[Peace-discuss] Ron Paul Is Correct About Pakistan

[Jenifer Cartwright]

Again, did y'all catch Chris Dodd on Keith Olbermann on the 27th? Said the same things that Tarik Ali did. Of course, Dodd won't get the nomination either, but (unlike Ron Paul) I think he'd actually make a halfway decent prez.
   --Jenifer 

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
  [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
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