| November 01, 2007 | Thursday | Shawwal 19, 1428 |
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Regime change — for a fee?
IN August 2007, CNN reported that the US firm of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers had ‘begun a public campaign to undermine the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’. The network described BGR as a ‘powerhouse Republican lobbying firm with close ties to the White House’.
CNN also mentioned that former Iraqi premier Ayad Allawi is both al-Maliki’s rival and BGR’s client, although it did not assert that Mr Allawi had hired BGR to undermine Mr al-Maliki.
On Monday, a report in The New York Times widened the scope of the lobbying firm’s activities. For starters, it turns out to be headed by Robert D. Blackwill, a former US ambassador to India, who was especially dispatched to New Delhi at the start of the Bush administration’s innings in 2001. It turns out that Mr Blackwill has his fingers in many a pie.
Apart from India, his clients include Serbia, Taiwan, the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Alfa Bank in Moscow and Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister of Thailand and a billionaire communications tycoon who was ousted in a coup in 2006. He also lobbies for Eritrea, the nation in the Horn of Africa that the US State Department has been threatening to designate a terrorist state for its support of Islamic rebels in Somalia.
Mr Blackwill’s clout is enormous. Since late 2005, lobbying disclosure reports at the Justice Department show that he helped bring in fees to Barbour Griffith & Rogers from foreign clients that total more than $11m. This is not an unusual story out of Washington. Lobbyists there have supported Saddam Hussein too.
We of course remember Mr Blackwill as the man who maintained a studious silence on the massacres in Gujarat, but who was quick to raise Cain when a blast occurred in Kashmir or elsewhere in India, in which Muslim extremists were apparently involved.
This of course somewhat balances out the equation for Pakistan which is said to have hired former diplomat Robin Raphael as its lobbyist in Washington DC. Given Ms Raphael’s access she had to the Clinton administration Pakistan may be a clear winner if Hillary Clinton becomes president in January 2009. The former top diplomat for South Asia during the Clinton administration is a senior vice-president with Cassidy and Associates, apparently hired by Pakistan to lobby its case at a yearly cost of US$1.2m.
If Mr Blackwill pleased his future clients in New Delhi by keeping quiet over Gujarat, Ms Raphael, who retired from the foreign service a few years ago, had pleased Pakistan in the 1990s by questioning the authenticity of the instrument of accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh that resulted in the state of Jammu and Kashmir becoming part of India. Some equation this — one lobbyist was wishing away the Gujarat pogroms, the other was wishing away India’s claim over Kashmir!
But the reason for India to hire Mr Blackwill’s current services is even more startling. According to The New York Times, Delhi has paid BGR $1.24m since Mr Blackwill began lobbying for it in late 2005. And what pray may India be lobbying for? It has hired him, ‘among others, to push for a nuclear deal between the United States and India that has run into resistance in Congress and in the Indian Parliament’.
In fact on April 2, Justice Department filings show, says NYT, that Mr Blackwill met on the issue of United States-India relations R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs and the administration’s point man on the nuclear deal.
This is a strange turnaround. Here we thought that good old President George W. Bush was so enamoured of India and its prime minister that he was willing to move heaven and earth to get New Delhi a premier deal on nuclear cooperation, which aimed to solve its chronic energy problems. And now we are told that India in fact had to lobby hard for the deal courtesy the good offices of Mr Blackwill.
There is another aspect to the controversial deal that has a connection with the NYT story. One of its chief architects was strategic analyst Ashley J. Tellis, an American of Indian origin and author of the voluminous book India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture. Mr Tellis was brought to Delhi as a chief adviser to Mr Blackwill, and was one of the most sought after officials at the US embassy during the 2002 nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan.
As far as I remember, Mr Tellis had calculated that there would be no war despite the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation that lasted through much of the year. Did the deal take shape during Blackwill’s tenure in Delhi with Tellis marshalling the technical support? If so where was the need to hire him later as a lobbyist? And, by the way, who are the American firms that have a stake in the deal’s successful closure and how much have they paid Mr Blackwill?
There are two more vignettes in the NYT story which link up with events in New Delhi in the past week. In the mid-1970s, Mr Blackwill worked for Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the counsellor to Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state. There is another reference in the story to Mr Blackwill’s affinity with Mr Kissinger. He ‘has a wily, Kissinger-like ability to cut through layers of government, is also a gifted raconteur who mixes policy, politics and personality in his analysis of issues’.
So the penny drops. Mr Kissinger happens to be in India currently, meeting everyone from Indian opposition leader Lal Kishan Advani to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, lobbying hard for the stalled deal to be quickly revived. Following the meeting with Mr Advani, the BJP has significantly toned down its opposition to the deal. Prime Minister Singh too remarked on Tuesday that it was not yet the end of the road for the deal.
And for a good reason too. Mr Kissinger is known to have a quick temper. He once threatened to make a horrible example of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He is said to have issued a similar warning to Indira Gandhi. Last week, he was back in business, quite possibly at Mr Blackwill’s behest, warning India that its failure to implement the civil nuclear deal with the United States could be bad news for Delhi’s credibility.
‘It would certainly, in an intangible way, affect calculations because when an American leader goes down a certain road, he stakes his prestige on the ability to get it executed. So in that sense, it would undoubtedly be a setback,’ he told CNN-IBN. ‘Definitely, people would make that argument,’ Mr Kissinger said, when asked whether questions could be raised in the US regarding India’s reliability if the nuclear deal failed to get through.
So there you have it. Mr Blackwill has got an American president to ‘stake his prestige’ on the deal’s success. Therefore, can he not be safely described as the world’s second most powerful man — if equally dangerous and reckless too?
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
