US squeeze on Pakistan

I DIDN’T think it would happen that fast. In last week’s column, I worried about the possibility that Washington, having become weary about what it considers to be Pakistan’s tardy response to the rise of the Taliban, may act to slow down the flow of aid funds to Islamabad.

I thought this may happen once the reins of power passed on to a new pair of hands in Washington in January 2009. However, a day before my article appeared, Vice-President Dick Cheney met General Pervez Musharraf and warned him of what the US may do if Pakistan did not change its stance with respect to the resurgent Taliban. That stance is seen as appeasement by many in American public policy circles.

Both the content of the message delivered to President Musharraf and the tone in which it was given have become the subject of much debate in the United States. Those who are keen to assign the blame for the recent setbacks in Afghanistan to Pakistan are suggesting that Cheney used strong language in his conversation with the Pakistani president.

He is said to have warned Islamabad that it could expect rough treatment at Washington’s hands if it did not follow the line being advocated by the Americans. According to one senior US official, Cheney was sent to Pakistan to “beat up on the Pakistani president.”

But Cheney provided a different impression. “That’s not the way I work. The idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business,” the vice-president told newsmen as he travelled to Muscat from Kabul. Senior administration officials said, however, that Cheney’s talking points for a meeting with Musharraf included a strong warning that the Democrats in Congress were threatening to reduce Pakistan’s foreign aid if it failed to combat terrorism.

Pakistani officials were reported by the American press to have confirmed that that was indeed the key element in Cheney’s message but that President Musharraf’s response was to warn Congress about passing what he called “discriminatory” legislation against his country.

There is no doubt that Pakistan is fast losing friends in the United States for reasons I will discuss. It was never very popular with the left in American politics. It couldn’t be because of its long history of military rule. But the right saw good reasons to support the warm hand of friendship extended by President George W. Bush to his Pakistani counterpart once Islamabad agreed to fully support Washington’s war on terrorism.

President Musharraf has been regarded as an invaluable ally prepared to risk his life to fight for the American cause. After all, he survived two attempts on his life mounted by Islamic extremists. It, of course, did not occur to the Americans that the fight the Pakistani president was launching against the radical elements in his country may have been judged by him to be in Pakistan’s long-term interests.

The Americans have been pleased when ever the Pakistani intelligence is able to kill or arrest a number of high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives. Pakistan has also exerted itself hard to contain the remnants of the Taliban in the formidable mountainous territory that is the defining feature of its long border with Afghanistan. It lost 800 soldiers while another 3,000 sustained injuries. The casualties taken by the Pakistani army were many more than those suffered by the United States and Nato in Afghanistan.

As the Americans dug themselves deeper in Iraq, as their cruel treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib got to be known, and as Washington’s support for Israel knew no bounds even after the massive bombings in Lebanon, it was hard for any leader in the Muslim world to continue to give full support to the American cause.

This is the case particularly is Pakistan where extremist Islam has gained traction largely because of the policies pursued by Washington in the 1980s as it fought the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. But these changed circumstances have not registered with many in America, in particular the people on the right of the political spectrum.

The loudest voice that comes out from the right is represented by the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. On February 28, the newspaper published an editorial meant to send a strong signal to Pakistan and its leaders. “There is no need to accuse Pakistan intelligence of tipping off the Taliban about Mr Cheney’s whereabouts to see a connection between decisions in Islamabad and terrorism in Bagram,” wrote the newspaper. The reference, of course was to the suicide attack on the extremely well protected American airbase near Kabul where the American vice president was spending the night. He was grounded there on account of bad weather, unable to take a helicopter flight to Kabul to meet President Hamid Karzai.

The attack did not hurt Vice-President Cheney but killed almost two dozen people, including an American soldier and an American contractor. “Mr Cheney reportedly delivered a strong message to Mr Musharraf about the need to deny the Taliban sanctuary along its frontier with Afghanistan. That’s a message Islamabad needs to hear, even as an Islamabad spokeswoman did insist after Mr Cheney’s visit that ‘Pakistan does not accept dictation’,” continued the editorial.

The newspaper noted that Pakistan had concluded a peace agreement with the Pashtun tribal leaders in North Waziristan at a time when it was expected to hit hard on them. “Still worse from US perspective was the agreement signed in September with the Taliban tribal leaders and ‘local Mujahideen’ from North Waziristan. That agreement allowed the Taliban to operate unfettered in the province in exchange for promise not to launch raids into Afghanistan. The number of raids has more than doubled, say Afghanistan and US military sources.” Pakistan, in other words, had contributed directly to the worsening situation in Afghanistan.

One immediate result of this impression is that congressional Democrats, including House Foreign Affairs chairman, Tom Lantos, have proposed putting Pakistan on a short leash by including a provision in the legislation passed by that branch of the American legislature. The proposed change in the law is an echo of the Pressler Amendment. That amendment took effect when the administration of President George H.W. Bush declassified Pakistan as a non-nuclear state. Lantos was joined by the liberal Democrat Senator Carl Levin in pointing a finger at Pakistan. The Wall Street Journal was willing to grant that Pakistan was faced with a difficult task but that was not of great consequence considering the perceived damage to the American cause.

“Policing a long mountainous border with Afghanistan has exacted a high price in Pakistani lives and treasure. Failure to police it may exact a higher one.” It was clear that the American right was aligning itself with the left and issuing a strong warning to the leadership in Islamabad.

The reason I have quoted at length from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial is to underscore an important point about the debate that is taking place in American public policy circles. This debate revolves round the assignment of responsibility for the colossal failure of American policy in two areas of vital interest.

The first, of course, are the reasons why Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups have started to gain strength in spite of the spilling of so much American blood and the expenditure of so much money on the war against terrorism since 9/11.

The second concerns the United States’ deteriorating relations with the Muslim world. Sharply different positions have been taken on these two issues by the liberal and conservative elements in the public policy community.

The liberals have come to the belated conclusion that the war in Iraq was a big mistake. Not only did America get involved in a country it did not understand, it was wrong to link Iraq with 9/11. In so far as the campaign against terrorism is concerned, the Iraq war was unnecessary. It only diverted attention from the areas from which Al Qaeda had operated and where it was beginning to re-establish it self. The conservatives who were behind the Iraq war are now repositioning themselves by asserting that America is now engaged in a deadly struggle against a new ideology that resembles Nazism and communism in the sense that those who ascribe to it are thoroughly against the West and its system of values.

This argument has some resonance with the liberal community even though it is helping the conservatives to shift the focus from Iraq to Afghanistan. Hence the pressure by both sides on Pakistan.

How should Pakistan respond to the squeeze that is beginning to be applied? Here it must try and make America understand better the dynamics in which Pakistan is involved in its northern areas. Islamabad must persuade the West – in particular the United States – that it must not repeat the mistake it made in Iraq. It must make it understand the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of the lives of the people who inhabit the tribal belts on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In teaching the Americans about this area it should emphasise that the people who live there belong to the fiercely independent Pashtun ethnic group. This group has a population of some 40 million people of which about 25 million are in Pakistan, about 13 million in Afghanistan and two million scattered all over the world.

These people have been left behind socially and economically on both sides of the border for different reasons. They have fallen behind other ethnic groups on the Afghan side because of the way the new political system was structured in Bonn in 2002 when Hamid Karzai became president. This gave much more power to the non-Pashtun groups – in particular the Tajiks – than ever before in the nation’s history. The Tajiks and also the Uzbeks translated their new political power into economic gains. This happened at the expense of the Pashtuns.

On the Pakistani side of the border, a series of administrations in the country’s history followed the legacy left by the British not to take to the Pashtun tribal belt development and modernisation in the belief, mistaken as it turned out, that such efforts would be seen as interfering in the old and established tribal ways.

Under Musharraf, for the first time in the country’s history, that approach has changed. The government has begun serious efforts to develop the tribal belt. It is for that reason that an agreement was reached in North Waziristan. To succumb to American pressure and use force rather than development would result in a disaster.

Failure of Bush doctrine

THE Bush doctrine – the principle that the US has the right to attack nations that pose a threat to its national security – is illegal in the context of international law relating to the use of force. There is no reasonable interpretation of the UN charter which allows for pre-emptive war, unless the threat is imminent and unavoidable.

An example often cited is that if the US had detected the Japanese fleet which was on its way to bomb Pearl Harbour in December 1941, it could have legally attacked the fleet before the latter launched its attack on the US base. The Bush doctrine does not expound this form of pre-emption as the threat against which the US may take action does not need to be imminent nor unavoidable under the doctrine’s principles. It simply has to exist in the opinion of the US. No hard evidence of its existence need be presented. The doctrine is in blatant violation of the UN charter and its fundamental principle which allows military action only in self-defence.

That being said, the doctrine appears to be a remarkably flexible, effective foreign policy tool, especially since the US public initially bought into it whole-heartedly. The justification offered by the Bush administration for this foreign policy was the 9/11 attack that, according to US officials like Condoleezza Rice, made the US realise that it faced threats from all quarters of the globe, and that it had to seek out and destroy such threats before they could harm it. Shocked by the events of 9/11, Americans and others around the world found this a fairly reasonable principle.

Thus, the Bush administration apparently got away with a blatantly illegal foreign policy doctrine that would allow it to assert and maintain its global hegemony. The doctrine essentially allowed the US to use force wherever and whenever it so chose as it did not define “threat”. Arguably, if a country such as Venezuela threatened to cut off oil supplies, the US could bomb it because a curtailment of Venezuelan oil could pose a national security threat to the US.

Similarly, if Pakistan had chosen not to help in the war on terror, the US could have launched missile strikes against its vital infrastructure because Pakistan’s refusal of aid would have posed a “threat” to national security. If the US wanted a permanent base in the Middle East and secure enormous oil reserves, it could invade Iraq, because Iraq’s alleged WMD capacity was a threat to national security.

The Bush doctrine provided a military carte blanche to the US in a domestically palatable form, thereby providing the necessary military resources to achieve the neo-conservative goal of perpetuating US global hegemony indefinitely. Unfortunately for the Bush administration and its neo-conservative ideologues, declaring to the world that the most powerful military force in history could attack who it wants and when it wants has had some drawbacks.

The first such drawback is that this doctrine severely damages US “soft” power. International relations expert Joseph Nye first coined the term “soft power” which is contrasted with hard power – the use of military and economic might to make others change their position. Nye defines “soft power” as a country’s ability to influence events through persuasion and attraction, rather than military or financial coercion, and argues that a country has more soft power if its culture, values and institutions win international admiration and respect. Diplomacy and a nation’s standing in international bodies enable it to build alliances.

Crucial to understanding Nye’s concept of soft power is the importance of US popular culture worldwide, in the form of Hollywood and hamburger chains. Also relevant to the concept of “soft power” is the lure of the US style of government, widely hailed for its freedoms and respect for the rule of law domestically and internationally, and for the opportunity it offers to immigrants.

Nye’s conclusion may have been essentially correct in the early 1990s, immediately on the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is decidedly false in 2007, and this remarkable loss of US soft power may be directly attributable to the Bush doctrine and its ramifications. The Bush doctrine is in almost direct conflict with the established norms of international law regarding the use of force by a sovereign nation; and the world is aware of this illegality. The invasion of Iraq was followed by the Abu Ghraib scandal and the war on terror by the denial of human rights.

How then can the US exert soft power through trumpeting its respect for the rule of law? In the light of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, would China be able to hide a smirk if the US lectured it on its human rights record? If Ethiopia invaded Eritrea in an act of military aggression, would the US have any moral sway in dissuading the Ethiopians by pointing to the UN charter?

The world no longer views the US as benign. In a poll conducted in 2004, an overwhelming majority of Germans believed that the US and George Bush were the greatest threat to world peace. A significant majority of British, Mexicans and Canadians in 2006 believed that the Bush administration was a grave threat to world peace. Negative world opinion is not limited to just Bush. It has become a virtual truism that America, and all things American, are viewed with distaste directly following 9/11.

In many circles it is viewed as a “rogue superpower. This is a huge blow to US power in general, (if power is defined, generally, as the ability to get your way) because, as Nye points out, hard power alone cannot always get the job done.

The Bush doctrine has weakened the US in other tangible ways as well. The doctrine was ostensibly meant to make the US secure against foreign attacks. In actuality, it was meant to provide the US with a doctrinal platform by which to police the world, protect its interests, and undermine or terminate unfavourable foreign regimes and governments through the unbridled use of hard power. However, the doctrine may actually have had the opposite effect, making the US less secure and less able to exert hard power.

The Bush doctrine is meant to prevent the development of WMD by “rogue” nations, by allowing the US to attack and destroy development capabilities. But the doctrine has actually caused certain states to accelerate their development of deadly weapons. Since Washington’s declaration that it would be free to use its military power without limitation, both North Korea and Iran have ratcheted up there nuclear development programmes as such states have realised, according to international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz, “that the US can only be held at bay through deterrence,” and that “weapons of mass destruction are the only means to deter the United States.”

Other experts concur with Waltz’s opinion. Steven Miller has written that in the face of unbridled use of US military power, certain states “are likely to draw the conclusion that weapons of mass destruction are necessary to deter American intervention”. Selig Harrison has commented that “there is no question that the lesson that the North Koreans have learned from Iraq is that they need a nuclear deterrent.” The same may be said with regard to Iran and the recent acceleration of its nuclear programme. The message is simple: develop nuclear weapons, or else there is nothing stopping a US invasion.

If power, in the geo-strategic sense, is broadly defined as a state’s ability to get its way with other states, then the Bush doctrine has fundamentally weakened US power in the five years since its pronouncement. The US can no longer use soft power as effectively as in the past in order to convince other nations to adopt US policies.

It also faces the prospect of encountering far more robust military deterrents from the very states it wishes to contain. The Bush doctrine and actions predicated on its principles have also created the greatest domestic societal polarisation that the US has witnessed since the Vietnam war, thereby damaging the administration’s ability to convince Congress and the US people to go along with its international policies and proposed actions.

By the Bush administration’s own admission, the Bush doctrine was promulgated in response to the attacks of 9/11. Could Osama bin Laden and those responsible for the attacks have hoped for anything more than this palpable reduction of US influence and power? If the goal of Al Qaeda is to damage US power, does this not lead to the conclusion that Al Qaeda has, whether by virtue of their own actions or the US’s response, achieved a resounding victory?