Moo Shu Pakistan and Washington's Baluchistan Problem: Calling Samantha Power! Hello? Samantha? Hello? Hello?

I was so depressed last night after I listened to 15 minutes of the latest Republican presidential hopeful debate that I went to jump out the nearest window, so it's a lucky thing I decided to visit the Glittering Eye first or I might be nursing a sprained toe right now. Dave Schuler's comments about Fareed Zakaria caused me to burst into surprised laughter. I thought I was the only one who'd noticed that Zakaria had turned out to be a complete ass. Refreshed and restored I braced myself for yet another night of wading through news on Pakistan and the Afghan War.

Two items caught my eye: Aziz Haniffa's January 20 summary for Rediff of a panel discussion at a Hudson Institute-hosted conference, Pakistan: The Crisis State.

Haniffa dutifully wastes his time and yours by quoting "noted South Asia expert" Stephen P. Cohen (NOT to be confused with my idol, Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen), who hangs out at Brookings Institution, and who wants the world to know that Pakistan is too nuclear to fail "implying that this is why it has got to [be] continually propped up by the likes of the United States."

So now we're deep in Thinktankistan territory, gas mask on and battery-powered gibberish decoder spitting out coordinates. The funniest quote is from Marvin Weinbaum, Scholar-in-Residence at The Middle East Institute:

I've been looking at Pakistan some 40 years now and as a Pakistan observer, I really don't know that there's been any time in that period when I would have characterised Pakistan as a 'normal' state. I know when you use the term crisis and you have a crisis all the time, the term crisis loses its meaning. So, I am asking here, whether there's something deeper involved here -- deeper in the body politic, deeper in the political culture of Pakistan, of which this is the latest and perhaps in the order of things, only of the most dangerous."

Please someone assure me it didn't take Weinbaum 40 years to arrive at that question.

The panel included Lisa Curtis, "former Central Intelligence Agency official and currently Senior Research Fellow for South Asian Affairs at the Heritage Foundation -- the conservative DC think tank." Curtis made an observation that I consider ominous:

If Pakistan feels that it needs to force the US to choose between India and Pakistan to have a strategic relationship, it's not going to happen. Yes, there has to be an understanding that yes, the United States would like a strategic partnership or relationship with Pakistan, but it's certainly not going to choose between India and Pakistan.

Given even the recent history India's government should not take that assurance to the bank, but the idea that Washington still wants Pakistan as a "strategic" partner is very bad news for Americans -- not to mention Afghans and Indians.

Lisa Curtis popped up again in the other report I noted, which is a January 19, 2012 Heritage Foundation background paper she co-authored with Derek Scissors titled The limits of the Pakistan-China alliance.

The gist of the paper will come as no surprise to Pundita readers but the authors provide considerable detail to shore their argument that the relationship between China and Pakistan is not as extensive or close as many in Washington believe; for that reason the paper is important. Or rather the paper would be important if not for the fact that Pakistan's water carriers in Washington will simply conjure another argument for the U.S. to maintain a "strategic" relationship with Pakistan if it's demonstrated that Washington's concerns about China's relationship with Pakistan are overblown.

The paper omits discussion of Beijing's increasing worries about Pakistan's designs on Afghanistan. And although Curtis and Scissors mention the glitch with the Gwadar Port deal in Baluchistan province, there is no discussion of what has become an extremely difficult problem for China's relationship with Pakistan -- That is the problem called 'The Pakistani military's atrocities in Baluchistan.'

To show you how popular any such discussion is in Washington, recently a former U.S. foreign service officer named M. Chris Mason had to go to a Canadian newspaper to get a media platform for his idea that the USA should consider supporting the Baluch independence movement. (Solve the Pakistan problem by redrawing the map; Globe and Mail, December 21, 2011.) But even Mason's tough-as-nails recommendation tactfully avoids mentioning the huge conundrum for Washington not to mention the 'international community' and the Human Rights crowd, to include Right to Protect hawks such as Samantha Power: Just how do you make an exception for the Pakistani military's atrocities in Baluchistan while you're yammering about the human rights violations of Assad's regime and when you advocated bombing Ghadafi's regime out of existence to protect the civil rights of freedom-seeking Libyans?

To put it all another way, how do all those human rights defenders keep covering for Pakistan's regime without appearing to be self-serving phonies? This is the great, unanswered question of the early 21st Century. And it's one of the many reasons I keep advising Washington to cut its relations with Islamabad to the bare bones of a purely transactional relationship.

When it comes to the point where even China's leaders, who have to fend off accusations about their own regime's human rights violations, worry that Pakistan's regime is becoming toxic in the international arena, this is a Sign. On the one hand Beijing doesn't want to encourage "splittist wolves" in Baluchistan because this would encourage China's own splittist wolves (the Tibetans, etc. who want independence). On the other hand China is trying to be the world's most admired power and for that type of social climbing one has to least put on a show of frowning at government-instigated mass murder.

And it's getting increasingly hard for Washington and the 'international community' and the press outlets that serve them to keep a lid on the Baluchistan Problem, as B. Raman's recent observations suggest:

The Killing Fields of Balochistan have started shocking the conscience of the international community. Not only non-governmental human rights organisations, but even Governmental spokesmen of other countries---including a spokesperson of the US State Department in response to Tweets on the sufferings of the Balochs--- have started getting over their hesitation in expressing their concern over the steady flow of reports from Balochistan about the atrocities committed by the Pakistani security forces on the people of Balochistan.

2. The atrocities have taken many forms. Brutal killing of the Baloch youth in false encounters for opposing State repression. Custodial deaths of Baloch youth rounded up by the security forces for interrogation on their suspected association with the on-going freedom struggle. Hundreds of missing Balochs, who were rounded up by the Security Forces for interrogation and who have since disappeared from public view and public conscience. Frequent recoveries of dead bodies of Baloch youth here, there, everywhere after they were allegedly tortured to death. Despite all this, the Baloch freedom struggle continues unabated.

3. Even the conscience of right-thinking sections of the Pakistani civil society have been shocked by the atrocities committed on the Balochs by the Pakistani security forces which bring to mind the atrocities committed on the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan before 1971.
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7. Even though the Western world has started showing signs of being disturbed by reports suggesting a systematic genocide of the Balochs by the Pakistani Security Forces, they are unable to go beyond expressing lip sympathy for the bleeding Balochs.
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Raman does not limit his criticism to the Western world; his post is specifically to take India to task for not stepping up, but it's not New Delhi that's leading the Right to Protect movement; it's Washington and Brussels.

Is Pakistan on the verge of a coup? Plus, do Bruce Riedel and State Department know which side they're on in the Afghan War?

From U.K. Telegraph report, US senators urge 'full review' of Pakistan funding, December 6, 2011:

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who led an inter-agency review of US policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan in early 2009, on Monday said the United States should give greater weight to containing the Pakistani army.

Speaking at a panel discussion in the US capital, he said that for now, Washington was "not doing enough on the containment part. We're slipping and sliding into it, but I think without a coherent framework."

According to Riedel, the Pakistani army is gradually installing a new military dictatorship, without even needing to resort to a coup.

"The new military dictatorship that is emerging in Pakistan will be very different from its predecessors," he said.

"The facade of civilian government is likely to continue to go on ... with very little real power. The media will continue to be very active and alive, except when they criticise the military."

From B. Raman's analysis, Pakistan Army: Back from the Barracks -- Need for alert in India, December 24, 2011:

1. Gen.Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistan’s Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), who had taken the Army back into the barracks after succeeding Gen.Pervez Musharraf as the COAS and announced that the Army would no longer dabble in politics, has reversed his past stand and re-asserted the role of the Army as one among equals -- along with the Executive, legislature and the judiciary -- in matters concerning national security.
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12. What we are seeing in Pakistan is not a de jure military coup that would require ex-post facto validation by the court, but a de facto coup that would not require any such validation.

There is a great deal of background between paragraphs 1 and 12, including information on "Memogate," which raised the latest round of questions in Washington about the coup issue, but I wanted to highlight just the conclusion because it jibes with Riedel's.

So here we have two very different people with different credentials, sources and levels of experience with analyzing Pakistan and both coming to pretty much the same conclusion.

If Messrs. Raman and Riedel are correct it means that the vast majority of Pakistan watchers in Washington have once again missed the boat. They've had their eyes peeled for a classic coup and believe this scenario is very unlikely. Righto, but there are coups and de facto coups.

Some thoughts about Bruce Riedel and the U.S. Department of State's way of promoting democracy before I close. Over the years I've quoted Riedel's views on Pakistan very sparingly because in my view he has the irritating habit of ignoring the implications of the data he pulls together on Pakistan's military/ISI when he arrives at drawing a conclusion.

And he can be naive; specifically, no matter how many correct observations he makes about the Pakistani military, he seems to draw a thick line between the military and Pakistan's civil society whereas none actually exists.

As with Egypt's military (and Iran's IRGC and several other militaries around the world), Pakistani's officers have extensive land and business holdings in the country, which employ a great many Pakistanis.

I think Riedel is reflecting the view of the U.S. Department of State/USAID, which has bought into the approach that through aid and technical assistance to a country's private industry and civil institutions it can weaken a military's hold on the country. (State has sold the White House on the approach for Pakistan.) Here's a sample of Riedel's reasoning in that regard, from an analyis he wrote for the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution in June of this year ( Three Ways to Help Pakistan):

For decades these [democracy-supporting] Pakistanis have asked America to do one thing: open our markets to trade from their country. Every Pakistani ambassador to Washington since 1991 has told me the same thing; trade not aid will help us build a modern civil society, empower women, strengthen the entrepreneurs who want to build Pakistan, and encourage peace not terror.

Instead, Washington places tariffs on Pakistani textiles that are three times the rate applied to most countries. A level playing field for Pakistani products is a national security imperative for America, even if our own textile industry hates it.

I hasten to add that Riedel is not the only opinion expert pushing the "trade not aid" approach to Pakistan; there's a coterie of 'em in Think-tankistan and the ones who belong tend to sound the same. From a September 2011 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times by Carnegie Endowment's George Perkovich (Changing the direction of U.S.-Pakistan relations):

Washington could foster Pakistan's economic development, self-regard and confidence in American intentions by removing barriers to Pakistani textile and apparel exports to the United States. Americans often profess that trade is better than aid. But to protect the tiny and unviable remaining textile and apparel sector in the United States, Congress blocks efforts to lower tariffs on Pakistani imports of these goods. By removing these protectionist tariffs, Washington would help spur Pakistan's economic growth without the psychological baggage often attached to aid when it is perceived as charity.

The State Department approach of buttressing the civilian sector hasn't worked out well in Egypt so far, despite all the aid and technical assistance it's channeled to building up the country's civil institutions. But sidestepping the argument about the merits of the approach, applying it to Pakistan is counterproductive. That's because the United States is up against a covert proxy war being fought by Pakistan's military in Afghanistan.

Aside from business holdings Pakistan's military has myriad ways to siphon the lion's share of aid/loan money for private sector/civilian government projects and is notorious for doing so. And what is not controlled by the military is controlled by the powerful 'landed' class, which works hand in glove with the military.

Thus, the only way the U.S. government can be assured that the military doesn't channel aid into helping terrorist outfits that attack American troops is to suspend all aid, all loans -- everything, including trade concessions. Sad but necessary until Pakistan's military shuts down its covert war in Afghanistan.

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