Madame Ambassador, regimes that live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

February 10, The News Tribe (Pakistan):

Washington: Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Sherry Rehman has conveyed the reservations of Pakistan to the US administration on the US Congress Comittee debate on Balochistan was tantamount to helping terrorists operating in the province.
[...]
Ambassador Rehman, in her meetings with the congressmen and senior officials of the US administration, said that the Congress hearing was marked by a blatant disregard for history and inflammatory use of selective facts.

“It is deeply regrettable that the legislature of a country that calls itself a friend of Pakistan should allow itself to be used as a platform by those advocating the dismemberment of Pakistan and provide justification to terrorists attempting to hold Balochistan, and Pakistan, hostage,” she said.

The subcommittee on oversights and investigations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had held the hearing on 8th February with testimonies from human rights organizations and policy analysts on the human rights violations and target-killings in Balochistan.

”Pakistan views this hearing with serious concern and considers it unacceptable in no uncertain terms,” she stated adding that this kind of an exercise constituted interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs. The hearing, she observed, would be detrimental to building mutual trust and confidence and “will add to suspicions in Pakistan about the American motives in the region and concerning Pakistan.”
[...]

She was just getting warmed up; News Tribe has her full statement. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the ISI is under judicial fire in Pakistan for the first time in its existence. Does this mean the spy agency is indeed Gen. Kayani's sacrificial goat? We'll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile, back at the indoor putting green, the White House announced yesterday that President Obama and his national security team had undertaken a review of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. From (Pakistan's) Dawn, dateline today:

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama has reviewed efforts to improve ties with Pakistan with his national security team, the White House said on Thursday as media reports indicated that both countries were trying vigorously to reduce tensions that have bedevilled their relations for more than a year now.

At Wednesday’s meeting, President Obama “received an update on our engagement with the Pakistani government on a range of issues of mutual interest, including efforts to strengthen cooperation along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” the White House said.

US sources told Dawn that the White House had been regularly consulting Pakistan’s new ambassador in Washington, Sherry Rehman, on these issues.

Last week, Ambassador Rehman and a Pakistani defence team met the head of the US Central Command, General James N. Mattis, at the embassy. Soon after the meeting, The New York Times reported that Gen Mattis would visit Islamabad later this month for talks with Pakistani military chief and other officials and he might also convey an official apology on the Nov 26 Nato attack on a Pakistani post that killed 24 soldiers.

Pakistan has long demanded such an apology as an important step towards improving ties.

Another sign that both sides are making serious efforts to overcome their differences came earlier Thursday when US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter hinted that Nato supplies might have resumed through Pakistani airspace. Pakistan had blocked the supplies after the Nov 26 attack and Washington wanted Islamabad to open both land and air routes as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Ms Rehman is having another important meeting with senior White House officials on apparently accelerated attempts by both sides to rebuild a relationship that has gone sour.

She also met Senator John Kerry, who is considered the Obama administration’s unofficial envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan on Capitol Hill and is often sent to Islamabad for dealing with contentious issues.

Asked for comments on these meetings, Ms Rehman said she could not discuss ongoing negotiations but both sides were eager to leave behind the bitterness of the past year and move ahead with a new zeal.

“Pakistan is still reviewing the full spectrum of its relations with the US in a historic parliamentary review, which will anchor forthcoming decisions in the solid background of public consent,” she said.

So. I gather from Dawn that the good news to emerge from the review is that Obama decided not to give Kayani the shirt off his back. Did he decide to give Kayani the shirt off your back? This is Dawn we're talking about; the glass is always half full on Pakistan's side of the table. I assume we'll have more definite news of Obama's decisions when Gen. Mattis returns from his trip to Pakistan.

All right; I'm outta here until next week. Have fun reading last night's two posts. Oh, one more thing: last week I guessed that the German command at NATO leaked the top secret NATO report titled, The State of the Taliban, which fingered the ISI as aiding and abetting the Afghan Taliban. I also half-joked that the one time I was willing not to blame the British for something was probably the one time I was wrong about them.

It turns out that the only journalists to read the report prior to its leak worked for two British media outlets: the BBC and the (London) Times; this, according to the Economist.

Heh.

That doesn't make it definite that the leaker was with the British command but it is suggestive. The report was leaked on the eve of a NATO foreign ministers' meeting. The next day the Telegraph reported that a substantial cut in British combat troops would occur in 2013 -- a claim that a defense ministry spokesperson denied but in such a way as to make it seem that the troop cuts were always planned for that year. Not. According to the Telegraph.

Well, if it was the British, I don't hold it against them. The public had a right and a need to know about the report.

Okay, my weekend is now officially underway; I'm off to down a thimblefull of sherry, for medicinal purposes only, of course. Cheers!

Vanishing Act

Leon Panetta set off such an uproar on Wednesday afternoon with his mention of (maybe) a 2013 exit from Afghanistan for U.S. combat troops that -- well, you'll never guess what. By Thursday the topic of the leaked NATO report (leaked Wednesday morning) fingering Pakistan's support for the Afghan Taliban and other groups fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan was nowhere to be found on American TV!

Wait, I take that back -- maybe the BBC (U.S. version on PBS) spoke a sentence about it in passing or maybe I was hallucinating. Anyhow, with regard to the Afghan war, newscasts last night on both cable and broadcast TV stations were fixed on, nay welded to, discussions revolving around Panetta's remarks. These of course generated debates between talking heads about whether it was a good idea to end combat operations in 2013.

The problem was that after materializing a three-ring circus out of thin air, Panetta then had to explain to a bunch of confused defense ministers from NATO countries what he meant by his remarks:

(Reuters) - U.S. forces will cede the lead role in combat operations in Afghanistan next year, but will keep fighting alongside Afghan troops, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday, as the Obama administration struggled to clear up confusion over its Afghan exit strategy. Panetta surprised allies on Wednesday by suggesting the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan would end in 2013, the first time Washington had floated such a deadline.
[...]

Did Panetta or Obama or both of them stage a magic show, or were Panetta's remarks simply a panic reaction to the leadking of NATO report? The crystal ball is out for repairs again so I have no idea what really happened. One thing is clear, though: if the motive for leaking the NATO report was to raise public awareness about Pakistan's role in attacks on NATO troops, news of it vanished too quickly from the public sphere to make an impression. The report will be studied by defense analysts and country experts specializing in South Asian affairs, but its news value was overtaken by bigger news of the day.

Afghan War, Groundhog Day chapter

Many things happened with blinding speed yesterday after Washington awakened to the news, already all over Europe, Kabul, Tehran and Rawalpindi, of a leaked NATO report that pointed to Pakistan's ISI as supporting the Afghan Taliban's war against NATO troops. I haven't checked which press source broke the story yesterday morning, European time, but if the BBC wasn't the first it was among the first.

The leaked report coincided with a visit to Kabul by Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Hina Rabani Khar, and was leaked on the eve of a NATO defense ministers' meeting in Brussels, which U.S. SecDec Leon Panetta was preparing to attend.

The rest of the news day went by in a blur of rumors, speculations and damage-control, all of which heated up when Panetta announced to reporters (on the flight to Brussels, if I recall) that the U.S. "might" move up to 2013 the end of U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan instead of staying with the agreed-on timeline of the end of 2014.

By the evening, when Jennifer Griffin reported on Fox that an unnamed White House official told her that Panetta had jumped the gun and that Obama had planned to make the announcement of the 2013 pullout in May at the NATO summit in Chicago, the confusion threatened to collapse into farce, as diplomats and reporters scrambled to keep up with the spin from official sources here and abroad.

Here, three reports that provide a window on how the day shook out:

> It was announced yesterday after his meeting in Kabul with Pakistan's Foreign Minister that he'll attend a trilateral meeting in Pakistan on February 16-17 that will include a (presumably high-ranking) member of Iran's government. See this report from Online News (Pakistan) for details.

> Last night David S. Cloud reported for the Los Angeles Times:

By announcing a specific timetable, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is hoping to head off a push by military allies to pull out their Afghan forces more quickly. [...]

Last night Robert Burns reported on the situation for the Associated Press (with contributions from AP writer Anne Gearan). The report, headlined, Panetta: US combat in Afghanistan to end next year, is on the long side because it goes into detail to dispel, to the extent possible at this time, the confusion raised by Panetta's announcement. But I'm going to cherry pick just a few passages because I think they have significance with regard to the leaked NATO report (see my Feb. 1 post Who was the leaker at NATO?), which the Burns report doesn't mention, and leave you to pore over the rest:

[...] On his second trip to Europe since becoming Pentagon chief last July 1, Panetta is gathering with his counterparts at a delicate time for NATO, not only because of the uncertainty surrounding the military mission in Afghanistan but also because of a growing gap in military power between the U.S. and nearly all other European members of the alliance.

That chasm is not expected to narrow even as the U.S. reduces its defense budget by nearly $490 billion over the coming decade and reduces the size of the Army and Marine Corps.

The U.S. remains the leader of a 28-nation NATO, but the Obama administration has made no secret of its intention to shift focus toward Asia and the Middle East. It announced last week that it will remove two Army brigades from Europe in the next two years, leaving one in Germany and one in Italy. The alliance also is quietly discussing the possible withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Europe in coming years. The nuclear issue is on the agenda for the Brussels meeting.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, said last week that the two brigades being removed from Europe will be eliminated rather than reassigned to U.S. bases. Both are based in Germany — the 172nd Infantry Brigade, in Grafenwoehr, and the 170th Infantry Brigade, in Baumholder.

Odierno said that in the long run [Pundita emphasis] this change will benefit both the United States and its European partners because U.S. Army combat and support units will periodically rotate in and out of Europe for training and joint exercises that are designed to meet the needs of the European forces.
[...]

You will note from the rest of the report that Panetta brings up the money topic more than once.

One more point about the AP report: I don't like arguing with Burns, who is a respected veteran reporter, but I think he's wrong if he's implying that the sudden decision to move up the end of combat operations was motivated by Obama's campaigning for reelection. ("The [new] timeline fits neatly into the U.S. political calendar, enabling President Barack Obama to declare on the campaign trail this year that in addition to bringing all U.S. troops home from Iraq and beginning a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, he also has a target period for ending the U.S. combat role there.")

I think the Obama administration was caught flat-footed by the leak of such a highly sensitive NATO report, which goes further than any other report that's come to public light in pointing to the fact that the U.S. has been pandering to a regime that it has known aids and abets the killing of NATO troops.

The best Obama could do, to douse a scandal that could bring down his administration, was to immediately signal that he was yanking U.S. combat troops out of the sights of Pakistan's military/ISI as soon as possible.

Of course I could be wrong and the unnamed White House official could have been right; maybe it was Panetta who made the decision on his own initiative to announce a change in the timeline. If that's the case I'd say he saw the leaked report's danger to the Obama administration, and the Pentagon, faster than Obama did. The danger is very real given the implications of the leaked report. If a Republican had been in the White House when the report was leaked, by the start of next week ranking Democrats in Congress could have been calling for the President's impeachment.

The only way out for the Obama administration, other than announcing an early end to combat operations, would have been to signal a radically different U.S. approach to Pakistan. Obama and his counterparts in the other major NATO countries, who've also pandered to Pakistan's regime, have not to this point displayed the inclination to make such a change.

That's the way things stand, as official Washington prepares to awaken to Groundhog Day.