Category: International Relations

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in an apparent suicide bombing today.

UPDATE: Pajamas Media has a roundup of links on the assassination. On CNN, Peter Bergin is speculating that there was likely some involvement with the Pakistani military due to the assassination happening in Rawalpindi. Previous assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf had involved low-level members of the military.

CNN is reporting that Bhutto’s husband said that she was shot in the neck before the suicide bomber blew himself up. There have been conflicting reports over whether Bhutto died from bullet wounds or shrapnel from the blast.

UPDATE: Some quick reactions: This could plunge Pakistan into civil war. Bhutto had some following with members of the Pakistani upper class who were sick of Musharraf and wanted to see Pakistan move towards democracy. With Bhutto assassinated, everything is in doubt. On the good side, perhaps this will unite the Pakistani people against al-Qaeda and the extremists in their own midst. This may force Musharraf to move harder against the extremists, especially along the lawless Pakistan/Afghan border.

For America, these events remind us that we can’t simply withdraw behind our borders. This is no time for isolationism, nor is it a time for a foreign policy based on naïvete. The brewing crisis in Pakistan could easily become a nightmare scenario for the world—if Pakistan’s nuclear weapons fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, it would be disastrous for the region and for the world.

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden has more links and insights on the fallout of Bhutto’s assassination. He suspects that this assassination was a collaborative act between al-Qaeda and Taliban linked jihadis and the Pakistani military. We would like to draw a line between the two, but Pakistani government and military is rife with radical Islamists. That line simply cannot be so cleanly made.

We have far more questions than we do answers, and the lack of answers is making a bad situation even worse. If Pakistan falls into civil war, we had better be prepared to take Pakistan’s nukes out of the equation or the results could be too terrible to countenance.

Venezuela To Chavez: ¿Por Qué No Te Callas?

In a bit of good news, the voters of Venezuela have rejected Hugo Chávez’s attempt to amend Venezuela’s Constitution to allow him to stay in office beyond 2012. The official tally has the amendment losing by 2%—although some sources indicate that the actual margin was considerably larger.

Chávez has been trying to make himself into another Castro—a “President for life” with plenary powers over everything in Venezuela. Thankfully, he isn’t strong enough to do that without moving directly against the Venezuelan army and people, who aren’t about to let him seize power. So, Chávez has had to try and democratically take more and more power. This defeat signals that his plans aren’t working, and his attempt to create another Cuban-style “socialist” state are failing.

TigerHawk asks whether Spanish King Juan Carlos didn’t help in putting Chávez down a peg. At a recent meeting in Chile, Chávez went on a rant, which prompted the monarch to tell him “¿Por qué no te callas?”—or “why don’t you shut up?” Adding insult to injury, King Juan Carlos used the informal form of address, which is the sort of language one would use for a child. The line has become famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world, being used in everything from mobile phone ringtones to numerous YouTube videos. By publicly scolding Chávez, King Juan Carlos essentially put him in his place, turning him from the Bolivarian Revolutionary to just another gasbag.

It’s unclear what Chávez will do now—although there’s no doubt he’ll try to hang on to power as long as possible. He’s wisely choosing not to move directly against the results of the election, but that doesn’t mean he’ll take the results lying down. As long as Hugo Chávez remains in power, Venezuelan democracy is imperiled. Thankfully, not even Chávez’s machinations have been enough to prevent the people of Venezuela from casting their votes. So long as the people have political power in that country, Chávez will be kept in check. What will be crucial is ensuing that he cannot so erode democracy as to give himself the dictatorship cloaked in Marxist rhetoric that he so fervently desires.

A Key Question

Glenn Reynolds asks a key question:

WHY IS THE WORLD MORE CONCERNED with Musharraf’s coup than with Hugo Chavez’s emerging dicatatorship? Because enemies of the United States, like Chavez, get a pass.

Sadly, he’s right. While Hugo Chávez gets fêted by Hollywood celebrities for his dictatorial takeover of Venezuela, Musharraf—who at least has some legitimate reason for his crackdown—is deeply criticized.

For some, it’s fine to be a dictator, just so long as you’re the right kind of dictator.

UPDATE: Reason highlights how Hugo Chávez pulled the wool over the world’s eyes as he slowly destroyed Venezuelan democracy.

Can We Trust Benazir Bhutto?

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has returned home to throngs of cheering supporters after eight years of self-imposed exile. She has an editorial in the Boston Globe on her intention of creating a new and democratic Pakistan, and she may just have the political power to do that. She writes:

As I board the plane that takes me home to Pakistan today, I carry with me a manuscript of a book I am writing that will be published shortly. It is a treatise on the reconciliation of the values of Islam and the West, and a prescription for a moderate and modern Islam that marginalizes religious extremists, returns the military from politics to their barracks, treats all citizens and especially women with full and equal rights, selects its leaders by free and fair elections, and provides for transparent, democratic governance that addresses the social and economic needs of the people as its highest priority.

To me this is not just a book but a campaign manifesto, a guide to governing. If the people of Pakistan honor me again with an opportunity to lead, I intend to practice what I preach, to have my actions match my rhetoric and to make Pakistan a positive model to 1 billion Muslims around the world.

It’s certainly a noble goal. The question is whether Bhutto can pull it off, and whether her return presages a brighter future for Pakistan or whether it will simply return that country to the pre-Musharraf status quo.

Ralph Peters makes a pointed argument that Bhutto will only take Pakistan backwards:

Nonetheless, we blind ourselves to the forces in play when we caricature all coup-makers. For all his faults, Musharraf views himself as a Pakistani patriot – not as a political party boss in the fashion of Bhutto, nor as a Punjabi or Pashtun, Baluch or Sindhi first. Indeed, only the military holds the fractured state of Pakistan together.

Now Benazir Bhutto – one of the figures who did so much to destroy the fabric of society and the economy – is back in Pakistan. It appears that she and Musharraf have worked out a power-sharing arrangement. We may hope for the best, but we also need to be prepared for the worst: a new era of hyper-corruption, as Bhutto’s grab-all gang replaces the relative moral rigor of the military in the public sphere.

And let’s not forget those nukes.

While Bhutto is saying all the right things, her record in Pakistan is hardly stellar. During her tenure as the country’s leader, the Pakistani government openly helped the Taliban gain power in Afghanistan. She was kicked out of office twice for massive corruption. She has nearly $1.5 billion that had previously been locked away in a Swiss bank account and is now accessible due to the deal with the Musharraf regime.

Peters is quite correct to point out that behind all the flowery rhetoric about peace and democracy is a politician who has repeatedly let her people down. One of the most corrosive problems faced by developing nations is corruption, which eats away at the foundations of good government. The last thing Pakistan needs to replace a flawed by honest patriot with a corrupt sectarian who will continue her policy of getting rich off lucrative foreign contracts while Pakistan crumbles around her and falls into extremism.

Perhaps Benazir Bhutto has changed her spots. Perhaps she really believes in democracy and establishing a democratic future for Pakistan. Yet the West should not blindly trust her to do so. The worst thing that could happen in the region is a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the hands of those who would use those weapons for either religious terrorism or national conflict. A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would devastate the entire region and throw the world economy into panic.

The stakes are too high in this matter to trust blindly. Bhutto must be held to her word, and that means that should she return to her own ways the West must be willing to look past Musharraf’s military background and work with him on ensuring that Pakistan does not fall into anarchy or worse.

When Dr. Strangelove Is No Longer Farce…

Ron Rosenbaum has an incredibly chilling article that suggests that the Russian Federation has a “doomsday” device that could allow a single individual to launch a massive nuclear strike. The system, code-named “Perimetr” is designed to detect a nuclear impact on Russian soil, and if so detected to await a stand-down order from Moscow. If that order is not received, an individual officer can then launch a responding strike.

With Vladimir Putin continuing to ratchet up tensions by resuming strategic bomber missions from Russian territory, the idea of such a “doomsday weapon” is frightening. We assume that there are command and control systems in place to prevent an accidental nuclear war — yet the safeguards in place for those command systems may not be sufficient to protect us from just such an eventuality.

We live in a world of risk, and while terrorists getting their hands on WMDs remains one of the lead risks we face, a conventional attack is not out of the question. Developing effective countermeasures while working to ratchet down tensions remain just as crucial now as they were 25 years ago when the risk of Soviet attack was a preoccupation of the US military. We would like to think that the days of the Cold War are over, but as Russia once again reaches towards militarism, the day of a nuclear threat from Russia may not be quite over. We should hope that technologies like ballistic missile defenses are not needed, but if they ever are needed, we cannot allow ourselves to be caught in a position where millions of lives are lost due to their absence.

Another Look At Kurdistan

Kamal Said Qadir has an interesting piece in Middle East Quarterly that says that Iraqi Kurdistan is on a downward spiral of corruption and terrorism:

There was renewed hope in the wake of Saddam’s fall that the bifurcated Kurdistan Regional Government could fortify its democracy. Such hope was dashed. On January 30, 2006, Kurdish authorities held new elections—the two dominant parties ran on the same list so as not to compete—and divided power equitably according to their leaderships’ pre-election agreement. KDP leader Masoud Barzani assumed the presidency of the Kurdistan region, and his nephew Nechervan Barzani became prime minister, overseeing a unified, albeit inactive, parliament. They preside over more than forty ministers, all of whom receive hefty salaries, perks, and pensions.

Because Iraqi Kurdistan lacks a constitution, Barzani and other senior political leaders can exercise unchecked, arbitrary power. The absence of accountability and a free press has enabled corruption, abuse, and mismanagement to increase.

Nepotism is widespread. Not only is the prime minister the nephew of the president, but the president’s son, Masrour Barzani, a scarcely-qualified 34-year-old, heads the local intelligence service. Another Barzani son is the commander of the Special Forces. And Masoud Barzani installed his uncle, Hoshyar Zebari, as Iraq’s foreign minister when the political party heads were distributing patronage. Other relatives hold key positions in ministries or executive offices. PUK leader Jalal Talabani has only one wife and two children and so has less patronage to distribute. Still, one son oversees PUK security and the other is the Kurdistan Regional Government’s representative to the United States. When the major Iraqi political parties divided up the ministry portfolios in Baghdad, Talabani awarded the PUK’s slot to his brother-in-law. Another brother-in-law is the Iraqi ambassador in Beijing.

Other Barzani and Talabani relatives have monopolized telecommunications, construction, and trade. Those who have no relatives in power sit at the bottom of every hierarchy. Merit is seldom a factor in promotion. While it is possible for non-family members to become ministers, they must have a long record of submission to the Barzani or Talabani families. Many Iraqi Kurds welcomed Iraq’s liberation, calculating that the presence of U.S. forces would also help solidify democracy in the Kurdistan region. They now question whether more than 3,000 U.S. troops sacrificed their lives to enable oligarchy.

We should be assisting the Kurds in their efforts to create an enclave of security in Iraq — but that support should also be conditioned on democratic reforms. It isn’t surprising that Kurdistan is having trouble with corruption and patronage — that’s a common feature of most developing democratic systems, even those that have had more time to develop than Kurdistan has. That doesn’t excuse what’s going on in Kurdistan, nor should the United States be passively enabling such behavior.

The Kurdish people owe much to the United States, and the US remains wildly popular throughout Kurdistan. We need to use that influence to ensure that the KDP and the PUK do not allow Kurdistan to become yet another Middle Eastern oligarchy. That means making funding conditional on democratic reforms, supporting responsible and democratic opposition parties, and working to restore responsible governance at the local level. All of those things can easily be done, so long as the United States is willing to push the Kurds towards democratic reform rather than sliding back towards autocracy.

We also need to ensure that Kurdistan is not becoming a hotbed of terrorism. We promised the Turkish government that the PKK would not have free reign in Iraqi Kurdistan — and the Turks have responded to recent PKK attacks by violating Iraqi territory. That is not an acceptable development on either side. The US must make it clear to the Kurds that support for terrorism is not acceptable, and if the peshmerga will not restrain the PKK, we will. That will be a difficult sell, but unless we want to see the one island of stability Iraq turn into yet another battleground, we have little choice.

Kurdistan remains 10 years ahead of the rest of Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t still work with the Kurdish people and the international community on reinforcing democratic values such as transparency and the rule of law. Kurdistan can be a democratic outpost in the Middle East that will positively effect the region — but they need the US and the international community to reinforce the values that will get them there. The development of Iraq as a nation requires a long-term commitment both in terms of security and in development. What happens in Kurdistan is a barometer for what will happen in the rest of Iraq in the future — and if Kurdistan becomes yet another kleptocratic state, the rest of Iraq will likely follow.

UPDATED: Sarko Keeps The Status Quo

Incoming French President Nicolas Sarkozy appears set to maintain the status quo in terms of French foreign relations. Sarkozy has already hinted at a French withdrawal from Afghanistan, and has recently selected the anti-American Hubert Védrine as Foreign Minister.

It appears that President Sarkozy has decided to embrace the left wing of French politics despite his overwhelming mandate for change. At best, this would make French foreign policy schizophrenic — Sarkozy’s Atlanticist views are in direct conflict with Mr. Védrines view of containing American “hyperpower.” At worst, it signals that President Sarkozy has no intent of changing the course of French foreign policy, which has viewed itself as a major player on the world stage despite being impotent in nearly every regard. The French people rejected the vision of the EU superstate and rejected the left-wing ideologies of the Socialists — Sarkozy may not want to embrace America as Prime Minister Blair had, but he certainly has the authority to say that French foreign policy can be more muscular in defending democratic principles and human rights from Iraq to Afghanistan to Darfur. In order for France to be relevant, they have to be willing to take risks and be willing to project power. Unfortunately, Sarkozy seems to have fallen into the myth that using diplomatic “soft power” while taking the use of hard power off the table is anything but a sign of political impotence.

If Sarkozy really wanted to make France relevant again on the world stage, he’d start by making France’s foreign policy relevant. Declaring that the use of force is off the table in regards to Iran, pulling out of Afghanistan, and hiring on yet another énarque elitist as Foreign Minister is hardly a break from the atrocious foreign policy of the Chirac government. If that’s the direction that Sarkozy will take France, then France will still be a bit player on the world stage. It’s unfortunate that someone like Sarkozy, who based his campaign on a rejection of the status quo in France, is so quick to embrace it in terms of France’s foreign diplomacy. To follow the failures of the Chirac government in this regard is a major blow to hopes for better Franco-American relations and a more muscular French diplomacy abroad. Then again, given that French diplomacy has been more on the side of the enemies of civilization rather than it its defense, perhaps the irrelevance of French foreign policy should be viewed as a good thing.

UPDATE: May 17, 2007: It appears as though Védrine will not be Foreign Minister, instead the job will go to the human-rights defender Bernard Kouchner. Kouchner is a Socialist, but a Socialist who is willing to stand strongly behind basic principles of human rights. Michael Ledeen describes Kouchner as “a Socialist mugged by reality” — which seems apt.

Sarkozy seems to have gone exactly in the opposite direction of where it had looked like he would when I wrote this piece. Bad for me, as it invalidates my entire argument. For France, and the rest of the world, it is a positive sign of a stronger French diplomacy standing for human rights across the globe.

I was wrong on this one, but gladly so.

Olmert Survives

In a surprising move, it looks like Ehud Olmert won’t be leaving so soon afterall, after surviving three no-confidence votes in the Knesset. Olmert’s biggest rival within the Kadima Party, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is also holding her fire and not challenging Olmert.

Even though Olmert survived, it’s not sure how long his coalition can last. The cracks are already showing as the weakened government is unable to accomplish much and the public has lost confidence in Olmert’s leadership. Olmert is as unpopular as it is statistically possible to be — his 3% approval rating is within the margin of error. Even Livni is taking political fire for sticking with Olmert.

The biggest winner in this seems to be Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud. Livni was the only realistic challenger to Olmert within Kadima, and when the current government falls — which seems inevitable, Netanyahu is the one most likely to become Prime Minister.

Olmert may have won this battle, but the war is almost certainly lost. By clinging to power, he’s taking Ms. Livni down with him, which only makes the collapse of the Kadima coalition more likely to destroy the party than it would be if he had stepped down and allowed Livni to take his place.

Sarkozy Wins

Center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has won a convincing victory in the Presidential race in France. Sarkozy beat Socialist Ségolène Royal by a convincing margin of nearly 6% in an election where turnout was a massive 85% of the electorate.

There is no doubt that President Sarkozy enjoys a rather substantial mandate from the French people, and he has promised to reform France’s battered economy, get tough on the out of control crime in the banlieues of Paris, and work to ensure that France once again becomes an important player on the world stage. It may be a difficult task for him to achieve, but he shows the right attitude in dealing with the many problems that currently plague the French state.

He also reached out to the United States in his acceptance speech, stating that France would be an ally to the United States, but also saying that he hoped that the US would be more aggressive in fighting global warming.

Sarkozy is a step in the right direction for France, but he will have to fight an incestuous political culture, unions which can cripple the country if they don’t get what they want, and an economy that has been chronically mismanaged for years. However, he does have the right spirit of reform, which gives France an opportunity to reobtain the greatness that they’ve lost over the years.

Glenn Reynolds, as always, has a large selection of links on the Sarkozy victory. The excellent French blog No Pasaran also has in-depth coverage of the protests reacting to Sarkozy’s win. Sarkozy has promised to crack down on the criminal culture in Paris — and those criminals are not happy about that even though they’re one of the largest reasons why Sarkozy won.

McCain And The League Of Democracies

Presidential contender John McCain has come out in support of a league of democratic nations to act where the UN will not. It’s an idea that I’ve long supported, and it’s an idea whose time has come. The UN has proven itself to be utterly incompetent and thoroughly corrupt — the Oil for Food scandal, child sex rings in Cambodia and Africa, and lax financial controls all being symptoms of the larger disease at work. While places like Darfur and Iraq are embroiled in violence, the UN more often than not sides with autocracies like Iran, Venezuela, or Libya rather than democratic nations.

ABC News has more details on McCain’s plan. If we accept that there is a concept of universal human rights, then complicit in that acceptance is the notion that the only governments which are legitimate are those that are ruled with the consent of the people. To have an international body that upholds human rights, it cannot put autocratic and undemocratic nations on the same level as nations which respect the will of their people. The central flaw of the UN (but certainly not the only flaw) is that it is charged with upholding human rights internationally while still giving legitimacy to nations like Sudan and Iran. There is a tension between inclusiveness and a commitment to human rights, and the UN is failing to find the right balance.

Still, the idea of a “league of democracies” is not without its flaws. For example, what is a “democracy?” Certainly pure democracy is not workable on the national scale — which is why there aren’t any purely democratic states. However, is Iran a democracy? They have elections, albeit elections which are controlled by an unelected Guardian Council. What of Venezuela? Hugo Chavez would say that he was elected by the will of the people, although it’s likely that his election was a scam. What of Russia? Vladimir Putin was elected in a free and fair election, but is clearly a leader with a deeply autocratic bent who has stifled free speech in Russia and is dismantling Russian civil society. What about Pakistan? President Musharraf is not a democratic leader, yet Pakistan is a critical ally in the war on Islamist terrorism.

The devil is in the details of this plan. A League of Democracies is a good idea, and the UN is so hopelessly corrupt that reform would require the UN to be practically rebuild from the ground up. Could a League of Democracies act as a valuable supplement to the UN, perhaps replacing the UN Security Council in holding veto power over the decisions of the General Assembly? McCain’s proposing a bold idea, and one that makes a great deal of sense from a moral perspective. What remains to be seen is how concrete he can make this plan. A League of Democracies makes sense conceptually, but it has to be made to work in practice. If McCain can come up with a compelling structure that makes it all work, it will be a major boost to his foreign policy credentials. If not, it will be a pie-in-the-sky idea that has no chance of implementation.

At the same time, I’m hopeful that McCain will be able to champion the cause of creating more durable and less corrupt international institutions. The international sphere has been taken over by the relativist left, which is ultimately harmful to world peace. Striking the right balance between preserving national sovereignty and respecting the self-determination of nations and enforcing valuable international norms is crucial in a world where terrorists and weapons of mass destruction pose unprecedented challenges to world stability. That balance has not been found yet, but that doesn’t mean that the US and its democratic allies should stop trying. We need international institutions which defend human rights and the democratic values that come with them, and if the UN cannot be that body, then we should be looking at institutions that can.