Talking with Benazir

The American decision to ‘punish’ Pakistan by withdrawing some $800m of a $3 billion military aid package demonstrates Washington’s nuanced approach to dealing with Islamabad that is to be commended. Clearly, the Pakistani Government knew exactly the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden at the time of his death in May at the hands of American Special Forces. There are no doubt several other senior Al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures being quietly supported by the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency. And yet, the ‘punishment’ is measured, enabling Islamabad to insist it is only the routine withdrawal of men and equipment; the removal of which they had themselves sought. It is a diplomatic Pas de Deux, and so it must be.

Why are the Americans being so careful with Pakistan? Quite simply, America and the West are a very long way from being able to leave that troubled region. Indeed, the West will need to support the Pakistani state against the anti-state for the foreseeable future. Fail and nuclear-armed Pakistan will provide the space for Al Qaeda and its cohorts to reconstitute and re-group. This struggle is far from over. Indeed, the Americans, unlike their European allies, most of whom have tuned out, understand that any strategy that draws down in Afghanistan must necessarily draw up in Pakistan.

Why are the Pakistanis so ‘difficult’? A couple of years ago I was briefed by the ISI at the Pakistani Army Headquarters. The briefing was what one would expect; a justification of Pakistan’s uneasy relationship with the Americans and their western coalition partners. Above all, whilst an ungoverned or Taliban Afghanistan may be a threat to the West, Afghanistan is only important to Pakistan in the context of its struggle with India over the future governance of Jammu Kashmir. To understand Pakistan, a Pakistani view is thus always essential and years ago I had the best.

Back in the 1970s I had a conversation with Benazir Bhutto in the Oxford Union. As I recall our chat was shortly before her father, Zufikar Ali Bhutto, then Prime Minister was overthrown by a military coup so it must have been late 1976 or 1977. Two years later Prime Minister Bhutto was executed on what are still widely held to have been trumped up charges. This striking, beautiful woman had the poise of an aristocrat and spoke like one, albeit with an alluring taste of the Punjab. What she had was star quality, and I was star struck.

She was inordinately proud of her country, but despaired of it; she loved her people, but despaired of them. She told me that whilst Pakistan wanted to be governed, its needs were so great that it was virtually ungovernable. Pakistan would always be a compromise between tyranny, democracy, society and community because the relationship between the state and the people was like no other on earth. Sadly, she too met an untimely end fighting for the country in which she so passionately believed.

She also took a sophisticated view of her country’s troubled relationship with India. Whilst she could be as populist as the next Pakistani leader when it came to India (she rather infamously once urged a crowd to cut an Indian governor to pieces), she also sought to break out of the sterile cycle of distrust that so still haunts these two nuclear neighbours born out of the British Raj.

The Americans clearly understand that any adjustment to strategy can only take place if the US a) acts as an honest broker between India and Pakistan; and b) convinces India and Pakistan that Jihadists are as much a threat to them as to the West. Fail and the status quo ante will be rapidly re-forged, with previously fragile states even further discredited in the popular mind. In such circumstances India will seek to increase its influence in southern Afghanistan to keep the region instable. The Pakistani Army will be forced to look two ways, south over the green line in Kashmir at the Indian Army, and north at an instable border along its entire north-west from Nimroz, through Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul and beyond. To counter India’s stratagem the ISI will continue to destabilise Kabul to prevent and constrain Indian influence in Afghanistan. At best two weak states, Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be left to handle a complex and disruptive Pashto space – the very conditions that spawned the Al Qaeda threat to the West.

Had Harvard-educated Benazir lived and risen to power, which seems likely, she may well have provided a more consistent partner to Washington. It would have been risky but she was no stranger to risk. She could well have insisted in return on the de-militarisation of America’s strategy in the region, which Washington is now moving towards. There would still have been a big ‘if’. New Delhi would of course have been critical both to her strategy and that of the Americans. The sadness for me is that Indian politicians have seemed so lacking in vision and thus unable to move beyond the domestically factional. Would they have made the leap of faith required?

Forty one years ago, on the eve of the 1970 war the relationship between India and Pakistan may have been one of competing equals. No more. Today, it is the relationship between a failing nuclear-armed Islamic state and an emerging world power. If anyone can change the regional-strategic dynamics it is the Indians, but to do so they will need to start acting like the world power they claim to be. And yet we wait.

America is thus right to tread softly with Pakistan. However, since the premature demise of Richard Holbrooke momentum has been lost (for all the Ambassador's heavy-handedness).  American attention to strategic detail only makes sense if India is properly engaged so that the conflicts in southern and eastern Afghanistan and that in Jammu-Kashmir are once and for all ‘de-conflicted’, to use the ghastly jargon of the strato-wonk.

I could not say I knew Benazir Bhutto, but I did meet her and talk with her and being very young and naive at the time I was utterly star-struck, like so many. She had her faults. She could be haughty and imperious and too easily forgive those around her less noble, but she never lacked for a ready smile and a keen wit. Had she lived Pakistan’s future would have been brighter, as would Afghanistan’s and India’s futures. This is because she had something I have so rarely seen in the region – an ability to rise above the factional and see a truly strategic future for her country, her people...and her region.

America must therefore honour her legacy and stick close to Pakistan, for all its many failings. There is simply no other strategic option open – not today, not tomorrow, nor the day after.

Talking with Benazir – I only wish I had had more of a chance.

Can Europe's Small Leaders Make Big Strategy?

George Washington wrote, “A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends”.

As Leon Panetta takes over at the Pentagon the US military faces cuts unknown for a generation. A defence budget of $700 billion is unsustainable given the intensive care nature of America’s economy. But here’s the strategic crunch; America like Europe must balance strategy with austerity at what is arguably the biggest moment in global strategy since 1945. The world is no longer Euro-centric, it is world-centric, but only now as the mist that is Al Qaeda begins to dissipate can strategic futures begin to be glimpsed with any clarity.

Balances of power and spheres of influence are slowly re-forming and with them the progressive marginalisation of the grand institutions that were the stamped hallmarks of the Western liberal age. Beijing sees power and strategy in essentially and traditionally classical terms.  So to a degree does Washington.  Neither have as yet ‘benefitted’ from Europe’s post-modern view of itself and the world beyond. Europeans are too busy seeking the world they would like to deal effectively with the world that exists.  And, like it or not it is America and China who will establish the rules of the twenty-first century power game, not Europe.

Thus, as Panetta takes high office China’s 2010 White Paper on China’s National Defence (CND10), published earlier this year, offers essentially more essential reading than the increasingly irrelevant and misnomered European Security Strategy and, dare I say it, the 2010 NATO Strategic Concept. Whilst China is unabashedly nationalist and strategic, both the European Onion and the Atlantic Alliance have become unashamedly astrategic.  A gap between words and deeds now yawns. In that context how one organises the transatlantic relationship or indeed the Onion is beside the point – the re-organisation of the irrelevant by the incapable in pursuit of the unattainable.

The China Paper pulls no punches. The US is bracketed alongside terrorists and extremists as a ‘destabilising force’ in Asia. Particular concern is expressed about the reinforcement by the US of its military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region. China’s aim: an Asian strategic order that is China-led.

The crux of the strategic matters is thus; the nature and pace of China’s relative rise and America’s relative decline, allied to the political-strategic philosophies of both, means that on current trajectories a clash at some point in this century is probably almost inevitable. Europeans thus face the most profound of big choices – seek the continued protection of the United States and the price that will go with it, or cut free from America and thus re-define its relationship with the coming China.

If European leaders want to understand the relevance of the transatlantic relationship to Americans they too might read CND10. Indeed, the relationship between America and China will shape not only Europe’s place in the world, but the shape and the nature of its defence. And, the strategic choices Europeans will make over the coming decade and the structures that emerge from such choices will tip those very emergent balances now apparent. Let us at the very least hope said choices are indeed strategic in both scope and reach, for they will need to be.

The facts of strategic power are indeed stark. China’s White Paper under-estimates its defence spending by a factor of at least two, China claims a defence budget of $81.8 billion, which is probably closer to $200 billion and growing at around 4% per annum. At present US defence expenditure represents some 4.7% of gross domestic product, China’s defence expenditure some 2.2%, but is more likely nearer 3.5%. US defence expenditure is politically unsustainable, whilst China’s defence expenditure is sustainable and from Beijing’s perspective desirable.

The nature of the strategic choice open to Europeans is thus simple - balance China with America or balance China and America. Certainly, Europeans will not be afforded a strategic bolt-hole in which to hide. But there is a glimmer of an opportunity if European leaders are big enough to see it. Europeans can and must work tirelessly with America, China and others to mitigate the dangers of said balances of power, not least because of the damage done to Europe's own history.  And Europeans could clearly be in a position to play such a role if it has the strategic vision and leadership so to do. 

However, such a role is dependent on a European grand strategy worthy of the name, either through a concert of European powers, or rather more implausibly through the increasingly unworldly European Onion. However, such a vision would also require big leaders, not least to overcome the self-defeating tension that exists between the Onion and the leading member-states on issues of strategy, the most fundamental of issues. Indeed, what the current crop of Euro-leaders clearly do not as yet realise is that the next decade is as big in strategic terms as that faced by Europe’s greats in the 1940s – Churchill, Monnet, Schuman, Spaak et al.

Thus, the strategic challenge for Americans and Europeans alike will not simply be to do more with less, but again to meet the challenge of greatness that is thrust upon us at a time when all the austerity–driven, post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan instincts are to retreat behind walls of rhetoric. To obsess over petty issues that divide and which providence will soon prove dangerously irrelevant.

The sad fact of our age is that neither the European Onion, nor NATO nor indeed the United Nations and its many diaspora are fit for the coming age. It is strategic midedle-aged spread shared by many of America’s great institutions of state which are still too focussed, too often on fighting each other. The failure of the West is thus a very real prospect. 

The ancient Chinese military writer Sun Tzu once said that the quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon. There is little in the uncertain way that Europe’s leaders have dealt with the debt crisis that suggests they are capable of either decision or timing, let alone strategy. It is not much more encouraging on the other side of the Atlantic. 

Can Europe’s small leaders make big strategy? 

Julian Lindley-French

Britain is Coming Off the Rails

London, 5 July. Can you believe it? The British Government is about to given £3 billion, some €3.5bn, of British taxpayers money to a German company to build one thousand rail carriages. As a result some fifteen hundred jobs will be lost in the north of England at a time of acute economic stress. The Government says that its hands are tied by European Onion procurement rules. Would the German or French governments have permitted such a deal? Answer? Never!

Apparently, the French and German governments take a more ‘liberal’ interpretation of Onion rules. But it is not the fault of Berlin or Paris. Indeed, this whole sorry saga typifies the mix of incompetence and arrogance that has marked the approach of successive British governments (both politicians and bureaucrats) who seem to forget that their first duty is to look after the interests of the people who put them in power – the British citizen.

It is incompetence in that British governments are eternally obsessed with playing by the rules that everyone else breaks. The result? Britain and its taxpayers are routinely shafted. It is arrogant in that British governments routinely convince themselves that leading by example will somehow convince others to do the same. This morning Berlin and Paris will be laughing at London’s stupidity – again.

Ironically, I have just watched a BBC TV programme on the future of the United Kingdom. A poll came out yesterday that suggested that some 50% of the English would not mind if Scotland gained independence. I am a passionate believer in the Union between England and Scotland that has been so effective since it was created back in 1707, when the English taxpayer had to bail out the Scottish state after Edinburgh’s disastrous expedition to colonise Panama brought Scotland close to bankruptcy. Just like the English taxpayer had to bail out the Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland after another ill-advised venture in more recent times.

Indeed, in a world getting bigger and more dangerous by the day the ‘United Kingdom’ is still a brand that offers something to a stable world. That said, as a democrat I would reluctantly accept the will of the Scottish people if they did indeed decide the forge their own path, so long as we English did not have to pay for it - again.

Interestingly, a sub-current of dissent ran through the TV debate; given that British institutions of state no longer look after the interests of British people then each of Britain’s constituent parts – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – might be better served if they looked after their own parochial interests. It is a mark of how far London has become disconnected from its primary responsibility (and one is tempted to say ‘reality’) that such a debate should even be taking place.

Do not get me wrong. Rules matter – but if only all governments uphold both the spirit and the letter of said rules, and avoid routinely defecting as and when suits. Nor am I calling for nationalism or protectionism, simply pragmatism. At the very least London should stop trying to occupy a moral high ground that does not exist. If the French and German take a ‘liberal’ view of Onion procurement rules than so must the British.

The implications are clear. Unless the ‘British’ people can see that London is indeed fighting for their interests both in the Onion and beyond and stops its obsession with playing by rules everyone else breaks then I fear for the future of the United Kingdom. And, unless the great institutions of the British state can escape from the political correctness that has infected it to the heart and which do so much harm to ordinary Britons then in time the United Kingdom will fail. Why? Because ordinary Britons will rightly no longer support institutions that clearly do not support them.

Britain is fast coming off the rails. Time to back on the tracks and stand up for Britain, Mr Cameron.

Julian Lindley-French