I suspect Matt’s always thought that Pakistan is the more important half of the Af-Pak clusterfuck, and today he comes out and says it. I’ve been beating around that bush for a while now too. Recently, however, I’ve been pondering the possibility that too much involvement in Pakistan might be a mistake as well.

I just finished carefully re-reading John Lukacs’ sketch of George Kennan last night and was struck anew by Kennan’s prescient calls to prudence in international relations, his conviction that most problems in the world are by their very nature too complicated to be “solved” in any meaningful way, and his counsel, therefore, that America be extremely selective in its engagements.

Remaking Afghanistan certainly doesn’t reach Kennan’s threshold for American involvement. One is tempted to wonder whether Pakistan does either. It’s not that the stakes aren’t high—nuclear weapons in a failed state are about as high as they can get. It’s that the paucity of our policy options and leverage is matched with a frightful lack of insight as to what’s happening on the ground, which makes the further improvement of our options seem unlikely. Indeed, the situation is so fluid and murky that even Pakistani journalists close to the events seem to be baffled by each new turn. It’s not that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with Pakistan, Kennan might say, but that we should be very hesitant about just “doing something” lest we muck it up more.

Joe Klein reports that Bruce Riedel, head of Obama’s “Af-Pak” strategy review, thinks we should focus our energies on the Pakistan problem:

“Afghanistan pales in comparison to the problems in Pakistan,” said an official familiar with Riedel’s thinking. “Our primary goal has to be to shut down the al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens on the Pakistan side of the border. If that can be accomplished, then the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes manageable.”

That’s music to my ears, as far as it goes. A bit further on, presumably the same source clarifies:

“Obviously, we’re not going to invade Pakistan,” said a senior member of the Riedel review. “We have to convince the Pakistanis to do the job. But we haven’t had much luck with that in the past.”

That is the crux of it, of course: there are no good solutions for Pakistan. Nevertheless, I still don’t see what an attempt at Afghan state-building gets us, except dead soldiers and an even more stretched budget.

Andrew Sullivan, responding to Christopher Hitchens’ claim that an Obama presidency will mean “more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less”, says:

I can face the idea of a president Obama taking on and finally defeating Osama. In fact, that’s the major reason why I favor his candidacy… . Obama will try to correct the massive stretegic error of the Iraq invasion and pivot Western allies toward a greater focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe that Obama will be able to do this with much less global p.r. blowback than McCain and that the support president Obama will get from our European allies will dwarf McCain’s.

First of all, I should point out that I, too, would welcome a President Obama “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” For what it’s worth, I could face a Honeydew-Beaker Administration “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” (Hey, I wouldn’t even mind if it happened in the next 3-4 months, under Bush, but I get the feeling that happenstance might upset someone…)

What I really wanted to draw attention to is Sullivan’s assumption that Obama will be able to formally and officially expand the Afghanistan problem into an Afghanistan-Pakistan problem with “much less global p.r. blowback than McCain.” Au contraire. I expect there will be more blowback against Obama.

Right now, he can ride high on a wave of global public support, but those thronging masses in Berlin and elsewhere are supporting him because they expect something in return: a massive rupture with Bush-era foreign policy. Since this is inchoate mob opinion we’re talking about here, it wouldn’t do to overanalyze it; basically they want more talk, fewer bombs, and they think he’s the one who’s going to give that to them. Americans, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take him at his word on his promises to get tough with Pakistan (though they still favor McCain on national security issues).

Something tells me that, if it comes to a choice between upsetting Americans’ expectations, and upsetting the world’s, the President of the United States is going to side with…well, the United States. And this is going to cut across a number of issues besides Afghanistan/Pakistan, as Slate pointed out awhile back:

If his diplomats or military advisers told him that the Iranians perceived his willingness to talk as a sign of weakness, he might reconsider his pledge to meet with the Iranian president as quickly as he now promises. Maybe when presented with confidential data gathered by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, he would be less keen to drop all the measures taken by Bush and criticized by the opposition. Maybe his belief that “the United States needs to lead the world in ending this genocide” in Darfur would put him at odds with reality or with some members of the international community. In each of these cases, Obama would suffer the consequences of high expectations. He would be trapped between the desire to preserve his high standing in the world and the need to act in ways that would erode that standing. Of course—his advisers would argue—it is better to have this political goodwill in the first place. But even if that were true, political goodwill should always be handled delicately. Starting modestly and building up is also an option, sometimes a better one if you aim to keep expectations realistic. (This, I think, is the way John McCain would play his cards internationally.)

It’s undeniable that the “get tough on Pakistan” rhetoric is good for Obama’s short-term political interests. The world simply isn’t listening as closely to the candidates’ statements as are Americans, so it’s easier for them to bask in the unadulterated glow of St. Barack. But if Obama wins in November, he may soon come to realize that hell hath no fury like a Berliner scorned.

Eli Lake at the Sun sums up what we know about the Al Qaeda connection to Bhutto’s killing: so far, only an Italian news agency is reporting having heard from Al Qaeda spokesmen confirming the outrage.

Lake considers that the killer may have had ties with ISI, but concludes that:

If Bhutto’s killer was also a member of Pakistan’s military or security services, it does not rule out an affiliation with Al Qaeda or another jihadist outfit.

Fine, fine, some members of ISI probably share kooky dreams of global domination via a resurrected caliphate with other damaged malcontents who call themselves Al Qaeda. If Lake was being more honest, though, the proper way to identify these people would be as ISI first, not Al Qaeda. ISI in Pakistan is a concrete problem for the United States. Framing this in terms of Al Qaeda does nothing to help us understand exactly what we’re up against. It just amplifies “War On Terror” nonsense talk to a shrill pitch.

As reliably shoddy as analysis often is at NR, one can count on John Derbyshire to inject an invigorating contrarian opinion, which, while also oversimplifying, is a tonic against the hysterics otherwise found there.

Today, on Pakistan:

On balance, I think we should be sanguine about Pakistan — or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Iraq — going jihadist. Jihadism is a sure route to national poverty and inconsequentiality. If you have oil, you can keep something going for a while, as Iran has demonstrated, but the next Soviet-sized threat to the U.S.A. will not be a jihadist power.

For a place like Pakistan, the choice is really:

1. Poverty, stagnation, and mischief under jihadist rulers, or

2. Some kind of halting progress towards modernization and secularization, with some occasional mischief, under a gangster-dictator like Saddam, or

3. A moderately open and modernizing government, probably run by the military, that is not hostile to us but can’t actually help us much against jihadist mischief because too many of their people are sympathetic to it.

It’s not a happy selection of choices, but it seems to me that is the complete menu. We of course have to deal with the mischief as it arises, to the degree that it impinges on us and our interests. I don’t know any reason to think we are incapable of doing so. The third option actually makes it harder, though — as we have learned in Pakistan.

Indeed. Un-bunch thy panties, oh stalwart warriors of the right. Pakistan’s a mess, to be sure, but there’s no need to start calling for the genocide of its peoples.

In the previous paragraphs of your no doubt hastily-composed rant, you assert that:

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism.

Let’s just assume, to be charitable, that you’re eliding nuance for the sake of a clean and forceful argument. So what exactly do you mean by this?

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

If ever one needs reassurance that the right’s ideologues are intellectually, strategically and morally bankrupt, one can readily turn to the National Review’s armchair pundits. NR’s website is a comforting place to visit in some perverse way.

In perhaps the most unsurprising turn of events of the past decade, Benazir Bhutto was hastily dispatched off this mortal coil, more than likely for threatening the status quo hold on power by the Pakistani military and ISI.

Though in the simplest analysis one may be tempted to point the finger directly at Musharraf, it’s likelier that this was undertaken at the behest of power brokers in the military. Andrew Sullivan, before descending into mawkish memorials, astutely observed:

The assassin was a suicide bomber, but he shot her first, and shot her in the neck. If you were part of the military or ISI, it would be in your interest to shoot Bhutto to ensure she was killed and then blow yourself up both to associate the murder with Jihadists outside the military and to destroy the evidence.

Expect to hear specialists in the coming days blame an inchoate “Jihadism” for the outrage. Jihadists fear democracy, as the narrative goes, and Bhutto was a beacon of hope in a benighted land on the cusp of reclaiming its democratic tradition.

Don’t buy into that simplistic tripe. It’s not about democracy or a threat to Islamism. The only question worth asking is who in the military was responsible. Was it the secularist old guard who feared that Bhutto’s ascendancy would undermine their ability to keep Pakistan together? Or was it an Islamist fifth column within the ISI flexing its muscles?

May you live in interesting times…

The New Republic really screwed up by losing Spencer Ackerman, one of the best reporters on national security matters of our generation. It’s not just that Ackerman gets good stories and does good analysis, it’s that he can write.

Here he is at The American Prospect, on the new hare-brained scheme to export the Anbar Awakening to Pakistan:

Imagine the Bush administration’s war cabinet as a drunken gambler during a moment of sobriety-inducing panic. The fortune he thought he accumulated has proven illusory, and most of the money he brought to the casino is gone. His throat is dry and his head is pounding. The display of his cell phone shows numerous missed calls—all from his wife, who begged him not to indulge his worst habits, and now pleads with him to come home. Three facts concentrate his addled mind: he is coated in shame, he is still in the casino, and he has a few dollars more.

My only quibble with the article, substance-wise, is regarding the success or failure of the Anbar Awakening in Iraq: while it’s likely doomed to failure if we envision Iraq ending up as some sort of modern parliamentary democracy, it may set up a balance of terror between the Shiites and Sunnis where they may agree to some sort of confederal soft partition solution to the country.

I’d wager the Cheney faction in the White House is structuring just that kind of outcome. And why not? It prevents all of Iraq falling under Iran’s sway, thereby slightly ameliorating the major strategic blunder of this entire war. And given that Iraq’s federal structures are bound to be fragile, it guarantees a need for a sizable American military presence in the country well into the future, which helps balance against Iran’s newfound regional hegemony. What’s not to like?

*