| Cartoon of the week |
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| The ideological battle |
What Was Bush's Biggest Foreign Policy Blunder?
Sadanand Dhume |
The answer: Pakistan.
Washington -- For a corner of the world traditionally peripheral to U.S. foreign policy, South Asia can claim an odd pair of distinctions. It is the site of President Bush's greatest success, as well as his most glaring failure. The success, of course, is India, whose strategic and symbolic importance to Washington Bush was quick to grasp, and with whom he leaves behind a vastly strengthened relationship. The failure: Pakistan, a volatile cocktail whose ingredients include Dark Ages fundamentalism, a shadowy nuclear weapons program, and a viscerally anti-American population.
To be fair, most of Pakistan's troubles are of its own creation. Carved out of British India in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims, the country's history reads like a compilation of the late 20th century's greatest hits of mismanagement and mayhem: genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), A. Q. Khan's nuclear Walmart, the creation of the Taliban. Transparency International regularly ranks Pakistan near the bottom of its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. (The current president, the oleaginous Asif Ali Zardari, is widely known as Mr. 10%.) Among the perennially protesting masses, Osama bin Laden has a higher popularity rating--46% in 2007--than many of the country's leaders.
Nonetheless, it was on Bush's watch that 9/11 occurred, and with it came the opportunity to transform the nature of a state that--along with Iran and Saudi Arabia--has long been one of the world's main exporters of Islamist fervor. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were masterminded by a Pakistani, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and abetted by the Taliban, a creation of the Pakistan army's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence.
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Using the same principle later applied (albeit erroneously) to Iraq--that a country given to military rule and the sponsorship of violence outside its borders could simply not be trusted with nuclear weapons--the U.S., backed by NATO and India, could have offered Pakistan a stark choice. To peacefully dismantle its nuclear program (like South Africa and Kazakhstan), shutter its most radical madrassas and dismantle the bulk of the ISI--or face both military action and crippling economic sanctions. Needless to say, compliance would have been rewarded with dollops of aid.
Instead, the Bush administration swallowed the fiction that the blame for giving al-Qaida a safe haven lay with the Afghans alone. Moreover, since 9/11--notwithstanding the desultory employment of predator drones in Pakistan's tribal areas--Washington has operated on the flawed assumption that an endless supply of carrots ($10 billion and counting) would do more to moderate Islamabad's behavior than the threat of a large stick. It backed the mendacious Gen. Pervez Musharraf for seven long years, when it ought to have been obvious by 2003--Musharraf's absurd comparisons of himself with Kemal Ataturk notwithstanding--that he was never serious about modernizing his country or taking on such powerful radical Islamic groups as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
The consequences have been predictably dismal. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently estimated that 75% of the terrorist threats uncovered by his security services lead to Pakistan. (As did the 7/7 bombings of 2005.) A. Q. Khan--whose nuclear bazaar has done more to endanger London or New York than any Soviet leader ever managed--remains un-interrogated by the U.S. government. The Taliban, operating from safe havens on Pakistani soil, continues to bleed NATO forces and destabilize Hamid Karzai's government in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Taliban's Mullah Omar remain at large. The terrorists responsible for organizing November's carnage in Mumbai have escaped punishment. On Barack Obama's lap now falls the thankless task of coercing and cajoling Pakistan into the community of civilized nations.
Sadanand Dhume is a fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C., and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist.
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