The New York Times
has two stories today that neatly illustrate the challenges President Obama and
his team face in working with our allies, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Afghanistan story
reveals that there may well have been a serious discussion about "doing
a Diem to Karzai" -- that is, discussion about whether to try to replace
Karzai with a more pliant leader. The proponent of this idea was Peter
Galbraith, an American who worked on the United Nations team trying to help the
Afghan government transition to full, stable democracy. Galbraith is an
interesting figure; he was the original author of what became known as the
Biden Plan to divide Iraq into 3-parts, and he gained notoriety in recent
months for not having revealed an alleged conflict
of interest (he stood to make millions of dollars from oil deals in
autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq).
In the story, Galbraith emphasizes that he never actually implemented the plan,
though he did apparently try to reach out to Biden's office to persuade the vice president on the matter. The problem, however, was that Galbraith's U.N. bosses were
appalled at the proposal, and Karzai got wind of the plan. In short order the
United States had to climb down. Karzai is (understandably) angry and
suspicious about what he doubtless views to be arrogant and perhaps even
imperialist behavior on the part of the Americans. And, as a consequence,
our influence over the Kabul government is arguably less than it might
otherwise have been.
The Pakistan story
has a different lede, but perhaps is of a piece with Afghan story. The stated
lede is: Pakistani harassment of U.S. contractors and junior diplomats is
undermining the war effort. The implicit link to the other story is: our
Pakistani allies believe the United States has been acting in an arrogant,
imperialist fashion and, as a consequence, our leverage over them is less than
it might otherwise be.
It may strike some as odd that an administration that has taken such pains to
present itself as more reasonable and less prone to cowboy diplomacy than its
predecessors would find itself in this predicament. The truth is that the
Obama and Bush teams held to very different theories about how best to cajole
our war allies into more constructive cooperation. The Bush team, belying
the cowboy image, believed that we got better results when we pressured
beleaguered allies like Karzai or Musharraf in private and offered assurances
in public. The Obama team believes that they will get better results if they
pressure in private and in public. Moreover, the Obama team feels the
need to demonstrate to domestic critics that it really is getting tough on both
the Afghan and the Pakistani government.
It is very hard, however, to do that kind of public pressuring without
antagonizing the government you are trying to cajole. In the same way, it is
very hard to engage in various regime-change plotting without generating
similar antagonisms.
That has been part of the AfPak story over the last year and it is part of the
reason that the policy results have been mixed.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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