Time To Move Beyond The Schizophrenic Perversity Of The U.S.'s Pakistan Policy

There may be no better illustration of the schizophrenic perversity of U.S. policy on Pakistan in the Age of Bush than the two lead stories at the online version of The New York Times yesterday morning.

The first carried the headline:

Pakistan Said to Raid Group Linked to Mumbai Attack

And the second headline:

Pakistan’s Spies Aided Group Tied to Mumbai Siege

While Pakistan is a big and complicated place despite the mainstream media's penchant for portraying it as monolithic, and despite the innumerable vagaries of foreign policy in South Asia that predate the 9/11 attacks, the White House's view of Pakistan has been deeply contradictory and consequentially self defeating: Lavish billions of dollars on strongman Pervez Musharraf in the form of fighter jets and greenbacks that reliably disappear into the maw of a corrupt military while pretty much looking the other way as Musharraf coddled the Taliban, and indirectly Al Qaeda, in the tribal region abutting Afghanistan and his state intelligence agency funds, equips and trains terrorists, including the terrorist gang that brought Mumbai to its knees.

Whew!

That gang -- formally known as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) -- is a good example of the bankruptcy of the Bush policy. LET was banned by Musharraf at U.S. request in 2002 but had continued to operate with impunity until four or five of its members were arrested Sunday in a sop to India, and indirectly the White House.

Here's the real deal: Pakistan is a terrorist state, plain and simple. Make that a nuclear-armed terrorist state.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their foreign policy wonks must work from that premise if not come right out and say it, which diplomacy dictates they probably should not do. But their actions -- including turning off the foreign aid tap if necessary -- must implicitly convey that premise even if it means making sacrifices.

Chief among the sacrifices in the service of a Pakistan policy with teeth would be having to rely less on it as the primary overland supply route for the war in Afghanistan when Islamabad retaliates for any punitive action from the U.S., which it most certainly will do. As it is, the reconstituted Taliban are raising holy hell along that route and Pakistan seems powerless -- or perhaps just disinterested -- in stopping attacks on supply convoys.

While Obama is largely untested in the foreign-policy arena as his critics endlessly pointed out during the campaign, he appears to be taking a stick-and-carrot approach to Pakistan, arguing during the campaign that U.S. forces should not hesitate to take the so-called War on Terror onto Pakistani soil while offering guarded praise for the post-Mumbai response of Asif Ali Zardari, Musharraf's successor and the widower of Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister and victim of an assassination in which that shadowy Pakistani intelligence service almost certainly played a role.

Obama's concept of crafting a "strategic partnership" with India and Pakistan is happy talk and likely to be little more than window dressing.

Beyond getting U.S. troops out of Iraq without that country imploding, the biggest foreign policy challenge for the new administration is indeed Pakistan, a ticking time bomb awaiting a massive terror attack, military coup or whatever, and arguably the greatest threat to both American homeland security and establishing a viable long-term Afghan war policy.

Sucking up to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and supporting anti-Indian terrorist groups buy the Pakistani leadership a measure of domestic tranquility, which is considerably more important than the long-term benefits of a real crackdown for this sadly failed democracy.

That has to change. Fast.

Photographs: Agence France-Presse, Charles Dharapack/
Associated Press, John Moore/Getty