Heckuva job, Condi! One doesn't wish to make light, in any way, of a terrible situation in Pakistan, but we must also remember that our leaders have an obligation to wise and farseeing. And if they are not wise and farseeing, we should get new leaders. And part of being farseeing, of course, is knowing what you don't know--what can't be known. In trying to manipulate Pakistani politics from 10,000 miles away, the Bush administration tried to play the political equivalent of drawing to an inside straight; actually what they wanted to do was much harder than that--more like hitting a hole-in-one on a difficult golf course in a high wind. In statecraft, humility is a great asset, although it's OK to feign that--this is politics after all. But what's really needed is a sense of what's realistic. As Bismarck, perhaps the most effective European diplomat of the 19th century, reminded us, "politics is the art of the possible." And given the Bush administration's pitiful track record when it comes to Pakistan--no apprehension of Osama Bin Laden, no suspension of cross-border aid to Taliban forces in Afghanistan, no effective oversight of US foreign aid, there was much reason for Rice and her boss, President George W. Bush, to be humble about their capabilities. And within just a few months, their high-hopes/low-realism strategy is in ashes.
If The Washington Post is to be believed, it was our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who urged Benazir Bhutto to go back to Pakistan--where, of course, she was killed on Thursday.
As this disturbingly detailed front page article in the Post makes clear,the US was heavily involved in all aspects of the deal, from ill-starred beginning to tragic ending:
For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy -- and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism.
So what to do? It would be too much to hope that those arrogantly overconfident neocons would completely fall silent, even when they have proven wrong yet again.
But fortunately, a few bold voices of resurgent realism are shining through. One such is Andrew C. McCarthy, writing for National Review Online. McCarthy gets right to the point, using blunt language that should be a cold slap in the face to those who see Pakistan as some place where American armchair "strategists" can play out their fantasies of Machiavellian mastery. Here's McCarthy, in his own blunt words:
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.
The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.
The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.
The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.
In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.
It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.
Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.
Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.
Once we've had our fill of neocon fantasy, we can return to what works in foreign policy--realism, the art of the possible. Last year Michael Lind , a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, published a useful history book, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, which sought to remind Americans of their own successful history in diplomacy. Lind does not argue for isolationism, he argues for a constructive internationalism, based on time-tested balance-of-power politics. Good! We need a foreign policy that works, for a change.
The stakes are high--mushroom cloud high.
Idealism and altruism are great. But as history reminds us, the continued freedom and sovereignty of America depends on flinty-eyed don't-tread-on-me toughness and realism. Maybe we can make other countries better. But most definitely, we must preserve and protect the United States of America.
That's the mission of the Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus.
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