Walter Russell Mead: Pakistan's Failed National Strategy
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
The unremitting spate of bad news from Pakistan continues; rains are still drenching the highlands and the devastation continues to spread down the river valleys. This year’s harvest has been ruined; increasingly, it seems unlikely that farmers will be able to plant fall crops. While visiting Pakistan earlier this month, I posted on the roots of Pakistan’s rage, doing my best to explain why so many Pakistanis are so angry with the United States. That is one side of the story; but equally mysterious to many people and especially in Pakistan is another side of the equation: why so many American policy makers and opinion leaders are fed up with Pakistan.
Listening to Pakistanis, I hear several theories about why the US (and the west more generally) are suspicious or unsupportive of Pakistan. Many of these have to do with religion: that Americans and their western associates dislike and fear Islam, and therefore dislike and fear Pakistan. Worse, some Pakistanis fear that America’s leaders see themselves engaged in a contest with resurgent Islam, and their policy toward Pakistan represents an attempt to keep the west on top and to suppress Islam as a global force.
That’s not the way most American policy makers and opinion leaders understand the relationship. The American foreign policy elite is not particularly religious or interested in religion by and large; it assesses countries on a more pragmatic basis: how well are they doing, and how do their policies and prospects affect American interests. And the problem is that most of the American foreign policy world thinks that Pakistan is doing a bad job, and that its mistakes, failures and vulnerabilities not only threaten its own interests and well being, but threaten to drag down the whole region as well.
Many of the Pakistanis I’ve met think this is horribly unfair; they argue, for example, that without the US abandonment of Afghanistan after 1989 and its strategically shortsighted policies there since 2001, Pakistan would be much better off. Perhaps, but even Pakistanis who think the United States is entirely to blame for everything wrong in South Asia would do well to understand the relationship as Americans see it. It always helps to understand the other side’s point of view...
Read entire article at American Interest (blog)
The unremitting spate of bad news from Pakistan continues; rains are still drenching the highlands and the devastation continues to spread down the river valleys. This year’s harvest has been ruined; increasingly, it seems unlikely that farmers will be able to plant fall crops. While visiting Pakistan earlier this month, I posted on the roots of Pakistan’s rage, doing my best to explain why so many Pakistanis are so angry with the United States. That is one side of the story; but equally mysterious to many people and especially in Pakistan is another side of the equation: why so many American policy makers and opinion leaders are fed up with Pakistan.
Listening to Pakistanis, I hear several theories about why the US (and the west more generally) are suspicious or unsupportive of Pakistan. Many of these have to do with religion: that Americans and their western associates dislike and fear Islam, and therefore dislike and fear Pakistan. Worse, some Pakistanis fear that America’s leaders see themselves engaged in a contest with resurgent Islam, and their policy toward Pakistan represents an attempt to keep the west on top and to suppress Islam as a global force.
That’s not the way most American policy makers and opinion leaders understand the relationship. The American foreign policy elite is not particularly religious or interested in religion by and large; it assesses countries on a more pragmatic basis: how well are they doing, and how do their policies and prospects affect American interests. And the problem is that most of the American foreign policy world thinks that Pakistan is doing a bad job, and that its mistakes, failures and vulnerabilities not only threaten its own interests and well being, but threaten to drag down the whole region as well.
Many of the Pakistanis I’ve met think this is horribly unfair; they argue, for example, that without the US abandonment of Afghanistan after 1989 and its strategically shortsighted policies there since 2001, Pakistan would be much better off. Perhaps, but even Pakistanis who think the United States is entirely to blame for everything wrong in South Asia would do well to understand the relationship as Americans see it. It always helps to understand the other side’s point of view...