Nothing unusual, then say the usual

THE biggest weapon of mass destruction on the subcontinent is that double-edged sword called the tongue. Our leaders seem determined to be sentenced by their sentences. This is bad enough. It becomes worse when media becomes interventionist. Television searches for a story in between the blank spaces of a conversation. Text flutters at the top of a newspaper page, rudely divorced from context.

Forget peace; this is a strange environment where even silence cannot deliver peace of mind. What-did-Musharraf-say-and-why-did-he-say-or-not-say-it is the favourite game of Delhi. Islamabad displays similar affection for Lal Krishna Advani. War and peace sway on the edge of a sound bite. If such analysis were merely puerile it might be left alone. But it does have its impact on atmospherics, and atmosphere is a critical indicator of the season through which we might be passing.

India-Pakistan relations are a forest in which everything can be found. Hares race in one place, hounds in another and it is only to be expected that their paths will cross. Lambs work their corner while lions growl nearby, waiting for the opportunity to pounce on those foolish enough to have left themselves unprotected. There are bees who will sting and disappear; and snakes who will wait in the grass for the moment when they can strike terror. Bears will growl, even those who mean no particular harm.

You will also find Pan strolling along playing the flute, dreaming of the beauty that is also an integral part of a forest. Within paradox and conflict we have to keep struggling to find peace, certain in the knowledge that the only alternative to peace is a debilitating and dangerous war.

There is one way out of the confusion. If you want to know what is really happening, or more accurately what might really happen if some saboteur does not turn up, then look through the thicket of statements that land up in newspapers every day and search for the unusual rather than the usual.

Political leaders will repeat the usual because they are bound to do so. Past positions will not change unless something significant happens, and to reach the point of significance you have to tread with care. President Pervez Musharraf was clearly dragged out of context when some journalists announced that he was launching another Kargil, but that is not really the point. It is usual for a general to dredge up the prospect of war. That is what he is trained to do. That comes instinctively to him, which is one reason why generals are generally poor peacemakers however strong their intentions might be.

General Pervez Musharraf was an author of the Kargil operations, and he will always believe that it was useful in any case and could have turned out more positively for his country if but the politicians had listened to him. Otherwise he would have to deny his sole contribution to Pakistan’s military history, and not a very glorious one at that. A general like him is bound to argue that three full-scale wars have taken place because of Kashmir, and if something is not done, a fourth one cannot be ruled out. (Just for the record, one of the three wars was not over Kashmir; it was over Bangladesh.)

More depressing are the other “usuals” in his repertoire, which he pulled out in the course of his trip to Germany, Britain and the United States. The nuclear gambit, for instance. We heard another variation of his theme song, titled “Give me arms, or I will bomb...” This is meant to frighten everyone. The United States should be frightened into selling its F-16s; India should be frightened into a dialogue.

I do not know where President Musharraf gets his advice from. I hope it is not from any North Korean, because he is beginning to sound like one. In any case, he should change advisers quickly. Crying nuclear wolf frightens no one, except of course investors who might for some reason be wanting to put a little money into Pakistan. Why should any businessman sow money into a country whose leader threatens to wipe out the crop in a nuclear war?

He has a second “usual”: time. Things must happen, they must be seen to happen, and they must happen quickly. As he said to yet another interviewer, his armies cannot be deployed on the border, facing India on the one side and Jihadis waiting to cross over on the other, without something starting to give. Tough luck, general. I think it was understood on all sides that the worst mistake made in Agra was hurry.

It is better that matters get resolved bit by bit so that every spoke is out of the way before there is any forward movement. We do not want another puncture, because poison gas leaks out of the tyres. The niggles that have come in the way of restoring transit relations prove that it is far better to sort them out before journeys restart. The debris of past experience must be cleared. The bus to Lahore has restarted, but hawks have descended on the train and the aeroplane.

All manner of excuses are being trotted out to stop the Samjhauta Express from resuming: a train becomes a vehicle for smuggling, suggest some officials sombrely. As if smuggling between India and Pakistan was waiting for a train! Others find their hearts bleeding for the harassment by immigration at Wagah and Atari. The answer to that is surely to stop the harassment, rather than stop the train.

The current deadlock over flights is typical and instructive. Pakistan wants flights to resume between India and Pakistan but is hesitant about overflights across airspace. Why? Apparently someone in Islamabad believes that this would increase the level of contacts between India and Afghanistan. This is how silly a problem can become. The government of India may not have the wealth of the United States of America, but it still has enough money to buy tickets via Dubai for any number of persons it wants to send to Afghanistan. Others want to punish India for the mistake — and it was a mistake — in banning overflights after the attack on our Parliament.

All this is usual. Is there anything unusual in what we have been hearing? I suppose sentiments of piety are not taken seriously, and when President Musharraf says that he will take two steps towards peace for every one that India takes, it is greeted with a yawn. But within the thicket of statements look and you will find a suggestion that if both sides shed their rigidity, there could be the beginning of a solution to problems, including Kashmir.

The most specific unusual statement was made by Mr Advani during his visit to the United States and Britain. He clearly said that with a little bit of give and take, the most difficult of problems could be resolved. Mr Advani also made the statements that are usually expected of him on this trip. He has a constituency, and he was going to address it. But the “give and take” phrase indicates that there is some flexible thinking going on.

Mr Advani is doing something that may be happening in both countries. It seems to me, and it is difficult to be more definite than this, that an effort is being made to seed the mind of the people and prepare them for the start of some new turn in direction. I would be happy to be proved right, but I am prepared to be proved wrong. Experience tells me that pessimism rules longer in India-Pakistan relations than optimism.

By now the leaders of India and Pakistan must have sounded out the world, and the new epicentre of the world, Washington, on what they think about their problems. They will also have heard what others think. Prime Minister Vajpayee cannot have forgotten the warmth with which his peace initiative was praised wherever he went — Berlin, St. Petersburg, Evian, Lausanne. George Bush made it a point to meet Mr Advani, and must have conveyed what he did to Mr Vajpayee at their famous dinner in Russia. President Musharraf will hear a similar international urge for peace.

But India and Pakistan have often been brought to the water: can they be made to drink? The rub lies exactly where it did in Agra. India has to talk about Kashmir, and Pakistan has to end support for terrorism. We are in serious danger of succumbing to another cliche: which comes first, the chicken or the egg? There used to be confusion about the answer once, but these days matters should be clearer. Cross-border terrorism must be curbed to the satisfaction of the watching world. It is not only Delhi which says that this has not come down; the American ambassador in India says the same thing.

Equally, cross-border terrorism may have begun at someone’s command; it will not end as easily as it started. (The biggest example of officially sponsored cross-border terrorism, if you come to think about it, was Kargil.) There has to be forward movement on people-to-people relations, and then a government-to-government dialogue. There is a bit of good news. See how easily hearts warm up even when governments meet. Emotions jumped out of the photographs when the Pakistani technical team recently came to Delhi to finalise details of the bus relationship.

India-Pakistan relations should be taken away from the tongue and returned to the heart.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi

America, the new hegemon

TO deal with America — as most countries, no matter where they are situated, must learn to do — it is important to develop a good understanding of the beliefs and values of its leaders and citizens. One way of cultivating such an appreciation is to review what America is reading. In an earlier article in this space (July 1), I discussed the contents of three books that were being read with considerable interest by policymakers and policy analysts in Washington.

The books dealt with the growth of America’s economic and military power that seemed to be leading the country towards the creation of a sphere of influence that may, one day, come to be described as the Great American Empire. If it gets created its reach will be global and America the new hyper power — or uber power, to attach a more meaningful German prefix — would not face any challenge for many decades to come.

America would have created such an empire in spite of the misgivings of several European colonizers. Belgium, France and Russia had empires of their own. These experiences had convinced them that people subjected to foreign rule did not develop into healthy world citizens. The European domination of much of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 19th century and much of the 20th century was deeply resented by the subject people. Many of the problems that these three continents face today can be traced back to colonial rule.

But these experiences, even when they became the basis of the European opposition to the use of force in Iraq did not deter America. Iraq was quickly overrun by a US-led force and America began the second experiment in nation-building in the Muslim world while the first one in Afghanistan had begun to falter. But Washington seems undeterred. Guided by a number of neo-conservative thinkers who are convinced that it is America’s purpose in the world to spread its values and its political and economic systems, it seems that Washington will continue to use its military and economic might to bring the world under its sway.

All this does not mean that this line of thinking is not being challenged by thinkers within America itself. By briefly summarizing the points of view offered by the authors of two other books, I will be able to nicely round off the discussion that I began in the article titled “What America is reading?”

While the books discussed in the earlier article helped define the various dialogues in which the policymakers in America are actively engaged, the authors of the two books I will discuss today seriously question the beliefs of the “imperialists.” Let me start with the book that appeared recently under the title of “At War With Ourselves.” The book’s sub-title, “Why America is squandering its chance to build a better world,” sums up well the main argument presented by its author Michael Hirsch.

Hirsch has sound credentials to write a book of this kind. He was the foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent of Newsweek magazine. He now works at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based policy institute. The main conclusion of the book by Hirsh is centred in the belief that the American penchant to act alone, to show impatience with those who sometimes disagree with the position it is taking, to present its own interests in highly moral tones creates more enemies than friends. He is surprised that Washington has arrived at this point since multilateralism as a philosophy and as a way of managing international affairs has strong American roots.

Even the United Nations which at times got engaged in frivolous projects and pursuits has served a very useful purpose for America. It helped contain and educate potential adversaries like China and Russia. Ultimately, these countries were brought into the multilateral system as responsible members. As for other international bodies, “the WTO is the world’s rule setter, the IMF its credit union, and the World Bank its principal charity. America fully and actively dominates all these institutions and uses them to “take the raw edge of American hegemony,” writes Hirsh.

These institutions, Hirsch believes, have over time become committed advocates of the values America cherishes and the neo-conservatives among its policymakers are so eager to have other countries and people to adopt these. Moreover, often it is better for America to have the organizations in which it has a large presence to influence policymakers round the globe. The United States doesn’t have to bear its knuckles to get others to move in the direction it wishes them to go. This can be done by the international institutions it helped create and continues to dominate.

Hirsch believes that it is wrong for America to throw its weight around as it has done on so many different occasions after President George W. Bush assumed office. The display of raw muscle power may be satisfying for the egotistical but has seldom been an effective instrument of international policy. Having juxtaposed these two points of view — the “you’re with us or you’re against us” line adopted by the current rulers in Washington may have served to create a sense of confidence and purpose in the minds of a population that had been left utterly demoralized by “nine-eleven.” But, over the long run, it has alienated a great number of people and a lot of countries. This approach has not played well with others. Hirsch believes that Washington will need to change this stance in favour of greater accommodation of different points of view.

Clyde Prestowitz, the other author I want to discuss today, is considerably pessimistic about the likely outcome of the policies adopted in recent years by Washington. He tellingly calls his book “Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.” As one of his books reviewers puts it: “If you want to know how the American colossus looks to the rest of the world, ‘Rogue Nation’ by Clyde Prestowitz is your book — an unsparingly but unhysterical catalogue of American behaviour that has made the world see us as self-centred and hypocritical. The counts in the indictment are familiar: We approach free trade but underwrite American cotton farmers at such high prices that we keep African farmers in poverty. We guzzle petroleum and then need a foreign policy that overemphasizes one region of the globe. We preach democracy and dance with tyrants.”

While Prestowitz heaps scorn on the Bush administration, he recognizes that America has always been an outlier, confident that it could, quite literally, go its own way. After all, it started to drive on the right of the road when the British, who invented road rules, were driving on the left. It continues to measure distances in feet, yards and miles while most of the rest of the world switched to the more scientific metric system. It distributes electricity at 110 volts rather than 220 volts. To get the lights on, the Americans flick the switch up rather than down. British eat biscuits, Americans consume cookies.

The British cars have boots, the Americans trunks. The British see films, the Americans watch movies. And so on. Americans are perplexed — sometimes even offended — if people in other parts of the world act differently. As Prestowitz puts it: “Indeed, the chief reason Americans are blind to their own empire is their implicit belief that every human being is a potential American, and that his or her present national or cultural affiliations are an unfortunate but reversible accident.”

How would Prestowitz solve this problem? He doesn’t believe that the rest of the world would become Americans. The French, certainly, will not go for that option in order to produce a more homogeneous world based on give-and-take rather than on take-and-take. And, at this time in history, it does not seem possible that the world of Islam would shed its beliefs and values and adopt those the Americans consider vastly superior. For that part of the world, a bloody clash with the American civilization is already well on its way.

Prestowitz’s solution is centred on America’s spontaneous enlightenment which would lead to the recognition that everything the world and the planet earth have available need to be shared. To give a meaning to this wish the world leaders should take the Americans out of the Hobesian world of perpetual conflict to the one in which supranational institutions and rules of conduct can intermediate between the different and varying interests of peoples and nations around the world. In other words, America has to be tied down as a member of institutions such as the UN, the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court.

Let me now draw some policy conclusions for Islamabad from the books discussed in the articles that appeared in Dawn on July 1 and those covered today. I have used five recent works by highly intelligent and experienced persons to present five different points of view that have begun to be debated in the corridors of power and in the hallways of many think tanks in America. We should tell Washington that it should not be tempted to follow the advice offered by Niall Ferguson and become an imperialist power with its own empire. The world today has been brought together by information technology and cheap communication. As we look at each other from such close distances we have begun to see how diverse we are. There is no one set of values and beliefs that can govern mankind.

It would also be wrong to follow Robert Kagan and try and ignore the lessons the Europeans can glean from their rich history. America is certainly the most powerful nation on earth today. It is not always the wisest. It has much to learn from what its Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has derisively called “Old Europe.” Age does not always mean senility; it can also mean wisdom.

Instead of Ferguson and Kagan, Washington should read Hirsch and Petrowitz more closely. Both make powerful points in underscoring the American attitudes and beliefs that grate on the nerves of other people. Hirsch offers a solution to accommodating American power and global diversity within an institutional setting with a global reach. Taking advice from these authors America should create a new world structure on solid institutional foundations laid by all countries and communities of the world.

Finally, not only the Americans but also the developing world should pay particular heed to the advice given by Fareed Zakaria who, with some powerful analysis, demolishes the romantic notion of developing democracy without first creating legal and judicial systems that govern behaviour; political parties that serve the interests of their members and not just of their leaders; and parliaments, that once elected, will serve their constituents and not only their members. There are some important lessons in this for today’s Pakistan.

All bets are off

RIGHTFULLY, I should be writing about rain and the chaos and mayhem and suffering it causes, not because it represents nature’s wrath but the negligence and incompetence of those who happen to be in charge of civic matters.

But what would I write that I haven’t written before, whenever it has rained in Karachi? I can only add that each year it seems to get worse and this time the havoc has been greater. History teaches us that history teaches nothing. It is this that is embedded in our mind for surely it would have been obvious that the infrastructure has been fragile since the days when Karachi was the capital of Pakistan. Writing about rain has become a ritual and there you have it, I have written about it.

What is intriguing is that the Pentagon had a plan to get information on the Middle East by setting up an online futures where investors could bet on the probability of war, terrorism and other events. The Policy Analysis Market, launched online at http://www.policyanalysis-market.org by the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, aimed at letting anonymous traders log on and wager money on when and whether such events as the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy might take place.

The plan was scrapped and even the Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz found it “too imaginative”. Paul Wolfowitz himself is an imaginative man and he can conjure rabbits out of a hat. Perhaps, he felt that the website might replace him. Terrorism, as one feared, has become a game.

The plan may have been scrapped but someone in the Pentagon thought of it and it must have been taken seriously for no less a person than the Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle has asked the Bush administration to apologize for it. But if the Pentagon has had second thoughts about opening a betting-shop, the United States is a land of opportunity and of free enterprise and who knows whether someone (with too much imagination) has not latched on to it?

I would imagine that the Mafia would not have been too thrilled. It does not take too kindly to anyone encroaching on its turf and when it comes to organised betting and gambling, the Mafia does not believe in free enterprise, it keeps it within the ‘family’ not unlike the giant corporations who too are a closed shop. It is entirely possible that the Pentagon may have scrapped its plan on the ‘advice’ of the Mafia.

I might add here that if the Pentagon had gone ahead with its plan, there may have been allegations of ‘insider trading’ for who better than the Pentagon knows when the monarchy in Jordan will be overthrown? Almost surely a wager would have been made whether weapons of mass destruction will be discovered in Iraq? But how would we know. No bookie or website would pay off on the say-so of Donald Rumsfeld or even Tony Blair who has now passed the buck to some Iraq Survey Group and the circumstances of Dr Kelley’s suicide to the judicial inquiry of Lord Hutton and having washed his hands of both, he has proceeded on a vacation where he will relax and one hopes will do some soul-searching though the two, at the same time, may be difficult.

But betting on terrorism trivializes it and this is, perhaps, what Paul Wolfowitz meant when he called Pentagon’s plan “too imaginative.” Terrorism must not be allowed to wander off into an abstraction as communism had and, therefore, had lost its urgency as a global threat. Opponents of apartheid in South Africa were both persecuted and prosecuted by a Communist Act though no one seriously believed that the African National Congress was a communist-front organization and even McCarthy might have hesitated in branding Nelson Mandela a communist had he been alive when the South African leader was taken to Roben Island.

It is getting too simple and too vague to see the finger-prints of Al Qaeda in every bomb-blast that occurs. Acts of arson in southern France are being blamed on terrorists though not yet on Al Qaeda but in the present climate someone is bound to provide a linkage. After all, weapons of mass destruction aside, the shadow of Al Qaeda falls on Iraq though Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were sworn enemies but the war in Iraq became a part and parcel of the war on terror.

It is fascinating to conjecture who might have most benefited from the Pentagon’s online futures market. The terrorists for one for they could have placed huge bets on themselves. The Pentagon or the CIA for another for they could have easily traced those who were making the bets and if they were persons of Middle East origin, they could have been shipped to Guantanamo Bay.

But what about the ordinary punter who likes to take a flutter? One presumes that it would have been legal or was this too intended to be a covert operation? One had visions of characters from Damon Runyon’s stories working the telephones and speaking in some coded language. Damon Runyon had made it seem like so much fun.

But all things considered, it was a good idea to scrap it. A lot of people would have unnecessarily got into trouble and I very much doubt that the Pentagon would have made a profit. One assumes it would have had a profit-motive and though these may be hard financial times for the Pentagon with so much money invested in wars, the profit earned would have been a drop in the ocean. It would not even have enough to pay for the cost of a Stealth bomber. Some may have even found it morally wrong. It isn’t as if cash rewards were being offered for information about those wanted dead or alive.

To return to the rains, no one will bet it will not be worse when the heavens open up the next time, which could be any day.

The unending ‘blame game’

THE two-day conference on Kashmir, held in Washington a week ago, at the initiative of Senator Thomas Harkins and a member of the US House of Representatives Joseph Pitts, unfortunately, failed to bring about any fresh thinking on the long festering dispute between India and Pakistan.

The sponsors apparently had hoped that the theme — ‘Beyond the Blame Game’ — would prompt some innovative thinking and throw up ideas which could prove helpful in breaking the ice of enmity and distrust. There is little to suggest that this has happened.

On the contrary, the discussions among the participants remained mired in the familiar exchange of accusations and counter-accusations. At one point, exasperated by the pointlessness of the discussion, one of the senior participants, Sardar Abdul Qaiyum Khan, a former prime minister of Azad Kashmir, threatened to walk out.

India’s indifference to the objective of the conference led to its official decision not to participate. However, several eminent Indian political thinkers and politicians decided to attend the conference in their individual capacity. They included the senior politician Dr Subrahmanyam Swamy, who had for some time served in his country’s central cabinet, and the renowned intellectual and author, Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma.

Pakistan, on the other hand, was supportive of the objective of the conference. Although there was no official delegation from Pakistan, its ambassador in Washington was among those who attended it. A former information minister, Mushahid hussain, was also among the participants, besides Sardar Qaiyum and several distinguished Pakistanis settled in America.

It appears that participants from both India and Pakistan chose not to shed their known mindset on the Kashmir question. Dr Subrahmanyam Swamy, for instance, insisted, even while discussing fresh ideas, that New Delhi had an “iron clad right” to the whole of Jammu and Kashmir as it was at the time of partition, knowing that India cannot force Pakistan to part with Azad Kashmir. The Pakistani participants also made the customary references to the antecedents of the Kashmir dispute, including the relevant UN resolutions. They should be expected to know that the situation on the ground has undergone vast changes since 1948 when the UN was first seized of the issue. Because of the near-absence of any fresh thinking on a problem which is a major stumbling block in the way of peace and stability between India and Pakistan, the conference thus ended as exercise in futility — to the utter disappointment of its sponsors.

At a time when Washington needs to cope with the difficult post-war problems in Afghanistan and Iraq, an atmosphere of discord in South Asia could not but add to its anxieties. The situation in Afghanistan particularly, with the border skirmishes between the Pakistan and Afghan troops is a further complicating factor for Washington to worry about.

American specialists of South Asia generally recognize the implications of the Kashmir dispute for the United States’ relationship with both India and Pakistan. It is accepted that Washington’s relations with the one cannot be at the expense of the ties with the other.

The failure of the Washington conference to shed some new light on a possible solution to the long festering problem of Kashmir must have come as a disappointment to official Washington as well as to those keen on having peace and stability in South Asia.

Perhaps the most tangible outcome of the Washington deliberations was a five-step plan to be implemented over a period of 11-year timeframe is not clear from the press reports of the conference. However, the central point of Dr Swamy’s plan is the proposal that the Azad Kashmir and the part of the state under Indian occupation should elect a joint assembly, with the elections being conducted by the respective election commissions of the two parts of the state. Dr Swamy has also proposed the abolition of the travel restrictions between the two sides over a period of two years.

Dr Swamy also believes that the Kashmiri pandits who once formed a significant cultural and literary community in the Kashmir valley and who were allegedly forced to migrate to Jammu by the excesses of the freedom fighters, should be given the facility to return to the valley.

Since a section of the Indian press tends to hold the Kashmiri freedom fighters responsible for the Kashmiri pandits’ plight, it is relevant to point out that an eminent Indian scholar, Sumuntra Bose, who was once associated with the Columbia University, maintains that the “spectre of Islamic fundamentalism” in Kashmir is largely a “scaremongering myth assiduously promoted by certain quarters to justify a policy of repression.”

Bose also maintains that the proportion of Kashmiri pandits in the state’s population and the cause of their migration have been highly exaggerated in Indian press reports.

Bose is extremely critical of the tendency to represent the Kashmiri freedom struggle in communal terms. In his words, the respect that Kashmiri Muslims have traditionally shown towards Hindu places of worship “has endured for the most part even in these troubled times.”

In his five-step plan, Dr Subrahmanyam swamy places great emphasis on the restoration of trade between India and Pakistan as part of a strategy to defuse tensions. He believes that Saarc provides an ideal forum for evolving a common market similar to the European Union or the Asean.

While normalization of trade relations and of information and cultural exchanges between Pakistan and India would contribute substantially to peace and stability in the region, the resolution of disputes such as Kashmir should not be delayed indefinitely. If these are not resolved to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned, tensions will remain to strain relations in South Asia.

A well known American scholar, Robert G Wirsing, recognized as a leading authority on Kashmir, has gone on record saying that the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan has had a broad impact on “a whole range of long-term US foreign policy efforts in the region, including nuclear proliferation, promotion of economic development and the protection of human rights: it has also constantly threatened to escalate into a full-scale war that could force the unwilling involvement of the United States.”

Warped intelligence

VICE-PRESIDENT Dick Cheney was in friendly territory when he spoke at the American Enterprise Institute, which has served as the administration’s intellectual brain trust, to defend the decision to go to war against Iraq.

As Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi looked on approvingly, Cheney declared that it would have been “irresponsible” for President Bush not to have acted.

Cheney’s argument rested on a 2002 estimate of Iraq’s threat level by the CIA. Considering the blame recently heaped on the CIA by the White House itself for faulty intelligence about Iraq, the speech’s logic had an odd ring.

The CIA estimate judged that Iraq could develop a nuclear bomb in a decade and that its biological and chemical weapons programme was more active than before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Questions remain about the extent to which those warnings were affected by ferocious political pressures. Such pressures are hardly new.

For instance, then-CIA chief George H.W. Bush created a “Team B” in 1976 to analyze the CIA’s estimates of the Soviet strategic threat, which said Soviet military expenditures were not radically expanding. The elder Bush’s team of “Cold Warriors,” which included current Deputy Defence Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, came to a much different conclusion: that because of a looming missile gap, the Soviet Union was leaving the United States in the dust militarily.

When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1989, the Soviet military machine was found to be a dinosaur. An article in the July/August issue of Arms Control Today by Greg Thielmann, until recently a senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, outlines more recent pressures on the CIA to adopt worst-case analyses of foreign threats.

In 1998, Congress asked current Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to lead a high-level commission, which also included Wolfowitz, that concluded the CIA was grossly underestimating the ballistic missile threat posed by Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

—Los Angeles Times