Walter Russell Mead, an esteemed scholar of American history, and provocative observer of current geopolitical trends is attempting to see the world through Pakistan’s eyes. Here’s his Pak-Vision of the situation in Afghanistan through Islamabad’s view:

The second major issue shaping negative Pakistani feelings about the United States is almost as important.  Pakistanis are on the front lines in the war on terror and Afghanistan is, literally, right on their doorstep.  Pakistanis have no confidence in America’s regional strategy and they are convinced that American blunders have created a multifaceted disaster that has already cost Pakistan dear.  Many Pakistanis believe that the US invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake in the first place; Mullah Omar offered to send Osama Bin Laden to stand trial in a third country, they say, and the US should have accepted that.  More, they argue that American policy from the beginning was a disaster.  We invaded in the wrong place at the wrong time; we refused to work with the people who could have helped us; we lost our focus on Afghanistan to turn toward Iraq (a war deeply hated by many Pakistanis).  Now, inevitably, the disaster in Afghanistan has spread across the border into Pakistan, with religious radicals and tribes in revolt turning their fury against Pakistani targets even as drone strikes in Pakistan infuriate many people.

The US, Pakistanis say, has given only derisory military aid — $1.5 billion versus the estimated $40 billion the war has cost Pakistan.  More, we are blaming the victim.  The spread of radical violence in Pakistan is the direct result, they say, of the American war and American blunders in Afghanistan, but all we do is blame Pakistan for the problem and, endlessly, repeat the cruel and unfeeling refrain: “Pakistan must do more.”  We even want them to dismantle their defenses against India (an enemy strengthened by America’s nuclear bias) to move forces to the Afghan frontier.

US attacks on Pakistan for ties to the Taliban and radical groups are, Pakistanis say, cynically hypocritical.  After all, the US and Pakistan worked together with many of these groups to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.  Is it perfectly OK to work with radical religious groups for American goals but a moral crime to use the same groups to protect Pakistan’s interests?

More, US threats against Iran threaten Pakistan’s economic interests and political stability — just as our failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute outrage Pakistani sensibilities and make our overall position in the region less stable.  Pakistanis darkly suspect that Indian money and Indian agents are responsible for violence in troubled parts of Pakistan and many believe that the US supports what Pakistanis believe are India’s efforts to build up its influence in northern Afghanistan.

Many Pakistanis believe that on top of everything else, the US is now getting ready either to cut and run in Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan with the thankless task of sweeping up, or, worse, handing northern Afghanistan to India, forcing Pakistan into a two front confrontation with its larger and richer rival.  Pakistan has no greater strategic nightmare than to see India entrenched in Afghanistan; many Pakistanis are completely convinced that this is what the end result of America’s Afghan policies will be.

Harsh! Mead has spent the last couple weeks traveling around Pakistan doing his academic thing, which means he does his ‘best to try to understand what it is that people object to in American foreign policy and, at times, American culture and life.  Before I arrive,..I’ll read up on the history and on contemporary issues and try to get a sense of the economic situation….I’ll come up with some working hypotheses about what is going on, or going wrong, in the relationship.  Once on the ground, I spend as much time as possible absorbing the local news media, interacting with journalists, officials, students, intellectuals and diplomats to test and refine my hypotheses. I keep at this until I find that more and more of the local people I meet with think that I ‘get it’, and it’s at that point that the conversations get really interesting.’

As one can see from Mead’s assessment of Pakistani interests in regards to the Afghan state, there are many areas of concern. First and foremost is their fear of Indian encirclement. An Afghan state too closely allied with India is considered a non-starter for Islamabad. Another threat that Mead mostly underplays in this section is the present violent turmoil being wrought by the Pakistani Taliban inside of the Pakistani state. The military has benefited from these insurgent forces inside of Afghanistan, but there have started to wreck havoc internally, with Karachi becoming a spot for near daily scenes of planned violent actions. That being said, Mead’s analysis puts the insecurities of Islamabad regarding its relationship with the United States, Afghanistan, and India under a bright, transparent light.

What do you think of Mead’s Pak-Vision?

Tags: Afghanistan, Islamic extremism, Islamist, Pakistan, terrorism

“I’m not sure anger is the right word. I just — I think mortified, appalled,” Gates said.

“And if I’m angry, it is because I believe that this information puts those in Afghanistan who have helped us at risk. It puts our soldiers at risk because … our adversaries can learn a lot about our techniques, tactics and procedures from the body of these leaked documents,” he said. “You know, growing up in the intelligence business, protecting your sources is sacrosanct.”

The leader of Wikileaks has come under increasing fire for these leaks and the United States Department of Justice is looking into ways it can legally go after him. He deserves all the heat coming to him. Also culpable is the three major newspapers that published the reports. Though they were much more careful with the classified information they still published secret information that the US government told them not to. Even worse, they gave Wikileaks the attention it craved and legitimized the organization by basically partnering with it on this story.

The impact of these released documents will only truly be known as time passes, but it definitely does not help the war effort and likely causes more Americans to view the American presence with suspicion. President Obama’s base on the left, including several US Congress members, have used this latest incident to question the President’s current strategy. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been very shaky in her support for the Afghan war effort and this didn’t change when she came onto ABC’s Sunday morning talk show yesterday:

“How does this figure into our protecting the American people? Is it worth it?” Pelosi asked rhetorically.

“Is it worth it?” Amanpour repeated pointedly. “Is it worth it?”

“That is the question,” Pelosi replied.

“But that’s my question to you,” Amanpour pressed.

“Well we will, as I said, we will see the metrics as they unfold in the next few months,” the Speaker said.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement! President Obama had better hope (even better use some political capital on the issue) that he has more steadfast friends from his own Party than Mrs. Speaker.

In Robert Kagan’s excellent piece of early American history, ‘Dangerous Nation‘, a complex picture is painted of an exceptional country, whose growth endangered societies both near and far. In ‘Nation’, Kagan in great depth profiles how the people who founded and grew the United States had to deal with an enormity of challenges of the physical (great power rivals of Europe, Native American tribes, untamed frontiers) and ideological (as a liberal republic in world of monarchies and despots) nature. The superpower we see before us today was not just born that way, it had to become one. And it was not easy!

Kagan tightly ties together the seemingly contradictory notion of a United States as both a practical realist nation and one born with a revolutionary ideology that continues to shape how it sees the world. In Kagan’s words: ‘Americans did not form a nation and then embark on a foreign policy to protect and further its interests. They began a foreign policy in order to establish themselves as a nation.’ The American liberal, democratic republic was a challenge to the monarchies of Europe and the native peoples of the American continent, but as Kagan accurately points out, back then, as well as today, the American people did not view themselves as challengers or ‘dangerous’. In fact, most Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward ‘passivity, indifference, and insularity’. Though Kagan may be going a bit over the top here, he is basically correct in noting that Americans view themselves as much more passive than the peoples of the world perceive us. ‘Dangerous Nation’s main themes of early US foreign policy are well laid out in this paragraph:

The statesman of the founding era were not unfamiliar with the ways of power politics, however. They were idealists in the sense that they were committed to a set of universal principles, the defense and promotion of which they believed would improve the human condition as well as further American interests. But they were practical idealists. In their moment of weakness they employed the strategies of the weak. They viewed alliances as necessary but dangerous. They denigrated so called power politics and claimed an aversion to war and military power, all realms in which they were far inferior to the European great powers. They extolled the virtues of commerce, where Americans competed on a more equal plane. They appealed to international law as the best means of regulating the behavior of nations, knowing that they had not other means of constraining the great powers of Britain and France. They adjusted themselves to an unhappy reality that they knew to be very much at odds with their aspirations. They looked forward to the day when, as a more powerful nation, they might begin to shape the world to conform more closely to their ideals. Fortunately for the young United States, the world was configure in such a way as to make this possible.”

Robert Kagan’s ‘Dangerous Nation’, Page 57

Besides a general analysis of the broad themes of American foreign policy from its colonial beginnings til the Spanish-American war at the turn of the 20th century, ‘Nation’ offers in-depth coverage of several crucial inner conflicts in American history. The three most intriguing conflicts detailed were the battle between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in guiding the nascent Republic, the foreign policy schizophrenia of slavery, and the still under emphasized great power coming out party of the Spanish-American war.

Kagan devotes three extensive chapters on how slavery affected American foreign policy and stances for most of the 19th century. This coverage showcases another one of Kagan’s main themes; the prominent influence of partisan politics affecting American foreign affairs. For example, in the section ‘Northern Containment, Southern Expansion’, Kagan describes how the interests of the southern states differed from the northern states in almost all cases of territorial expansion, including the Louisiana Purchase. This is an important lesson for those who believe that partisan politics ends at the ‘water’s edge’. This theme can be vividly seen in the domestic debates to decide if the US should go to war with Spain over Cuba, with many Republican operatives being against the war, before they were for it.

The study of the America’s early foreign policy is still lacking, but ‘Dangerous Nation’ joins WR Mead’s ‘Special Providence‘ and Merrill/Paterson’s ‘Major Problems in American Foreign Relations‘ series in bringing light to a fascinating topic.

Tags: America Exceptionalism, American histroy, Book Review, Robert Kagan, US foreign policy

Tags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan troop surge, American left, American right, Bush, domestic politics, Obama

Charles Krauthammer chimes in on ‘Flight of the Intellectuals’ main theme:

The Pentagon review of the Fort Hood shooting runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan’s Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor.”

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers varied in nationality, education, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

Tags: Add new tag, Islam, Islamic extremism, Islamist, Obama, political correctness, terrorism

I just finished Paul Berman’s ‘Flight of the Intellectuals‘ and while not a tour de force like its prequel, ‘Terror and Liberalism’, was a phenomenal read. I will give a full length review after my vacation (warning GPP is going on a two week travel break), but right now I will highlight to key part of the book’s conclusion. This section features Berman building his theme of Western intellectuals failing to stand up to the Islamist’s ideology, which he clearly lays out was partly fathered by European fascism, while at the same time spitting venom at actual liberal people with Muslim backgrounds, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The following sections immediately follow a listing of Western intellectuals (some with Muslim backgrounds) who require bodyguards to protect them from Islamist violent radicals. The list is sadly long. Enough of me, here’s Berman:

‘And so, Salman Rushdie has metastasized into into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia-its Muslims free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including other people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Fear-mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip a bizarre ideology-has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life. And yet, if someone like Pascal Bruckner intones a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin-”Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?”- and onward to the litany about fascism. In the New York Times Magazine Ian Buruma held back from hinting even obliquely at the genuinely fascist influences on [Tariq] Ramadan’s grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death-Hassan al-Banna, who spoke highly of Adolf Hitler and helped the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem escape from getting tried at Nuremburg. Yet Pascal Bruckner, the liberal-here is somebody, Buruma would have us think, on the brink of fascism!’….[Pg. 296]

‘The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, contrasted unfavorably in the very best of magazines with Tariq Ramadan, who is celebrated as a bridge between cultures-Ramadan, an alumnus of the anti-Rushdie Islamic Foundation in Britain. Ramadan, who, even in 2009, managed to commend in a single sentence of his book Radical Reform both Sheikh Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb, and the Egyptian sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, who publicly defended the assassination of Foda. And yet, if there is a menace to society, nowadays it is said to come from Hirsi Ali or some other vocal and articulate opponent of the violent sheikhs-the European intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds who, in their unforgivable departure from the child-like image of how Muslims are supposed to behave, have arrogated to themselves the right to update a few ideas from John  Locke or John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. During the Rushdie affair, liberals who called for courage were applauded. Liberals from Muslim backgrounds were positively celebrated. But not today.’ [pg. 298]

Hopefully, you were able to follow Berman’s thinking in these paragraphs. If so, please give GPP your thoughts. If not, please give GPP your confused thoughts.

Tags: intellectuals, Islam, Islamic extremism, Paul Berman, terrorism

Here are a few observations from Michael Hasting’s Rolling Stone article

Obama-McChrystal seemed to be on same page in terms of actual Afghanistan war strategy/policy - This has been an underreported aspect of the whole incident. McChrystal and his aides were mainly critiquing (if ‘bite me’ is a critique) the political process and not the actual policy strategy. President Obama emphasized this nicely in his address yesterday. Now can Gen. Petraeus be successful with the same group of civilian politicans (Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrooke) in his Afghan camp?

So Gen. McChrystal is now a goner and Gen. Petraeus is back to save the day yet again. Anyway you cut it, this is a sad situation that can only make a difficult situation even worse. Gen. Petraeus is obviously a capable leader and he fits in well with the counterinsurgency strategy which we are smack in the middle of implementing, but this whole incident reaks of an overall policy in dissarray. The three month review process by the Obama administration, culminating the announcement of a troop surge with a definite time limit, created fissures that have obviously not been filled. Vice President Biden, Envoy Richard Holbrooke, and Ambassador Eikenberry, all targets of Gen. McChrystal and his aides in the Rolling Stones article, in one way or another voiced reservations about Gen. McChrystal’s plan for the Afghan war effort, with Biden and Eikenberry being outright opposition. Gen. Petraeus is adeft at Washington DC politics as he is at counterinsurgency and we can only hope that he and Obama’s civilian team can finally get on the same page. The only winners in this embarrassing incident are the Taliban.

I’ll have some more comments on the Rolling Stone article, McChrystal, Obama, Petraeus in a little bit

Tags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan troop surge, McChrystal, Obama, Petraeus

I have been critical of some of the post-modern tendencies in the foreign policy of many of Europe’s leading states, and rightfully so. As much as many of us would wish, many of the world’s most intractable problems cannot be solved by aid, diplomacy, or institutionalism alone. A willingness to use a balance of tools is needed in most cases. That being said, the progress of that the states and people of Europe have made in the past 60 odd years is a remarkable achievement in global security and peace. An achievement that none of us should take for granted. A peaceful, democratic Europe seems especially fortunate when one looks at world facing increasing challenges (China’s rise, North Korean bombast, Iranian nukes, flotillas from hell, Brazil and Turkey alliances becoming muddled, international terrorism, financial crises, etc.) to worldwide stability. So let’s be thankful that Europe is at peace (if not financially, at least security-wise).

I googled 'Europe at peace' and this is what showed up. So I present to you the visualization of Europe at Peace!

Here’s well-regarded IR scholar and soft power advocate Professor Joseph S. Nye on why Europe and the EU are an influential and positive force in the world:

Europe does face severe demographic problems, but size of population is not highly correlated with power, and predictions of Europe’s downfall have a long history of failing to materialize. In the 1980s, analysts spoke of Euro-sclerosis and a crippling malaise, but in the ensuing decades Europe showed impressive growth and institutional development….

The American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik makes the similar argument that European nations, singly and collectively, are the only states other than the US that are able to “exert global influence across the full spectrum from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ power. Insofar as the term retains any meaning, the world is bipolar, and is likely to remain so over the foreseeable future.”

Moravcsik argues that the pessimistic prognosis is based on a 19th-century realist view in which “power is linked to the relative share of aggregate global resources and countries are engaged in constant zero-sum rivalry.” Moreover, as he points out, Europe is the world’s second military power, with 21 percent of the world’s military spending, compared to 5 percent for China, 3 percent for Russia, 2 percent for India, and 1.5 percent for Brazil.

Tens of thousands of troops from the EU’s member states have been deployed outside of their home countries in Sierra Leone, Congo, Ivory Coast, Chad, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. In terms of economic power, Europe has the world’s largest market, and represents 17 percent of world trade, compared to 12 percent for the US. Europe also dispenses half of the world’s foreign assistance, compared to 20 percent for the US.

But all this potential strength may be to no avail if Europeans do not solve the immediate problems stemming from the financial markets’ loss of confidence in the euro. All who admire the European experiment must hope that they succeed.

Tags: Europe, soft power