WikiLeaks Disclosure Sets off Defensive Posture in the International Politics of Pakistan.

The recent news on Pakistan’s international relations that came out of the latest WikiLeaks document cache has been remarkably easy to bear.  Nothing untoward has happened.  All the players have played their parts. International politics between the U.S and Pakistan continues in recognizably similar ways as it did yesterday, and the day before.  Of course, strategic politics has nakedly come to the fore and understandably so; the real news however is non-news--that though everyone has grumbled, moaned, they have all walked away into their own corners of politics and chicanery to hold onto their share of power in Pakistan.

Indeed, each partisan to Pakistan’s politics is doing its best to preserve necessary ties while claiming priority for its own prerogative.  The media is leading the charge here, and both the central government in Islamabad and its U.S allies are on the defensive. The right is blaming President Asif Ali Zardari, pointing to Saudi King Abdullah’s criticism of the political situation in Pakistan—a rather veiled threat? -- that “when the head is rotten, it affects the whole body.”  The left and the center in Pakistani politics, the majority of Pakistanis therefore, are talking about sovereignty as they have always done. Already, judging by a series of opinion polls conducted by organizations like Pew Research and the New American Foundation over the summer, Pakistanis distrust the U.S intervention in Pakistan and blame the U.S squarely for the intensifying drone attacks in the tribal regions.  The new revelations that the U.S. had been intent on removing enriched uranium from a nuclear site and therefore, had been intervening in Pakistan’s favorite national capability, its nuclear arsenal, can only inflame that distrust and disdain.

So far, the Zardari administration in Islamabad has been loath to deal with the rightists in Pakistani politics.  Thus the right-leaning English language newspaper, The News front page piece chiding President Zardari drew an unsurprisingly mild response from the executive office: Zardari claimed that King Abdullah is like his older brother.  ”Call me names”, he seemed to say, “and I will turn the other cheek.”  He might well have added that he is doing this to maintain his precarious grip on power.

Consider that Zardari needs to brush aside this offensive rebuke. Hardliner Saudi Wahhabis help fund the Taliban in Pakistan, as much as they do in Afghanistan. Perhaps to contain the domestic criticism laid against him, King Abdullah spoke to appease the homebred Wahhabis; perhaps not. There is no doubt, however, that Zardari bowed before King Abdullah in order to staunch as much of the runaway support of the right as he can.  In order to not fall in the way of his democratically elected predecessor, and current opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif he needs to kowtow to the right.  Perhaps more importantly he needs to court the military to his side, though he has long bristled at that fact.

President Zardari and his ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) have been deferring to the military after a terrible summer of misrule and missed opportunities.  After the devastating summer floods that ruined farms and fertile fields in large swathes of the countryside, the people of Pakistan sanctioned the Pakistani military as the only functioning authority in the country.  (Note how many are clamoring for the seemingly misremembered clarity and purpose of General Musharraf’s rule!)  Since then Zardari and his Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani have been looking for a way to undercut the military for their political benefit.

Indeed, the recent news might have provided that opportunity.  Upon the disclosure that the U.S. had been trying to get rid of a cache of enriched uranium in Pakistan for fear that it would wind up at the disposal of militants, even the left leaning English daily Dawn that often defends the Zardari administration, raised the specter of Pakistan’s contested sovereignty. It’s front-page headline: “Pakistan’s nuclear capability a source of strength: PM”. At the same stroke as defending Pakistani national pride, Prime Minister Gilani tied together the fate of Pakistan with the fate of the ruling party.  Notice though that even though he spoke to the pride of place of the nuclear arsenal, and therefore of Pakistani national security, he failed to mention that the Pakistani military might have anything at all to do with securing Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

In response to Gilani’s bold move, the U.S. government, through the person of the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, has argued for the continued cooperation of sorts that it enjoys with Pakistan, without backtracking from its criticism of the Zardari government and without disavowing the moves it reportedly made against Pakistan’s nuclear, military complex.

These moves and counter-moves raise the haunted ghost of previous U.S. interventions in Pakistan.  Those interventions have not gone well for the Pakistani people. How might the U.S. now defend itself against the claim that it is charging head-long into occupying Pakistan, when it has been shown to have interfered into Pakistan’s favorite public capability: its nuclear arsenal?  Little surprise then that Ambassador Cameron Munter moved to calm those in the military and in the political right and published an op-ed piece this morning in the right-leaning newspaper The News, announcing in part that:

Pakistan is an important strategic partner of the United States. Of course, even a solid relationship will have its ups and downs. We have seen that in the past few days, when documents purportedly downloaded from US Defense Department computers became the subject of reports in the media.

Moreover he claimed, the U.S foreign policy team:

…will continue to work to strengthen our partnership with Pakistan and make progress on the issues that are important for our two countries. We can’t afford anything less. I am in close contact with Pakistan’s leadership to make sure we continue to focus on the issues and tasks at hand. President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and I remain committed to being trusted partners as we seek to build a better, more prosperous world for everyone.

It is too early to tell if the U.S government’s overtures to the Pakistani people, over the summer and now, going forward, will smooth out years of implacably opposed opinion on unhelpful interventions in Pakistan’s politics.  Most Pakistanis think that American promises aren’t worth much. Promises of a longer stay coupled with more productive moves to ensure the safety of Pakistanis in the tribal regions, plans to spur on economic growth, raise education standards, fall to daily drone strikes.  But maybe there is yet a third way.

Faheem Haider is the Senior Blogger on Asia for the Foreign Policy Association.

Why Nations Fight? Past And Future Motives For War

Last night at IDEAS, Richard Ned Lebow launched his new book, Why Nations Fight. Here he outlines the key argument of the book, which analyses a wholly new data-set of inter-state wars.

Following Plato and Aristotle, I posit spirit, appetite and reason as fundamental drives with distinct goals.  They generate different logics concerning cooperation, conflict and risk-taking. They require, and help generate, characteristic forms of hierarchy based on different principles of justice. A fourth motive – fear -- enters the picture when reason is unable to constrain appetite or spirit. Fear is a powerful emotion, not an innate drive.  In real worlds, multiple motives mix rather than blend, giving rise to a range of behaviors that often appear contradictory. 

In modern times the spirit (thumos) has largely been ignored by philosophy and social science. I contend it is omnipresent. It gives rise to the universal drive for self-esteem which finds expression in the quest for honor or standing.  By excelling at activities valued by our peer group or society, we win the approbation of those who matter and feel good about ourselves.  Institutions and states have neither psyches nor emotions.  The people who run these collectivities or identify with them do.  They often project their psychological needs on to their political units, and feel better about themselves when those units win victories or perform well. Transference and esteem by vicarious association are especially pronounced in the age of nationalism where the state has become the relevant unit.  

I documented the relevance of the spirit for war in a series of case studies in A Cultural Theory of International Relations.  In this book, I extend my analysis to war throughout the modern era and analyze war initiation in terms of the relative power of states and their respective motives for war.  I derive six propositions from my theory about war initiation concerning the kinds of states that start wars, their motives for going to war, who they fight against, their rate of successes, the extent to which general wars arise from miscalculation and the propensity of weaker states to attack stronger ones.  To test these propositions, I constructed a data set of all inter-state wars involving great and aspiring rising powers from 1648 to the present.  

Contrary to realist expectations, I find security responsible for only 19 of 94 wars.  A significant number of these wars pitted great powers against other great powers and none of them were associated with power transitions.  Material interests are also a weak motive for war, being responsible for only 8 wars, and most of those in the eighteenth century.    Standing, by contrast, is responsible for 62 wars as a primary or secondary motive.  Revenge, also a manifestation of the spirit, is implicated in another 11.  There is no evidence for wars between rising and dominant powers, as predicted by power transition theory.  There can be little doubt that the spirit is the principal cause of war across the centuries, and that it and its consequences have been almost totally ignored in the international relations literature.

In examining the future of war we need to recognize important changes that are taking place in how actors understand war in relation to their goals.  Interest shows a sharp decline as a cause of war once mercantilism gave way to more sophisticated understandings of wealth.  Security-motivated wars show no similar decline by century but come in clusters associated with bids for hegemony by great or dominant powers.  The most recent clusters of security-related wars were associated with the run up and conduct of the two world wars of the twentieth century.  Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is now longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.  Wars of standing can also be expected to decline as successful war initiation no longer enhances standing.  It may actually lead to loss of standing in the absence of United Nations’ approval of the military initiative in question.  The chance of war among great and rising powers is therefore diminishing and we may be cautiously optimistic that interstate war as an institution will see a sharp decline in this century. 

Richard Ned Lebow the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Myanmar 2010 Elections: Outcomes and Implications

This event served to discuss the political situation in Burma/Myanmar after the elections of 7 November as well as the release from house arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi six days later. The chair, Dr Jürgen Haacke, briefly reminded the audience that the elections were part of the military regime’s roadmap to a so-called ‘discipline-flourishing multiparty democracy’. He also outlined some of the core features of the political system that the 2008 Constitution sets out, highlighting among other the ways in which military leaders are keen to play a role in the country’s national politics, not least by retaining significant influence in both the executive and legislative branches of government. Bo Bo Lansin, a consultant editor of Mizzima News, used his introductory remarks to focus on the results of the elections and the various reasons why these should be seen as having been seriously flawed. In particular, he pointed to the phenomenon of advance votes for the junta that produced unfavourable outcomes for candidates from opposition and ethnic parties. Derek Tonkin, a former UK diplomat and now Chairman of Network Myanmar, discussed the ineffectiveness of existing sanctions and the role that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would likely now play, not least as a possible mediator between Burma/Myanmar and the international community on the issue of sanctions.

The ensuing discussion focused on two broad themes: the current domestic political situation and the issue of sanctions. In relation to the former the audience for instance asked the panellists whether they thought the elections constituted a successful exercise in the re-branding of Myanmar and the ruling junta. Other questions focused on the state of the National League for Democracy, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s relations with other leaders of the pro-reform and pro-democracy camp. In response, Bo Bo Lansin spoke about the current fluidity of Burmese politics, focused on the significant legitimacy issues faced by the military junta and also emphasised the tensions between Naypyidaw and a number of ethnic nationalities. Derek Tonkin pointed out that in previous months and years neither members of the business community nor the armed forces had rejuvenated NLD party ranks. Panellists pointed to past problems of factionalism within the NLD, while highlighting Daw Suu’s stated preparedness to work with other political leaders.

The question arose whether human rights organisations working on Burma/Myanmar should expect that Western governments would follow their advice of now putting more pressure on the regime. The panel thought that this was unlikely without the governments first consulting with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on this issue. Derek Tonkin pointed out that Daw Suu has argued that if the people of Burma wanted sanctions to be lifted, she would consider it. It was moreover noted that the US government is clearly interested in persisting with pragmatic engagement, a position reflected in the remarks made by State Department speaker Phillip J. Crowley on 15 November 2010.

There was agreement that sanctions imposed on Naypyidaw have hitherto failed. Derek Tonkin distinguished between three broad categories of sanctions: the blocking of funding by Western countries from international financial institutions (which leaves Burma/Myanmar with less than a quarter of development assistance received by neighbouring Laos or Cambodia); the official discouragement of trade, investment and tourism; and statutory sanctions specifically targeting regime representatives and associated cronies. He recounted how the European Union had on one occasion - mistakenly - imposed sanctions against a significant number of private businesses with no obvious connections to military or ‘crony’ interests. He suggested that the regime’s leadership was at best inconvenienced by targeted Western sanctions. Also, by employing sanctions Western countries had undermined any influence with the military they might once have enjoyed.

Given the political realities and the challenges facing Aung San Suu Kyi and, more broadly, the country’s pro-reform and democracy camp, Bo Bo Lansin and Derek Tonkin both remained sceptical concerning the more immediate prospects for significant political change within Burma/Myanmar.

By Dr Jürgen Haacke