Hillary in Pakistan

Scott Horton discusses Hillary Clinton's visit to Pakistan and notes how the Obama Administration is trying to shift policy from the dead-end Bush approach.

When a critical assessment of the Bush-era “War on Terror” is undertaken, a vital chapter will focus on U.S. relations with Pakistan. President Bush labeled the nation “a major non-NATO ally” in order to qualify it for military programs. He then lavished Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship with billions in aid designed to beef up its ability to engage the Taliban and Al Qaeda, only to see most of this money diverted into secret military programs designed to address Pakistani security qualms about India. Future historians may well conclude that the Bush team were played for patsies by Pakistan’s military, with Interservice Intelligence (ISI) in the lead. There is increasingly solid evidence that the ISI consciously thwarted the United States–facilitating the escape of key Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership figures from Afghanistan and sheltering them in Pakistan’s rugged Northwest Frontier Province. In their place, Pakistani authorities streamed hundreds of perfectly innocent people into American hands, filling the special detention center that Bush built at Guantánamo with chaff rather than the leadership figures the Americans were seeking.

Hillary Clinton is now on a visit to Pakistan. Her comments there reflect a new U.S. relationship with Islamabad, built on a far more serious understanding of Pakistan’s internal problems and a more aggressive view about dealing with them. But they also reflect a fundamentally different take on civilian-military relations in this nuclear power of 181 million. Reuters reports:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wound up a bridge-building visit to Pakistan on Friday leaving a pointed question ringing in her hosts’ ears: Where are the al Qaeda leaders operating in your country? While no Pakistani officials were immediately prepared to answer, ordinary citizens told Washington’s top diplomat the country was living on a daily basis with the consequences of the September 11, 2001 attacks engineered by the militant Islamist group…

On Thursday Clinton expressed disbelief no-one in authority knew where al Qaeda leaders were hiding out — a remark that may fuel much reaction once she leaves the country. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she told a group of newspaper editors during a meeting in Lahore.

While these remarks were portrayed by the clueless U.S. media as a gaffe, in fact they provide a deep glimpse into the Obama Administration’s agenda for Pakistan. To start with, they’re remarkably mild. She’s presenting as a question something that U.S. intelligence knows for a fact: the ISI has been coddling Taliban leaders and their Al Qaeda allies, just as the ISI has systematically enabled the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. While American commentators view this as something shocking or potentially offensive to an ally, in fact it regularly figures in Pakistan’s domestic political discourse, in which the mainstream political parties view the Pakistani military’s support for militant Islam as a threat. Thus, Secretary Clinton is speaking an obvious truth, and at the same time ratcheting up pressure on the Pakistani military to change its erring ways and fully embrace the crackdown.

Horton also points to a second track to US diplomacy in the region, which is to encourage negotiations between Pakistan and India...a difficult path certainly, but well worth the effort.