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Powell has tough road
ahead
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY -
Colin Powell's tiptoe diplomacy faces a credibility test
as he undertakes his most intensive sweep through Asia
since landing the job as Washington's top mediator 18
months ago.
The US secretary of state leaves on
Friday for a nine-day trip to India, Pakistan, Thailand,
Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia and the
Philippines that will focus squarely on global
terrorism.
Specifically, Washington wants a more
proactive security shield so it can avoid wielding a big
stick against troublemakers. But just in case, it is
also beefing up its own military presence in Asia.
Conservative and essentially low-risk, it is the sort of
measured strategy that could clear some of the smoke in
Kashmir or the Korean Peninsula without disturbing the
embers underneath: keep eating your Tandoori, folks, but
please leave the chillies out.
It hasn't worked
in the Middle East, and there is little reason to expect
that it would in Asia, where US policy makers are even
more isolated from the underlying causes of bilateral
tensions.
Unfortunately for Powell, his
reputation as the most politically attuned soldier of
his generation, a team player with a mixed track record
for making the hard decisions, had preceded him long
before he heeded the call to public office.
Powell came to the notice of the Asian military
establishment as an aide to the former South Vietnamese
government in the late 1960s, when he made his first of
two tours to Indochina - serving mostly as a
non-combatant.
Known for his unswerving loyalty
to his superiors, he earned a dubious footnote in one of
the Vietnam War's most murky incidents by failing to act
on reports of a massacre of hundreds of civilians in My
Lai village by US forces in 1968.
Twenty-three
years later, as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Powell's judgment was again called into question
when he opposed plans to commit US forces to an attack
on Kuwait after it had been invaded by Iraqi forces,
apparently to avert US casualties.
Then he was
instrumental in the fateful decision not to pursue the
fleeing Iraqis to Baghdad, thereby ensuring the survival
of Saddam Hussein's odious regime. Political pressure
prevailed, and the Gulf War is still being fought a
decade later.
When a group of US peacekeepers
were killed in Somalia not long afterward, a Senate
Armed Services Committee report blamed Powell and his
subordinates for failing to send air support because
they feared congressional opposition.
Like many
of the officer corps who witnessed the daily convoys of
body bags arriving from Vietnam, Powell is consumed with
saving GI lives and puts more stock in restraint than
the use of force, though he is not afraid to retaliate
once the talking has ended.
He is keen to build
a consultative dialogue around the bland ASEAN Regional
Forum (ARF), currently Asia's only permanent security
talking shop, while simultaneously giving the US Pacific
forces a more visible presence in the region.
The latter will probably be achieved by
increasing the frequency of visits by carrier groups,
rather than opening new bases, which might invite a
diplomatic backlash. Close allies such as Singapore and
Thailand are nonetheless likely to be courted for
logistical backup.
Overhauling the soporific
ARF, whose main preoccupation is avoiding direct
criticism of fellow members for their destabilizing
actions, will be far more challenging.
ARF,
meeting this year in Bandar Seri Begawan from July 31 to
August 1, suffers from its link-up with the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and is in danger of
following that body down the road to diplomatic
extinction.
Reformists, mostly confined to the
US, European and Australian contingents, constantly find
themselves at odds with Asia's penchant for compromise
at all costs.
The US assistant secretary of
state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, James Kelly,
one of Washington's most senior Asian specialists,
dismissed ARF as "limited" during the administration's
annual foreign-policy testimony to Congress.
Yet
even a more interventionist approach will not work
unless ARF becomes more representative of Asia: India is
a member, but not Pakistan. China is in, but Taiwan out.
If the Middle East is any guide, Powell will
continue to approach security issues in Asia with the
same detached Gulf War philosophy of building a
consensus position within the region and then using it
to apply pressure.
But can this be adapted to a
prickly issue like Kashmir, where India is so sensitive
to outside interference that it will not even permit the
word "mediation" to be used in its dialogue with
Washington? And where Pakistan opened talks with Powell
this year by presenting a wish list of new weapons
purchases?
Unlike the Palestinian issue, which
directly influences US interests, there would be no
obvious mandate for Washington in Kashmir if it weren't
for the perceived nuclear threat. This is true
especially in view of its historic indifference to that
region. The US last played negotiator back in 1998-99,
with moderate success, when India and Pakistan both
tested nuclear weapons and the Kargil conflict erupted
in the Himalayas.
Washington's strategic
statement to ARF makes no mention of Kashmir or its two
claimants and there was only a vague reference to the
issue in the George W Bush administration's introductory
foreign-policy document, which is preoccupied with the
Koreas and China.
Although the current
leadership has significantly boosted the importance of
the US relationships with India and Pakistan, Powell has
had no previous dealings with either country, and often
defers to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the
issue. It is evident he is having difficulty balancing
Washington's desire for reduced tensions with the
conflicting need to actively involve the two neighbors
in its anti-terrorism offensive.
Sanctions on
arms exports and military assistance to India and
Pakistan were removed in the aftermath of the September
11 attacks in the US, even while Powell was trying to
get a dialogue going on Kashmir.
India further
underscored Washington's impotence in the affair by
sending a shower of artillery across the fuzzy frontier
just as Powell was arriving for his previous visit to
Delhi. Expect more of the same brinkmanship this time.
One obvious danger of such stopgap diplomacy is
that it tempts negotiators to push too hard in the hope
of achieving an early breakthrough. That isn't going to
happen this time around, as emotions will be high ahead
of a presidential poll in Pakistan and Indian state
elections in Kashmir during October.
But already
Powell has upset India by calling for a total withdrawal
of troops from the contested border, a naive demand in
the circumstances and one that was quickly rejected.
For all of the noise coming out of Washington,
Kashmir will never figure highly in the Bush
administration's foreign policies, as Powell
acknowledged in a recent US TV interview: "I don't think
you can come in with any outside plan. I think this is
something that has to be dealt with between the two
sides, and outsiders can play a role in getting them
talking to one another, and putting a process in place,
but it's a plan that they will have to come up with."
Powell is likely to be constantly reminded of
this diplomatic truism as he swings through the region,
mindful that it takes more than a common terrorism
threat - and a new US peace envoy to set aside decades
of mistrust.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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