[Peace-discuss] Ron Paul Is Correct About Pakistan
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Mon Dec 31 00:24:57 CST 2007
[The best things I've seen on Pakistan remain Tariq Ali's pieces in the
London Review of Books, the Guardian and Democracy Now. The following
brief piece by two US historians seems innocent of any sense of what the
US policy in Pakistan is or how it relates to general US policy in the
ME, but it still may be on to something. --CGE]
12-31-07
Ron Paul Is Correct About Pakistan
By David T. Beito and Scott Horton
[David Beito Ph.D. is a member of the Liberty and Power Group Blog at
the History News Network and Scott Horton is Assistant Editor at
Antiwar.com.]
The conventional wisdom among presidential candidates is that the
assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has
proved the importance of continued American meddling in that land. Both
Republicans and Democrats are rushing to mumble incoherent platitudes
before the cameras while several have even proclaimed their next big
idea for how Pakistan ought to be run.
Democratic candidate Bill Richardson made his first headline in months
by proclaiming that President Bush ought to give former General – now
just "President" – Pervez Musharraf his pink slip. Most of the rest
simply say we should "support democracy" there.
This "wisdom" of interference is so conventional that CNN's Wolf Blitzer
expressed shock when Republican candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas said
that the tragedy proved his case for nonintervention in the affairs of
other nations. We should not, Paul said, either subsidize or work to
undermine other governments because such policies invariably only
empower our enemies.
But why should Blitzer have been shocked?
Benazir Bhutto herself thought this was so. In one of her last
interviews, she told Parade magazine, "[The U.S.] policy of supporting
dictatorship is breaking up my country. I now think al Qaeda can be
marching on Islamabad in two to four years."
As Paul told David Shuster of MSNBC, "the murderers are 100 percent
responsible" for what they have done, but we should not look at the
events of this week in a vacuum.
The U.S. has poured tens of billions of dollars into Musharraf's
dictatorship while he has failed to prevent the entrenchment of Qaeda
radicals hiding out on the Afghan border, and numerous attacks by them,
revealing the overall policy to be flawed and counterproductive.
The U.S. government's backing of the military in Pakistan helps it to
play an inordinate role in the society at large and ultimately makes it
harder for democratic forces to organize their own power structures,
weakening them and alienating the population. This is especially true
when "democracy" is identified with the U.S., which backs their
dictatorship.
Then when Musharraf's public relations have soured, we reverse our
policy and work to undermine the government we've been propping up (i.e.
Bhutto's U.S.-brokered return to Pakistan this October).
Is it the case that good intentions always result in good outcomes? That
because "We're an empire now," we can "create our own reality," as a
White House staffer once put it to journalist Ron Suskind? Is it
possible for American politicians (other than Dr. Paul) to question for
a moment whether the policies they advocate might do more harm than good?
Those who think that Paul's noninterventionist outlook somehow amounts
to a "weakness" on the terrorism issue might examine the view of the
former chief of the CIA's bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer – the man
whose team gave the Clintons ten separate opportunities to capture or
kill Osama bin Laden before September 11th.
After a debate last May, when Congressman Paul tangled with former New
York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani over his view that we're threatened by
suicide terrorists due to our bombings, occupations and support for
dictatorships in the Middle East, Scheuer released a statement defending
him.
"Of [all] presidential candidates now in the field from both parties,
only Dr. Paul has had the courage to square with the average American
voter." He continued, "[Y]ou can safely take one thing to the bank. The
person most shaken by Dr. Paul's frankness was Osama bin Laden, who
knows that the current status quo in U.S. foreign policy toward the
Islamic world is al Qaeda’s one indispensable ally."
Terrorism is a tactic adopted by weak actors. Having limited resources
with which to wage war, groups like al Qaeda resort to a sort of foreign
affairs judo: using the enemy’s power against itself – in this case, us.
The action for them is in the reaction. Al Qaeda's strategy is to
recreate the old Afghan jihad against the USSR: hit the U.S. and our
allies hard in order to provoke invasion and occupation to bleed our
treasury and military dry. They celebrate our occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq as steps towards our eventual total withdrawal from the region.
Regarding the assassination of Bhutto, former Centcom commander General
Anthony Zinni appears to validate Paul as well. He told the Washington
Post he believes al Qaeda is trying to bait the U.S. into reacting by
broadening the Afghan war into Pakistan.
The al Qaeda movement has only been halfway successful thus far in its
war with the United States. Even with our occupations of Afghanistan and
Iraq and the spread of the jihad through them both, the thousands of
American lives and hundred of billions of dollars wasted, the jihadists
have failed in their primary mission: to rally the people of the Muslim
world around their movement. They may have the ability to assassinate
leaders; however, mostly exiled in the Waziristan region, bin Laden's
followers have no real chance of ever taking their places.
If anything could change that, it's further American intervention, while
a hands-off policy could be just what the doctor ordered to allow the
Pakistani people to handle their own business and marginalize their own
violent radicals.
Intervention is precisely what our enemies want. Will Americans smarten
up, or will bin Laden and Zawahiri succeed once again in dictating
American foreign policy?
http://hnn.us/articles/45967.html
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list