President Zardari May 5-8 Visit to Washington
posted at 12:15 am on May 4, 2009 by coldwarrior
Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari will arrive Monday for his first official visit to Washington.
Zadari will hold talks with President Obama on “bolstering bilateral relations” and will attend a trilateral meeting on ways to root out violent extremism from Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Zardari will also be meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
President Zardari is scheduled to have a series of meeting with American leaders including Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Zardari will also be meeting with leaders of the Senate and House foreign affairs committees.
Is anyone else concerned about Biden meeting with Zardari at this critical moment for Pakistan?
Just one crack about Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and….well, give that a moment’s thought.
Expect more holier-than-thou platitudes and condescension from the White House, gaffes from Biden, and from Congress more of the usual pap.
Expect Pakistan to respond poorly to the usual public lectures of Zardari by the Obama Administration and Congress. Expect the Taliban to gain strength by portraying Zardari completely in the pocket of Washington…and a weak horse.
Zardari, unfortunately, is not a good match to be President of Pakistan at this crucial time.
Zardari is going to have to stop pandering to Washington, and stop pandering to his base at home, and stop pandering to various rival elements within Pakistan who are equally threatened by the Taliban.
Zaradri simply must allow the Pakistani security forces and military to accomplish operations without the constant second-guessing that comes from a politically-sensitive President. Zardari needs to step back, give the military a simple directive…rid Pakistan of the Taliban.
Unpopular? Certainly is. But Zardari’s attempts to be popular have enabled the Taliban to grab huge swaths of Pakistan for their own fiefdom…and they don’t care about popularity, they care about raw power.
Want to destroy the Taliban threat?
Take a lesson from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1:
“Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war!”
Fail to rise up and meet the threat and one is soundly defeated. Second guessing every decision when an enemy has no such qualms is no way to win a war, let alone survive.
Clauswitz wrote of “war to achieve limited aims” and “war to “disarm” the enemy.” Limited aims have served thus far to merely show the Islamists that we are a weak horse. And by extension, the Zardari government. Time to disarm the enemy…close with them, destroy them.
It is time, again referring to Clauswitz, to note the axiom “War is a continuation of politics by other means.”
Thus, when talk fails, and when talking emboldens an enemy, when talking begets only more talking, while an enemy uses talking as a maskirovka to gain tactical and strategic advantage….at some point, we have to get serious..and stop talking.
Is it wrong to advocate for an aggressive foreign policy out of Washington, in order to safeguard our national interests?
Is it wrong to support a nation on the cusp of being soundly defeated?
Is it wrong to encourage that nation to take the kid gloves off, toss aside the Marquess of Queensberry Rules?
The Taliban has its own set of rules…has no qualms about beheading captees, has no qualms with rape or burning whole villages, has no qualms about using civilian human shields to protect its ruthless and cut-throat thugs.
If the Obama Administration goes into Thursday morning confident that it has given Zardari a “sound thrashing” over Zardari’s not sitting down and talking more to the Taliban…
…then we might as well get out of Afghanistan immediately, and encourage our NATO partners to do the same, and prepare for a new Pakistan, a new Afghanistan and quite a bit of the rest of the region to embrace the Black Flag of al Qaeda, and hand victory over to the stronger horse.
As for Biden? Lord, help us all.
Blowback
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why fear what biden will say? toss a coin. he might even say “blast the taliban”. one never knows.
thanks for the post. i read LWJ & Sindh Today trying to find out more. very bad situation in pakistan. how long before we have to do something? or their natural enemy, the Indians?
kelley in virginia on May 4, 2009 at 7:14 AM
The “weak horse” thing was a vast understatement and will be impossible to shake as long as there is a member of the Taliban studying at Harvard.
aengus on May 4, 2009 at 9:23 AM
Biden has a knack…I fear a stern lecture by Biden,light on facts, heavy on stereotype.
Fortunately, for Pakistan…and for India…India is in the middle of a month-long parliamentary election cycle. So while the Pakistan situation is on their screens, they are tending to more important matters at home.
For the past eight years, India has enjoyed closer relations with Washington than in the previous eight years. But, India is seeing more of a tilt toward Pakistan as the Afghan-Pak-Taliban-AQ War continues. India is closer to the Karzai government of Afghanistan than Pakistan would like, even under normal conditions in the region, however, if played right, this may be something that India [and Washington] can use to help defuse a growing bad situation. India has had its own share of problems with radical Islam over the years, and more so recently.
A common enemy makes for strange bedfellows.
How long before we have to do something?
We should have been doing “something” all along. And this is seen all over Pakistan, from the back alleys of Queta to the salons of Karachi. Not intervention at our choosing, and only when Pakistan “acts up” either. But intervention through our actually working on partnership, and the economic programs Musharraf tried to put in place just a few years ago. Instead, we applied sanctions…to include ending our joint military training of Pak officers, and our not encouraging investment in Pakistan. To punish Musharraf time and again we cut Pakistan off from the very means it could have used to stabilize its economy, and draw on the loyalty of its professional classes.
Pakistan is important, most Paks see, only when they are a threat to the United States or India. Or only important when it comes to their country coming apart at the seams. Or so such is reflected in the Pak press lately.
However, as regards India, with India fully advised and kept abreast, if the Pak armed forces and security forces are allowed to take on the Taliban and AQ wherever it shows itself, with vigor, then and only then can conditions be found so as to facilitate Pakistan’s preserving its democratic institutions and return to something recembling normalcy. And for its part, Pakistan needs to dismantle the ISI…even as this Islamist chaos in Pakistan continues to rage, for the ISI, intact, is an ally of the Islamists. This has to end. Pakistan needs to be made to understand this.
My big fear is that Pakistan will be very publicly put into a very visible box by the Obama Administration…and thus, the resentment within all levels of Pakistan will become more visible and potentially lethal…and there will be those in Pakistan who view support of the Taliban and other Islamists as a means to stick a finger in the eye of Washington…short sighted, yes, but it has been done before.
Our insistence, for example, that Musharraf be tossed aside, and Bhutto be universally embraced did not go down so well within Pakistan, only in Sindh. This added to the rifts that enabled the current situation. Neither were perfect by any measure. But Bhutto was seen as more of a darling of the West than a truly wonderful personage within Pakistan…and her propensity to pander to the Islamists was well known and widespread, as well as her reputation for corruption on a huge scale.
I’d recommend telling Pakistan that they should clean up the immediate threat, with our support and with India fully on board, and then we can allow Pakistan to address other issues as we move into the rest of the year.
We shouldn’t be asking Pakistan to decide on the color of the new drapes while the house is still on fire. This is what I fear may come from Washington this week…selecting new drapes…not putting out the fire.
coldwarrior on May 4, 2009 at 9:33 AM
What happens when a government runs on hope and change.
In this case, the Pakistani government over the past weeks.
“We set up Islamic courts, we gave them Islamic judges, yet they do not accept this. They have some other agenda,” said Northwest Frontier Province Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain, who helped negotiate the pact and had been one of its strongest defenders. “We will fight them and, God willing, these handful of miscreants will be defeated and the nation will prevail.”
Perhaps if Pakistan is shown that making deals with miscreants simply does not work?
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said the army would not launch an offensive in Swat unless the government formally abandoned the truce.
Does Zardari have the chops to do this?
coldwarrior on May 4, 2009 at 9:43 AM