Pakistan Policy Choices Loom
Pakistan’s disturbing internal situation has occasionally bobbed to the surface of foreign policy debates among presidential contenders and is likely to get fresh attention with the February 18 elections. CFR’s Max Boot writes today for the Commentary magazine blog, Contentions, that U.S. policymakers would be wise to recognize the plummeting domestic support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Boot writes: “Two new surveys of public opinion in Pakistan deliver generally good news about the future of that country—and bad news for the future of administration policy, which has been tied so closely to President Pervez Musharraf. That policy seems increasingly untenable, with a new poll sponsored by the International Republican Institute finding that 75 percent favor his resignation and only 16 percent are opposed.”
Keep reading here.
For all the candidates’ positions on U.S. policy toward Pakistan, see CFR.org’s Campaign Issue Tracker on the subject.
February 14th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Pakistan was a terrorist harbor on September 10, 2001, most especially it’s military of which Musharraf is a part. If GWB wanted to invade something, it should have been Pakistan and Afghanistan; one can’t help but wonder whether that would have upset some sort of oil pipeline scheming/planning/debate taking place in the region post-collapse of the Soviet Union. Unocal, for one, admits dealing with the Taliban in the mid-90s in a cold-eyed corporate way, and to date, the oil reserves in all of the “stans” remain pretty much untapped.
So, now recently, we have had the silly spectacle of GWB advising PM to change his outfit! Or maybe that was a good idea: that’s what GWB did on the aircraft carrier. But, big difference: Musharraf’s new costume had been symbolically stripped of the protective codpiece which was so effectively implied in GWB’s pilot garb; so Musharraf had better be ready for some defensive moves. Ouch.