Wednesday Links
- Drop the neocons: “Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional noninterventionist roots and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus.”
- John Samples on the national impact of this week’s elections: “The evidence suggests the Obama administration might be on the same path that led the Clinton presidency to the election of 1994. But there is an important difference: In 1994, the public had some faith in the alternative to Clinton and the Democrats in Congress.”
- Podcast: “Independents and the GOP Victories“
Who Is John Gupta?
Apparently Ayn Rand’s popularity is growing on the subcontinent. For more on Rand’s resurgence, attend or watch online this Cato event next week.
(H/T: Josh Blackman.)
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy
Exiting the Afghan Quagmire
Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, and Anatol Lieven, a professor at King’s College London, discuss in the Financial Times how we can exit the Afghan quagmire:
The west should therefore pursue a political solution, open negotiations with the Taliban and offer a timetable for a phased withdrawal in return for a ceasefire. This should begin with the military pulling out of specific areas in return for Taliban guarantees not to attack western bases and Afghan authorities in those areas. If the Taliban refuses such terms, then military pressure should continue. The point should not be to eliminate the Taliban – which is impossible – but to persuade it to agree to a deal.
Lodhi and Lieven’s argument echoes one that David Axe, Jason Reich, and I made yesterday on ForeignPolicy.com.
… regime change, and democracy, are not necessary for counterterrorism. Propping up President Hamid Karzai’s Western-style government in Kabul does not make operations against al Qaeda any easier or more successful. If anything, it distracts from the conceptually simpler task of finding and killing terrorists. Without U.S. and NATO protection, Karzai’s regime would, sooner or later, probably fall to the Taliban. But U.S. observers should not equate that eventuality with “losing” the war. The war is against terrorists, not Islamist governments. The United States should be prepared to make peace, and amends, with a resurgent Taliban — and to encourage the group to excise its more extreme elements.
I admit talking to the Taliban sounds weird and scary. But my contention is that there is no shortage of Pashtun militants willing to fight against what they perceive to be a foreign occupation of their region. Certainly the Taliban does not enjoy support among the majority of Pashtuns—as Lodhi and Lieven point out—but neither did the IRA in Northern Ireland or the FLN in Algeria. The point is not exclusively about popularity (although that’s a critical component, along with local legitimacy), but the fact that these indigenous groups are willing to fight the United States and NATO indefinitely. Indeed, it is the western military presence that is driving support for the Taliban both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
Moreover, the notion that we must protect Pakistan from the Taliban is ludicrous. Pakistan’s intelligence service helped create the Taliban and they continue to protect the Afghan Taliban to keep India at bay. From this point of view, deploying more troops would be irrelevant to the fight against al Qaeda and counterproductive in our attempts to pacify the region. For more on what we should do, check this out.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Wednesday Links
- Should more troops be sent to Afghanistan? Cato’s Malou Innocent weighs in alongside the policymakers.
- What does the end of the missile defense system in Central Europe means for U.S.-Russian relations?
- Signals indicate that the market just might be on the rebound. That’s great, but it’s important not to get ahead of ourselves, says Johan Norberg. “We must never forget that the light at the end of the tunnel can be an approaching train.”
- A few thoughts on the new rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and what it means for Pakistan and India.
- Michael Cannon continues his debate in the LA Times: The dirty little secret is that “Obama-care” isn’t about reducing health care costs or making coverage more secure. It’s about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
- Podcast: If you’d like to see what Obama wants to do to the U.S. health care system, don’t listen to his rhetoric…look at what he’s doing to Medicare.
Pakistan: More Aid, More Waste, More Fraud?
Pakistan long has tottered on the edge of being a failed state: created amidst a bloody partition from India, suffered under ineffective democratic rule and disastrous military rule, destabilized through military suppression of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by dominant West Pakistan, dismembered in a losing war with India, misgoverned by a corrupt and wastrel government, linked to the most extremist Afghan factions during the Soviet occupation, allied with the later Taliban regime, and now destabilized by the war in Afghanistan. Along the way the regime built nuclear weapons, turned a blind eye to A.Q. Khan’s proliferation market, suppressed democracy, tolerated religious persecution, elected Asif Ali “Mr. Ten Percent” Zardari as president, and wasted billions of dollars in foreign (and especially American) aid.
Still the aid continues to flow. But even the Obama administration has some concerns about ensuring that history does not repeat itself. Reports the New York Times:
As the United States prepares to triple its aid package to Pakistan — to a proposed $1.5 billion over the next year — Obama administration officials are debating how much of the assistance should go directly to a government that has been widely accused of corruption, American and Pakistani officials say. A procession of Obama administration economic experts have visited Islamabad, the capital, in recent weeks to try to ensure both that the money will not be wasted by the government and that it will be more effective in winning the good will of a public increasingly hostile to the United States, according to officials involved with the project.
…The overhaul of American assistance, led by the State Department, comes amid increased urgency about an economic crisis that is intensifying social unrest in Pakistan, and about the willingness of the government there to sustain its fight against a raging insurgency in the northwest. It follows an assessment within the Obama administration that the amount of nonmilitary aid to the country in the past few years was inadequate and favored American contractors rather than Pakistani recipients, according to several of the American officials involved.
Rather than pouring more good money after bad, the U.S. should lift tariff barriers on Pakistani goods. What the Pakistani people need is not more misnamed “foreign aid” funneled through corrupt and inefficient bureaucracies, but jobs. Trade, not aid, will help create real, productive work, rather than political patronage positions.
More Evidence on America’s Socialism
KPMG has released its annual survey of personal income tax rates around the world. The survey covers 86 countries, including all the high-income nations and many middle- and lower-income nations, such as Brazil, China, and India.
The chart shows the top personal income tax rates in 2009 for national governments, per the KPMG study. The current top U.S. rate is 35 percent, which is substantially above the 86-country average of 28.9 percent. The Obama administration plans to let the U.S. rate jump to 39.6 percent in 2011, which would be almost 11 points higher than the international average.
Worse still, the United States has state income taxes with rates up to 10 percent that are piled on top of the federal tax. Some of the nations in the survey (e.g. Canada) also have subnational income taxes, but many, or most, of them do not.
Finally, note that supporters of government health care expansion have been eyeing further increases in the top U.S. tax rate above 40 percent. Alas, we need more of the Global Tax Revolution to sweep across our shores.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
Bringing the States Back In
It’s an annoying, hackneyed trope of foreign policy types to say “if you want to understand X, you have to understand Y.” That said, let me engage in a little bit of it.
What’s going on in Afghanistan, we’re supposed to believe, is about terrorism, failed states, economic development, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, human rights, and some other stuff. And to an extent, it is about each of those things. But to my mind, if you want to get a handle on what’s driving events over there, and on its historical status as a plaything of regional and extraregional powers, you ought to read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The themes that permeate the article are familiar: States as the primary actors in international politics, their uncertainty about other states’ intentions, the fundamental zero-sumness of security competition…somebody should cook up a theory or two on this stuff.
Eventually–although in fairness, God only knows when–we’re going to leave Afghanistan. When that happens, India and Pakistan are still going to live in the neighborhood. They’d each prefer to have lots of influence in Afghanistan, and to preclude the other from having too much. Accordingly, they’re both trying to set up structures and relationships that would, in the ideal scenario, let them control Afghanistan. In a less-than-ideal scenario, they’d like enough influence to undermine the other’s control of the country. Until you grasp that nettle, you’re really just fumbling around in the dark.
Find a solution for that in your COIN manual.
Other Countries as Ends-in-Themselves
Here in Babylon on the Potomac, most foreign policy discussions begin and end with the United States: How can we extend our control of the world? Who is challenging us? What problems might, say, a rising China, pose to American primacy? We are, as Madeleine Albright asserted, the “indispensable nation.” One popular scholar recently advanced the theory that the U.S. government is, and should be, the world’s government. There’s a real refusal to recognize that we are, as a simple matter of fact, isolated by the blessings of geography and power. We’re just not a 19th century continental European power, no matter how much we threat-inflate and conceive of ourselves as the only source of order in a disorderly world.
You’d think we’d be inclined to recognize the luxury that our isolation affords us, but you’d be wrong. Consequently, in discussions about the rise of China, for example, U.S. analysts generally pose the question as a simple U.S. vs. China confrontation: How quickly can they challenge us? Where should our “red lines” be? Which allies will support us? If our strategists were smart, they’d be thinking more creatively about offloading responsibility to countries that live more closely to China, and waiting to see how things progress. While the ChiCom menace tends to get represented as ten feet tall in these discussions, the Chinese have a host of significant problems, including the internal unrest that has been on display recently, among others.
High on the list of “other problems” is China’s relationship with countries like India. Much more so than the United States, countries like India and Japan have a lot to lose, potentially, from China’s rise. Liberal international relations thinkers are right to point out the positive-sumness of economic relations between potential adversaries. Economic ties between China and Taiwan, China and the U.S., China and Japan, are also positive forces that can help to moderate security competition. That said, security itself is zero-sum. Either you control your sea lines of communication or else another country does. If another country does, bad things can happen to you, as, for example, Japan remembers all too well.
All of which is a long-winded way of introducing this excellent article by James Lamont and Amy Kazmin in the Financial Times. Lamont and Kazmin highlight the growing unease in New Delhi about China. Unease tends to crop up when a big powerful neighbor does things like claim whole provinces of your country as its own territory, as China does with the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh. (For more on this subject, see my talk on Capitol Hill from May 2008: video here.)
In fairness, the Bush administration did some smart things on this front, like trying to improve ties with India. For years, U.S.-India relations had been tainted by a cold war mindset where we resented their association with the Non-aligned Movement. (I think the India nuclear deal has a lot of downsides, but the intentions underpinning it were smart ones.) Similarly, the Bush administration signed a joint agreement with Japan stating that a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dispute is a “common strategic objective.”
But the important part will be beyond getting other countries to accept our goodies (the India nuclear deal) or sign a statement of interest (the joint Japan-US statement on Taiwan). Those countries would rather, ceteris paribus, stand tall against China from over the shoulder of the United States. The only way that we will get to a point where the countries with the most to lose pay the most for a hedge against China is for the United States to credibly commit to do less. And on that front, there is a lot more work to be done.
Finally, an Ally That Doesn’t Wait for America
Washington’s willingness to toss security guarantees about the globe like party favors has encouraged other nations to do little for their own defense. From the European, Japanese, and South Korean standpoint, why spend more when the Americans will take care of you?
But it looks like Australia takes a different view, and is willing to do more to defend itself and its region. Reports the Daily Telegraph:
The latest defence White Paper recommends buying 100 advanced F-35 jet fighters and 12 powerful submarines equipped with cruise missiles, a capability which no other country in the region is believed to possess.
The “potential instability” caused by the emergence of China and India as major world powers was cited as the most pressing reason for this military build-up. In particular, Australian defence planners are believed to be concerned about China’s growing naval strength and America’s possible retreat as a global power in the decades ahead.
Chinese officials say their country’s growing power threatens no-one. Behind the scenes, Beijing is thought to be unhappy about Australia’s White Paper, with one Chinese academic saying it was “typical of a Western Cold War mentality”.
But the Chinese navy has almost doubled the number of secret, long-distance patrols conducted by its submarines in the past year. The reach of its navy is extending into Australian waters. China is also acquiring new amphibious assault ships that can transport a battalion of troops.
So instead of calling Washington to deal with Beijing, the Australians are building up their own navy. Novel approach! Now, how can we implant a bit of the Aussie character in America’s other friends around the globe?
Buy American Hurts Most Americans
Earlier today, Doug Bandow weighed in with some commentary on the problems that Buy American provisions are creating for both Canadian and American businesses. Let me reinforce his view that such rules are anachronistic and self-defeating with some thoughts from a forthcoming paper of mine about the incongruity between modern commercial reality and trade policies that have failed to keep pace.
Even though President Obama implored, “If you are considering buying a car, I hope it will be an American car,” it is nearly impossible to determine objectively what makes an American car. The auto industry provides a famous example, but is really just one of many that transcends national boundaries and renders obsolete the notion of international competition as a contest between “our” producers and “their” producers. The same holds true for industries throughout the manufacturing sector.
Dell is a well known American brand and Nokia a popular Finnish brand, but neither makes its products in the United States or Finland, respectively. Some components of products bearing the logos of these internationally recognized brands might be produced in the “home country.” But with much greater frequency nowadays, component production and assembly operations are performed in different locations across the global factory floor. As IBM’s chief executive officer put it: “State borders define less and less the boundaries of corporate thinking or practice.”
The distinction between what is and what isn’t American or Finnish or Chinese or Indian has been blurred by foreign direct investment, cross-ownership, equity tie-ins, and transnational supply chains. In the United States, foreign and domestic value-added is so entangled in so many different products that even the Buy American provisions in the recently-enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, struggle to define an American product without conceding the inanity of the objective.
The Buy American Act restricts the purchase of supplies that are not domestic end products. For manufactured end products, the Buy American Act uses a two-part test to define a domestic end product: (1) The article must be manufactured in the United States; and (2) The cost of domestic components must exceed 50 percent of the cost of all the components. Thus, the operational definition of an American product includes the recognition that “purebred” American products are increasingly rare.
Shake your head and chuckle as you learn that even the “DNA” of the U.S. steel industry, which pushed for adoption of the most restrictive Buy American provisions and which has been the manufacturing sector’s most vocal proponent of trade barriers over the years, is difficult to decipher nowadays. The largest U.S. producer of steel is the majority Indian-owned company Arcelor-Mittal. The largest “German” producer, Thyssen-Krupp, is in the process of completing a $3.7 billion green field investment in a carbon and stainless steel production facility in Alabama, which will create an estimated 2,700 permanent jobs. And most of the carbon steel shipped from U.S. rolling mills—as finished hot-rolled or cold-rolled steel, or as pipe and tube—is produced in places like Canada, Brazil and Russia, and as such is disqualified from use in U.S. government procurement projects for failure to meet the statutory definition of American-made steel.
Whereas a generation ago the cost of a product bearing the logo of an American company may have comprised exclusively U.S. labor, materials, and overhead, today that is much less likely to be the case. Today, that product is more likely to reflect foreign value-added, regardless of whether the product was “completed” in the United States or abroad. Accordingly, Buy American rules and trade barriers of any kind (as appealing to politicians as they may be) hurt most American businesses, workers, and consumers.
It’s time to wake up and scrap these stupid rules.
Pakistani Nukes: The Solution or the Problem?
The New York Times writes up the revelation that Pakistan is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal. Congressmen and Senators, we’re told, are worried that US military aid might be diverted to this purpose.
Two points here.
1. Insofar as we are giving money to Pakistan, it probably doesn’t matter much if we restrict it to our priorities. Money is fungible — by funding something Pakistan might have paid for itself, we free its funds for other priorities. Maybe it’s the case that the Pakistanis view aid that US gives them for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capability as purely wasteful — and therefore wouldn’t spend a dime if we didn’t provide it. But probably they would have bought much of this capability if we didn’t, and therefore we are freeing up funds for other purposes like the expansion of the nuclear weapons arsenal. If we don’t want to help them do that, we should quit funding them, period.
2. Lots of people point out that Pakistan’s big problem is India — that its preoccupation with its largely indefensible Indian border prevents it from devoting sufficient resources to pacifying its restive Pashtuns and encourages it to employ high-risk strategies like using extremists to tie down Indian forces in Kashmir.
What you don’t hear much is that nuclear weapons, and particularly the secure second strike capability that Pakistan is likely pursuing, is a potential solution to this problem. Nuclear weapons are a cheap form of defense. In theory, the security that they provide against Indian attack would allow Pakistan to limit its militarization, stop bankrolling extremists, and focus on securing its own territory as opposed to its border. (Note: I’m not arguing that that’s necessarily right, I’m arguing that if you think vulnerability to India is what creates danger for us in Pakistan, you should consider the utility of nuclear weapons in solving this problem).
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are frightening, no question. But the series of wars Pakistan and India have fought since their split should put that fear in perspective. If they can arrest conventional conflict, the nukes are doing great good.
With our president calling for a nuclear-weapons free world, it’s worth considering whether abolishing nukes makes sense if you can’t abolish war.
Elections in India
Despite being hit by the global recession, the ruling Congress Party-led coalition swept to an unexpected victory in India’s general election, mainly because of rural prosperity in a country where 70 percent of the population is rural. Good monsoons and high agricultural prices—linked partly to the global commodity boom—helped agriculture grow at a record annual rate of almost 4.5 percent for five years. The combination of high prices and high output yielded a happy peasantry. High food prices did not outrage rural workers because of a new rural employment scheme guaranteeing up to100 days work, and this helped despite corruption in implementation. Many states raised minimum wages too, raising worker pay faster than prices, and this was sustainable because of high crop prices. The government had partly or fully forgiven bank loans to small farmers, and this too won its votes.
However, this policy will encourage loan defaults in future: far better would have been cash payments to the needy, while maintaining loan discipline. The world commodity boom made it possible for the government to hike its support prices for crops as well as minimum wages, but such happy conditions will not last. India needs agricultural reform that focuses on raising productivity rather than loan waivers and hikes in controlled prices. And it must carry on its good work in improving rural infrastructure.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; International Economics and Development
Pakistan Troops Pour into Swat Valley
The Associated Press reports that Pakistani troops have taken the fight to militants in the Swat valley, ending a three month truce between the government and Taliban forces.
As I argued in the Washington Times almost a year ago, Pakistani government peace deals with militants have a tendency to collapse. Thus, we shouldn’t be too surprised to see the latest “Shariah for peace deal” in Swat already begin to fray.
With this in mind, U.S. policymakers and defense planners must keep in mind the constraints Pakistani leaders are operating under. After 9/11, Pakistan was caught in an unenviable and contradictory position: the need to ally openly with the United States and the desire to discreetly preserve their militant assets as a hedge to Indian influence.
For example, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, who heads Pakistan’s Islamist political party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, led large anti-US, anti-Muaharraf, and pro-Taliban rallies in major Pakistani cities after the U.S. began bombing Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. JUI and other influential Islamist organizations fiercely criticized Musharraf and the military for aligning with the United States and Pervez Musharraf himself was condemned within Pakistan for aligning with America in the war on terror. This dynamic has not gone away.
Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Record on Foreign Policy
Cato foreign policy experts weigh in on President Obama’s record in his first 100 days:
Christopher Preble, Director Foreign Policy Studies:
President Obama deserves credit for making a few modest changes in U.S. foreign and defense policy, and he has signaled a desire to make more fundamental shifts in the future. Some of these may prove helpful, while others are likely to encounter problems. In the end, however, so long as the president is unwilling to revisit some of the core assumptions that have guided U.S grand strategy for nearly two decades — chief among these the conceit that the United States is the world’s indispensable nation, and that we must take the lead in resolving all the world’s problems — then he will be unable to effect the broad changes that are truly needed.
Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President Defense & Foreign Policy Studies; Christopher Preble:
On the plus side, Obama moved quickly to fulfill his most important foreign policy promise: ending the war in Iraq. That said, the policy that his administration will implement is consistent with the agreement that the outgoing Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqis. Given that the war has undermined U.S. security interests, and our continuing presence there is costly and counterproductive, Obama should have proposed to remove U.S. troops on a faster timetable.
Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst:
The jury is still out on the other major, ongoing military operation, the war in Afghanistan. That mission is directly related to events in neighboring Pakistan, which is serving — and has served — as a safe haven for Taliban supporters for years. President Obama deserves credit for approaching the problem with both countries together, and also in a regional context, which includes Iran, as well as India. Still unknown is the scope and scale of the U.S. commitment. President Obama has approved a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. Some have suggested that still more troops are needed, and that these additional troop numbers might prevail for 10-15 years. That would be a mistake. The United States should be looking for ways to increase the capacity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to confront the extremism in their countries, and should not allow either to grow dependent upon U.S. military and financial support.
Christopher Preble and Ted Galen Carpenter:
On Iran, President Obama made the right decision by agreeing to join the P5 + 1 negotiations, but that is only a first step. The two sides are far apart and President Obama has not signaled his intentions if negotiations fail to produce a definitive breakthrough. Sanctions have had a very uneven track record, and are unlikely to succeed in convincing the Iranians to permanently forego uranium enrichment. If the Iranians are intent upon acquiring nuclear weapons, military action would merely delay Iran ’s program, and would serve in the meantime to rally support for an otherwise unpopular clerical regime, and a manifestly incompetent president.
Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow; Christopher Preble:
A related problem is North Korea’s ongoing nuclear program, an area where the president and his team seem to be grasping for answers. President Obama was mistaken if he believed that that the UN Security Council would render a meaningful response to Pyongyang’s provocative missile launch. It was naive, at best, for him to believe that even a strong rebuke from the UNSC would have altered Kim Jong Il’s behavior. The president must directly engage China, the only country with any significant influence over Kim. The North’s reckless and unpredictable behavior does not serve Beijing’s interests.
Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow; Christopher Preble:
Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are correct to apply greater scrutiny to bloated Pentagon spending, and to terminating unnecessary weapon systems, but the budget will actually grow slightly, at a time when we should be looking for ways to trim spending. If President Obama decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations, we could cut our ground forces in half. If we stopped planning for near-term war with China or Russia, the Air Force and Navy could be much smaller. Unless we commit to a grand strategy of restraint, and encourage other countries to provide for their own defense, it will be impossible to make the large-scale cuts in military spending that are needed.
Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies; Benjamin Friedman; Christopher Preble:
Two other quick points. President Obama has moved away from some of the overheated rhetoric surrounding counterterrorism and homeland security, including dropping the phrase ‘War on Terror”. This was the right approach. The language surrounding the fight against terrorism is as important — if not more important — than the actual fight itself. Equally useful is his pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and his renunciation of the use of torture and other illegal means in the first against al Qaeda. These steps send an important message to audiences outside of the United States who cooperation is essential.
Ian Vasquez, Director, Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity; Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Project Coordinator for Latin America.
President Obama has signaled a slight change on US-Cuba policy by softening some travel and financial restrictions. It is not as far as we would have liked, but it is a step in the right direction — toward greater engagement, as opposed to more isolation, which was the approach adopted by the Bush administration.
For more research, check out Cato’s foreign policy and national security page.
Pundit Predilection: Reading a Lot into a Little
American policymakers have a tendency to ignore the viewpoints of other nations. Such was the case when Gen. David Petraeus complained that Pakistan saw India rather than the Taliban as the more significant security threat. I made the simple but still important (in my view, anyway) point that Pakistan had reason to fear India, including the latter’s role in detaching East Pakistan from what had been a geographically divided state.
Yet there appears to be predilection by some pundits to read a lot into a short blog post. Matthew Yglesias apparently believes that to point to India’s role in the 1971 war is to gloss over Pakistan’s ignoble conduct in what became Bangladesh. Others may have seen “a happy Pakistan bouncing along” until victimized by a “rapacious” India, but my post said nothing of the sort. In fact, in contrast to Mr. Yglesias, I was alive during the war and remember stories about Pakistani atrocities.
Nevertheless, the point remains: there is a reason leading Pakistanis fears India more than the Taliban and other extremists. And lecturing them that they are misguided, that Pakistan’s artificial geographic and social configuration was doomed and that the Khan government’s brutality gave India good cause for intervening, is not likely to change the current threat assessment of those in power, especially in the military. So the point remains: Washington policymakers have to deal with rather than dismiss Islamabad’s fears.
Solving Our Problem in Pakistan
Pakistan has nuclear weapons, an active jihadist movement, a weak civilian government, a history of backing the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a military focused on fighting another American ally, India. Pakistan probably is harder than Iraq to “fix.”
Unfortunately, the gulf between the U.S. and Pakistani governments is vast. Starting with the respective assessments of the greatest regional threat, Gen. David Petraeus has given Islamabad some unwanted advice. Reports AP News:
The United States is urging Pakistan’s military to focus more on the Taliban and extremists advancing inside their borders instead of the nation’s longtime enemy — India.
The top U.S. commander in the region told Congress Friday that extremists already inside Pakistan pose the greatest threat to that nation.
Gen. David Petraeus (pet-TRAY’-uhs) was asking a House Appropriations subcommittee for funding to help the Pakistani military root out and stop insurgents, saying he wants Pakistani leaders to realize they need to learn how to fight internal extremists.
Petraeus called India a “conventional threat” that should no longer be Pakistan’s top military focus.
Gen. Petraeus is obviously right, from America’s standpoint. But try explaining that to Pakistan, which has fought and lost three wars with India. Indeed, Pakistan was dismembered in one of those conflicts, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.
Enlisting Pakistan more fully in combating the Taliban and al Qaeda will require recognizing, not dismissing, Islamabad’s other security concerns. Squaring the circle won’t be easy. But doing so will require more creative diplomacy and less preemptive demands, more regional cooperation and less military escalation.
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