Daily Archives: December 30, 2007

OPINION: In foreign policy, image is created through action, not branding

He could care less about Obama’s story
By Reza Aslan, Washington Post, December 30, 2007

Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to “re-brand” America’s image in the Middle East, I can’t help but think about Jimmy Carter’s toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s much-despised despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to welcome the new American president. After eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations’ blind support for the shah’s brutal regime, Iranians thrilled to Carter’s promise to re-brand America’s image abroad by focusing on human rights. That call even let many moderate, middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New Year’s dinner, Carter surprised everyone. In a shocking display of ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

It’s just this sort of blunder — naive, well-meaning, amateurish, convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions — that worries me again these days. That’s because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a “fresh face” with an “intuitive sense of the world,” and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror. [complete article]

See also, America has a clear-cut choice: the candidates of hope or fear (Andrew Sullivan).

EDITORIAL: The knot of uncertainty tightens

Who knows?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, December 30, 2007

“Benazir Bhutto was so fearful for her life that she tried to hire British and American security experts to protect her,” The Sunday Telegraph reveals. Her entourage even approached Blackwater. They might have been able to protect her life but they would have destroyed her image. She was even directly receiving confidential U.S. intelligence about militant threats to her life. The intelligence was clearly inadequate.

Whenever a dramatic and unexpected event occurs, some journalists try and find out what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Many more pick up the phone and hunt down some well-respected “expert” who’s only too happy to pump some certainty into a mighty void. Bruce Riedel, a former defense and intelligence official and currently senior fellow at the Brookings Institute is just such a person. The day Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, Riedel was quick to assert that this “was almost certainly the work of al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda’s Pakistani allies.” How did he know? He didn’t, but how many news editors would find fault in quoting the opinion of a Brookings sage? Three days later, many of the fast-talking experts are now starting to sound a bit foolish — Riedel’s own certainty quickly backed off into a “hunch” — so the only expertise still worth noting is that which underlines the uncertainty rather than makes the pretense of knowledge. Only now are the papers finding column space for a more considered and circumspect analysis. From an assassination which supposedly had “al Qaeda” written all over it, the signature is now acknowledged as being quite hard to decipher. As the Los Angeles Times notes:

Several analysts said the use of a handgun in addition to explosives is a departure for militant groups in Pakistan. “This is not by any means a signature killing by Al Qaeda,” security analyst Nasim Zehra said. “A targeted shooting, even in combination with a familiar suicide bombing, makes it look more like a political killing than one by some militant group.”

While facts remain hard to come by, a number of possibly useful observations can be made. Western politicians want to characterize Bhutto’s death in symbolic terms — this was an attack on democracy, an attack on the freedom and power of Muslim women, or some such pernicious act. But to see that as the effect is not to discern the intent. Much more likely this was first and foremost a successful attempt to prevent Bhutto becoming prime minister. This was indeed a political assassination and suspicion should fall first on those whose power is threatened rather than on those whose ambitions are expanding.

The jihadist signature was that the attackers gave up their lives, but it now seems unclear that that was the intent of the gunman. The fact that he wore dark glasses at least suggests that he might have entertained the hope that he was going to make a getaway. What his handlers hadn’t told him was that as soon as he completed his mission, a jihadist foot soldier — unknown to the gunman — was going to make sure that the assassin would never tell his tale.

As for what we can now say about the Bhutto family, the perpetuation of the dynasty and of the Benazir legend are upper most in their minds. The mystery surrounding her death provides yet more grist to their political mill.

Will we ever know the identity of the gunman in shades? Was he driven by dreams of an Islamic state or did he perhaps see himself as a latter day Carlos the Jackal?

NEWS & OPINION: The measure of American influence

U.S. strives to keep footing in tangled Pakistan situation
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, December 30, 2007

For the Bush administration, there is no Plan B for Pakistan.

The assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto dramatically altered Pakistani politics, forcing the largest opposition party to find new leadership on the eve of an election, jeopardizing a fragile transition to democracy, and leaving Washington even more dependent on the controversial President Pervez Musharraf as the lone pro-U.S. leader in a nation facing growing extremism.

Despite anxiety among intelligence officials and experts, however, the administration is only slightly tweaking a course charted over the past 18 months to support the creation of a political center revolving around Musharraf, according to U.S. officials.

“Plan A still has to work,” said a senior administration official involved in Pakistan policy. “We all have to appeal to moderate forces to come together and carry the election and create a more solidly based government, then use that as a platform to fight the terrorists. ”

U.S. policy remains wedded to Musharraf despite growing warnings from experts, presidential candidates and even a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan that his dictatorial ways are untenable. Some contend that Pakistan would be better off without him.

“This administration has had a disastrous policy toward Pakistan, as bad as the Iraq policy,” said Robert Templer of the International Crisis Group. “They are clinging to the wreckage of Musharraf, flailing around. . . . Musharraf has outlived all possible usage to Pakistan and the United States.” [complete article]

Bush’s best-laid plans
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, December 30, 2007

Faced with the prospect of “losing” Pakistan, what should the world’s sole superpower do? Despite Musharraf’s flaws, should Washington back him to the hilt as the only alternative to chaos? Or should Bush commit the United States without reservation to building a strong democracy in Pakistan?

To pose such questions is to presume that decisions made in Washington will decisively influence the course of events in Islamabad. Yet the lesson to be drawn from the developments of the last several days — and from U.S. involvement in Pakistan over the course of decades — suggests just the opposite: The United States has next to no ability to determine Pakistan’s fate.

How the crisis touched off by Bhutto’s assassination will end is impossible to predict, although the outcome is likely to be ugly. Yet this much we can say with confidence: That outcome won’t be decided in the White House. Once again, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “events are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” with those events reducing the most powerful man in the world to the status of spectator.

At the beginning of his second term, Bush spoke confidently of the United States sponsoring a global democratic revolution “with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Ever since that hopeful moment, developments across the greater Middle East — above all, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and on the West Bank — have exposed the very real limits of U.S. wisdom and power.

Now the virtual impotence of the U.S. in the face of the crisis enveloping Pakistan — along with its complicity in creating that crisis — ought to discredit once and for all any notions of America fixing the world’s ills. [complete article]

FEATURE & OPINION: After Benazir

After Benazir
By Declan Walsh and Jason Burke, The Observer, December 30, 2007

Speaking again to this newspaper not long before her death – this time by phone from Dubai – Bhutto had voiced her concerns. They were not with the militants but with those inside the security establishment – the same people whom her husband blamed for the Karachi attack.

‘I’m not worried about Mahsud,’ said Bhutto. ‘I’m worried about the threat within the government. People like Mahsud are just pawns. It is the forces behind them that have presided over the rise of extremism and militancy in my country. They feel threatened now that their infrastructure will be rolled back when democracy is restored.’

The reality was that Bhutto’s return was deeply threatening to powerful interests in a Pakistani establishment increasingly dominated under Musharraf’s rule by the army and the intelligence agencies.

It was marked by a hatred towards the Bhuttos within a core section of Pakistan’s military – one that runs back to the coup against Bhutto’s father in the late 1970s. This group were less threatened by her threat to roll up the extremists than her promise to give western countries access to the disgraced scientist Khan, who operated a nuclear weapons supermarket from Pakistan for much of the 1990s. The fear was that Khan might implicate powerful figures in the army who had supported his illegal activities.

Deep down, Bhutto considered these people the real enemy: ‘I’m talking about the retired military officers who fought the jihad, who created the Afghan mujahideen, and later morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The real threat comes from them; it doesn’t come from their puppets or their pawns. They have a lot of supporters within the echelons of administration and intelligence.’ [complete article]

Pakistan’s flawed and feudal princess
By William Dalrymple, The Observer, December 30, 2007

Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments – one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

‘London is like a second home for me,’ she once told me. ‘I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and WH Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours. I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes, I used to drive all the way up from Oxford just for an ice cream and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.’

It was difficult to imagine any of her neighbouring heads of state, even India’s earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.

For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn’t was possibly more attractive even than what she was. She wasn’t a religious fundamentalist, she didn’t have a beard, she didn’t organise rallies where everyone shouts: ‘Death to America’ and she didn’t issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.

However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might have been fluent, but you couldn’t say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently, but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse; apart from a few imperatives, she was completely at sea. [complete article]

OPINION: Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are vulnerable

What about the nukes?
By Graham Allison, Newsweek, December 28, 2007

The assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto reminds us starkly of an unanswered question most of us would prefer to forget: how secure are Pakistan’s nuclear weapons? Could Al Qaeda or another terrorist group acquire a warhead or enough radioactive material to create a dirty bomb?

Over the years I have had the opportunity to discuss the loose nukes issue with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf on three separate occasions. On each he insisted that there is no possibility that corrupt custodians or terrorists could steal the country’s nuclear weapons and materials. But in the third of these conversations, which occurred in December 2003, just a week after terrorists came within a second and a half of blowing him up, I managed to penetrate his standard defense. How plausible is it, I asked, that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is more secure than the president of the country himself? His answer: well, there you may have a point. [complete article]

NEWS: The CIA’s tireless effort to protect itself — and others

Tapes by CIA lived and died to save image
By Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, December 30, 2007

If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency’s clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service’s director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. [complete article]

NEWS: U.S. blocked talks with the Taliban

Diplomats expelled ‘at behest of the U.S.’
By Eleanor Mayne, The Telegraph, December 30, 2007

Two European diplomats accused of holding secret talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan were thrown out of the country following a complaint by the US, intelligence officials in Kabul have told The Sunday Telegraph.

Mervyn Patterson, who is British, and Irish-born Michael Semple were flown out of Kabul on Thursday after the Afghan government accused them of “threatening national security”.

The pair had been working for the United Nations and the European Union respectively.

But according to a senior Afghan intelligence source, American officials had been unhappy about meetings between the men and high-level Taliban commanders in the volatile Helmand province.

The source claimed that the US alerted Afghan authorities after learning that the diplomats were providing direct financial and other support – including mobile phone cards – to the Taliban commanders, in the hope of persuading them to swap sides.

“This warning came from the Americans,” he said. “They were not happy with the support being provided to the Taliban. They gave the information to our intelligence services, who ordered the arrests.” [complete article]

NEWS: Iraq safer, Petraeus says, but “there will be bombs”

Iraq safer but still perilous at year-end, Petraeus says
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, December 30, 2007

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, delivered a positive but cautious assessment Saturday of progress in the country in 2007, citing the drop-off in violence over the latter half of the year but warning that the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq remains the country’s preeminent threat.

Petraeus said the number of weekly attacks in Iraq — such as roadside bombings, mortar attacks and sniper fire — has fallen by about 60 percent since June, to about 500 a week by late this month. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in December through the 22nd appeared to be about 600, according to a graph of the past two years provided by Petraeus that uses combined Iraqi and U.S. figures. The highest death toll during this period came last December, when about 3,000 civilians were killed.

“The positive security trends and the factors that produced them are changing the context in many parts of Iraq. While progress in many areas remains fragile, security has improved,” Petraeus said during a briefing for reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. He added that success “will emerge slowly and fitfully, with reverses as well as advances, accumulating fewer bad days and gradually more good days. There will inevitably be more tough fighting.”

The downturn in violence is generally attributed to three factors that emerged over the year: the arrival of 30,000 additional U.S. troops, the emergence of tens of thousands of Sunni fighters who aligned with American troops against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the decision by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to call for a six-month cease-fire by his militia. Petraeus also cited a drop-off in fighters coming to Iraq from Syria and Saudi Arabia, and a decline in recent months in the use of weapons believed to have been made in Iran. [complete article]