A Failed U.S. Mission to Pakistan

March 26, 2008

In what looks like an emergency mission, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher yesterday descended on Pakistan. Reviewing Pakistani news sources, the mission seems to have failed. It started off with undiplomatic pressure.

According to sources, this particular visit was not planned. Instead, the US side contacted Islamabad expressing a desire for the visit.

"The reaction from Pakistan was that a new government was not yet in place and even the new prime minister had not been sworn in. It was advised that some later date could be arrived at with mutual consultation. However, both the officials insisted on coming," confided one source.

In seperate sessions Negroponte and Boucher met with Musharraf, the leadership of the PML-N party of Nawaz Sharif and the PPP leadership around Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

Today they will meet the new Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani, who is also a member of the PPP, as well as with heads of other parties. Interestingly Anne W. Patterson, the US ambassador to Pakistan, did not take part in any of the meetings.

The task seems to be twofold:

Political analysts said the US officials’ visit was aimed at defusing a possible confrontation between the new parliament and the presidency.

Another purpose of the visit, they said, was to seek commitment from the new coalition government about Pakistan’s role in the war on terror.

With regard to Nawaz Sharif that mission failed on both issues. On point 1:

Talking to US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher here at Punjab House on Tuesday, he made it clear on visiting US authorities that he would not work with President Pervez Musharraf at any cost.

and point 2:

“Pakistan wants to see peace in every country, including the US. However, to ensure peace in other countries, we cannot turn our own country into killing fields,” Mr Sharif said in categorical terms.

The reaction to the U.S. demands from the PPP party, at least on point 2, was slightly friendlier, but essentially the same:

During his talks with the visiting American officials, vice secretary of state John Negroponte and Richard Boucher, co-chairman PPP Asif Ali Zardari has made it clear that he wished to settle disputes with militants through dialogue and not through offensive against them.

A Private TV channel reports that Asif Ali Zardari espoused his views in reaction to the American desire to keep up the previous policies and steps against the militants.

It is very unlikely that the new prime minister Gillani will have a different view on U.S. style War of Terror than the heads of his coaltion parties. With regards to Musharraf, he will not have any friendly word either. Giliani is the scion of a leading landowner family from Punjab.

He was sent to jail by Gen. Musharraf in 2001, serving five years following a conviction over illegal government appointments. After being sentences by the Musharraf regime in 2001 he told reporters that the charges were “concocted and were fabricated to pressurise him to leave the PPP… Since I am unable to oblige them, they decided to convict me so that I could be disqualified and an example set for other political leaders who may learn to behave as good boys.”

The U.S. pressure team came late. The new elected government was swift in taking over. It immediately freed the judges Musharraf had jailed or put under house arrest and it cleaned up the government hierarchy. By now Musharraf has lost most of his allies in the military and in politics.

Chief of Army Staff Gen Pervaiz Ashfaq Kayani has replaced Maj-Gen Mian Nadeem Ejaz with Maj-Gen Mohammad Asif as Director-General of the Military Intelligence (MI). …
Maj-Gen Nadeem Ejaz has close family relations with President Pervez Musharraf, and was appointed to the position almost two years ago.

Head of Military Intelligence, the infamous Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, is a key position in Pakistan. Another key position was held by Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, the legal mind behind past Pakistani dictators as well as behind Musharraf:

Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, the legal architect of almost every [Provisional Constitutional Order] which repeatedly subverted the Constitution, has been finally removed from his job along with other advisers and special assistants of the past military regime.

…
With Pirzada’s exit, President Musharraf is left with only one key aide outside the presidency – Attorney-General Malik Muhammad Qayyum, who too would be replaced within a few days time.

It looks likely that Musharraf will have to leave his job pretty soon. The U.S. War of Terror in Pakistans North West tribal area will have to stop. U.S. policy on Pakistan has completely failed.
As The News editorializes:

[T]he panic in the American camp is no one else’s fault but a situation caused by Washington’s own acts of omission and commission. The White House and the State Department never listened to advice – often coming from within America – in the last many years telling them not to put all their eggs in one (individual’s) basket. Now it is time to face the consequences of a bad policy.

Posted by b on March 26, 2008 at 16:04 UTC | Permalink

Comments

when you want the massacres done – who do you call – of course you call john ‘salvador option negroponte – murderer for his master

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 26 2008 16:58 utc | 1

The US Mainstream Media or even liberal blogs never discuss the strategic concept that is basic foundation of the current Administration and the future McCain Administration Global War on Terrorism. The USA is going to kill them all and let Allah sort them out. Except, blowing up houses in the Tribal Areas does not kill them all, just a few women and children. It assures that all Muslims will hate Americans for the next millennium and forces any responsible Pakistani government to counter the foreign interference in their country.
The USA has also decided to shake the Iraqi Hornets’ nest one more time with more aerial bombing of houses; in Basra this time. The sad fact is this cabal of Neo-Conservatives and True Believers are totally lacking in the empathy to place themselves in their opponent’s boots. This is because they are cults, just like the Muslim Al Qaeda version they’re trying to torture and kill.
Shortly, they will have to employ the only system that will show their manhood, achieve their strategic goals and bring on the Rapture; nuclear bombs.

Posted by: VietnamVet | Mar 26 2008 17:19 utc | 2

Random thoughts…
the US policy here was a continuation of the “he’s an SOB but he’s our SOB” school of foreign policy it has pursued for two generations now, i.e. investing in local strongmen and comprador elites to control resources and restless indigenous populations…
this policy is a reflection of an elitist view of history and politics, one that sees kings and presidents as the movers and shapers of history. it’s a view rooted in aristocratic belief systems and military metaphors, and it has echoes in the personality cults that spring up in politics worldwide. a more subtle and long-lasting policy would be to focus on conditions conducive to the outcomes that one wants, and waiting patiently (like a gardener, not a platoon sergeant) for the people to respond to the changed conditions.
and of course lastly, my analysis above may be bunk because the conditions that the US wants are those conducive to failure of the state (ignore their BS and watch what they actually do), so supporting puppet monsters, liquidating resources, immiserating the poor, etc. may in fact be subtle and long-lasting condition-establishment conducive to the desired end: a world full of Darfurs, with one lone organised hegemonic state looting and raiding the disorganised periphery at will…?
and

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 26 2008 17:35 utc | 3

re DeAnander #3, congrats on move, Canada sensible, coast pretty.
My suspicion is that elitist view
sees kings and presidents as the borrowers and payers of history, not movers and shapers except as intestines move and shape.

Posted by: plushtown | Mar 26 2008 18:52 utc | 4

wow
r’giap, my first thought also.
one wonders how many coals the US can stoke @ one time to force the fire out of control. stability is only desired if it becomes locked down and strangled to our liking.
i hope you aren’t right vietnam vet, but i fear you are. their final card will be framed in the guise of inevitability.
settle disputes with militants through dialogue and not through offensive against them.
pray tell.

Posted by: annie | Mar 26 2008 18:57 utc | 5

Getting Ducks in a Row for Great Iran Adventure?

Posted by: R.L. | Mar 26 2008 19:17 utc | 6

@plushtown, Canada not so sensible as it used to be, Harper very dangerous. post office has been privatised, hence costs more and delivers worse service than US system. much of health care system has been privatised and weakened under conservatives. rail transport is being starved of funds, branch lines cut down, service sabotaged. SUVs everywhere. Harper wants to paramilitarise police (and the Mounties don’t need any encouragement in that direction), adopt draconian US drug policy etc. strip malls and corporate wastelands proliferate, Canadian-owned businesses are struggling.
however, having said all that, it’s still a nice place to be and I’m glad to be here at last. it was here or Belize 🙂 and I prefer high latitudes. would just like to get a little further from the US border 🙂

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 27 2008 1:22 utc | 7

Dawn:

ISLAMABAD, March 26: The visiting US Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher met Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani on Wednesday, concluding their first round of talks with the new Pakistani leadership.
Mr Negroponte, who is returning home on Thursday leaving Mr Boucher behind for a couple of days, said”: “We are quite pleased with our meetings.”
It may be mentioned that US Ambassador Anne Patterson had left for home on a scheduled private visit on Monday, the day the two senior diplomats arrived and Mr Boucher said at a reception that there was nothing unusual about her absence from Islamabad during their visit.
…
Prime Minister Gilani, during his meeting with the US officials, reiterated Pakistan’s firm resolve to address the issue of terrorism, but called upon the world community to do more and develop a collective approach.
…
The prime minister made it clear that the new government would continue to fight terrorism in all its forms by using democratic, economic and strategic means. “It is also a matter of concern for us and we will confront it with complete determination.”
He said parliament was a sovereign body and all important policy matters and decisions on important national issues would be taken through parliament. He said every effort would be made to ensure parliament’s supremacy.

Notice the absence of “military means”
also Dawn

LANDI KOTAL: US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher met tribal chiefs at the Khyber Rifles mess in Landi Kotal on Wednesday.
Sources said the elders from the Khyber Agency impressed upon the US to avoid use of force in the region while pursuing the war against terrorism.
…
According to the sources, the tribal chiefs warned that any direct action by the United States and allied forces in the tribal territory would have disastrous consequences. They said that the former USSR had sent its troops into Afghanistan against the wishes of the majority of the Afghan people and it was forced out of that country.

I’d call that an unveiled threat …
WaPo: U.S. Steps Up Unilateral Strikes in Pakistan

The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that the country’s new leaders will insist on a scaling back of military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials.
Washington is worried that pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf, who has generally supported the U.S. strikes, will almost certainly have reduced powers in the months ahead, and so it wants to inflict as much damage as it can to al-Qaeda’s network now, the officials said.
…
Musharraf, who controls the country’s military forces, has long approved U.S. military strikes on his own. But senior officials in Pakistan’s leading parties are now warning that such unilateral attacks — including the Predator strikes launched from bases near Islamabad and Jacobabad in Pakistan — could be curtailed.

“We have always said that as for strikes, that is for Pakistani forces to do and for the Pakistani government to decide. . . . We do not envision a situation in which foreigners will enter Pakistan and chase targets,” said Farhatullah Babar, a top spokesman for the Pakistan People’s Party, whose leader Yousaf Raza Gillani is the new prime minister. “This war on terror is our war.”
Leaders of Gillani’s party say they are interested in starting talks with local Taliban leaders and giving a political voice to the millions who live in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher heard the message directly from tribal elders in the village of Landi Kotal in the Khyber area yesterday.

Posted by: b | Mar 27 2008 6:30 utc | 8

Thanks to all for valuable comments and basic information.
Deanander’s brief comments seemed trenchant, though (or perhaps because) fundamentally pessimistic. I assume (little or no unequivocal evidence, of course, except for the occasional story of a bombing raid on a mountain village) that the U.S. is engaged in a secret war in Pakistan’s Northwest frontier province, until now with the tacit consent of the (Musharaf) government. It seems that the terms of the American intervention are in the process of being renegotiated (with the convenient absence of the Ambassador facilitating sub rosa accords between deniability conscious intelligence agencies). Beyond the by-now standard use of GWOT rhetoric to provide cover for sordid trafficking in arms and drugs, it’s hard to see what Negroponte and Boucher hope to accomplish in Pakistan, other than to stave off an impending debacle until after GWB is safely out of office. Or could they
be laying the groundwork for the capture or assassination of Osama B.L.,
again, just in time for maximal electoral effect? Since that rabbit remained in the hat for the 2004 election, it seem doubtful that the spooky magicians will extract it this year, but one never knows for sure
what type of hedging of bets is in progress.
Anyway, thanks to B and all for exposing these machinations, and at least partially illuminating their background.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Mar 27 2008 8:45 utc | 9

William Pfaff: Pakistani Negotiation with the Islamists

When the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, took office this week, it was not an intelligent decision for Washington to send both Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher to confer with Musharraf as well as other officials, inviting Pakistani press comment that they had come to put pressure on the new government.
…
The argument that the struggle with the Taliban has to be won in Pakistan is reasonable, but “winning” is an ambiguous term in these circumstances. The notion that western forces could be any more effective in the badlands of tribal Pakistan than they are inside Afghanistan, trying to win hearts and minds with artillery and air strikes, is absurd. The Pakistanis are not going to do the job for NATO — against their own countrymen.
The Taliban threat to Afghanistan can only be countered with political measures, and that is what the new Pakistan government is proposing. This is good news, not bad.
…
The new government offers the possibility of a constructive approach to dealing with the Islamists. Let it try. What Washington and NATO are now doing in Afghanistan is unmistakably headed for failure.

Posted by: b | Mar 27 2008 8:51 utc | 10

What, this isn’t just another little blip that can be managed by stepping up our Predator attacks on the tribal regions? After all these years, is the Bush administration’s Pakistan policy finally coming unstuck? Just one more way that events elsewhere in the world continue to affect the U.S. while most Americans don’t even notice, distracted as they are by the media circus that passes for coverage of the presidential primaries.

Posted by: Madison Guy | Mar 27 2008 16:59 utc | 11

Note that the NYT is two full days behind me in reporting this story.
They have a reporter on the ground who catches some additional funny anectodes, but why didn’t she report the central issue when it was actually news?
A Chill Ushers in a New Diplomatic Order in Pakistan

If it was not yet clear to Washington that a new political order prevailed here, the three-day visit this week by America’s chief diplomat dealing with Pakistan should put any doubt to rest.
The visit by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte turned out to be series of indignities and chilly, almost hostile, receptions as he bore the brunt of the full range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule by Washington’s favored ally, President Pervez Musharraf.
…
Perhaps the most startling encounter for the 68-year-old career diplomat was the deliberately pointed question by Farrukh Saleem, executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies, at the reception Wednesday evening.
“How is Pakistan different to Honduras?” Mr. Saleem asked, a query clearly intended to tweak Mr. Negroponte about his time as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, when he was in charge of the American effort to train and arm a guerrilla force aimed at overthrowing the leftist government in Nicaragua. He was later criticized for meddling in the region and overlooking human rights abuses in pursuit of United States foreign policy goals.
The diplomat demurred, according to Mr. Saleem, saying, “You have put me on the spot.”
…
As they stood on the lawn of a diplomatic residence here in the spring evening, the chairman of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan, who has led the campaign to restore Mr. Chaudhry, picked up the challenge to Mr. Negroponte.
First, Mr. Ahsan said he told the diplomat, the lawyers were miffed that Mr. Negroponte had not included them on his planned round of meetings. When the lawyers asked for an appointment on Tuesday, they were rebuffed by the American Embassy, Mr. Ahsan said.
Then, Mr. Ahsan, a graduate of Cambridge and one of Pakistan’s most talented orators, gave Mr. Negroponte a 10- to 15-minute discourse on why an independent judiciary was important to fight terrorism.
…
Mr. Negroponte’s visit was generally poorly received. Coming in the week that the government was still being formed — a cabinet has yet to be announced — it was widely interpreted as an act of interference, a last effort to prop up a vastly weakened Mr. Musharraf. One television commentator called the visit “crude diplomacy.”
Others said Mr. Negroponte did not understand that Mr. Musharraf was a disappearing figure, isolated and with little power. One of his last loyal aides, Attorney General Malik Mohammad Qayyum, resigned Thursday.

One wonders how the U.S. could – again – miscalculate so much here. Wasn’t it obvious that Musharraf would lose in this scenario?
The reporter is clueless too. She writes that “He also met with prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, who was an unknown politician until this week”
An unknown figure??? Only to a stupid U.S. reporter who doesn’t know how to use Google.
The guy is in politics for over 25 years, his family for generations. He was member of several cabinets, speaker of the Parliament etc …

Posted by: b | Mar 28 2008 7:12 utc | 12

Also late McClatchy: U.S. pressure on Pakistan to attack militants may backfire

Concluding a visit that’s been widely criticized for taking place before a new government was fully formed, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said that talking with many of the insurgents is unthinkable.
…
n Pakistan’s Feb. 18 election, voters resoundingly rejected U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf, raising doubts about his future and the military action that he and President Bush have championed against Taliban and al Qaida fighters operating in the country’s tribal areas.
The civil parties that won control of the government in the election have said that Pakistan’s new counterterrorism policy will be based on negotiations with the militants, and they indicated they’ll seek talks with all extremist groups.
Analysts and politicians said the visit by Negroponte and Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, may backfire as Pakistani politicians respond by distancing themselves from the Bush administration’s war on terror.
“To my mind, it seems ham-handed insensitivity that brought Negroponte and Boucher to Pakistan. Because certainly no one has welcomed their visit here,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of the country’s leading political commentators. “It’s a sign of panic, anxiety, of things slipping through their hand.”
One detail I didn’t know but which shows again the mindlessness of U.S. policies:

Pakistani concerns about U.S. activity have been ignited over the last month by a series of apparent American missile attacks on targets in Pakistan. The news that the former commander of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, where hundreds of Muslim prisoners, many of them Pakistanis, have been held without charge, has been appointed the chief U.S. defense representative in Pakistan isn’t likely to help relations.

Posted by: b | Mar 28 2008 10:32 utc | 13

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