by David Steven | Feb 9, 2008 | South Asia
These are dark days for Pakistan.
Eighteen months ago, when I was first in Islamabad, Pakistanis could see a route that would take the country towards greater democracy and political stability. For sure, there were fears about rising extremism and anger about American influence, but the general mood was confident.
Pakistan would not follow Iran towards revolution; Afghanistan towards anarchy; or Iraq on the road to disintegration. Its society and institutions were more resilient than that. Progress might be messy and compromised, but things were unlikely to get worse.
But then on 9 March 2007 – less than a year ago – came the disastrous clash between General Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan’s Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Musharraf was stunned when Chaudhry refused his order to resign and by the protests that followed. His humiliation was complete when Chaudhry was reinstated to his role in July.
Overnight, the general was transformed from world leader to tragic figure. Not in the trivial sense that we should feel sorry for him, but with the original meaning of a man whose flaws had begun to trap and entangle him. Suddenly, the talk was no longer of his power and competence, but of his vanity and weakness. He had lost control of his own destiny. At any time, his supporters in the army and US administration might decide enough is enough, and abandon him to his fate.
But still the country had options. One was Nawaz Sharif, the man Musharraf ousted in his 1999 coup. When I was here in October, Nawaz tried to return to challenge a man he loathes and despises. But he got no further than the airport lounge, before being sent back into exile in one of his lavish overseas pads.
And then there was the deal with Benazir, Pakistan’s most famous daughter. Musharraf saw it as his get-out-of-jail card and the international community was falling over itself to be supportive. Whether or not they liked the proposed fudge, the Pakistanis I talked to understood it. They took comfort in the fact that they knew what was supposed to happen next.
But now they don’t, because of two further cataclysms.
On November 3rd, Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, moving against Chaudhry, the rest of the legal establishment, and the media. And finally, on December 27th, the assassination of Benazir, after a couple of months in which a squadron of suicide bombers had tracked her around the country.
Reportedly, Bhutto was resigned and fatalistic in the days before her death. Perhaps this explains her reckless decision to leave the safety of her bomb-proof car, sticking her head through an escape hatch to wave to supporters as the car inched away from a rally. Her attacker was standing only 2 metres away when he exploded the bomb, crushing her skull against the lip of the hatch.
It is hard to overestimate the shock that her death caused here in Pakistan or the mood of apprehension that has followed. People I have talked to describe is as the most traumatic day in Pakistan’s history, whether or not they were Benazir’s supporters. It marked the point where people began to give up hope and to consider the possibility that they do indeed live in a failing state.
“The crunch is coming,” a veteran political campaigner told me yesterday in Lahore.
“A good crunch or a bad crunch?” I asked.
“It could go either way,” he replied gloomily, “but it seems that we are staring into a black hole.”
by Alex Evans | Feb 8, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Gideon Rachman was with the dynamic duo as they touched down in Kabul. He reports that the security was so tight that it would have been impossible for the pair to form any impression of their own of what was actually happening:
The “security situation” here is so dicey that the arrival of the American secretary of state and Britain’s foreign secretary could not be advertised in advance. In fact my Foreign Office companions became highly agitated when I mentioned on an “open line” (ie a mobile phone call home) that I was sitting in a motorcade at Kabul airport, with Rice and Miliband in the car ahead, waiting to be swept along to the president’s palace.
The security is so tight that it must be virtually impossible for visiting western dignitaries to form any spontaneous impression of Afghanistan. Rice and Miliband arrived early this morning on an unadvertised flight from London. They were immediately put on a military plane to Kandahar – but did not leave the military base there. Then it was back to Kabul, and a short drive to see President Karzai on a road that had been cleared of all traffic. Then it was time to visit some more troops in a gym at Nato HQ. And that’s it. Condi is off tonight. Miliband is staying for a formal dinner. I’m sure they will have had “frank discussions” with President Karzai. But they must be completely reliant on their diplomats for any impression of how things are going.
And, he adds, he’s been hearing some worrying comparisons:
I’m slightly disturbed by occasional echoes of the Russians’ unhappy period here. When there was some discussion about whether our plane would be able to land on a snowy Kabul airport, an Afghan remarked – “The Russians always landed in the snow.” And when there was talk of sending girls to school in Afghanistan, I was told that the Russians had been keen on that too.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 7, 2008 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
Gary Anderson from George Washington University has a good piece in the Washington Post. Al-Qaeda is losing. As he argues:
The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaeda is making a comeback from its rout in Afghanistan. Many point to its success in killing Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and to its support of Islamic insurgents there as evidence. Not so. Al-Qaeda is waning. Its decline has less to do with our success than with the institutional limitations of the al-Qaeda organization. Simply stated, to know al-Qaeda closely is not to love it.
Everyplace where al-Qaeda has gained some measure of control over a civilian population, it has quickly worn out its welcome. This happened in Kabul and in Anbar province in western Iraq. It may well happen in Pakistan as a reaction to the killing of Bhutto.
No one likes to be brutalized and dominated by foreigners. The weakness of al-Qaeda is that everywhere it goes its people are strangers. This is no way to build a worldwide caliphate.
Why, then, are we supposedly losing the information war in the Muslim world, and why has there not been more of an outcry among Muslims over this slaughter of innocents? A big part of the reason is that we spend too much time wanting to be liked rather than turning Muslim anger on our enemies.
We preach some values that are viewed as alien and threatening to the traditional order of things. Our popular culture is seen as decadent at best and downright threatening at worst in traditional cultures. Our message isn’t selling. We can’t change what we are, nor would we want to. No matter how much the government may disapprove, the government’s official propaganda will be overwhelmed by the deluge, both positive and negative, from the popular media. We need to accept this fact and move on, rather than waste more millions on strategic communications “charm campaigns.”
What we can do is to expose our Islamic extremist enemies for what they are. The people of Afghanistan and Anbar found this out the hard way and threw the rascals out. But when al-Qaeda kills scores of innocents, we report it as a statistic without context. We may see weeping relatives and bloodstained bodies from a distance, on video or in photographs, but they are depersonalized, and people quickly become desensitized to anonymous images. Ironically, Stalin was right: One death is a tragedy; millions are a statistic. We need to help Muslims understand how these people really treat other Muslims.
The original Islamic movement spread its doctrine by a combination of military action and compassion. Charity was a key tenet. This is largely why Hamas and Hezbollah gain a degree of popular support in the areas they control. That ingredient is missing in the al-Qaeda/Taliban approach to the world. To them, winning hearts and minds means, “Agree with us or else.” That is largely the reason that the U.S. government dropped its early “for us or against us” approach. It has taken us some time, but we seem to be recovering from that approach.
by Alex Evans | Feb 5, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
The Foreign Office launched its new Strategic Framework yesterday. It seems rather a grand title for a leaflet that stretches to two pages of A4, but perhaps that means we can hope for a fuller exposition in due course. Here’s your cut-out-and-keep guide to how it’s different from the old strategic framework:
Stuff that was in before and is still in now: WMD, terrorism, conflict prevention, the EU, a high growth economy including support for UK business, energy security, climate change, human rights & good governance, migration, consular stuff, overseas territories.
Stuff that was in before but has disappeared: Organised crime (“reducing the harm to the UK from international crime, including drug trafficking, people smuggling and money laundering”); sustainable development.
Stuff that has appeared for the first time: More emphasis on conflict resolution (“including through an integrated civil-military approach to peacekeeping, stabilisation and sustained post-conflict peacebuilding”); an explicit reference to the Millennium Development Goals [happy faces over at DFID, no doubt]; and a reference to the international system in its own right [rather than just in the context of conflict prevention, as under Margaret Beckett].
FCO say that they’ve shrunk the list of priorities from ten priorities to four policy goals (counter-terrorism and weapons proliferation; prevent and resolve conflict; low-carbon, high-growth global economy; effective international institutions) and three essential services (support British economy; support British nationals abroad; support managed migration to Britain). But given that there are three distinct sub-points under each policy goal, and that 95% of the content of the old priorites is still in there, I’m politely sceptical.
Still, let’s offer up a small prayer of thanks for David Miliband’s special gift to us all: the defenestration of sustainable development, the world’s leading all-things-to-all-people concept. On the other hand, it’s a bit worrying that resource scarcity has effectively disappeared as a result, especially on the food and water front. A missed trick there (especially since Miliband really pioneered the concept of ‘one planet living’ hard while he was at Defra); it could have fitted in nicely alongside the energy security stuff.
So what happens now? David Miliband’s statement to Parliament on the new framework says a little about what it all means in practice:
We will be increasing substantially the overall level of resources the FCO puts into counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation; climate change; Afghanistan and other conflict regions; and key international institutions. All these areas will receive additional staff and money.
We have also decided that we should adapt the FCO’s overseas network of posts to align it more closely with our own priorities and those of HMG as a whole. So we will be shifting a proportion of our diplomatic staff from Europe and the Americas to Asia, the Middle East and other parts of the world, while continuing to sustain our global flexibility and reach…
In order to put more resources into these new priority areas and to sharpen our strategic focus, it is necessary to reduce the resources the FCO puts into certain other issues, notably where other Whitehall Departments in London are better placed to direct HMG’s international priorities, in particular in the areas of sustainable development, science and innovation, and crime and drugs.
Miliband also said that “we will be taking forward the detailed planning and implementation over the next few months, inside the FCO and with other Government Departments”. As that process gets underway, it would be good to hear more about FCO’s strategy in two particular areas:
1. Its role on policy synthesis. As David and I set out in our paper last April on Fixing the Foreign Office, one of the core problems in UK foreign policy is that with domestic departments all leading internationally on their little bit of foreign policy (Defra on climate, BERR on energy and so on), we have a problem with policy coherence arising from the fact that all of these organisational silos emphatically do not add up to a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts. Traditionally, overcoming this would have been a Cabinet Office job. But today, the Cabinet Office just doesn’t have the resources for such a complex task. So does FCO have a special role in effecting a strategic policy synthesis and in joining up the dots? And if so, how does it work?
2. Its theory of influence. Miliband is already clear that the new empowerment of non-state actors in foreign policy is a Big Deal (c.f. his idea of the ‘civilian surge’). But if diplomats’ work now extends far beyond just talking to other diplomats, does the FCO have a clear approach towards leveraging influence in this new context? (This is the question that David and I will be tackling in our forthcoming Demos pamphlet on The New Public Diplomacy.) And if so, how does it work?
