Why Obama is skipping Pakistan?

[GUNNER]

Agreed. Which is why I was surprised to see reactions in the Pakistani press that were rather dejected/annoyed at Obama giving Pakistan a miss.

Some i agree, not all. You see, what the press says has to be viewed through the lens they wear. There are those who have argued in a positive way clarifying the differences between India and Pakistan. Like the first article in this thread. Let me post another article from a Pakistani newspaper editorial.

 

[GUNNER]

Reading Obama right

By and large, headlines in Pakistan regarding US President Barack Obama’s visit to India have been positive. The president was primed with advice on what to say in India. Hence, the good headlines: “Be a good neighbour, Obama tells India”; “Stronger Pakistan in India’s interest”; “Obama pushes India to talk to Pakistan”; “Stable Pakistan best for India”, etc. There was only one exception: “Carrots for India, sticks for Pakistan”.

Given the generally morose Pakistani reaction to Pakistan’s own strategic dialogue with the US earlier, one expected that the mere idea of Obama’s visit to India would be off-putting. But the newspapers in Pakistan have interpreted the presidential words in a moderate manner. Given the high level of anti-American feeling among the public in general and media men in particular, this is a good augury and presages a period of objective analysis of what is happening in Pakistan and the region.

The news anchor of one TV channel that specialises in the economy had to calm down one of its reporters, who insisted that the US was never a sincere friend of anyone in history and that India was not a good neighbour of anyone in South Asia. He compared America’s refusal to let Pakistan ply concessional trade with it while giving India trade worth $10 billion. It was sad to note that an economic reporter did not know the difference between what Pakistan wanted and what President Obama has promised India.
The other thing that could have rubbed us the wrong way was the spectacle of the top couple of America dancing with children to popular Indian tunes. The ease the world feels with India is owed to India’s ‘soft image’ which our ideology and our weak state situation do not allow us. The truth is that our hard ideological environment repels global capital as investors feel jittery visiting Pakistan. These days, even expat Pakistanis don’t visit readily for fear of being kidnapped for ransom.

What should help us overcome our paranoia are some of the things President Obama said.
He said it is in India’s interest to have a stable Pakistan next door. If you don’t decide to wave that aside as a picayune gesture, it should address our not always honest plaint that India is destabilising Pakistan in collusion with all sorts of unlikely partners. President Obama also recommended normalisation of relations and an India-Pakistan dialogue that would resolve the outstanding issues between the two. It is unfair to pretend to feel angry that he did not say the word Kashmir. Not many heads of state visiting India say that.

When it comes to India, we think black and white. The world appears to us in all sorts of political distortions through the prism called India. We are already hurting from the nuclear deal that the Republican administration – traditionally closer to Pakistan than India – gave to New Delhi. We are hurting even more that America is not only not giving us the nuclear power stations we desperately need but is opposing China’s decision to give us a few. Aren’t we the front line state in America’s war against terrorism? Instead, President Obama hinted in New Delhi that Pakistan needs to show more enthusiasm in fighting terrorism.

Here comes the problem of an inward-looking state that no longer cares how isolated it is in the world. The news going out of Pakistan says the country hates America and the West in general because it is pushing Pakistan into a war that is not its own. There is a stream of news about how the terrorists – home-grown and imported – are killing innocent Pakistanis and that these terrorists are, at times, described by Pakistan’s own media as Islamabad’s ‘strategic assets’. Lacking objectivity and relativism grown out of realism, we ignore the difference of approach between the American president and the British prime minister while in India.

If the Americans hold on to pledged funds, much of it must be linked to our own fair assessment of the abysmal level of governance in Pakistan, and the confession by Musharraf about what he did with the aid he received. The Obama visit has been carefully orchestrated not to offend an excessively sensitive Pakistan.

For the coming days, Pakistan must learn to develop a more differentiated and supple approach to the world outside. Habituated to a confrontational foreign policy – because of the subordination of our Foreign Office to the military point of view – Pakistan has been adopting postures that gratify the domestic urge for ‘ghairat’ (honour) rather than its economic interests. In a recent speech made by a retired foreign secretary, the US was described as a state unfriendly to Pakistan’s interests with a history of going against Pakistan at crucial junctures. This attitude will be of no benefit to Pakistan, given its inherent domestic weaknesses.

In today’s world, defeat can be described in one way only: international isolation. Yet the concept of honour can only be realised through standing alone and fighting for a cause. Be it Kashmir or any other issue, principles don’t help if they cause isolation, pointing to martyrdom as justification for national honour.

We must learn from China’s non-confrontational approach to its rival, the US. Beijing knows that the US is looking at South Asia as an arena where China could be challenged but its relations with Washington remain mostly intact. In our black and white Manichaean mind, we can prove our loyalty to China by vociferously opposing the US.

The ambiguity of benefiting from maintaining friendly relations with both China and the US at the same time does not appeal to us. We prefer keeping things clearly defined; for instance, the US and India on one side and China and Pakistan on the other. That is not how China looks at India, nor India at China. Pakistan must learn to be more objective about the crisis it is facing internally because of its past operation of foreign policy in the region. Ironically, today Pakistan can sort out this crisis through self-correction.


Published in The Express Tribune, November 9th, 2010.

Reading Obama right – The Express Tribune

 

[Pride]

I dont know why such comparison is taking place. When Obama visited China we din't complain that Obama is not visiting us or skipping similar noise is not made by Sri Lanka, Bangladesh etc.
Every country and its head has his own agenda to visit some specific country which is done by Obama. Nothing related to Pakistan.

 

[Rig Vedic]

Every country and its head has his own agenda to visit some specific country which is done by Obama. Nothing related to Pakistan.

Unfortunately, Pakistan is a factor in US-India relations. See:

latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-harrison-indopak-20101108,0,6290458.story

latimes.com

Pakistan divides U.S. and India

Washington should stop providing Islamabad with weaponry that can be used against India and take a realistic view of the reasons for Indian-Pakistani tensions.

By Selig S. Harrison

1:50 PM PST, November 8, 2010


" Obama Mission: Billions to Pakistan, Billions From India" — This screaming headline in the Times of India ahead of President Obama's visit to New Delhi explains why a quiet crisis is developing in what seems, on the surface, to be an increasingly promising relationship between the world's two largest democracies.

Calling for a strategic partnership, Washington has pressed New Delhi to buy $11 billion in U.S. fighter aircraft and to sign defense agreements permitting U.S. military aircraft to refuel at Indian airfields and for U.S. naval vessels to dock in Indian ports. But New Delhi responds that the United States can hardly be a strategic partner if it continues to build up the military capabilities of a hostile Pakistan that sponsors Islamist terrorists dedicated to India's destruction.

The Obama visit this weekend will no doubt strengthen growing cooperation between the United States and India in trade, investment and high technology that contrasts strikingly with the mutual suspicions of the Cold War decades. Promising plans explored at recent G-20 meetings for a new global currency exchange rate regime were also on the agenda.

But the full potential of U.S.-Indian cooperation, including naval cooperation in the face of an increasingly ambitious China, will not be realized until Washington stops providing Islamabad with weaponry that can be used against India and takes a realistic view of the reasons for Indian-Pakistani tensions.

Since 9/11, the U.S. has showered $13.5 billion in military hardware on Islamabad, and it pledged another $2 billion last month. The Pentagon justifies this buildup in the name of combating terrorism. But the big-ticket items have all strengthened Pakistani air and naval capabilities needed for potential combat with India, not for counterinsurgency mountain warfare against the Taliban.

For example, post-2001 U.S. military aid has more than doubled Pakistan's fleet of nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets, equipping them with state-of-the-art missiles and laser-guided bombs, and has tripled the number of its anti-submarine helicopters and anti-ship missiles. Before 2001, Pakistan had 200 TOW antitank missiles, crucial in plains warfare with India but of little use in mountain warfare against tribal jihadis. Now it has 5,250.

The message from Islamabad is that Pakistan's "insecurity" in the face of Indian power explains why it aids the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that a settlement over the disputed Kashmir region would lead Pakistan to abandon support for Islamist forces. Bob Woodward's book, "Obama's Wars," shows in detail that the U.S. intelligence community has accepted this argument uncritically and that it has impressed the president.

But the reason Pakistan supports the Taliban is that it wants to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan with its own surrogates. This objective would not be altered by a Kashmir settlement. More important, the underlying reason for Pakistan's feelings of insecurity is that it is an artificial entity hastily patched together by the British Raj in the 1947 partition.

The Muslim League movement that campaigned in then-undivided India to create Pakistan had limited mass support in the areas that were to constitute the new state. Recent historical studies have conclusively established that Pakistan came into being primarily because league leaders had agreed to give Britain military bases there, while India's Jawaharlal Nehru had declared his intention to pursue a nonaligned foreign policy.

No state had ever combined the four incompatible ethnic regions that make up Pakistan today, encompassing the dominant Punjabi and large Baluchi, Pashtun and Sindhi minorities, each with their own ancestral territory. The minorities had fought throughout history to resist domination by the Punjabi, but it was a Punjabi-dominated army that took over the new state.

The U.S. has held Pakistan together for the last half-century by pouring billions in military aid into a series of military dictatorships, initially in return for intelligence-monitoring facilities to spy on Soviet missile sites, later for helping to aid the Afghan resistance and, since 2001, to compensate for cooperation in the "war on terror."

The army has become a bloated behemoth that dominates Pakistani politics and fans tensions with India to justify the huge defense budgets that underlie its privileged position in Pakistani society. Apart from their dominant position in real estate, current and retired generals run army-linked business conglomerates with net assets totaling $38 billion.

Civilian political leaders have consistently faced opposition from the army in their efforts to reduce tension between India and Pakistan. This was especially true in the case of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who secretly negotiated conventional arms control measures in 1989 with Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that were snuffed out when discovered by the army. In 1999, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wanted to de-escalate the crisis resulting from the army's invasion of Kargil in Kashmir, and this was one of the factors that led to his ouster by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Now President Asif Ali Zardari has made clear that he would like to pick up where Bhutto, his late wife, left off.

Zardari is often dismissed as a corrupt playboy incapable of governing, and he has indeed been a weak administrator. But he has demonstrated surprising courage and consistency in seeking to downgrade the Kashmir issue and to jump-start trade with India as the key to easing Indian-Pakistani tensions.

Significantly, it was in the weeks preceding the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that Zardari first went public with his peace overtures. Dismissing the threat of an Indian attack, he declared that the Muslim insurgents fighting Indian rule in Kashmir were "terrorists." Then, two days before the Mumbai attack, he said, "I can assure you Pakistan will not use nuclear weapons first against India."

This reversed Pakistan's policy of deliberate ambiguity on the first use of nuclear weapons and outraged military leaders. Was this the last straw for the army? Was the Mumbai attack instigated by Islamist hard-liners to wreck Zardari's peace campaign, as one of his closest advisors suggested to me? In any case, the army has largely succeeded in silencing him.

To demonstrate sensitivity to Indian concerns about Pakistan, Obama should make clear that the United States accepts the findings of an Indian intelligence probe of the Mumbai attack. The inquiry showed that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) supported the attack by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. The director of Obama's own initial review of his Afghanistan policy, Bruce Riedel, who has had access to the Indian report, concluded that it "reinforces the sense that Pakistan is riding a jihadist Frankenstein." Given the level of detail in the Indian probe, he declared, there appears to be "no question that the ISI had a role in Mumbai." Acknowledging that the ISI is behind Pakistani-based Islamist efforts to destabilize and dismember India is the necessary first step for the United States to demonstrate that it is serious about a true partnership with New Delhi.

Selig Harrison is director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

 

[mjnaushad]

Now as i read it. I'll say good articles.

 

[Rig Vedic]

Ehsan Azari Stanizai: The West Must Excise the Cancer of Terrorism in Pakistan -- or Brace for Failure

Ehsan Azari Stanizai
Adjunct Fellow, Writing and Society Research Group at University of Western Sydney

Is Pakistan a friend or foe of the United States (or both?) at the same time as the war in Afghanistan? This issue took an unexpected turn recently as the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared at the end of a bilateral strategic dialogue in Washington that the United States has "no stronger partner when it comes to counter-terrorism" than Pakistan. The US also announced a rise of $2 billion a year in its military aid to Pakistan, which is an increase of $10 billion over five years. However, it seems greatly unlikely that Pakistan would stop aiding and abetting the American sworn-in enemies.

At the backdrop of this extravagance of money give away to Pakistan, very disturbing news is resurfacing that Pakistan's infamous military Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) is killing every Taliban leader who dares to reach out to the Western-backed government in Kabul. Worse still, the spy agency encourages those Afghan Taliban who cross the border and launch deadly attacks on NATO and coalition troops in Afghanistan.

It is an undeniable fact that most of the Taliban leaders are living in Pakistan under ISI protection. Why are Taliban leaders in Pakistan? Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in Kabul in 2001, the ISI managed to beguile the key Taliban leaders and their families to find shelter in Pakistan. This was part of Pakistan's strategy to have the Taliban leadership under its control in order to retain the greatest capacity to influence Afghan internal politics. The Taliban one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar is now virtually a prisoner to the ISI and has no ability to act on his own.

"Do you really think the ISI could pick Mullah Omar if they wanted?" Hillary Clinton asked President Hamid Karzai in Kabul. "They could deliver Mullah Omar like I can pick up this cookie." Karzai answered when he reached over and plucked a chocolate chip cookie from his plate," reports Bob Woodward in his book Obama's War.

The former Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Salam Zaeef, who is living in Kabul, said recently that there are about 2,500 Taliban in Pakistani sepulchral prisons across the country. They are kept for future use in Afghanistan. Last year, when I spent time in Kabul, a young journalist from Paktia province, which borders Pakistan, threw his hands in the air and cried out at a conference, "I swear to Allah that Taliban still receive instructions from the ISI."
The ISI, likewise, detained 23 Taliban leaders, including Taliban second-in-command Mullah Ghani Brader in February, who was in secret talks with Karzai without Pakistan being aware of this. Pakistan's drumbeat of claims that every peace effort in Afghanistan will doom to failure without Pakistan's participation self-evidently explains the ISI enormous leverage on the Taliban.

The US is now hoping that Pakistan will launch a military offensive against the Haqqani network in north Waziristan. As reports indicate the ISI has already begun relocating Haqqani network. The Pakistani military might launch a few mock operations in north Waziristan as decoys to ensure the flow of the American cashout. This is Pakistani opus operandi, as Stephen P. Cohen writes in The Idea of Pakistan, "Pakistan's officials like Pakistani beggars, become alert when they see Americans approaching."

To make sense of the secrecy behind the US-Pakistan relationship, every commentator is marching on a slippery slop. Has the US leadership become schizophrenic by throwing borrowed money from China and elsewhere at a country that is helping its enemies in Afghanistan to kill more Americans? Nearly 600 coalition forces, including 400 Americans, have so far been killed this year in Afghanistan.

Perhaps Pakistan's history offers an easy answer -- for this country has traditionally been an American regional tool to promote its global imperial ambitions. Since its creation in 1947, Pakistani state has been an Anglo-American regional espionage cathedral and military cantonment. Thus, the war in Afghanistan may be a side show of the real drama of saving Pakistan.

Right from the day one of its birth, Pakistan has been a basket case. And without the American money, it would have been very hard to survive. The US was against the formation of Bangladesh, as Richard Nixon called it dismemberment of Pakistan. Similarly, Washington was always opposed to the Afghan voice for decolonisation of the Durand Line that was aimed at dividing and weakening Afghanistan. This is one of the most disputed borders in the world. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, once described it as "the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace of life and death to nations". We are now witnessed to the rightfulness of his words. Would the world have the problem of transnational religious terrorism if the British colonial strategists did not give the Pashtuns to Pakistan and its rulers, Punjabi Maharajas?

However, the facts of Pakistan's underhanded way of dealing with the Taliban fly in the face of President Obama's recent statement "We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan... We also need to excise the cancer in Pakistan."

The Western success in Afghanistan hinges on how soon we can excise the cancer from Pakistan. If the West fails to clear Pakistani soil of these terrorist networks and its relevant cancerous ideology, we have to be bracing for a grand strategic failure. Many Western commentators believe that Pakistan's core demand is to make Afghanistan free of India. However, in truth Pakistan wants to perpetuate its control over Afghanistan. By controlling Afghanistan, Pakistan essentially wants to control the Pashtuns, who like Baluchis see the Pakistani military as an occupying force. Pakistan has nuclear weapons to hedge against India, but the demise of Islamic militancy, which will spark Pashtun nationalism, could bring a real doomsday to Pakistan. This is Pakistan's empty nest syndrome.

Dr Ehsan Azari Stanizai is an Adjunct Fellow in University of Western Sydney's Writing & Society Research Group.

 

[Rafi]

Politics and diplomacy is never a zero sum game, the people how started this thread are following a mischievous path, that I see on any number of threads, and these sometimes unfortunately start flame wars.

What indians need to understand is our press is free, and people in opinion peace's can arrive at any conclusion that they wish, some newspapers are right wing and some are left wing. This forum is also a beacon in that it allows many anti-Pakistan views and encourages dialogue, I don't think there is a website either indian or Pakistani which has free speech that is on here.

Regarding Pak-US relations, US has provided us billions of dollars worth of indian specific weapons, including BVR missiles, 4.5 gen fighters, radars, PGM's 155mm SPA - MPA's, helicopter gunships, etc etc, also has made a commitment to provide 2 billion in defence for next couple of years, not including about a billion a year in the special Pentagon fund.

Also about 7.5 billion in civilian aide, that will help us free resources up for defence of the realm. In fact if we include all the aid US and China provide for us our true defence budget would be triple or 4 times what it is in the official figures.

That does not make the US anti-india, it is what is known as Realpolitik.