to do if it wants to get a real process with the Palestinians underway as part of a bigger regional deal with the Saudis and Iranians, then a guy like Cohen up there on the (State Department’s) seventh floor who is in on it and can claim influence on the outcome can help.”

“Bringing on Cohen could help inoculate her from criticism by the Cheney camp,” agreed Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation in a reference to the vice president and the neo-conservatives and other hawks who surround him. “One of the things that’s been consistent is that Rice never takes Cheney head-on and is very careful not to take on people who might antagonise him.”

In that respect, Cohen is a nearly ideal choice. Like Cheney, Cohen was a founding member in 1997 of the Project for the New American Century whose positions on how to prosecute the “war on terror” — including the invasion of Iraq and cutting ties to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yassir Arafat — he has consistently endorsed.

Although lacking in any regional expertise or policy-making experience, Cohen has written prolifically in recent years on US policy in the Middle East.

Cohen first gained national prominence shortly after the 9/11 attacks when he published a Wall Street Journal column entitled “World War IV” — a moniker quickly adopted by hard-line neo-cons like former CIA director and fellow-DPB member James Woolsey, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, and Centre for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney (on whose board Cohen also sits) — to put Bush’s “war on terror” in what he considered to be the appropriate historical context and to define its enemy as “militant Islam”.

After defeating the Taliban, he argued, Washington should not only “finish off” Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whom he accused of having “helped Al Qaeda”, but also seek to overthrow “the mullahs” in Iran whose replacement by a “moderate or secular government would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of (Osama) bin Laden.”

In another Journal article in April 2002 when the second Palestinian intifada was at its height, Cohen, who had just signed a PNAC letter which called for severing ties to the PA and asserted that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight,” argued that proposals to send an international force that would separate Israeli forces from the Palestinians were “notàserious”. “(T)here are times when well-intentioned measures can only make matters worse,” he warned.

Cohen has also been quick to label critics of Israel and the so-called “Israel Lobby” in the US as anti-Semites.

“Only a reshuffling of the deck — through the disappearance of Arafat, or an event, such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) that profoundly changes the mood in the Arab world — will make something approaching truce, let alone peace, possible,” he argued in a favourite pre-Iraq war neo-conservative theme.

The following summer, Cohen achieved new fame when Bush was photographed carrying Cohen’s just-published book, “Supreme Command”, which argued that the greatest civilian war-time leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, had a far better strategic sense than their generals. It was a particularly timely message in the months that preceded the Iraq war when a surprising number of recently military brass here were voicing strong reservations about the impending US invasion.

He also became a charter member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an administration-supported group both to lobby for war in Iraq, largely on behalf of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC). Indeed, Cohen, like his friend Wolfowitz, was already arguing publicly for Washington to rely heavily on the INC in any effort to overthrow Hussein in December 2001.

After the Iraq invasion, however, Cohen became progressively more critical of the way in which the subsequent occupation and counter-insurgency were being carried out, although, after a Pentagon-sponsored tour of Iraq that featured interviews with top US military commanders there, including Gen. George Casey, last February, he became briefly more optimistic.

If the surge should fail, however, Cohen’s preferred and “most plausible” option, which he laid out in an October 2006 Journal column titled ‘Plan B’, would be a coup d’etat (“which we quietly endorse”) that would bring to power a “junta of military modernisers”, a development which, as he noted himself, would call into question the administration’s and Rice’s avowed goal of democratisation.—Dawn/The IPS News Service

As a confidence building measure for any challenging series ahead, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) officials often tell players that representing your country is a privilege; You should not take it lightly; Go out and serve the country and nation with all your patriotic zeal.

All this is fine and is, indeed, required to lift the spirits of the players on all such occasions. However, it appears quite odd when the same PCB officials keenly pursue the appointments of foreign coaches and trainers for these players.

I am, by no means, judging the professionalism of these coaches and trainers but just think about it for a moment; how much patriotic can these coaches and trainers be and upto what extent can they relate to the psyche of the players.

It, surely, is no coincidence that at present, the top four teams in the world — South Africa, New Zealand, England and Australia — have their local coaches, physiotherapists and trainers as support staff.

This phenomenon of employing the foreign coach only appeals to the Asian (Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) cricket boards who somehow believe that local coaches and trainers do not qualify as competent officials for the national duty.

There is this thinking among our cricket set-ups that lap-top coaching can do wonders. I admit that computers are an efficient tool for analysing the performances and other aspects of the team but it certainly cannot be a substitute for the human brain. What we must begin to realise and understand is that a qualified local coach can understand the issues confronting Pakistan cricket much better than a foreign coach.

Most of the players obviously know how to play the game and one can only improve their respective techniques here and there. But where a foreign coach really fails to deliver is the aspect of comprehending the psyche of our players with respect to their social and environmental set-ups in the sub-continent. Most of our players need a typical sort of pep talk to give their best on the field. There are certain habits, well entrenched among the Asian people, that need to be catered to. For example, the diet of the players is a prime aspect, so is the weight training which should essentially be lightweight as opposed to gruelling workouts which are not that well-suited for Asian players because of the hot climate.

If you observe, in the 1970s and ’80s, the injury ratio in teams was about 5% but now it has jumped to 35%. Look at the shoulder problems Wasim Akram faced during his career, Saqlain had knee problems, Azhar Mahmood has gone through shoulder problems, Inzi himself suffers from back spasms quite often, Mohammad Asif has issues with his elbow, Shoaib Akhtar has shoulder and knee problems, Umar Gul has had leg injuries and the list goes on and on.

Why do these fitness problems keep cropping up which were not there in the past. One of the reasons, in my opinion, is this weight and gym training on still machines which is totally inappropriate for cricketers. It may be alright for athletes and players in some other sports but not cricket. But since going to gym is considered ‘in’ and is a modern concept, it has been adopted as a fashion in cricket as well.

To give another example, most of our fast bowlers begin their careers with excellent pace but after a few years, their speed fades. Prime cases of this today are Mohammad Sami or India’s Irfan Pathan. This is mainly because of the extra wings like shoulder muscles and biceps that get developed due to extensive weight trainings in the gym. The way these muscles develop, it becomes difficult to maintain the same high pace for the faster bowlers.

During World Cup 2003, we met the famous West Indian trainer Dennis Waight who served the all-conquering cricketing nation for almost 25 years. He told us to avoid the use of weights in gym and instead do jogging, short running sprints, brisk walk, push-ups and swimming.

He disclosed that the great Viv Richards and Malcolm Marshall used to do around 900 push-ups between them during a five-day game and used to swim a lot. That is why the batsmen and fast bowlers of the 1970s and 1980s were fitter while now-a-days it is common for players to be injury-prone.

People feel that it is due to the amount of cricket but actually it is due to wrong balance in diet and training.

Now a local coach will understand this training aspect much better than a foreign one who is, perhaps, more used to operating in sophisticated gyms all the time with his army of players.

Another thing a foreign coach often overlooks is the manner of hunting and grooming the talent in this part of the world. In Brazil, they look around and work very hard in identifying talent across their country for soccer outfits while Europe has more than 1,000 academies. Well, academies are good, no doubt about that, but eventually we do not need to produce robots, do we? We need to produce world-class cricketers and our experience in Pakistan from late 1970s and the ’80s is that our players were able to excel in this game since much of the talent was spotted by the former cricketers who had a big role to play in our cricketing set-up.

Likewise, in the late 60s and early 70s, Pakistani players got much of their early grooming in England’s county cricket where they played alongside some very fine cricketers from all over the world.

Again, I am not disputing that there is no use of county cricket now or that knowledge and experience from outside should not be gained, the main point is that eventually the success lies in local development, precise facilities and streamlined system which can only be provided by the Pakistan Cricket Board.

The coaches, the former players and other team staff will then perform with devotion and zeal but only when they belong to our own domestic set-up and are, naturally, charged-up with true patriotism.—The writer is a former Pakistan captain