{"id":4063,"date":"2007-11-19T11:48:18","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T18:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/19\/pakistan-displacing-iran-as-crisis-of-%e2%80%9808\/"},"modified":"2007-11-19T11:49:28","modified_gmt":"2007-11-19T18:49:28","slug":"pakistan-displacing-iran-as-crisis-of-%e2%80%9808","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/19\/pakistan-displacing-iran-as-crisis-of-%e2%80%9808\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan Displacing Iran as Crisis of ’08?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Visit Lobelog.com<\/a> for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unquestionably premature to conclude that Pakistan may displace Iran as the most urgent foreign-policy challenge likely to be faced by the Bush administration next year, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s beginning to look like a distinct possibility. For evidence, see his column<\/a> in the Sunday New York Times <\/em>by Tom Friedman in which he somewhat offhandedly asserts, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issues that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and, more strikingly, a second Times column co-authored by neo-conservative Fred Kagan and liberal interventionist Michael O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Hanlon, entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pakistan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Collapse, Our Problem<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the latest example of the growing partnership between the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institution. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We do not intend to be fear mongers,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d according to the two authors who then proceed to argue that Washington needs to focus right now <\/strong>on how best to intervene militarily in the Muslim world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second-most-populous nation to secure its nuclear stockpile if and when things get out of hand there. Their optimal goal is to get those weapons to New Mexico, but, if that proves impossible [for, say, political reasons], then the U.S. should \u00e2\u20ac\u0153settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The article itself is mind-blowing in the various scenarios it depicts; sending in, for example, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a sizable combat force \u00e2\u20ac\u201d not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in support of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the core of the Pakistan armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. But the fact that Kagan is widely viewed as an architect of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Surge\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Iraq (and hence close to the White House); and that O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Hanlon, a former Clinton national-security aide, is regarded as representative of an important sector within the Democratic Party means that the article and its various scenarios are likely to be taken quite seriously in the Muslim world, most especially in Pakistan itself. And, please note, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no talk of the importance of democracy here; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about making sure those nukes are placed in reliable (preferably our) hands. The assumption is that the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153moderate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d core of the Pakistani military will be the key to success and, despite any nationalist feelings it may harbor, is prepared to fully cooperate with a major foreign military intervention to ensure foreign control of its most important weapons.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m no Pakistan specialist; nor do I have any reason to believe that Kagan (whose expertise is German military history) and O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Hanlon are particularly learned on the subject; their operating assumptions appear highly questionable to me. But I have no doubt that their musings are indeed an indication of what is speeding to the top of the administration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s national-security agenda. Moreover, compared to the concerns they express about the fate of Pakistan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nuclear stockpile and the lengths to which Washington should be prepared to go to secure it, the threats posed by Iran over the next year or so seem awfully tame. Now, with Musharraf appearing to have rejected the appeals of both Bush last week and Negroponte over the weekend, and the political impasse between the civilian opposition and the military under Musharraf having hardened considerably in just the past few days, a serious crisis of the kind envisaged by Mssrs. Kagan and O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Hanlon is looming ever larger. Under such circumstances, the notion that the U.S. would attack Iran seems considerably less credible, at least from Tehran\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point of view.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, for an interesting analysis of the relationship between U.S. military intervention, the regional rise in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Islamic nationalism,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and how it plays out in Pakistan, particularly from the point of view of the Pakistani military, I strongly recommend an article<\/a> by the former vice chair of the CIA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s National Intelligence Council and an expert on the region, Graham Fuller published November 8 by New Perspectives Quarterly<\/em>. Fuller currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in beautiful Vancouver, B.C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unquestionably premature to conclude that Pakistan may displace Iran as the most urgent foreign-policy challenge likely to be faced by the Bush administration next year, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s beginning to look like a distinct possibility. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4063"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}