Friday’s roundup

18Jul08

Diplomatic moves and sobriety

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution said that the West must respect Iran’s ‘red lines’ before entering nuclear talks with Tehran, reported Press TV.   Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Wednesday that Tehran is ready for negotiations with world powers as long as no one threatens Iran over its nuclear program. 

“We have made clear our stance and red lines on the nuclear issue. Our position on the matter should be respected,” the Leader said.

“Iranian experts have acquired nuclear technology and no power in the world can deprive Iran of its right to this know-how.”

The Leader’s remarks were made ahead of talks scheduled for Saturday in Geneva between Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana on a Western package of incentives.

 

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that Iran is considering a proposal by the US to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran.

“The request of the United States has been made via the media in a non-official fashion,” Mottaki said at a news conference in the Syrian capital, Damascus on Thursday.  He highlighted that the opening of an American interests section is the object of a study underway in Iran.

 

The UK Guardian claimed that the US plans to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years “as part of a remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush.”

The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section – a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.

The news of the shift by Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his tenure comes at a critical time in US-Iranian relations. After weeks that have seen tensions rise with Israel conducting war games and Tehran carrying out long-range missile tests, a thaw appears to be under way.

The White House announced yesterday that William Burns, a senior state department official, is to be sent to Switzerland on Saturday to hear Tehran’s response to a European offer aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff.   Burns is to sit at the table with Iranian officials despite Bush repeatedly ruling out direct talks on the nuclear issue until Iran suspends its uranium enrichment programme, which is a possible first step on the way to a nuclear weapon capability.

 

The interconnectedness of things

The question on everyone’s mind is, is this a real policy shift by the Bush Administration?  The first qualifier to any answer is that the question assumes that there is any “policy.”  Arguably, there may be no coherent policy toward Iran, only the combination of inertia and bureaucratic infighting that has characterized the most incompetent American government since Warren G. Harding.  Under this hypothesis, Bush is simply an impotent head of state, much like the Japanese emperors in the 1600s, to be at the whim and influence of rival warring factions.

Bush’s punitive measures toward Iran are nothing new, but merely extensions of Carter-era doctrines and sanctions in place since 1980.  This business of not talking to Iran masks the fact that the Administration lacks the sophistication and depth of policy to both give and take in serious negotiations.  Unfortunatetly, Congress is no better, and is in a competition with the White House to get out front in the sanctions race.

A possible explanation for the temporary ascendancy of the State Department’s approach to Iran may be the stark fact, communicated by military leaders such as CENTCOM’s Admiral Mullen, to the effect that that the US simply cannot take on any more conflicts while it remains emboiled in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As American deaths fell in Iraq (a dubious measure of “winning”) the neo-conseratives actually appeared to grow cocky, and unsuccesfully tried to muscle the Iraqi government into ceedng 50 permanent bases.  The Iraq war was also being ideologically converted into a faux-Vietnam proxy war between the US and Iran, despite the fact that there is no solid evidence yet produced of serious Iranian intervention.  Iraq was positioned as a springboard against Iran.   This issue is very much alive, but are being eclipsed by other events.

Afghanistan (and by extension, Pakistan) may be the latest barrier to neocon dreams of an Israeli-US strike against Iran.  While most eyes have been rivited on Iraq and the “surge”, Afghanistan has been going to hell in a handbasket.  The weekend battle at Konat left 9 Americans dead and 15 wounded, which is a significant portion of the platoon-sized unit involved.   This was a Vietnam-scale battle, with Vietnam-scale losses, and to top it off, the US abandoned the post this week.  What’s it all for?

An excellent column by Zia Mian ties the decline of NATO fortunes in Afghanistan to the rise of Al-Quada and the Taliban in Pakistan’s western frontier regions. 

The concern for the United States is not just the reconstitution of al-Qaeda and what that might mean for another attack on the United States. Of equal importance is the linked problem in Afghanistan of the Taliban fighters who come across the border to fight and return there when pursued by U.S. and NATO forces.

Monthly U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are now at the highest level since the U.S. invasion in 2001.More U.S. and NATO soldiers have been killed in the past two months in Afghanistan than in Iraq. There are now 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the largest number since the invasion, and President Bush says “We’re going to increase troops by 2009.” There are reports that the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln is now moving into position to add great airpower to support coalition forces in Afghanistan.

With the future of Pakistan in the balance, the United States is at a loss for a strategy. They had bet on General Musharraf and his fellow generals and lost. President Bush is reported to have told journalists that the biggest challenge for the next president will be Pakistan, not Iraq or Afghanistan. The temptation will be to use yet more force, to reach further and more often across the border, and attack al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan even harder. But this will only serve to strengthen the perception that the United States is at war with Pakistan and inevitably inflict more civilian casualties.

Bush’s “policy” further ignored the corrosive effects within Pakistan of continuing to support a proto-military government that has lost public support, much like the Diem regime in Saigon by 1963.  Mian relates on polls that show that the majority of disenfranchised Pakistanis consider the US to be the greater threat, even more than India.  Pakistan has suffered enormously by being tethered to the US “war on terrorism”:

In April 2008, the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center reported that Pakistan suffered 1,335 fatalities from terrorist attacks in 2007; other estimates are higher. Half these attacks came in FATA. In 2008, these attacks have continued and spread across the North-West Frontier Province. One attack in January killed over 50 people and wounded almost 150 while they were praying in a mosque. Taliban fighters have captured towns and villages and threaten Peshawar, the provincial capital. They have sought to enforce their version of Sharia law, setting up courts, carrying out public executions, blowing up girls’ schools, harassing women, destroying video shops, and even threatening barbers who offer shaves.

Pakistan’s elected government is struggling to deal with a crisis that it has inherited from the past seven years of U.S. policy and military rule.It has tried to talk to and fight the militants at the same time. But the repeated breakdowns of cease-fires negotiated with various militant groups and the bombing in the heart of Islamabad on the anniversary of the siege of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) show that this strategy is not working. There are also suspicions that elements within the Pakistan army and ISI are still sympathetic to the militants.

A way forward is not clear. But the first step must be for Washington to consider how its policies in the “war on terror,” in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan have failed and now feed public animosity in Pakistan toward the United States and support for the Islamist militancy. For its part, Pakistan needs to have a national conversation on what kind of future it wants, whether it wishes to become the kind of savage and ignorant society that the Taliban offer, and if not, how to confront the Islamist threat.

 

 

Filed under: Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iran's foreign relations   |  2 Comments