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| Amused US leaders stop short of endorsing Zardari |
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Friday, May 08, 2009
By Shaheen Sehbai
WASHINGTON: Top US leaders are amused, a little irritated, at the almost annoying refrain of President Asif Ali Zardari that democracy in Pakistan should be protected and it will deliver everything the US wants. In other words, said a US expert who has been meeting officials on both sides: “Mr Zardari is saying to Mr Obama ‘Protect me, I am democracy and I will deliver’.”
But in all the statements coming from Obama downwards after the White House talks and the State Department meetings, no specific guarantees have been given to protect Zardari, but all assurances have been given for continuing with democracy in Pakistan and to provide billions of dollars to build social and economic infrastructure so that the root-causes of discontent are addressed.
The US media has been specific on the “support for Zardari” as against “support for democracy”. All major newspapers quoted senior officials in one way or the other on this issue, which came into focus when the Pakistani president repeated “my democracy” and “our democracy” almost 20 times in a three-minute statement at the State Department.
The influential Washington Post said: “After a day of meetings at the State Department and the White House, administration officials affirmed Obama’s support for the democratically elected governments of the two countries, although they avoided personally endorsing either man. Karzai faces re-election in August, and Zardari is deeply unpopular at home.”
The paper quoted US National Security Adviser James L Jones: “Obama asked each leader to confront corruption and work on projects that directly improve the lives of people, such as schools and health clinics.” In the case of Afghanistan, where an additional 21,000 US troops are being deployed to stabilise the south, Jones said Obama stressed “the fact that the upcoming elections should be as fair and open as possible.”
To Zardari, Jones said, Obama outlined how he intended to help Pakistan’s development efforts. Obama is pushing a five-year, $7.5 billion economic assistance package for Pakistan, and last month the administration arranged an international donors’ conference in Tokyo that generated $5.5 billion in pledges. “We must do more than stand against those who would destroy Pakistan,” Obama said. “We must stand with those who want to build Pakistan.”
A Reuters analysis emphasised the same point in clear language: “There was no backslapping from President Barack Obama for the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan on Wednesday, two countries that represent perhaps the United States’ most urgent foreign policy headache. Obama took a pragmatic, arms-length approach to dealing with both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, stressing support for their democratically elected governments but avoiding becoming wrapped up in personalities.”
It said: “It is a strategy born in part from having seen that personalities had limits in President George W Bush’s friendships with Karzai and Zardari’s predecessor, Pervez Musharraf.... And the Obama administration is not limiting its Pakistani contacts to Zardari, the widower of slain Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. It is also talking to opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, among others,” and stressed: “After their meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Obama was careful to stick to diplomatic language in his message across that both the Afghan and Pakistani presidents need to do more to confront the threat posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda.”
The Los Angeles Times said the first round of the two-day summit appeared to leave the Obama administration largely where it began: confronting deteriorating situations in two strategically vital countries where it must rely on leaders who have fallen markedly short of US hopes.
Obama made it a point at the White House that only he spoke after the trilateral meeting with Karzai and Zardari and both the presidents were made to listen to his diplomatese, hands folded and in silence. The US president said it was a meeting of “three sovereigns” but by his action he made it clear that he was the only sovereign who mattered.
US sources who know what is going on behind the scenes say except for some urgent military aid and a vitally needed dose of budgetary support, President Zardari had not received anything substantial except commitments of long-term aid in shape of projects, which would be strictly monitored by the US Congress.
A top Pakistan diplomat in the president’s delegation was asked about these conditionalities of the Congress and he tried to brush aside fears that anything new in terms of monitoring would be introduced in the aid process and its usage. Pakistani spokesmen and officials usually try to put a positive spin on the visit but the real situation comes out faster in Washington before the spin starts working.
Even members of the Pakistani delegation are irritated. “Why are we not talking about urgent aid for the IDPs, the internally displaced persons as result of the breakdown of the peace deal in Swat and the military operation which has been launched again with full force?” asked a key member.
The feedback of President Zardari’s meeting with the House Foreign Relations Committee was totally different from the Pakistani spin. The head of the committee spoke on record, raising serious questions about the president’s capacity to clearly explain issues and strategies.
The New York Times said: “Mr. Zardari still has work to do to convince Congress of his government’s ability to beat back the Taliban insurgency. A 90-minute meeting with the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday did not help his cause: members said they were confused and disappointed by Mr. Zardari’s presentation.
“He did not present a coherent strategy for the defeat of the insurgency,” said Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who is the committee’s chairman. “I had a sense of what they are doing today. I did not have a sense of what they plan to do tomorrow.”
The lack of detail, Berman said, underscores why Congress needs to attach tough conditions in authorising any further military aid to Pakistan. Zardari made a forceful plea for assistance, Berman said, at one point referring to the government bailout of American International Group. “I pointed out that the conditions on AIG are a lot stronger than the conditionality in our bill,” he said.
Berman, in another interview, said that in his conversation with Zardari on Tuesday afternoon, the Pakistani leader was “articulate and passionate” but left him with questions. “What I didn’t hear was any coherent strategic plan for defeating the insurgency.”
The statements made by the Pakistani side in meetings were apparently not taken on the face value, according to an analysis by the NYT. “Pakistani officials told their American counterparts this week that they were moving large numbers of troops toward the border with Afghanistan, which American officials described as encouraging. But it remains a question whether these troop movements are real or token, and some of Mr. Obama’s senior aides caution that Pakistan’s military is ill suited to carry out the kind of counterinsurgency operations needed to end the Taliban fighters’ control of Swat, in the North-West Frontier Province, and to keep them from infiltrating again or shifting to another region.”
The paper said: “They’re fundamentally not organised, trained or equipped for what they’ve been asked to do,” said a senior administration official who is closely following the Pakistani military operations in Swat, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid offending the visiting Pakistani leaders. “They will displace the Taliban for a while. But there will also be a lot of displaced persons and a lot of collateral damage. And they won’t be able to sustain those effects or extend the gains geographically.”
In the NYT assessment, “none of this was said publicly on Wednesday, as American officials, from Mr. Obama on down, sought to strike an optimistic tone in the presence of Mr. Zardari and Mr. Karzai.”
The focus, the American officials told reporters, was on ways that Afghanistan and Pakistan, both unstable and strategically vital, could work with each other and with the United States to fight the militants who plague both countries.
The NYT said the elder Zardari, for his part, alluded several times during his visit to the assassination of his wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was shot and killed after a rally in Rawalpindi in 2007. “Democracy will avenge the death of my wife and the thousands of Pakistani citizens around the world,” he said during an appearance at the State Department.
But the issue of not making his words clear still remained a hanging question. “What does he mean by saying ‘Democracy will avenge the death of my wife and the thousands of Pakistani citizens around the world,’ asked an irritated US expert, though the first part of that statement makes sense. “And how long will we keep on pushing the Benazir picture at international fora, people now want to judge us on what we do.”
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