US foreign policy

Juan Cole on Pakistan

Published on May 11, 2009

Juan Cole agrees with me on the American view of Pakistan:

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

Like I said Saturday, mistrust of democracy has always been a staple of US foreign policy. It’s not surprising that US government sources consistantly overstate the dangers of the Taliban in Pakistan or the importance of the campaign against it; for the US government, the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan is the most important security issue there as it impacts on American operations in Afghanistan.

What is surprising is how far the western news media have internalised this attitude. Not only do they agree with this and present news from Pakistan in the context of the war against the Taliban, but the idea that this war might just be less important to Pakistan itself, that the Taliban is to the Pakistani state as the ETA is to Spain, an important security problem but not a fundamental challenge is almost never mentioned. Pakistan is constantly judged on whether it achieves American goals and nobody thinks this strange. As if we’ve lost the ability to understand any other viewpoint but the American one.

A democratic Pakistan is a failed state

Published on May 9, 2009

Manan Ahmed on the failed state rhetoric as used against Pakistan:

It was that under the rule of the military usurper Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan that Pakistan was adopted as a Cold War ally and held up as a model “developing nation”. During Khan’s tenure, Pakistan was said to enjoy the benefits of a so-called “developmental dictatorship” – many dams were built and much cement was poured.

The US even helped Ayub Khan engineer an election victory in 1965. But shortly thereafter, he foolishly went to war with India; his popularity plummeted, and his flashy foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, began a national campaign for a democracy based on socialist principles. Bhutto’s rise ran afoul of the “domino theory” intended to check the spread of Communism; it was in this context that Pakistan was first crowned a “failed state” – giving rise to decades worth of books and studies with titles like The Failure of Democracy in Pakistan (1962), The Failure of Parliamentary Politics in Pakistan, 1953-1958 (1967), Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1968), Ethnic Conflict and the Failure of Political Integration in Pakistan (1973), Pakistan, Failure in Nation Building (1977) and Pakistan On the Brink (2004).

[…]

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

It’s an old constant in US foreign policy to prefer the familiarity of military dictatorships above the uncertainty of democratically elected governments. They’re easier to deal with and easier to manipulate. It’s never about what’s good for Pakistan, just what suits the US best. Having Obama in the White House doesn’t change this.

What We Say Goes — Noam Chomsky

Published on October 12, 2008

Cover of What We Say Goes

What We Say Goes
Noam Chomsky
223 pages including index
published in 2007

Noam Chomsky has been one of the most consistent critics of American hegemony and empire of the past four decades, maintaining a prodigious rate of output over the years as one of the few socalled public intellectuals who does not see his role as parroting received wisdom. His books, articles and interviews have always managed to explain in clear, understandable language how America and its ruling class keeps its power both domestically and abroad and particularly how it dictactes the boundaries of acceptable discourse. A measure of his importance as a critic of American power can be found in the vehemence of the criticism aimed at him by both conservative and liberal commentators. Despite their differences, both groups believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that America has a right, or even a duty to shape the rest of the world according to its own desires. What Chomsky has done for so long has been to show the reality behind “defending democracy” and “humanitarian intervention” and neither liberals nor conservatives like this.

What We Say Goes is his latest book, a collection of interviews he gave to David Barsamian about “U.S. power in a changing world”. It’s fair to say that there are few surprises here for those who’ve read his previous books, with the interview format used here precluding much indepth analysis. However, if you look at this book as an introduction to Chomsky and his concerns, What We Say Goes works fine. It’s short and to the point and as per usual Chomsky manages to cut to the heart of things quickly. He talks about all his usual obsessions — the way in which democracy and human rights are used against official enemies, the role of the US in the Middle East and South America, the role of the socalled free press in determining the boundaries of criticism allowed — and ties them together, with the interview format helping in keeping things rolling along.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City — Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Published on July 27, 2008Leave a comment

Cover of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006

The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It’s a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.

In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It’s true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a “A visceral –sometimes sickening– picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq” and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it’s still a whitewash. The clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It’s like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of
the British there.

Further thoughts on Cuba

Published on February 21, 2008

(I posted the comment below first at Unfogged but it was too good to just waste on those ingrates.)

What you need to keep in mind when judging Castro is that the man has stayed in power for almost fifty years and is only giving it up because his health has detoriated. This despite enormous odds against him, what with a certain superpower not a hundred miles away not liking him much. Unlike the Eastern European socalled socialist countries, his regime did not crumble once Soviet support was withdrawn, nor did Cuba go the Chinese or Vietnamese way of economic but not political freedom. At the same time his regime has been repressive, but it hasn’t engaged in mass murdering opponents in the same way US backed dictatorships in central America have done, or even (afaik) in the kind of repression that China went through.

That suggests to me that the reason Castro has survived so long in the face of so much difficulty is because the Cuban people want him to and believe he is their legitamite leader, despite some of the nastier features of the system he built.

What might help with this acceptance is the example of neighbouring countries like Haiti, with its history of brutal dictatorships, short periods of democracy undermined by Uncle Sam and civil wars/chaos…

Cuba is poor, but doesn’t have the extreme inequality of many Latin American countries, has free healthcare and school system for all its citizens annd has been able to go its own way despite superpower pressure. Would Cubans want to give up these hardwon achievements in return for the often dubious freedoms of liberal democracy as defined by US foreign policy?