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2 Cheney meets a general in his
labyrinth By M K Bhadrakumar
Is US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
no longer in the loop on Washington's Pakistan
policy?
At any rate, Rice appeared
altogether unaware of the leak to the New York
Times last Sunday that President George W Bush has
finally decided to send "an unusually tough
message" to Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf that unless the latter played ball with
grit and sincerity in curbing Taliban activities
inside Pakistani territory, Washington would be
constrained to cut
aid.
Rice wasn't prepared to pay attention to
the leak. On the contrary, in an interview with
American Broadcasting Co television on Sunday, she
paid her most handsome tribute ever to Musharraf.
She spared no effort to let it be known that
Washington regards him as a gallant soldier.
Rice said: "This has been a stalwart
fighter, Pakistan's Musharraf, in this fight.
Let's remember that al-Qaeda tried to kill him a
couple of times [actually, according to Musharraf,
five times] and the Pakistani leadership knows
that al-Qaeda would like nothing better than to
destabilize Pakistan and to use Pakistan as a base
rather than Afghanistan for its operations."
A day later, US State Department spokesman
Sean McCormack repeated Rice's warm sentiment.
Lauding Musharraf's new border strategy in the
lawless Pakistani tribal agencies bordering
Afghanistan, McCormack said, "Let me reiterate and
underline that President Musharraf is a good ally
in the war on terror, Pakistan is a strong fighter
in the war on terror ... Steps have been taken,
cooperation has improved." He wasn't to be drawn
into the "leak" either.
Rice was justified
in ignoring the leaks in the New York Times. After
all, the daily carried so many leaks in the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq that the venerable
newspaper finally ended up apologizing.
War clouds in the Persian Gulf Besides, with another war looming, there are
leaks galore in Washington. The frequency of these
is increasing in almost direct proportion to the
descent of the fog of war in the Persian Gulf
region. Everyone, or almost everyone, including
great powers, has begun hedging. It is difficult
to recall another instance in recent memory when
the Kremlin chose to release to the media excerpts
of a sensitive cabinet discussion anticipating an
impending war.
At that meeting presided
over by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on
Monday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov referred to
"the increasingly frequent and worrying
predictions that air strikes will be launched
against Iran. In particular, the US vice president
[Dick Cheney] mentioned such a possibility."
Whereupon Putin asked: "What are we
talking about here - strikes that do not have
United Nations Security Council authorization?"
Lavrov replied: "None of those who are
talking about such a possibility have mentioned
any such authorization. While he was in Australia,
Cheney said recently that he does not rule out
such a possibility because Iran cannot be allowed
to ignore the international community's opinion."
The Afghan angle So, what was
Cheney's surprise halt in Islamabad on Monday all
about?
Without doubt, there was an Afghan
angle to Cheney's mission. The threshold of US
defeat in Afghanistan is nowhere near being
reached. There is bipartisan support in Washington
for the "war on terror" in Afghanistan. Military
commanders see the Taliban as a "defensive
insurgency" and the war as eminently "winnable".
But all the same, Washington faces a grave
challenge in Afghanistan.
The message from
the recent meetings of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) defense and foreign ministers
in Seville and Brussels is that there is a real
danger of the Afghan war transforming as an
Anglo-Saxon war, with major NATO allies from "Old
Europe" looking in. The latest British decision to
augment troop strength in Afghanistan to 7,000
soldiers testifies to the fence-sitting by major
NATO allies Germany, Italy, France, Spain and
Turkey. Here the problem is also of geopolitics.
There are serious misgivings in Europe that the
secretive Anglo-American agenda is to inveigle the
Euro-Atlantic community in a new cold war with
Russia.
China too has begun expressing
disquiet lately about the geopolitics of the
Afghan war - US global strategy of "taking control
of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take
the helm of the entire globe" by establishing a
military presence on an "unstable arc from the
Caucasus, Central and South Asia down to
the Korean Peninsula" (emphasis added), to quote
the People's Daily.
It is against this
background that Cheney was called on to weigh the
cruciality of Pakistan's role in Afghanistan. On
the face of it, Musharraf enjoys seamless
maneuvering space vis-a-vis the United States. But
having said that, a continued US presence in
Afghanistan is vital for Pakistan's national
interests. Ideally, the war must roll on.
The Pakistani economy does well only when
US capital flows become available. The highly
respected former Pakistani finance minister and
vice president of the World Bank, Shahid Javed
Burki, warned recently that the specter that
haunts the Pakistani economy is that out of sheer
war fatigue, US troops may soon pack their bags
and take leave of the Hindu Kush and head for
home.
Writing in the Pakistani daily Dawn,
Burki substantiated that whenever the US "poured
economic and military assistance" into Pakistan as
a quid pro quo for serving US geostrategy,
the Pakistani economy had a windfall, and,
conversely, whenever Washington became indifferent
toward Pakistan, its economy slumped.
Thus
during president Ayub Khan's rule when Pakistan
took pride of place in the US Cold War strategies
toward the Soviet Union, Pakistan's gross domestic
product (GDP) grew by more than 6.5% annually.
This was a significant jump from the annual 2.7%
GDP growth in the first 10 years of Pakistan's
independence after 1947. Again, when the Afghan
jihad of the 1980s against the Soviets brought
Washington and Islamabad close together and US aid
resumed, Pakistan's GDP shot up 6.5%, as against
less than 4% previously.
However, with the
end of the Cold War and the decline in Pakistan's
geopolitical importance in the 1990s, US aid
declined and its GDP growth rate dropped to an
average of 4.7% during the period 1988-99. Then
came the attacks of September 11, 2001. The
commencement of the "war on terror" has turned out
to be a bonanza for the Pakistani economy. Burki
concluded, "There is a direct relationship between
Pakistan's economic performance and its foreign
policy."
That is to say, there is a degree
of merit in the tendentious assumption underlying
the New York Times story about Cheney's mission to
Islamabad. But that is about it.
One thing
is clear. There is a sense of urgency in Cheney's
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