The Pakistanis Have a Point

[GUNNER]

It's a long but reasonably written article. I ve only posted first few paras...for rest go to the link.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/magazine/bill-keller-pakistan.html?pagewanted=1

The Pakistanis Have a Point

By BILL KELLER
Published: December 14, 2011

As an American visitor in the power precincts of Pakistan, from the gated enclaves of Islamabad to the manicured lawns of the military garrison in Peshawar, from the luxury fortress of the Serena Hotel to the exclusive apartments of the parliamentary housing blocks, you can expect three time-honored traditions: black tea with milk, obsequious servants and a profound sense of grievance.

Talk to Pakistani politicians, scholars, generals, businessmen, spies and journalists — as I did in October — and before long, you are beyond the realm of politics and diplomacy and into the realm of hurt feelings. Words like “ditch” and “jilt” and “betray” recur. With Americans, they complain, it’s never a commitment, it’s always a transaction. This theme is played to the hilt, for effect, but it is also heartfelt.

“The thing about us,” a Pakistani official told me, “is that we are half emotional and half irrational.”

For a relationship that has oscillated for decades between collaboration and breakdown, this has been an extraordinarily bad year, at an especially inconvenient time. As America settles onto the long path toward withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan has considerable power to determine whether the end of our longest war is seen as a plausible success or a calamitous failure.

There are, of course, other reasons that Pakistan deserves our attention. It has a fast-growing population approaching 190 million, and it hosts a loose conglomerate of terrorist franchises that offer young Pakistanis employment and purpose unavailable in the suffering feudal economy. It has 100-plus nuclear weapons (Americans who monitor the program don’t know the exact number or the exact location) and a tense, heavily armed border with nuclear India. And its president, Asif Ali Zardari, oversees a ruinous kleptocracy that is spiraling deeper into economic crisis.


But it is the scramble to disengage from Afghanistan that has focused minds in Washington. Pakistan’s rough western frontier with Afghanistan is a sanctuary for militant extremists and criminal ventures, including the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the notorious Haqqani clan and important remnants of the original horror story, Al Qaeda. The mistrust between Islamabad and Kabul is deep, nasty — Afghanistan was the only country to vote against letting Pakistan into the United Nations — and tribal. And to complicate matters further, Pakistan is the main military supply route for the American-led international forces and the Afghan National Army.

On Thanksgiving weekend, a month after I returned from Pakistan, the relationship veered precipitously — typically — off course again. NATO aircraft covering an operation by Afghan soldiers and American Special Forces pounded two border posts, inadvertently killing 24 Pakistani soldiers, including two officers. The Americans said that they were fired on first and that Pakistan approved the airstrikes; the Pakistanis say the Americans did not wait for clearance to fire and then bombed the wrong targets.

The fallout was painfully familiar: outrage, suspicion and recrimination, petulance and political posturing. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the army and by all accounts the most powerful man in Pakistan, retaliated by shutting (for now and not for the first time) the NATO supply corridor through his country. The Pakistanis abruptly dropped out of a Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan and announced they would not cooperate with an American investigation of the airstrikes. President Obama sent condolences but balked at the suggestion of an apology; possibly the president did not want to set off another chorus of Mitt Romney’s refrain that Obama is always apologizing for America. At this writing, American officials were trying to gauge whether the errant airstrike would have, as one worried official put it, “a long half-life.”

If you survey informed Americans, you will hear Pakistanis described as duplicitous, paranoid, self-pitying and generally infuriating. In turn, Pakistanis describe us as fickle, arrogant, shortsighted and chronically unreliable.

Neither country’s caricature of the other is entirely wrong, and it makes for a relationship that is less in need of diplomacy than couples therapy, which customarily starts by trying to see things from the other point of view. While the Pakistanis have hardly been innocent, they have a point when they say America has not been the easiest of partners.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/magazine/bill-keller-pakistan.html?pagewanted=1

 

[53fd]

Interesting read.

 

[IND151]

once a Pakistani had said that "at time of war , we Pakistanis fight like tiger but otherwise we are lazy"

this seems main problem of Pakistan along with " half emotional, half irrational" behavior

if Pakistanis learn to control their irrationality, keep head calm and take tough decisions nothing can stop them

bravery of tiger will make you win wars, but taking tough decisions and working hard like bull continuously are the things which will lead Pakistan towards prosperity

 

[TruthSeeker]

Really, it all boils down to not seeing eye-to-eye on India. The USA thinks that Pakistan is "emotional and irrational" about the need/feasibility to wrest Kashmir from India; and Pakistan thinks that a true "all-weather" friend would help it do so. The differences over the jihadi groups inside Pakistan and the makeup and policies of the government of Afghanistan are simply derivative of our main differences over relationships with, and policies toward, India. The USA will not side with Pakistan, over India, unless and until Pakistan is as democratic and anti-terrorist as is India. The PRC can be an all-weather friend because it welcomes Pakistan's hostility toward India as a useful pressure on India. The authoritarian PRC leaders have more empathy for military-led Pakistan than do USA leaders.

 

[53fd]

Really, it all boils down to not seeing eye-to-eye on India. The USA thinks that Pakistan is "emotional and irrational" about the need/feasibility to wrest Kashmir from India; and Pakistan thinks that a true "all-weather" friend would help it do so. The differences over the jihadi groups inside Pakistan and the makeup and policies of the government of Afghanistan are simply derivative of our main differences over relationships with, and policies toward, India. The USA will not side with Pakistan, over India, unless and until Pakistan is as democratic and anti-terrorist as is India. The PRC can be an all-weather friend because it welcomes Pakistan's hostility toward India as a useful pressure on India. The authoritarian PRC leaders have more empathy for military-led Pakistan than do USA leaders.

The US wants India to be influential inside Afghanistan at Pakistan's expense, even though India has no genuine security interests in Afghanistan like Pakistan does, as it does not share a border with them. Whether the supply routes are opened or not, Pakistan will make sure that does not happen at any cost.

Pakistan will stick to its guns, & as I see it, it is the noises of annoyance that are coming from the US about how the events in Afghanistan are transpiring. And it will continue to be like that.

 

[Pakistanisage]

America is like a 1000 lbs. elephant in a china shop bulldozing its way through. Diplomacy is not America's strong suite. The Problem is not lack of cooperation because that is the symptom and not the root cause. The root cause is that the two countries have divergent national interests in Afghanistan, plain and simple. America's problem is it is always rushing into overseas wars to appease its jingoistic public without taking into account the longterm effects and strategy. Somewhere, half way through they start scratching their heads wondering what would be the EXIT STRATEGY. This where America finds itself today just like in Vietnam and Iraq wondering about exit strategy.

America needs an out from Afghanistan by declaring VICTORY and coming home. America wants Pakistan to help them find a way to declare victory after a negotiated settlement with the Afghan Taliban. However America is not willing to give Pakistan what Pakistan needs in return. In other words, America wants to eat its cake and have it too. Afghanistan is Pakistan's backyard and will always be in Pakistan's shadow. Pakistan will not tolerate india's SHENANIGANS in its own backyard, Period.
The sooner America reconciles to this simple reality, the sooner America can depart Afghanistan with dignity. Pakistan will provide the face saving exit to America by arranging a negotiated settlement.

 

[Awesome]

Really, it all boils down to not seeing eye-to-eye on India. The USA thinks that Pakistan is "emotional and irrational" about the need/feasibility to wrest Kashmir from India; and Pakistan thinks that a true "all-weather" friend would help it do so. The differences over the jihadi groups inside Pakistan and the makeup and policies of the government of Afghanistan are simply derivative of our main differences over relationships with, and policies toward, India. The USA will not side with Pakistan, over India, unless and until Pakistan is as democratic and anti-terrorist as is India. The PRC can be an all-weather friend because it welcomes Pakistan's hostility toward India as a useful pressure on India. The authoritarian PRC leaders have more empathy for military-led Pakistan than do USA leaders.

You see all of that is the US's fault and its a stupid thing to ask Pakistan to change itself for the US. US's inability to view Kashmir as a democratic problem (simply ask Kashmiris who they want to be with), and viewing it solely through the Indian looking glass is its own problem - rather lets say it - It knows what the issue is, but there's more money in India than there is in Pakistan so it decides willy nilly to support a tyranny and of course military rule over Kashmir.

You can google for these things:

1. Kashmiris put up Pakistani flag around Srinagar
2. Kashmiris use the Pakistani national anthem as their mobile ring tons
3. Kashmiris beat up Indian police whenever they can
4. Kashmiris 80% want freedom, no India, no Pakistan
5. Kashmir's most famous militant group is not the Pakistani LeT, but the very Kashmiri Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.
6. Hizb-ul-Mujahideen has had Hindu commanders

Sure we may come off as irrational in your newspapers, but the facts or not irrational and the people who are supposed to be involved would know these facts, but they choose to under-report them and play up the Pakistan-terrorism angle since they want India to remain happy.

 

[IND151]

America is like a 1000 lbs. elephant in a china shop bulldozing its way through. Diplomacy is not America's strong suite. The Problem is not lack of cooperation because that is the symptom and not the root cause. The root cause is that the two countries have divergent national interests in Afghanistan, plain and simple. America's problem is it is always rushing into overseas wars to appease its jingoistic public without taking into account the longterm effects and strategy. Somewhere, half way through they start scratching their heads wondering what would be the EXIT STRATEGY. This where America finds itself today just like in Vietnam and Iraq wondering about exit strategy.

America needs an out from Afghanistan by declaring VICTORY and coming home. America wants Pakistan to help them find a way to declare victory after a negotiated settlement with the Afghan Taliban. However America is not willing to give Pakistan what Pakistan needs in return. In other words, America wants to eat its cake and have it too. Afghanistan is Pakistan's backyard and will always be in Pakistan's shadow. Pakistan will not tolerate india's SHENANIGANS in its own backyard, Period.
The sooner America reconciles to this simple reality, the sooner America can depart Afghanistan with dignity. Pakistan will provide the face saving exit to America by arranging a negotiated settlement.

for bolded part> i disagree

history shows us success of american diplomacy in several incidents

Sino-soviet split........ ringing any bells?

 

[Rig Vedic]

You can google for these things:

1. Kashmiris put up Pakistani flag around Srinagar
2. Kashmiris use the Pakistani national anthem as their mobile ring tons
3. Kashmiris beat up Indian police whenever they can
4. Kashmiris 80% want freedom, no India, no Pakistan
5. Kashmir's most famous militant group is not the Pakistani LeT, but the very Kashmiri Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.
6. Hizb-ul-Mujahideen has had Hindu commanders

And you can google for JKLF wanting to contest elections in Pakistan occupied Kashmir, and being banned. While Hurriyat people contest elections in Indian J&K and lose their deposits.

 

[W.11]

yes joining this bullshitt useless war, was irrational and emotional, let americans fight their war on their own, why the hell is pakistan doing business which is a bad business, irrational, why in the first place pakistan supporting life line of these big satan which is also a big loser

 

[Pfpilot]

Really, it all boils down to not seeing eye-to-eye on India. The USA thinks that Pakistan is "emotional and irrational" about the need/feasibility to wrest Kashmir from India; and Pakistan thinks that a true "all-weather" friend would help it do so. The differences over the jihadi groups inside Pakistan and the makeup and policies of the government of Afghanistan are simply derivative of our main differences over relationships with, and policies toward, India. The USA will not side with Pakistan, over India, unless and until Pakistan is as democratic and anti-terrorist as is India. The PRC can be an all-weather friend because it welcomes Pakistan's hostility toward India as a useful pressure on India. The authoritarian PRC leaders have more empathy for military-led Pakistan than do USA leaders.

Well that is where the "self-pity" the article mentions, comes into play. Pakistan tends to act as if the world is based on some fair democratic system when it comes to it's dealings with superior nations. When dealing with Afghanistan and our local problems, we do anything and everything we like, with little thought to the consequences for the people that end up suffering, due to our policies.
From America, we want unyielding support, even though we have yet to provide the same to them. And massive loss of life Pakistan has suffered during WOT is not a sign of support... instead it is our leadership just sending our troops to the west like lambs for slaughter, even though they have only recently done anything to actually eliminate the terrorist threat. Most of our troops died because they were stationed in dangerous areas as show pieces...not to end the extremist threat. Merely there, so that the military leadership could tell the Americans, "see, we have a 100,000 troops on the border".
The Americans understand, and so do many Pakistanis for that matter, we must adjust our policies and world view to the reality. Keep fighting India and we will continue to stagnate as a nation due to our singular focus. Keep playing both sides on our western border and it takes one desperate presidential campaigner to make a couple of promises to get into office and we may see Pakistan end up as the next American firing range.

 

[Meengla]

Excellent OP!
You could tell that the author was trying hard to not appear overtly-sympathetic to the Pakistani viewpoint--hard to find space for that on the front page of NY Times--but he did manage a good debate and perhaps made a few people in America appreciate Pakistan's stance.
But he should have emphasized that the road to the regional peace runs through Kashmir; the rest is just details.

 

[rockstarIN]

Welcome back gunner, you were absent for long time..

 

[SQ8]

One must go through the whole thing.. It is well written.

 

[Vassnti]

(simply ask Kashmiris who they want to be with),

4. Kashmiris 80% want freedom, no India, no Pakistan
.

There seems to be half the problem, Pakistan assumes Kashmir is part of Pakistan ( India the same) They dont seem to want to be with any one, they want to be Kashmir.

The same attitude is expressed towards Afghanistan,

Afghanistan is Pakistan's backyard and will always be in Pakistan's shadow. Pakistan will not tolerate india's SHENANIGANS in its own backyard, Period.