By Anwar Iqbal
Saturday, 11 Apr, 2009
‘He is politically weak, and sounds disinclined to push the military to wage war against the Pashtun tribes in the mountains,’ writes Matthew Kaminski.—Reuters/File
WASHINGTON: Asif Ali Zardari gives the overall impression of an accidental president who still has an uncertain grasp on power, writes a senior Washington Post writer David Ignatius who met the president in Islamabad last week along with a group of other senior American journalists.
‘He is politically weak, and sounds disinclined to push the military to wage war against the Pashtun tribes in the mountains,’ writes Matthew Kaminski, a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board who also met the president with this group that accompanied US special envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.
‘The fragile democratic government of Asif Ali Zardari … seems unwilling to admit the extent of the problem’ confronting Pakistan, writes Joe Klein of the Time magazine who was part of this group.
All three writers, however, also note that Mr Zardari appears ‘sincere’ and ‘convincing’ while talking about ‘the cancer of extremism,’ which caused the death of his wife, Benazir Bhutto.
‘But on some major security and intelligence issues, he claimed no knowledge or sought to shift blame to others, and the overall impression was of an accidental president who still has an uncertain grasp on power,’ writes Mr Ignatius.
The Washington Post writer points out that part of the problem in Pakistan is the gap between what officials say in private and what they can admit openly. ‘Pakistani leaders know the Predator attacks help combat the Taliban in remote Waziristan, but they don't want to seem like American lackeys. So they protest in public the very strategy they have privately endorsed. One way or another, that gap has to be closed.’
Mr Kaminski quotes Ambassador Holbrooke as saying that the Pakistani president ‘deserves credit for his personal courage’ in holding the job. Mr Holbrooke also welcomed the ‘statesmanlike’ resolution of a recent political feud with rival Nawaz Sharif over the reinstatement of a Supreme Court judge.
The fight could have resulted in ‘civil war on the one hand or assassinations on the other,’ Mr Holbrooke told the journalist.
Mr Klein of the Time magazine quotes Mr Zardari as telling the journalists that ‘the germ (of terrorism) was created by the CIA.’
‘True enough, but somewhat dated,’ the journalist comments. ‘Your government called them the ‘moral equivalent of George Washington,’ Mr Zardari says, referring to the mujahedin who defeated the Soviets.
‘True again — and US complicity in the creation of al Qaeda shouldn't be forgotten — but the game changed after the Russians were kicked out of Afghanistan and the terrorists focused their attention on both the US and Pakistan, where they now reside,’ the journalist observes.
In the interview Mr Zardari insists that the presence of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar on Pakistani soil is not his fault. ‘They were pushed [into Pakistan] by your great military offensive [in Afghanistan],’ he says sarcastically. ‘For seven years nothing has happened, and now we are weak and you are unable to do anything about it ... I've lost my wife, my friends, the support of my countrymen ... and in eight years you haven't been able to eliminate the cancer.’
WSJ’s Mr Kaminski notes that ‘among Pakistani politicians, Mr. Zardari speaks most clearly about the threat emanating from the country's west’ but is unwilling to allow US military incursions into Pakistan.
The journalist then quotes Mr Holbrooke as saying that America too is unwilling to cross this ‘Red Line.’
‘Some people say to me, particularly after a few drinks, ‘Why don't we go in there with our troops and just clean it up?’ Ambassador Holbrooke tells the journalist. ‘First of all we can't without their permission, and that would not be a good idea. Secondly, cleaning them up in the mountains of Pakistan's tribal areas, as anyone can see from the search for al Qaeda in Afghanistan, is a daunting mission. It's the same kind of mountains. A few weeks ago I flew up through the deepest and remotest valleys imaginable. You could see tiny villages in the crevices in the mountains. You don't want American troops in there. So that option is gone.’
The Post’s writer ends his piece on a positive note: ‘If there's a positive sign in all this chaos, it's that the Pakistani army isn't intervening to clean up the mess,’ he writes. ‘Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, the army chief of staff, has been telling the feuding politicians to get their act together. But he seems to understand that the route to stability isn't through another army coup, but by making this unruly democracy work before it's too late.’
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