George Bush's foreign policy chickens are coming home to roost. They're leaving perhaps an impossible clean-up job, and it's all the widely predicted result of their keeper's early devaluation of Afghanistan in favor of Iraq adventurism.
Had someone, in 2002, acquired for Mr. Bush a copy of "Foreign Policy for Dummies," its first, longest and, oddly enough, least complicated chapter would have zeroed in on the importance of isolating the Afghanistan problem, while taking advantage of the world's resounding approval of our efforts there. It would have hammered on the vast and concomitant dangers of taking our eyes off the ball, especially by siphoning resources from relevant point A to irrelevant point B.
Now one of those dangers -- Pakistan's precariousness and its likely fall -- is the focus of a New York Times' analysis. Every angle of the current "nightmare scenario," as one administration official calls it, is covered: the Taliban and Al Qaeda's healthy resurrection in Pakistan's neighboring region; President Pervez Musharraf's political losses as a result of militarily engaging these now-internal foes; the potential of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and technology falling into the hands of some other crazed Osama bin Laden.
Our reversal of fortunes within Afghanistan, largely resulting from its neighbor's contributing weakness, is more than implicit in the Times' analysis, which notes these inextricable problems "could cripple a renewed administration effort to turn around the war against Taliban insurgents." Ah yes, we remember now -- that original cause of all the post-9/11 mayhem and carnage, the thousands of lives, the trillion in dollars.
The analysis does make an effort in retrieving some pertinent history in noting that "critics of the American policy say both General Musharraf and the Bush administration were slow to sense the gathering of new threats." Slow? Try catatonic. And the cited history does crawl back several years: "A frequently cited example was the administration’s delay in responding to evidence starting in 2004 that Al Qaeda and the Taliban were creating a new sanctuary in the tribal areas, on the Afghan border. At the time, Mr. Bush and General Musharraf were publicly declaring that Al Qaeda’s ranks had been greatly weakened, and that the Taliban was a spent force."
All true enough. So was the Times' coverage of the Bush administration's web of incompetence in dealing with the Afghan-Pakistani meltdown -- a disjointed concoction of foreign policy bedlam that would bring tears to the eyes of any organizational theorist.
As a few in the military centered on tracking down bin Laden, the CIA was scurrying around "making sure that [Pakistan's] nuclear black market ... had been dismantled. Meanwhile, the State Department was responsible for coaxing General Musharraf toward democracy...," while the White House obsessed exclusively with protecting its good general and presidential dictator, believing "the nuclear arsenal will remain under strict control" as long as Musharraf was at the helm.
Not surprisingly, "It never stitched together," said a former State Department official. "At every step, there was more risk aversion ... than there was a real strategic vision." Yet the risk-averting water has now reached the upper decks, and this official is merely one of the many who belatedly has joined the fleeing rats.
But strikingly, even astoundingly, there is no mention in the Times' analysis of the fundamental genesis of this "nightmare scenario" so clearly coming into play. And that genesis, of course, was Bush's 2002 decision to demote Afghanistan's standing in the vaunted "war on terror" and shift irreplaceable American resources into the inevitable, mindless quagmire of Iraq.
The closest the analysis comes is this tepid passage: "Almost every major terror attack since 9/11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Mr. Bush should consider the 'central front' in the battle against terrorism."
Not one minute of this wasn't predictable; and not one minute wasn't, in fact, predicted. Middle East experts by the busloads warned vociferously of the domino effect sure to come by lighting a match outside Afghanistan, and sure enough, the implosions have followed.
Now the danger of Iran's incipient nuclear program pales alongside Pakistan's possessions. Perhaps the Times felt some mention of Bush's original sin and epic fatuity would have been but bloody obvious pedantry, but I think a little reminder of the origins would have been but proper.
***
Dear reader,
Last day of this brickbat harrassment, although I hope you don't entirely see it in terms of that noun.
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