An ill Matthew Yglesias confesses he doesn’t know how exactly the U.S. ought to conduct itself with respect to Pakistan. Bradford Plumer has a nice summary of the problem (click through for the hyperlinks):
Most policymakers and pundits don’t seem to know how to deal with Pakistan. (I certainly don’t.) On the one hand, the United States wants Musharraf to be more aggressive about hunting down Al Qaeda operatives in North Waziristan. On the other hand, moving too aggressively against that part of the country might cause Musharraf’s government to collapse, in which case radical Islamists could seize power–and with it, control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Scary stuff.
Plumer then wonders:
At any rate, I’m curious to know what sort of safeguards Pakistan has in place to prevent its nukes from falling in the wrong hands, should, say, Taliban sympathizers in the intelligence services stage a coup (or whatever). The reporting on this front appears patchy. In 2004, Graham Allison warned that the security measures were still much too flimsy, and wanted the United States and China to do a thorough review of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, in order to help Musharraf set up proper controls. That would involve a lot of delicate diplomacy–especially since Pakistan is understandably reluctant to open its arsenal up to outside inspection–but it doesn’t seem completely undoable.So what’s actually being done? A Congressional Research Service report in 2005 noted that the United States was offering some assistance, but mostly to “focus on helping secure nuclear materials and providing employment for personnel, rather than on security of nuclear weapons.” See also here. And last August, Pakistan declared that it had set up a “tri-command nuclear force,” but it’s not clear whether that would safeguard the weapons in the event of a coup. (In any case, the country’s past assurances on this score have been fairly suspect.) Those seem to be the main media stories of late. Who knows, perhaps the administration really is doing all it can here, but I’d sort of like to see a closer investigation.
There’s also the possibility of war with rival-nuclear-power-India to worry about. As for solutions, I too am stumped by the larger problem of how to deal with a nuclear power struggling with militants, rogue intelligence services, and hostilities with a nuclear neighbour. My modest suggestion of the day is that if I were in charge of U.S. foreign policy, I would have made a resolution of the Kashmir dispute a very high priority around 2002 (when things got very heated for a while between India and Pakistan), if I hadn’t already.
Obviously Kashmir is a tricky issue, but it’s not an impossible one. Constructive and careful intervention by an outside party might well make real progress on the issue, perhaps even leading to a solution that most of the parties could live with. This would be valuable for two reasons. First, one thing people are always forgetting is just how radicalizing the issue of Kashmir is within Pakistan. If you care about the issue of Islamic radicals in Pakistan – and you really ought to care – then you should be very interested in steps that might remove a major cause around which militants in the country have tended to rally. Second, obviously, a resolution of (or even progress on) the Kashmir dispute would significantly reduce the probability of a nuclear exchange on the subcontinent, an exchange that would be disastrous for the entire world’s environment and leave millions dead and dying.
Anyway, all this is just to say that I’ve spent the last few years wondering why this isn’t a very big priority for people whose opinions matter.
upyernoz | 27-Feb-07 at 4:17 pm | Permalink
i think the reason more people don’t write about pakistan is that, like plumer said, no one really knows what to do. that doesn’t mean pakistan isn’t recognized as a major priority, but it’s hard to say anything about the place except list all the problems and then shrug your shoulders.
periodically someone will mention that the bush administration’s policy towards pakistan makes no sense at all (pakistan, for example, seems to be all the things bush claimed iraq was but that turned out to be wrong. it has WMDs and has exported them to unfriendly people. it has al qaeda camps, and probably even bin laden), but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to come up with something that does make sense.
Chris | 27-Feb-07 at 5:18 pm | Permalink
That must be part of it, but it can’t be the whole story. After all, Plumer points to some valuable stuff they might do, and I point in the direction of a major, though feasible, diplomatic initiative.
I should have been clearer, though. I wasn’t calling (in the weak sense that someone with a blog “calls” for things) for a diplomatic initiative on the part of the Bush administration. They’d fuck that up, for sure for sure for sure, and then things would be even worse. I was pointing more to the absense of sensible punditry on the issue, which I believe there is room for, even if the whole thing is one big clusterfuck.
Also, of course, there was the subtext of this entire blog: The world would be in better shape if I were running things.
OneFatEnglishman | 28-Feb-07 at 5:10 am | Permalink
Every morning I wake up astonished to find that Pakistan is still there. As a state it’s unstable in so many ways that I wouldn’t trust myself to count them, and the simple fact of its continued coherence defies most analysis, let alone anything more sophisticated.
I remember talking to a fairly senior British diplomat in 1969, a few years before Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) won independence, and it was clear that the consensus then was that the country would fall apart one province at a time: Bengal, NWFP, Kashmir, Baluchistan…
Kashmir is the most obvious point of instability at the moment, but it’s also the case that most Pashtuns in NWFP identify more with their fellow Pashtuns in Afghanistan than with the Punjabi elite in Pakistan (with all that implies for finding Mohammed Omar and Bin Laden, even if Musharraf really wanted or dared to try seriously); many if not most Pakistani Baluchi identify more closely with their fellow Baluchi in Iran, and they don’t give a toss for Islamabad anyway. Most Western Punjabis do identify primarily as Pakistani, but then many of them hate the Sindhis like poison, and vice versa.
Kashmir is complicated by the fact that if anybody ever asked them a substantial chunk of the population (possibly, not certainly, a plurality) would prefer independence from both India and Pakistan. Which India is not going to agree to any time soon either.
Where the hell do you start, trying to analyse such a state of affairs? Since in the world we live in Pakistan already has nukes and delivery systems, it seems to me that in violation of all my dearest principles the rest of the world has to be brutally pragmatic and do whatever it takes to allow Islamabad to continue their sixty year balancing act until at the very least some sort of stability is returned to Afghanistan and the pragmatists get back in in Tehran.
I hate thinking like this, but I honestly don’t believe there are any clever solutions.
Chris | 28-Feb-07 at 1:36 pm | Permalink
OFE, I share your sense of astonishment. I also occasionally have a very sick feeling pass over me when I think of the possibility of something going seriously wrong with those nukes – either of their falling into the wrong hands or actually getting used against India. And it’s worth bearing in mind that Pakistan’s problems are ultimately primarily Pakistan’s responsibility to deal with, even if the failure to deal with them has potentially terrible consequences for other people.
Still . . . I believe we can identify modest steps that we, as outsiders, might take (or might have taken) to help here and there. There aren’t any clever solutions, but there are clever stop-gaps, half-measures, and mitigation strategies. That’s all I was really trying to say.