I’ve posted a few times about that relationship, and argued many times with Rindy–on the blog, by email, over drinks, we may have even text-argued about it, mainly about the use of drones. I’m pretty unsympathetic when it comes to the Pakistani point of view. There’s no doubt that it stems in part because of a conviction that the Pakistani security forces bear some responsibility for the horrible murder of Daniel Pearl, a killing I felt very closely.

But mainly I just find it exasperating that we are paying billions of dollars in aid to a country that takes our money and helps our enemies, all of which has led directly to loss of American lives.

On the day that the US officially declares its war over in Iraq, we are also moving towards ending our war in Afghanistan. I fully support this–sick of propping Karzai’s bizarre and corrupt government, spending billions that is much needed at home and, most of all, still losing American lives in that barren graveyard of a country.

But this essay did what good journalism can do at times: educate and demonstrate a different point of view. There is much to be gleaned from Keller’s piece about the Pakistani point of view, some of which was new to me (the details on how effective the Pakistani military has been in Swat and the loss of life it suffers when it battles the Haqqani clan, for instance) and some of which wasn’t (its all-consuming obsession with India and how that drives its policy).

It may have gotten me thinking a bit more broadly about Pakistan and how it views its relationship with the US, but I still support what former CIA official Bruce Riedel wrote in this op-ed about the US pursuing more of a “containment” policy when dealing with Pakistan. And I definitely support both opening the textile trade in the US while drawing down on the amount of direct financial aid we are giving to essentially a military run country that enables the people that kill US soldiers and undermines our policy.

In the interest of bringing discussions like this out of email and into the public, let me expand upon my argument and respond to some of Jeremy’s points. For brevity’s sake, I’ll keep it to two points.

Obama continues torture

“I’m under the impression that we have stopped waterboarding and most forms of enhanced interrogation.”

Jeremy’s impression is technically correct; President Obama signed an order on his first day in office to ban waterboarding and other techniques. But forces in the field can still employ prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, and force-feeding, techniques which have been cited as cruel and unusual. Moreover, the rendition program, in which we transfer prisoners to other countries (like Libya) to be tortured, continues uninterrupted. Most troubling is a report that the CIA has a complex in Somalia, where it directly pays guards’ salaries, and to which it brings prisoners from all over the world, god help them.

Beyond the policies themselves, the fact that Obama gave a pass to the enablers and architects of the torture program means that those choices remain open to future administrations. Because he refused to prosecute them as crimes, they have now become policy positions, on which respectable people can disagree. You have a Republican field saying they would bring back waterboarding, but if Obama were honest about how hard and dirty he’s fighting the terrorists he’d win every red vote in the country. Which brings us to our next point.

Drone bombing continues

“I support the drones, mainly because I don’t want US troops on the ground.”

This presumes that we need to attack or invade any country in which a so-called “terrorist” is found. And it blindly ignores the fact that so many civilians, even children, are killed by these sky robots of death. It is a heartless and backward policy, which is bound to result in deadly blowback for America.

“You never come up with anything as an alternative to drone strikes, you only reply with the same tired bumper-sticker ideology of ‘killing a terrorist creates more’. How will you feel when [someone] succeeds in blowing up a truck bomb in Times Square?

Sadly, something terrible like this is very likely to occur as a result of these strikes. The failed Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, very nearly pulled off the trick, and cited American drone attacks in Pakistan as one of his motivations. The drones “don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” he said in court.

At a meeting last month, Pashtun tribal elders described the sounds of drones hovering over their villages during the day, and launching Hellfire missiles at night. A teenager who volunteered to gather evidence of civilian deaths was killed by a drone one week later. My “alternative” to drone strikes is the absence of drone strikes. I do not believe in a military solution to the problem of terrorism; I would point out that ten years of war in Afghanistan did not prevent Faisal Shahzad from acting, but 3 years of drone strikes compelled him to act.

These are some of the foreign policy failures of Barack Obama, a president who ran on a platform of restoring America’s reputation in the Muslim world. As Jeremy said, Obama’s election bought us much goodwill in the Middle East. But that has all been squandered by his policy decisions. The evidence shows a clear and steady decline. I would argue that these trends will eventually lead to more, not less, terrorist attacks against the US.

On January 9th the people of South Sudan will vote on whether to secede from Sudan and form their own state. They are extremely likely to do so and there is a strong possibility the North will not allow this and fighting – which has gone on for decades and killed tens of thousands of people – will resume. The South has much of the country’s oil wealth (as well as potential mineral resources and agricultural potential) and the North will not be happy to let it go. Here is an excellent column that lays out the history of the conflict, the scary possibility of a proxy war between the US and China, and the positive prognosis that fighting can hopefully be avoided.

I just got finished reading the third installment of the amazing Alexandria Quartet over the holiday break when news of a church bombing in Alexandria, Egypt, broke out. The book I finished, “Mountolive”, deals with tensions between the Copts and the Muslim majority and involves a conspiracy by the Copts to stand up for their shrinking strategic interests as Egypt transitioned from colonialism in the first part of the 20th century. The bombing was a reminder that those issues have never been solved. Sad the way Middle Eastern countries have over time basically chased out everyone that isn’t Muslim; the same thing is going on in Iraq right now as well. Maybe that’s one of the reasons those countries rank so very low on the UN’s development index.

Then there’s good old Pakistan. What post on ethnic conflict is complete without a word on that wonderful country. The latest news is Muslim protest against proposed changes to the blasphemy law, that some say makes simply being anything other than a Muslim in Pakistan a dangerous idea.

Ah, happy new year!

I sat next to a guy who was in the CIA as a young guy in late 60′s based in India. He later worked for Lehman Brothers when Holbrooke worked there. He said that he was friendly with Holbrooke and his girlfriend at the time Diane Sawyer, sometimes playing tennis with both. He said Holbrooke had a towering ego but was also a kind person and fiercely intelligent. Another guy at my table knew Holbrooke as well and traveled with him a few times when he was supporting Holbrooke’s team with policy advice. He said Holbrooke “surely had some kind of OCD” as he obsessed about details on the food, the motorcade meeting them upon their landing, and other small details. Perhaps it was this kind of near obsession with details, and his incredible drive to achieve, that led to the supposed stress-related death.

Anyway, the panel was fascinating, which wasn’t unexpected when you consider the mind-numbing problems of the region. The panel was comprised of several members of a task force that was supposed to produce a paper evaluating the situation and strategy of the U.S. government in the region. The panel gave a qualified endorsement of current strategy and expected that those who are critical of the war efforts and would like to draw down troop numbers and move towards a “light foot-print” and a “counter-terrorism-plus” strategy would become more vocal when the spring comes, the fighting intensifies, and U.S. casualties pick up.

I haven’t read the task force’s paper and don’t intend to because they needed to come to some consensus, which I think led to a somewhat bland and misleading “qualified endorsement”. Daniel Markey, a CFR fellow who follows the region, called the Karzai government a “failure” and the situation as “unsustainable”. Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief in Islamabad went even further. He described the government as “a criminal enterprise” that uses local appointees to perpetuate a system of patronage that lives off corruption. He said a radical decentralization of political power in Afghanistan, even if means empowering local warlords, is much better than the mafia government that exists (which does sounds like a CIA point of view).

But James Dobbins, a seasoned diplomat and currently at the RAND corporation, disagreed. He pointed out that Karzai has higher popularity ratings among Afghans than Obama does among Americans. He said that Afghans look around at their neighbors and their terrible governments, and recall the horrible 80s and 90s in their country, and see more security and stability and appreciate it.

None of the panelists had particularly ground-breaking views on how to curtail Pakistan’s double-dealing. The Pakistanis are playing both sides because they want influence after the Americans and NATO leave and fear an Afghan state that is more sympathetic to India. Peace with India would change that, but we all know that is a very tough proposition. In the meantime, the impasse will likely stay the same. James Dobbins darkly pointed out though that the relationship with Pakistan is only “one car bomb away” from becoming radically different.

Click to view this on Google Maps

As they point out on their site, drone attacks of Pakistan have increased dramatically under Obama. From 2004-2007 there were a total of nine attacks inside Pakistan. In Bush’s last year in office, there were 34. In Obama’s first year, there were 53, and this year we’ve already had 50. And this says nothing about the attacks inside Afghanistan, where at least we’re officially at war. In Pakistan, we’re bombing a supposed ally whose government denies it is allowing this.

I encourage you to check out the map on the Satellite mode, which shows real imagery of the earth. It has a surprisingly close level of detail, and you can see just how isolated the area is: a spindly maze of ridges and crevices, sparsely dotted with small villages. It must be similar to the view the remote-control pilots have on their video screens while they fly these deadly robots. And with the push of a button… boom…

This map was assembled using public information, but this week’s big story (or not – have you heard it mentioned in conversation once this week?) showed another example of information technology exposing the reality of war. Wikileaks published a trove of classified documents which it acquired through its super-encrypted international network. The infrastructure is set up in such a way as to be impervious to simultaneous shutdown in multiple countries, and takes full advantage of the world’s strongest free-speech laws, which are often found in northern Europe. Check out the New Yorker’s profile of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to read more about his background and the network itself, or watch his interview with the TED folks here, where he sort of comes off as the web geek version of 007:

Holbrooke said he was willing to answer questions about the military surge and the reasoning behind it, but stressed that his portfolio was on the civilian side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan issues. He said that he thought for years aid to Pakistan has been unbalanced, with a heavy bias towards military aid and not enough focused on civilian programs that will ameliorate the virulent anti-Americanism so widely prevalent there and help develop what is a shockingly backwards country.

Holbrooke insisted on introducing the 17 members of his team that occupied much of the first 2 rows on one side. People snickered a bit at this insistence, and some clearly thought it was a politician wasting time, but I thought it was extremely interesting to see the multi-disciplinary nature of his team, which has essentially every major US government office involved, aside from the CIA (though they were well represented in the crowd).

Two of the best moments were by journalists asking questions (which isn’t always the case at the CFR, where most of the talks are off-the-record). The first was by a Pakistani journalist from the Pakistan Spectator who practically leaped out of his seat to get the attention of Michael Gordon, the moderator and NY Times correspondent. The guy wanted to essentially declare that nothing would happen in the area unless the Kashmir issue was resolved and what was he doing about it. He spastically tried to lump in several questions but was cut off by Gordon. Holbooke was originally supposed to have Kashmir as a part of his portfolio but when the Indians got wind of it they went ballistic and it was taken away from him. The Indians freak out over perceived outside interference in the Kashmir question. Holbrooke, the cool character, told the dorky Pakistani that he “wasn’t working on the issue” and then moved on.

Shortly after that Pam Constable, who covers Aghanistan for the Washington Post, asked rather despondently if the US government was actually serious about trying to improve Afghan society and painted it in rather hopeless terms, referring to the “defiant self-destruction” that she claims to witness regularly there. Holbrooke, again Mr. Smooth, said that he was surprised to see Pam there, that he has only met her once but admires her reporting greatly and always asks for her when he’s in Kabul but is always told she’s out reporting from the hinterlands. He proceeded to tell her why the US was going to be succesful, and had a number of really interesting insights into the agricultural programs that the US is pushing now in Afghanistan, many in place of the opium destruction, which he called counter-productive as they drive farmers into the arms of the Taliban. He also pointed out that even in the US we have “defiant self-destruction.”

I wanted to try to introduce myself to Holbrooke at the end. Two friends of mine last year bought his former house in the Hamptons and I wanted to see what reaction I could get out of him if I mentioned some of the shenanigans that go on there regularly now. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who wanted a word with Richard and it didn’t happen.