Patience Needed in Pakistan

August 20, 2008

Things are iffy in Pakistan, with the new civilian coalition getting shakier and the future of Pakistan uncertain after the resignation of Pervez Musharraf, the military president who'd seized power in 1999. The country's leading journalist, Ahmed Rashid, is predicting greater instability in the immediate future, and a Taliban-linked bomb killed dozens in the northwest. So yesterday I went to see Husain Haqqani, the ambassador of Pakistan to the United States, who spoke at a packed noontime meeting of the New America Foundation.

Haqqani is a friend, who I got to know during research for my book, Devil's Game and in reading his wonderful book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. Last year, when he was chairman of the international relations department at Boston University, he invited me to Boston to speak about political Islam.

Yesterday Haqqani delivered an erudite, balanced, optimistic report on Pakistan so far, under the civilian government. Its earlier military rulers, he said -- including Ayub Khan in the 1950s, Zia ul-Haq from 1977-1988, and Musharraf -- provided on an "illusion of stability." The task now is develop government and civil society institutions to create true stability. "The parties have to learn how to work things out," he said. "And they are learning."

McCain, Circa 2003

August 17, 2008

There's yet to be a solid, point-by-point effort to expose John McCain's pre-2003 views on Iraq, when (along with his neocon advisers and cheerleaders) he led the charge to Baghdad. Barack Obama, so concerned about how to end the war in Iraq, seems to have forgotten the importance of questioning how it began, especially McCain's pernicious role.

In today's Times, under the headline "Broad Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of a McCain Doctrine," appears a sketchy but useful reminder of McCain's pre-2003 irrational exuberance for war. (As a broader piece on McCain's so-called "doctrine," the article falls flat. There are better pieces on that score, including two authored by yours truly for The Nation, one published in 1999 and the second earlier this year.)

Here's the lede of the Times piece, showing McCain in full jingoistic, damn-the-torpedos mode:

Election Shocker!

August 8, 2008

Biblical scholars in Colorado Springs have uncovered startling evidence that Senator John McCain may be the Antichrist. Their conclusions, while highly controversial, may have a dramatic impact on the 2008 elections, since many Bible-believing Christians have already expressed doubts about McCain's fealty to Christianity.

The analysis was conducted by the respected True Bible Society, and it will be published next month in the End Times Journal.

The analysis was especially ironic, given that it came out just one day after McCain was accused of subtly hinting that Barack Obama could be the Antichrist. McCain ran a commercial depicting Obama as "The One," giving rise to charges that he was sending a subliminal messages to anti-Obama Christians.

The Crisis in Pakistan

August 1, 2008

Here's a choice for would be foreign policy makers: is the solution to the current crisis in Pakistan (a) a comprehensive Pakistan-India accord, with full Iranian and Russian support, to strengthen Pakistan's civilian government and assert civilian control over Pakistan's rogue ISI intelligence agency, or (b) stepped-up US military intervention in Afghanistan, unilateral US strikes into Pakistan's lawless border areas in the northwest, and thuggish American threats aimed at Pakistan's fledging regime?

If you picked (a), good for you. If you picked (b), well, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain might offer you a job.

Recent revelations in the New York Times about Pakistan's ISI and its ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, including reports that the ISI was indeed responsible for the deadly bombing at India's embassy in Afghanistan, have pushed the Afghan-Pakistan-India nexus to the very front of the news.

Iraq on the Edge

July 27, 2008

While everyone's looking at Iraq's effect on American politics -- and whether or not John McCain and Barack Obama are converging on a policy that combines a flexible timetable with a vague, and long-lasting, residual force -- let's take a look instead at Iraqi politics. The picture isn't pretty.

Despite the Optimism of the Neocons, which has pushed mainstream media coverage to be increasingly flowery about Iraq's political progress, in fact the country is poised to explode. Even before the November election. And for McCain and Obama, the problem is that Iran has many of the cards in its hands. Depending on its choosing, between now and November Iran can help stabilize the war in Iraq -- mostly by urging the Iraqi Shiites to behave themselves -- or it can make things a lot more violent.

There are at least three flashpoints for an explosion, any or all of which could blow up over the next couple of months. (Way to go, Surgin' Generals!) The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq's Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa ("Awakening") movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

Maliki the Thug

July 24, 2008

The current Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is in the news lately over his endorsement of Barack Obama's plan for withdrawing troops on a sixteen-month timetable, but yesterday in Washington it was a former Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, who was making news. And it wasn't good news for Maliki.

Allawi, a former Baathist and an Iraqi nationalist, heads the Iraqi National List party in Iraq, and he served as the first prime minister of a sovereign Iraq until elections gave power to the Shiite religious parties. Allawi is a Shiite, but a secular one, who appeals to both Sunnis and Shiites. After quitting the Baath party, Allawi lived in exile and he was supported by MI-6 and the CIA, and he returned to Iraq in 2003. He makes no secret of wanting to replace Maliki, who is a confirmed sectarian with close links to Iran.

Last September, Allawi tried to arrange clandestine meetings between Iraqi resistance forces under Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former aide to Saddam Hussein, and US commanders in Iraq.

Back in the USSR

July 23, 2008

Two news items this week underline the cost of the Bush Administration's bungling anti-Russia policy. Both relate to Russian activity in its old stomping ground in America's Latin backyard.

The first is news that Russia is thinking about putting manned bombers in Cuba in response to US efforts to install anti-missile defense systems in eastern Europe:

Russian bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons could be deployed to Cuba in response to U.S. plans to install a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, a Russian newspaper reported Monday, citing an unnamed senior Russian air force official.

Flash! Bin Laden Calls Iraq "Distraction"

July 20, 2008

Osama bin Laden, the leader-in-hiding of Al Qaeda, announced today that his organization was shifting resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.

"Iraq is not the central front in the War of Terror," he said. "It is a distraction. By sending so many troops into Iraq, we've stretched our forces thin. As a result, I am shifting at least two brigades from Mosul and Diyala province to southern and eastern Afghanistan."

Analysts said that bin Laden is responding to critics within Al Qaeda who warned, in 2002, that entering Iraq would be a disaster for the terrorist group. "Bin Laden believed, wrongly, that Iraqis would welcome Al Qaeda with open arms," said Phineas McGill, a Brookings Institution terrorism specialist. "He was half right. Iraqi Sunnis welcomed him with arms." McGill said that a rebel faction in Al Qaeda accused bin Laden of saying that Iraq "would be a cakewalk."

Spies Cash In

July 17, 2008

There's a brouhaha developing over the latest U.S. intelligence community funding bill, but it's not the right one. The fuss is over the effort by the House intelligence committee to force the White House to provide classified briefings about ongoing covert operations to committee members. Until that's agreed to, the House proposes to hold back 75 percent of the funding for those covert ops. Because of that, the White House is threatening to veto the measure.

That's all well and good. But, to me, the real issue is the staggering size of the intelligence budget. As recently as the late 1990s, and even at the start of the Bush Administration, the spooks' got something like $29 billion a year. That's a lot of money, and you could argue -- based on results -- that we weren't exactly getting our money's worth. According to the Washington Post, however, the 2009 intelligence budget will top $55 billion. John Pike's invaluable site, globalsecurity.org, suggests the actual figure for 2009 is more than $66 billion. He cautions: "The US intelligence budget is classified. This is an educated guess as to what the numbers look like."

According to Pike's breakdown, the CIA gets about $10 billion of that, while the Pentagon, under which the big-ticket agencies such as the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office are located, gets more than $43 billion.

Maliki's Balancing Act

July 15, 2008

There's a rumor going around that Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is feeling his oats, flexing his muscle, and displaying a newfound confidence that has allowed him to challenge the American occupation of Iraq. As a result, or so the story goes, Maliki has suspended talks with the United States on a long-term security agreement, and he has spoken out in favor of a timetable for withdrawing US forces.

But that's mostly wrong. From the start of his reign as prime minister in 2006, Maliki has been a weak and ineffectual leader. His political base is exceedingly narrow, and his Dawa Party is virtually nonexistent as a political force in Iraq today. (Dawa -- which means "The Call," as in Islamic proselytizing, has always been a thin part of the ruling alliance, and it recently splintered, when former Prime Minister Jaafari and his faction withdrew from it.) Maliki's power rests on a shaky coalition of other Iraqi parties, including the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a militia-based party closely tied to Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Maliki has tried to strengthen his hand by bringing the religious Sunni bloc back into the ruling coalition. But the party that represents the religious Sunnis, whose core is the Iraqi Islamic Party, won't help Maliki. The IIP, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood secret society, was elected in 2005-2006 to its provincial posts and its parliamentary slots only because it was the sole Sunni party that would take part in an election that was widely boycotted by Sunni Arabs. (Only about two percent of Sunni Arabs voted.) So the idea that IIP has any political power is absurd. Most Sunni Iraqs are secular or moderately religious, and they reject the fundamentalist views of the IIP. The IIP is facing a determined (and armed) force arrayed against it amongst the Sunni "Awakening" or sahwa, also known as the "Sons of Iraq." Either through political means (i.e., the upcoming provincial elections) or by armed force, the Sons of Iraq movement will likely obliterate the IIP fairly soon.