The other night, at a cocktail party, I excused myself from holding forth about Pakistan so that I could refill my wine glass. While I stepped away, the gentleman to whom I was talking whispered to Kathleen, “Your husband sure knows a lot.” Indeed, I was shamelessly gratified, the next morning, to find nearly everything that I had said echoed (as it were) in Lawrence Wright’s latest contribution to The New Yorker‘s Annals of Diplomacy, “The Double Game.” I did know a lot — and I learned almost all of it from reading articles at 3 Quarks Daily. 

I recommend the site highly, especially to Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan diplomat whose Op-Ed piece in the Times, “Demanding Answers From Pakistan,” struck me this morning as almost hygienically pure of common sense, not to mention common knowledge about Pakistan. Mr Khalilzad envisions diplomacy as a sort of chess game, which every nation plays in the same way and with a single purpose. Did diplomacy ever function in that way? I understand that treaties are designed to pretend that it does, but beyond that I have always understood that each nation plays the diplomacy game according to its characteristic bent. It would be treason not to do so. Every sovereign power owes a far greater duty of care to its subject people than it does to other sovereigns, and most sovereign powers represent multiple constituencies with inconsistent, sometimes colliding interests. And while it is laudable to encourage one’s own sovereign to play the game fairly and candidly, it is childish to expect other sovereigns to do so.  

This is why the second prong of Mr Khalilzad’s “two-stage strategy” for obliging Pakistan to behave more like an ally is so fatuous.

Then we should follow up with demands that Pakistan break the backbone of Al Qaeda in Pakistan by moving against figures like Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; remove limits on the Predator drone campaign; uproot insurgent sanctuaries and shut down factories that produce bombs for use against American and Afghan soldiers; and support a reasonable political settlement in Afghanistan.

This assumes a sovereign unity in Pakistan that simply does not exist. Lawrence Wright quotes the late Benazir Bhutto’s description of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate as “a state within the state.” Then he proceeds to write about S Wing, a supposedly secret organization comprised of retired ISI officials that operates within (or alongside) the ISI. It is thought that if Osama bin Laden had any support from Pakistani officials, it was the men of S Wing who knew where he was and who respected his cover. It would seem that the official government of Pakistan has little or no say in the doings of S Wing. The Predator drone campaign is understandably unpopular with Pakistani people, and expanding it in any way would increase the unpopularity of the government, which whatever its party affiliation or campaign promises is invariably drawn from the wealthy, largely feudal (landowning) elite. This ruling class has undertaken for decades to distract disaffected Pakistanis with the pursuit and acquisition of Kashmir, which was foolishly allotted to India in the last hours of the Raj. Pakistan’s dealing with Afghanistan — another country that, as we have found to our cost, harbors a number of mutually hostile elements that jockey for nominal control of the nominal government — are in contrast cloudy and multifarious. It is unclear what Pakistan stands to gain from “a reasonable political settlement” in Afghanistan, and Mr Khalilzad’s blather actually serves to underline this point. 

It is in neither America’s interest nor Pakistan’s for relations to become more adversarial. But Pakistan’s strategy of being both friend and adversary is no longer acceptable.

While Mr Wright and many others entertain the possibility of withholding financial aid to the government of Pakistan, in retaliation for the double game that Pakistan appears to have been playing (against itself as much as the United States), that option figures nowhere in Mr Khalilzad’s four-pronged backup plan (in case the “two-stage strategy” fails). Doubtless his diplomatic proposals are pregnant with significance for diplomatic insiders, not so much for their patent content as for their timing (and Mr Khalilzad is in any case far more concerned about Afghanistan than he is about Pakistan). But I can’t imagine what use the editors of the Times expected the bulk of their most educated and well-informed readers might make of Mr Khalilzad’s boilerplate. It’s almost criminal of them to make precious Op-Ed space available to a writer who has so little genuine information to offer.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.