BushCo's Pakistan Policy Has Failed Miserably

My thinking in the months following the 9-11 attacks was that we needed to send at least 100,000 of our troops into Afghanistan and use it as a jump-off point from which to invade Pakistan. After all, the Taliban originated in Pakistan, and it was clear that there were elements within the Pakistani government that still supported the Taliban. If they're not with us, then they're against us, right?

Pakistan has nukes, you say? So what. We have more. Plus, we probably could have gotten our allies to help us in such an endeavor, given (1) all the goodwill we had around the world in the months following the 9-11 attacks, and (2) Pakistan was actually linked to the 9-11 attacks through its association with the Taliban (i.e., no need to manipulate the intelligence like BushCo had to do with regard to Iraq). I have no doubt the American people would have supported such an invasion. Americans, after all, supported the invasion of Iraq, at least initially.

But instead, we made a deal with Musharraf and then decided to invade a country that was no threat to us or anyone and that had no ties with the 9-11 attacks. And we know how that all turned out.

The U.S. debacle in Iraq has been expensive for us not only in lives, treasure, and loss of goodwill, but also because Afghanistan is currently going to hell in a hand basket. And now, it's starting to look like our deal with Pakistan is going to come back and bite us in the ass:

Pakistan is on the brink of disaster, and the Bush administration is continuing to back the man who dragged it there. As President Pervez Musharraf fights off the most serious challenge to his eight-year dictatorship, the United States is supporting him to the hilt. The message to the Pakistani public is clear: To the Bush White House, the war on terrorism tops everything, and that includes democracy. * * *

The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban's main patron: ignoring Musharraf's despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda's senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan's chaotic border regions.

The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. "They know nothing of Pakistan," a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

The level of incompetence within the Bush Administration never ceases to amaze me.