Dangerous Ally

On July 30, the day after Senator John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, CNN Crossfire host Tucker Carlson stated, “His [Kerry’s] plan for Iraq, such as it is, is to have other people, dark skinned foreigners, from the Middle East fight our war for us. He said it last night in his speech. I watched his speech.

I heard that comment and I wondered what Carlson had been smoking. But I now realize that he was simply indulging in the usual right wing projection:

Few people likely paid attention last week when former President Clinton accused the Bush administration of contracting out U.S. security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan in its zeal to wage war in Iraq. In an interview with Canadian television, Clinton asked, “Why did we put our No. 1 security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis, with us playing the supporting role, and put all our military resources into Iraq — which was I think at best our No. 5 security threat?” Clinton also observed, “We will never know if we could have gotten him [bin Laden] because we didn’t make it a priority.”

One consequence of the decision to subcontract the hunt for members of al-Qaida to Pakistan is that the terrorists appear to be regrouping. The Washington Post, quoting senior U.S. and Pakistani officials, reported “new evidence” on Aug. 14 that suggests “that Al-Qaeda is battered but not beaten, and that a motley collection of old hands and recent recruits has formed a nucleus in Pakistan that is pushing forward with plans for attacks in the United States.”

Despite Pakistan’s past role in propping up the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Bush administration — in one of its least transparent foreign alliances — continues to rely on Pakistani military and intelligence services to deliver bin Laden. Since much of the give-and-take in this relationship is covert, it is unclear exactly what is or is not taking place.

Pakistan sells nuclear and missile technology to Iran and North Korea and its internal political situation is so complex that probably half of the army and most of its intelligence service are sympathetic to al Qaeda. Yet we are depending upon that country to handle the most sensitive intelligence matters pertaining to islamic terrorism while we fiddle around in Iraq for no good reason.

The Bush Doctrine of “if you feed a terrorist, talk to a terrorist, or harbor a terrorist means you’re a terrorist” applies in every aspect to Pakistan. The country is a military dictatorship in which the general in charge suspends the constitution on a regular basis. The country is a powderkeg in a region that is a powderkeg. And yet we have put the real central front in the war on terrorism in their hands.

I know we had to keep them close, but our dependence on them has always seemed to me to be exceedingly dicey. As many commentators have pointed out recently, it’s created a dilemma for both countries in that Pakistan is motivated to keep dribbling out al Qaeda from time to time while never actually netting anything definitive or seriously meaningful because to do so would mean the end of huge amounts of American money and support. Crack diplomacy at work, once again.

One can’t help but wonder every day, for a hundred different reasons, what we could have acomplished in narrowing the threat of Islamic radicalism if we had focused our best and the best of all of our allies on that problem. It certainly would have been preferable to having Pakistan take the lead on al Qaeda while we fought a completely unnecessary war elsewhere.

It all comes back to the delusionary belief among Bush’s advisors, even after 9/11, that islamic radicalism is not as great a threat as rogue states. This fundamental error has almost driven us off a cliff and will definitely do so in the next four years if these people remain in power.