One hundred days in Obamistan

The meticulous and thoughtful consideration that President Barack Obama puts into his every word is a joy to behold. His first one hundred days have been a demonstration of the realm of possibility when a nation and its great people act with the self-confidence that is their rightful domain, instead of acting like scared children in a roomful of cookie- dough monsters. Despite the gloom of a recession deeper than any in living memory, and the continued threat of nutjob terrorists doing a number on the global efforts to recover, the world can once again look to America for moral, intellectual and political leadership. At one hundred days, that is a mind-boggling achievement. The Obama Presidency is not just living up to its hype. It is mostly exceeding it.

On the domestic front, he has resisted his own left of centre instincts to flame Wall Street and jail the greedy, slimeball bankers that got the world into this mess. Instead, he's acted responsibly and firmly. And he's chosen to wield his hammer strategically, almost always bringing it down, when nobody is looking. Wall Street may not have been bloodied and battered on the front pages, by the Obama White House, but it will never get away with the kind of daylight rape and robbery that was standard fare for far too long, again. That's all Obama.

Internationally, Obama interviewed with Al-Arabiya, and made a trip to Turkey to massage Abdullah Gul and the AK Party (the most important political party in the Muslim world). His performance at the G-20 summit, decried by Republicans as a failure, was in fact one of the great successes for America at a time in history when that country is at its least popular. Single-handedly, President Obama has begun to alter the perception that his nation is a global superbully. It is far from perfect, still, yet Obama's America, 100 days since he took the oath to become president in the freezing DC cold, is a warmer and more beautiful spectacle than it has been for a long, long while.

That is why the melancholy here in Islamabad is particularly intense. In the context of the audacity of hope, and the fierce urgency of now, the performance of the Barack Obama administration in its first one hundred days, as far as Pakistan is concerned, has been audaciously hopeless, and fiercely lethargic.

It is bad enough that Pakistanis must endure one joke of a policy after another. The latest evidence of how bad things are can be found in the PPP's most recent public policy gem. The 3 D's--dialogue, deterrence and development--are supposed to be the new weapon against Talibanization. Twenty-something Madison Avenue rejects could come up with better slogans. But the real punchline for a nation now programmed to expect mediocrity is not the reality show fake-ness of the responses to Pakistan's 3D (as in three-dimensional) dysfunction. The real punchline is America's 3C response to Pakistan. In 100 days on the job, President Obama's response to the growing crisis in Pakistan has been defined by three C's: confused, confounded and contrived.

Confused, because let's face it. Nobody really knows who's running the show on Pakistan. Is it Joe Biden? After all, the Veep is no foreign policy slouch. Biden has a long history with South Asia, and he's the one that first proposed ramping up aid to $1.5 billion. Or is it Hillary Clinton, who has more Pakistani friends and donors that probably any other major US politician? It helps that she happens to be secretary of state. Or maybe its, Richard Holbrooke--to whom Clinton has delegated the stitching up of admin and logistics; fixing up USAID, state's diplomatic function, and coordination with the military? Perhaps, it is really Bruce Riedel, whom President Obama tasked with drafting a new Af-Pak strategy? But wait, maybe its Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, who makes more trips to Islamabad than even General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani does. Or perhaps it is the other military man, Centcom Boss General David Patreaus? Maybe, it is ISAF & US forces chief David McKiernan? He thinks Pakistan needs to do more to erase the Taliban (April 19, news conference in Kabul). There's always the other David, David Kilcullen. The one that thinks Pakistan is toast in less than six months (March 22, Washington Post). He too is advising the Obama White House. But perhaps it is not any of these folks. Perhaps it is John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who believes "there is not in place yet an adequate policy or plan to deal with" Pakistan and its "moment of peril" (April 22, USA Today). Who else could be leading the Pakistan front for President Obama? Leon Panetta? Jacob Lew? Robert Gates? Jim Jones? That is a total of more than a dozen potential chairs on Pakistan. Each with their own unique worldview, their own approach, and in some cases, perhaps a particular agenda. Where poor Ambassador Ann Paterson figures in all of this is anybody's guess. What we can be certain of is that the conspiracy theories about the US government running Pakistan are all hogwash. There's too much confusion here for there to be any relief.

Confounded, because when you have a dozen cooks, you don't just spoil the broth, you damn near kill it. There must be very little accountability in DC for someone to have been as arrogant and ignorant as to have proposed lumping together countries as diverse and difficult as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to then openly and brazenly refer to them as Af-Pak. The geniuses that came up with this may all have scored 1400s in their SATs but they have clearly never been to any room in Kabul or Islamabad that didn't have two dozen GIs guarding their lives. You needn't take year long immersion courses in Persian and Punjabi to understand the dramatic differences between the two. And perhaps all you really had to do was to listen to trained professionals in the US Foreign Services. But in the feeding frenzy of the post-Clinton Democratic Party, in a Hillary Clinton State Department, this kind of confounding self-defeatism was inevitable. Bottom-line? President Obama demonstrated more clarity (and was taken more seriously by GHQ) when he was asserting US authority to use drone attacks unilaterally back in July 2007, than he has in the last 100 days. The Af-Pak construct has set back US policy in Pakistan by at least 100 days. And that is if the president can somehow manage to clear his desk of the dozen memos it currently has on it, relating to Pakistan, and replace it with one, single-page, bulleted list that synthesizes the mass cacophony of analysis that is now at his disposal. Somebody needs to Rahm Emmanuel the Pakistan strategy.

Contrived, because American attention for Pakistan is so explicitly temporal and myopic that it has no chance of being taken seriously, be it Main Street, or Cantonment Street. The failure of President Obama's first hundred days in Pakistan is that the warmth that is involved in every new US mission to Islamabad seems more show and tell than it does real. This may be a deeply dysfunctional country of 172 million, but dysfunction does not mean disabled. Pakistanis are not stupid. Especially not the ones that run interference for Team GHQ. Obama Democrats can try to flame President Reagan all they please, but the Great Communicator knew public diplomacy. His man-crush for General Zia was so openly and explicitly on display, little Pakistani children around the country used to be able to name American fighter pilots. Today, there are a dozen Pakistan strategy chieftains in DC, playing good cop, bad cop on something called Af-Pak. The New York Times runs a couple of stories a month about the Pakistani nukes' imminent launch by crazed Taliban. And every so often, an American foreign policy czar can be found crying in the rain about how Pakistan was abandoned by the US in the 1990s. This fear-mongering Dr Jekyll and the love-giving Mr Hyde performance makes for a spectacle of Uncle Sam that just does not jive with either Barack Obama's America, or with the President Obama's modus operandi. No drama Obama's peeps are all drama when it comes to Pakistan.

Notions of a Taliban takeover of Pakistan and the actualization of a Taliban Republic, or Talibanistan are far-fetched and represent the least rigorous and most imaginative analyses out there. The blunt reality is that today's Pakistan is a lot closer to being a model of US foreign policy failure, than it is of Taliban success. Failure here will stain every last spec of achievement by the Obama administration at home and elsewhere.

This is not Talibanistan, it is Obamistan.



The writer advises governments, donors and NGOs on public policy. He can be reached through his website