|
Foreign Policy Magazine |
|
|
|
December 5th, 2010 |
|
|
meluha
|
 |
|
Join Date: Nov 7th, 2010 |
|
Location: Islamabad |
|
Posts: 14 |
|
Not sure if anyone is reading this on an ongoing basis, but it provides very insightful details on how the only super power in the world collects political thought and opinion and translates it into policy in Washington. On an ongoing basis, I think this should be a must read:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/
|
|
|
|
| |
December 5th, 2010 |
|
|
meluha
|
|
|
|
Join Date: Nov 7th, 2010 |
|
Location: Islamabad |
|
Posts: 14 |
|
Here is a piece from it by James Traub:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/12/03/the_land_of_no_good_options?page=0,1 The Land of No Good Options
When
I arrive in a foreign country to write a piece, I ask journalistic colleagues, NGO
types, and whatnot which diplomats are worth talking to. If it's a country in
the developing world, I usually get directed to the embassy of the ex-colonial
master and often to the Brits, even outside the Commonwealth. (British
diplomats have a reputation for acumen which might mostly have to do with their
accent and air of amused detachment.) As for the United States, people will
say, "There's a political attaché who's been here for years and really gets
around." What about the ambassador? "Only if you feel the need to touch base."
The feeling is that the U.S.
ambassador is so swaddled in security and bureaucracy, so restricted to the
la-di-da realms of the country, that he or she might as well be living in the
clouds.
WikiLeaks
has done U.S. ambassadors a favor by allowing us to read their
homework. And it turns out that there's more to be said for the privileged
perch they occupy than I had realized. None of the cables I've read so far
sound like George Kennan, much less John Quincy Adams, whose dispatches from
the Court of Prussia at the turn of the 19th century were devoured
back home, including by President George Washington in retirement; either
U.S. diplomacy no longer attracts literary intellectuals, or they keep it
to themselves. But they do show a high level of clarity, of analytical rigor,
even occasionally of amused detachment.
The
chief flaw the embassy officials exhibit in the documents is one to which
journalists, too, are very much prone: the tendency to give too much credence
to the people you like. The diplomats in Tbilisi
who, as the New York Times points
out, swallowed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's version of the 2008
war with Russia
whole, may have been guilty of believing what they wished to be true. So, in a
very different way, was the departing U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, who in
2007 optimistically predicted
President Robert Mugabe's impending demise. But none (so far) are clueless; as
yet there's no Ellsworth Bunker reporting from Saigon
on the battle for hearts and minds. The cables may have the unexpected effect
of countering the stereotype of diplomats as lickspittles with a mastery of
etiquette.
I
can think of no better example than Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador
to Pakistan
until this past October. Patterson was a career diplomat; I first met her when
she was acting U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2005, and then again in Pakistan in 2008.
Our conversation in New York had been notably bland, and in Islamabad she
seemed quite comfortable defending -- off the record, of course -- the George
W. Bush administration's unwavering support for Gen. Pervez Musharraf in the
midst of massive demonstrations calling for civilian democratic government, a
policy that had come to seem increasingly tone-deaf.
Why
expect otherwise? The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad,
like most U.S. embassies in trouble spots, is a big, ugly installation (an
earlier iteration had been bombed) located on a lonely road behind a series of
gates. Security was so tight that I had to provide, in advance, my cab driver's
name and license number. Diplomats only ventured out in convoys. Patterson, in
short, operated from a bubble.
And
yet it turns out you can learn a lot in a bubble. On Sept. 23, 2009, Patterson
sent a cable
in response to an inquiry from an unspecified source in the National Security
Council. The debate over AfPak strategy inside the White House was then at its
height. The military brass were pushing a full-bore counterinsurgency strategy calling
for 40,000 troops; Vice President Joe Biden and other senior officials were
arguing for a more modest program of counterterrorism in Afghanistan paired with a much greater focus on Pakistan.
It wouldn't work, Patterson said: "It is not/not possible [the double "not"
appears to be a peculiar convention of the diplomatic cable] to counter Al Qaeda
in Pakistan
absent a comprehensive strategy that 1) addresses the interlinked Taliban
threat in Afghanistan
and Pakistan,
2) brings about stable, civilian government in Afghanistan, and 3) reexamines the
broader role of India
in the region."
Pakistan's
fears of India's
ambitions in Afghanistan,
"justified or not," Patterson wrote, meant that it would not tolerate any
vacuum in Kabul
that could be filled by a pro-Indian regime. "General Kayani," she wrote,
referring to Pakistan's
army chief and effective ruler, "has been utterly frank about Pakistan's
position on this. In such a scenario, the Pakistan establishment will
dramatically increase support for Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Patterson cautioned that "discussion of deadlines, downsizing of the American
military presence or even a denial of the additional troops reportedly to be
requested by Gen. McChrystal" could trigger this response.
Patterson
also signed a cable
from January of that year, when Biden, then vice president-elect, and Sen. Lindsey
Graham (R-S.C.) came to Islamabad
for a heart-to-heart with Kayani. Patterson recounted Kayani's
reassurances of support that U.S. counterterrorism efforts; he
just needed more money to take on the insurgents. In answer to a blunt question
from Biden, Kayani and Pakistani intelligence chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha promised
to take on the Pakistani Taliban first, and then the Afghan branch. "[They insisted
that] nobody was protecting the bad guys Graham said that he would support
development assistance to Pakistan,
but needed to know that the aid would produce a change in Pakistani behavior. Kayani replied that Pakistan
and the U.S.
had a convergence of interests."
This
was an important meeting, for it may have helped persuade Biden that
the United
States could make more headway in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. The
cable makes
no judgment about Kayani's sincerity, perhaps because diplomats are
disinclined
to report that the local strongman has pulled the wool over the eyes of
two
visiting senior statesmen. But at least by September, Patterson knew
that
Kayani had been telling his visitors what they came to hear. "There
is," she
wrote in the later cable, "no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced
assistance
levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support
to these
groups, which it sees as an important part of its national security
apparatus
against India." Patterson suggested that the United States seek to
lower tensions between India and Pakistan and use its civilian aid to
"extend the
writ of the Pakistani state into the FATA" -- the frontier area where
the
extremists seek sanctuary -- "in such a way that the Taliban can no
longer
offer effective protection to Al Qaeda from Pakistan's own security and
law
enforcement agencies in these areas."
Of
course, saying that the United States must help Pakistan create legitimate
governance in the frontier region and must help Afghanistan do so all over the
country is useful advice only if it's possible. And in fact later that fall,
Patterson's counterpart in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry would write a memo
of his own arguing that such a strategy almost certainly wouldn't work. He
appears to have been absolutely right. Nor have U.S. aid efforts made much
headway in FATA so far, though Patterson was careful to warn in the September
cable that doing so would "require a
multi-year, multi-agency effort." The embassy in Pakistan didn't, and perhaps couldn't,
supply the White House with a better answer; rather, the cables may have forced
policymakers to think twice about the appealingly modest alternative Biden
and others were proposing.
You
can imagine Obama reading the Patterson cable, smacking his forehead and saying,
"So I can't go small, like Joe wants, but I'm not convinced I can win by going
big. What do I do?" In the end, Obama tried to square the circle by limiting
the goal of the war in Afghanistan to "disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al
Qaeda and its extremist allies" rather than crushing the Taliban; accepting
that the central threat was not Afghanistan
but Pakistan;
but nevertheless ordering in 30,000 more troops and the ambitious civilian
effort required to bring "stable civilian government to Afghanistan." Maybe
he heard Patterson's message.
The WikiLeaks documents in general show that
U.S. diplomats are quite adroit at analyzing problems like this, ones that their
government turns out to be unable to resolve. This shouldn't come as shocking
news, but I suppose it would to Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, who must
have thought that the documents would expose American imbecility, or hegemony,
or both. He has, at any rate, probably done a good deal less damage than he had
hoped.
|
|
|
|
| |
|
