Can Imran Khan Really Transform Pakistan?: Editorial, Globe & Mail, July 31, 2018 — Imran Khan is the sort of figure who rises to political power in movies, but not often in real life.
Bailing Out Pakistan: Jed Babbin, Wahsington Times, July 29, 2018— Nuclear-armed Pakistan is not a model of stability.
Will Pakistan’s Charismatic New Premier Change the Relationship With Israel?: Charles Dunst, Times of Israel, Aug. 1, 2018 — The election of former cricket star Imran Khan as Pakistan’s new prime minister has raised eyebrows across the globe.
Trump Needs to Tell America Where this Afghanistan War is Heading: Steve Beynon, Washington Examiner, July 11, 2018— Last week, an American soldier was killed, and two of his comrades were wounded in an apparent insider attack in Afghanistan.
On Topic Links
Meet the New Pakistan, a Lot Like the Old Pakistan: Daniel Ten Kate and Chris Kay, Bloomberg, Aug. 1, 2018
Meet Pakistan’s Playboy-Turned-Prime Minister: Mary Kay Linge, New York Post, July 28, 2018
Is Afghanistan Ready for Peace?: Barnett R. Rubin, Foreign Affairs, July 30, 2018
Peace in Afghanistan More Elusive as Taliban Shrug Off Talks: Rahim Faiez, National Post, July 11, 2018
CAN IMRAN KHAN REALLY TRANSFORM PAKISTAN?
Editorial
Globe & Mail, July 31, 2018
Imran Khan is the sort of figure who rises to political power in movies, but not often in real life. He was Pakistan’s most famous cricketer before his retirement. He was educated at Oxford and was friends with Princess Diana. His playboy reputation made him tabloid fodder in 1980s London. The election win of such an intriguing figure is bound to raise hopes of renewal at home and abroad.
His Pakistan Movement for Justice party came up slightly short of a majority but looks likely to form a governing coalition with smaller parties. Mr. Khan is already being widely treated as prime minister-in-waiting. Can Pakistan’s presumptive new leader transform the country, as he has vowed to do, building an “Islamic welfare state,” rooting out corruption and forging peace with its many terrorist factions?
The mere fact of his election is a moderately hopeful sign. Mr. Khan is a departure from the procession of glowering generals and corrupt dynasts who usually lead Pakistan. If he assumes the premiership as expected, it will be just the second peaceful transfer of democratic power in Pakistan’s history.
But there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about Mr. Khan’s ability to cut through the morass of Pakistani politics. Over the years, he has spoken in favour of misogynist tribal law. He also expresses guarded sympathy for the Taliban and supports Pakistan’s stringent anti-blasphemy laws. A bold modernizer, willing to take on the country’s religious establishment, he is not.
And though Mr. Khan is rarely accused of being corrupt, his recent triumph has been marred by accusations of vote-rigging and a belief that Pakistan’s powerful military establishment was behind his candidacy. It does not bode well for the integrity of the vote that Nawaz Sharif, the former PM and de facto leader of Mr. Khan’s rival party, was jailed on corruption charges shortly before the election. Mr. Khan is an impressive figure, but Pakistan’s problems run deep. Leading its government will prove to be a sticky wicket, even for a legendary cricketer.
BAILING OUT PAKISTAN
Jed Babbin
Washington Times, July 29, 2018
Nuclear-armed Pakistan is not a model of stability. It just elected a new prime minister after a campaign that featured widespread violence and election day bombings. The apparent loser has alleged vote-rigging in favor of his opponent, who was supported by the omnipresent Pakistani army. That’s one half of the context in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will soon consider another financial bailout for Pakistan, which has benefited from a dozen of them since the 1980s.
The other half is the fact that Pakistan’s economy is in shambles due to large-scale corruption and a growing debt crisis. The money it owes other nations and non-Pakistani entities is more than 30 percent of its GDP partly because of the extensive loans it has received from China to build parts of CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, by which China is building roads, power plants, railroads and military bases in Pakistan. Pakistan needs about another $3 billion in the next few months to avoid defaulting on loans from the IMF, the World Bank and China. The IMF will almost certainly bail Pakistan out of its financial troubles again. But should it? There are two reasons that weigh heavily against such an action.
The first is Pakistan’s continuing support of a variety of terrorist networks through its infamous Inter Service Intelligence agency, ISI. Among the terrorist groups Pakistan supports are al Qadea, the Taliban (also supported by Russia and China) and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which massacred more than 160 people in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Osama bin Laden hid for years in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It’s inconceivable that ISI wasn’t responsible for his concealment. The Trump administration has terminated military aid to Pakistan because it refuses to cease supporting terrorist networks with money, fighters and intelligence information. But there is no action we, or any other nation, can take to stop Pakistan’s religiously-based support for terrorism. Why, then, shouldn’t we block another IMF bailout?
The second reason not to bail out Pakistan is China’s growing de facto colonization of Pakistan through CPEC. According to a Wall Street Journal report, China is investing about $62 billion in Pakistan to build infrastructure projects. Three years into the program, according to that report, about half of the CPEC planned projects have begun. China is conducting what some call “debt trap diplomacy,” through which Pakistan is becoming so indebted to China that it will be compelled to follow China’s policies in Southwest Asia and beyond. In fact, the debt trap has already been sprung with the eager assistance of the Pakistan’s government, ISI and army.
Gwadar is a large Pakistani city on the Arabian Sea. Chinese officials have demanded that much of the nearby population be moved away for security reasons and to make room for thousands of Chinese military and civilian people being brought in to construct large port facilities and eventually transform Gwadar into a Chinese naval base. Pakistan’s government — dependent on its army for whatever level of stability it can achieve — will not suffer de facto colonization gladly. Despite Pakistan’s support of terrorism, China’s corrupting largesse will be able to satisfy the Pakistani army and ISI sufficiently to quell any thoughts of rebellion. In June, Defense Secretary James Mattis said of China, “The Ming Dynasty appears to be their model, albeit in a more muscular manner, demanding other nations become tribute states, kowtowing to Beijing.”
Another IMF bailout for Pakistan would be a Western contribution to China’s transformation of Pakistan into a tribute state. In these circumstances, the United States — the largest contributor to IMF — needs to voice its opposition to another bailout of Pakistan and try to prevent it. We probably can’t prevent it, but we certainly need to try. We have some leverage. According to a 2016 report by the Congressional Budget Office, U.S. obligations to the IMF were then $164 billion. But, as the CBO reported, it is very difficult to account for the actual costs we incur. Nevertheless, as the CBO wrote, because of the risk of defaulted loans U.S. contributions to IMF are at risk.
Some will argue that denying Pakistan another IMF bailout would force it to borrow more from China, accelerating its dependence on Chinese largesse and power. Unfortunately, that dependence is already established and whether IMF grants another bailout or not won’t change that. Instead, denying another IMF bailout would make Pakistan’s subservience more obvious to the Pakistani population and government. The attendant embarrassment to Pakistan could create friction between it and China, which is sufficient reason for another IMF bailout to be blocked.
Pakistan’s immediate importance to us is the logistics route it has provided for supply our and our allies’ forces in Afghanistan. China’s power over Pakistan may cause future closures. Thus, our policy toward China has to factor in the war in Afghanistan. India, which borders both Pakistan and China, is the key.
But our policy toward China is unclear. President Trump’s accelerating tariff war won’t turn it into a fair trader, far less an ally. It would be far better for the president to speak out on the dangers of China’s de facto colonization of Pakistan and other nations. If such action were coupled with a clear embrace of India, comprised of a new trade agreement and the beginning of a defense alliance, the president’s policy could help contain China’s ambitions.
WILL PAKISTAN’S CHARISMATIC NEW PREMIER
CHANGE THE RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL?
Charles Dunst
Times of Israel, Aug. 1, 2018
The election of former cricket star Imran Khan as Pakistan’s new prime minister has raised eyebrows across the globe. He has promised a “new Pakistan,” running on a light-on-policy nationalistic anti-corruption platform. Khan, 65, “is known for running a team of one, making impulsive decisions, contradicting himself and then using his enormous reserves of self-confidence and charisma to dig himself out,” Jeffrey Gettleman wrote in The New York Times.
Critics have questioned the legitimacy of his victory, as “the election was widely considered tainted” due to allegations of rigging and military interference. Some observers believe he could forge more functional relations with the United States and India — despite the US-India-Israel nexus being reviled domestically – while others are concerned he could further isolate the country from relations with the West.
Khan has also long faced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — his first wife had Jewish roots — and since becoming a more devout Muslim in recent years has talked of making Pakistan a welfare state according to Islamic tradition. Pakistan, the world’s sixth-most populous country, has nuclear weapons and is located strategically next to India, China, Iran and Afghanistan. So what is there to make of the country’s new leader?
He was first a sports celebrity. Khan is a former cricket star who made his debut for the Pakistani national team in 1971 at 18. Upon graduating from Oxford University in England, he rejoined the national squad team, playing from 1976 to 1992 and captaining Pakistan to victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup. He spent much of his time in London in the 1980s and 1990s, developing a reputation as a playboy — a past he has aimed to distance himself from. Khan frequently visited London nightclubs, describing the club Tramp as his “living room.”
He has been the victim of anti-Semitic taunts. Khan married the British socialite Jemima Goldsmith in 1995 when she was 20 and he was 42. Goldsmith is not Jewish, but has ethnic Jewish roots and recounts being “made familiar with Jewish traditions.” Khan’s Pakistani critics have long exploited her heritage to undermine his domestic political credibility. In 2013, political rivals wrote of his “Jewish connections” and spread “innuendos” about “Jewish financing.” Khan even filed a libel suit against a politician who accused him of working as an “agent of the Jewish lobby.” The railways minister, Khwaja Muhammad Asif, wrote in 2017 that “Khan’s relations with [the] Jewish lobby are no secret.”
“Imran Khan always responded to barbs about his alleged Jewish connection by saying that his ex-wife, Jemima, was brought up Anglican Christian,” Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011 and current director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute, told JTA. “I wish he had stood up to anti-Semitism, but he never did.” Although Goldsmith converted to Islam before the pair’s marriage (she also learned Urdu and moved to Pakistan before the couple divorced), Khan’s “past marriage to a woman of Jewish descent is considered by many Pakistanis as an unforgivable stain on the energetically Islam-infused platform,” Paul Gasnier wrote in Haaretz.
He has distanced himself from his Western past. Khan’s recent electoral victory demonstrates that Pakistanis have either looked past or accepted the blemish of his Western past — including his marriage — or that the former cricket star was able to effectively scrub it away (or that the army was always going to pick a winner).
Khan, despite his time in England, has recently dog-whistled to hardline Islamists and has been “distancing himself from his days as a star athlete and ladies’ man.” Khan has pandered to both Islamists and secularists. He has promised to create both the “type of state that was established in Medina,” referring to the Muslim city-state from the Prophet Muhammad’s time and “the country that Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah had dreamed of,” which would have been a secular democracy.
He is critical of Israel but less so than many other leaders in the Muslim world. Khan winks abroad to both the Muslim world and the West. On Twitter, he repeatedly calls out Israeli policy toward Gaza, although in a manner more subdued than other leaders in the Muslim world, referencing “Israel’s continued oppression against Palestinians” and condemning US President Donald Trump’s move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Yet in a 2012 tweet Khan, in an apparent repudiation of anti-Semitism present in some parts of Pakistani society and perhaps with a nod to the West, showed empathy for Jewish suffering. “Just as questioning the holocaust is painful to the Jews, & we respect this,” he wrote, “so abuse of the Prophet (PBUH) is even more painful to Muslims.”
Experts doubt he will change Pakistan’s official stance toward Israel. In the glow of victory, Khan has made overtures toward the US and India — two countries that, along with Israel, form the nexus that Pakistan’s Senate chairman once called a “major threat” to the Muslim world. While he has not directly commented on Israel, Pakistan has a history of semi-secret relations with the country despite an official boycott of the Jewish state and local derision of a supposed Zionist-Hindu conspiracy.
In 2005, then-Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom met his Pakistani counterpart, Khurshid Kasuri, in Istanbul, Turkey. Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf attended an American Jewish Congress dinner in New York as the guest of honor. In 2009, the head of Pakistan’s spy agency contacted Israeli officials to warn of potential attacks on Israeli targets in India. And in 2011, Israel was rumored to have exported military technology to Pakistan.
Pakistani journalist Kamran Yousaf, writing in 2018 in The Express Tribune, the country’s New York Times-affiliated newspaper, said that “Diplomacy is the art of making new friends and avoiding confrontation with countries with which you don’t have the best of relations.” Pakistan’s policy toward Israel has historically followed the Muslim world’s boycott of the Jewish state — an icy diplomatic reality that seems to be thawing. “Proponents of that policy have now themselves embraced the change,” Yousaf wrote. “Saudi Arabia is the prime example.”
Ambassador Haqqani, however, believes that Khan will neither build upon these previous relations nor follow Saudi Arabia’s lead in thawing frozen relations with Israel. “His political stance has been anti-Israel,” Haqqani told JTA. “He also has to take into account the fact that Islamist groups got 5 million votes in the election that got him 16 million votes. Given his own Islamic-nationalist rhetoric, I do not see Imran Khan as the man who would reach out to Israel on behalf of Pakistan. But miracles can always happen.” Christine Fair, provost’s distinguished associate professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, told JTA that any opening to Israel will be the decision of the army, not Khan’s, referencing the Pakistani military’s vast power. “To my knowledge,” she said, “there is no such interest in the army.”
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center, expressed similar pessimism. “Khan may consider himself a maverick and a bold reformer willing to go where others haven’t gone before him — such as in his pledge to eliminate corruption — but I don’t think he’ll go out of his way to reach out to Israel,” he told JTA. “Not that he’d rule out exchanges and relations, but the idea of trying to push for official relations — that’s a tall order, and I just don’t see it happening.” Kugelman said, however, that for all the obvious political and religious differences between the two countries, they share something fundamental in common in that they are religious states.
“Pakistan’s military and civilian elites — including Khan — all have ties to the West, and when you have ties to the West, the chances are that you’ll have some type of exposure to Israel or to Jews, or both,” he said. “So none of these [previous] relations are surprising.” “The big question is if there will ever be a Pakistani leader who tries to push for a normalized relationship with Israel. If it happens, I doubt Khan will be the one to make that push.”…[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
TRUMP NEEDS TO TELL AMERICA
WHERE THIS AFGHANISTAN WAR IS HEADING
Steve Beynon
Washington Examiner, July 11, 2018
Last week, an American soldier was killed, and two of his comrades were wounded in an apparent insider attack in Afghanistan. These casualties ought to spur the Trump administration to ask exactly what we’re doing in that country, nearly 17 years after we launched our post-9/11 attack on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. I have a personal occasion for a moment of reflection. This week marks 10 years I have given to the Army, some of which I spent in combat in Afghanistan. I do not regret a single day of service. But we are at war, and all signs point to the government forgetting that and the American people don’t really know what we’re fighting for.
“I say with confidence, because of all of you and all those that have gone before and our allies and partners, I believe victory is closer than ever before,” Vice President Mike Pence said addressing troops in Bagram, Afghanistan in December. The sentiment was uplifting, but Pence wasn’t able to point to any recent military victories, or any concrete improvements. In fact, the White House simply hasn’t explained what our military is trying to accomplish in that volatile country where its sons and daughters are still coming home in coffins or without limbs.
President Trump seems to have been more occupied with his war on the press than the war in Afghanistan, only mentioning the country once this year on Twitter in January. The only major action the administration has reported to the public is deploying the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), which the Department of Defense claims killed 94 Islamic State fighters including four commanders.
Like many of the actions of the administration, the bombing was solid TV and made us feel good. But it’s a reminder that Afghanistan is not like Nazi-occupied France in 1944: there’s no town to take, no single figurehead to take prisoner, and no capital city to bomb. In fact, we have no measurable gains in Afghanistan. It’s time for the administration to shoot straight with the American people. Right now, it is difficult getting an accurate count on the number of troops deployed. It looks like the administration is concealing its plans in Afghanistan, trying to sweep this conflict under the rug to keep it out of the public eye. Or worse, there is no plan for this war.
Some of the questions the Trump administration need to answer: Towards what end are these troops dying in Afghanistan? Is the massive federal spending in this conflict worth it? What does victory look like? A full withdrawal from the region would almost certainly lead to the collapse of Afghanistan’s government. So is the U.S. committed to war in Afghanistan for a hundred years. If so, that fact needs to be spelled out so Congress and the public are dealing with reality.
And if Afghanistan falls: Does that materially affect American interests? It is a brutal question, but we need to decide if we’re staying handcuffed to this country or not. One study shows the Taliban control 70 percent of Afghanistan, some of which I patrolled half a decade ago. Soldiers are still are getting into gunfights on the same mountains I did years ago. There’s no clear evidence killing a gunman in Helmand Province makes me safer going to Home Depot in Virginia.
I am proud of my service, and I feel my friends and I did a lot of good work in Afghanistan. But there’s potentially poor management on the Department of Defense’s end when places where I slept are in worse condition today than they were years ago. This feels like less of a war with great strategic minds behind the scenes and more of a game of kick-the-can in which leaders today hope someone emerges down the road or dynamics change in a way that brings a natural conclusion to the war. The burden on the administration’s shoulders is to give the public an acceptable explanation as to why we’re at the point where a father and son can be deployed to the same war and with little to show for it.
On Topic Links
Meet the New Pakistan, a Lot Like the Old Pakistan: Daniel Ten Kate and Chris Kay, Bloomberg, Aug. 1, 2018—“We will run Pakistan like it has never been run before,” said Imran Khan during his first televised address after his party’s decisive election win on July 25. He did so below a picture of a young Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the nation’s revered founder when it won independence from the British Raj in 1947.
Meet Pakistan’s Playboy-Turned-Prime Minister: Mary Kay Linge, New York Post, July 28, 2018—Cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan, the former playboy who counted Princess Diana as a close friend, is poised to become Pakistan’s next prime minister. “We’re going to run the country like it’s never been run before,” he declared ahead of Saturday’s early election results.
Is Afghanistan Ready for Peace?: Barnett R. Rubin, Foreign Affairs, July 30, 2018—We used to appreciate the hard work of the United States for development in Afghanistan,” Iqbal Khyber, a 27-year-old medical student from Helmand Province, told me in Kabul on July 2. “Unfortunately, things happened.
Peace in Afghanistan More Elusive as Taliban Shrug Off Talks: Rahim Faiez, National Post, July 11, 2018—With the Taliban shrugging off the Afghan government’s latest offers of a cease-fire and negotiations, peace seems as elusive as it has been for decades in this war-battered country, both for troops on the front lines and for civilians facing frequent attacks.
