Posted by
KsReaganite on Saturday, March 21, 2009 4:27:39 PM
The President, from the time of his campaign, has rightly made a huge deal about the importance of Pakistan to the goals of the United States in the greater Near- and Middle East, especially the war in Afghanistan. Fortunately for us, the President has a fairly decent knowledge about the politics of Pakistan and has even spent time there. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, much of knowledge of Pakistan is filtered through the largely useless lens of professional foreign service and think tank types, to the exclusion of anyone else. Let us make no mistake about it: unlike the previous two generations of foreign service officers, today’s apparatchiks in US embassies and consulates abroad live extremely cloistered, fearful, and detached lives, entirely cut off from the actual pulse of the society where they are supposed to be our eyes and ears. All these pampered bureaucrats hear and see are glimpses of the elite in heavily guarded garden parties and painting exhibits where the only local attendees, in the case of Pakistan, are the second sons of feudal lords, wives of top civil servants, and the army generals who have chests full of medals from wars they never fought and eager for an alcoholic drink they cannot get but at embassy parties. Heck even the wives I mention are often not Pakistani since many of Pakistan’s top civil servants, politicians, intellectuals, and military brass have a peculiar tendency to marry women from elsewhere. Former Prime Minister Z A Bhutto married an Iranian (Benazir’s mother), his foreign secretary J A Rahim wed a German blonde as did his fellow Bengali Air Marshal Tawab, former Finance Minister Noon was married to an Englishwoman as was Pakistan’s foremost poet Faiz and its cricket icon Imran Khan.
The point is that for the last thirty odd years, we have simply not engaged the society of Pakistan, beyond the perfunctory seminars in Karachi, polio shot programs at the Peshawar Club, or scholarships for the elite under PL 480. If Pakistan, as opposed to merely the elite of Pakistan, is to be made a partner in the fight against terror and narcotics, we gotta do better than the noisy and lackluster effort in place now. Public diplomacy (as opposed to the fortress diplomacy in vogue), principled outreach of democratic forces, and robust support of indigenous human rights movements are all elements that must be nourished in order to craft a new approach to Pakistan.
It can be done. We cannot afford not to do so. If Pakistan implodes, and very well may, it will be only a short time that so will Afghanistan, notwithstanding the resources we pour into the latter. For reasons to many to catalogue here, Pakistan is the lynchpin of America’s Transcaucasian strategy.