By Sajjad Shaukat

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who visited Islamabad on October 20 this year, succeeded in reducing the heat in Pak-US relationship, but she emphasised on Pakistan to “remove safe havens of militants in FATA and the continuing threats across the border to Afghans.” But on October 23, during a CNN interview, Ms. Clinton first time remarked, “US acknowledges the need to

The Internet has exploded over the past couple of days with news that Susan G. Komen, the largest breast cancer organization in the US, would halt funding for Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of reproductive health services in the US.  A virtual uprising on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms by Komen and Planned Parenthood supporters and opponents and high-profile media coverage has inspired a national debate.  As of this morning, Komen has reversed its decision.  Since 2005, Komen has funded Planned Parenthood’s breast health and education programs, which include screenings and referrals for mammograms and other diagnostic testing, with just under $700,000 in grants disbursed to 19 (of 83) affiliates last year.  At the heart of the controversy: the American abortion debate.

Planned Parenthood and its defenders, as well as some from Komen itself, have alleged that the organization gave in to pressure from anti-choice groups that oppose Planned Parenthood’s contraception and abortion programs.  Komen, the “marketing juggernaut that brought the world the ubiquitous pink ribbon campaign,” has maintained that its funding halt was the result of internal changes to grant-making criteria.  Komen founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, appeared in a video, posted to the organization’s website and YouTube, charged critics with “mischaracter[ing]” the changes, which were made to increase impact and efficiency.  An investigative piece from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg cited anonymous sources within Komen who said that the new funding guidelines were merely an excuse to stop all grants to Planned Parenthood, which finds itself continually under fire from socially conservative, often religious, groups and politicians.  The revised Komen grant rules stipulated that any grantee under investigation by a local, state, or federal authority would no longer be eligible to receive funding.  Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, has been leading an investigation to learn whether Planned Parenthood had used US government funding for abortions, which would violate federal regulations.  Goldberg also discusses the role of Komen’s new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, in pushing to end funding to Planned Parenthood.  Handel ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 and is on the record as anti-choice and against Planned Parenthood’s mission.  As Goldberg points out, Planned Parenthood and Komen both say that previous funding has been used for breast cancer programs, not abortions or other reproductive health services.

While announcing Komen’s restitution of funding to Planned Parenthood, the organization apologized to the American public, stating that it would “ensure that politics has no place in our grant process.”  Only grantees under criminal investigation would be deemed ineligible.  The executive director of a Komen branch in New Jersey attributed the reversal to the public uproar and to actions within the organization itself: “We sent official letters to the headquarters,” she said. “Komen is a grassroots organization. The displeasure and the outrage was heard and the decision was reversed. I’m thrilled.”  Planned Parenthood, which has an annual operating budget of $1.1 billion, ended up benefitting from the national attention: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged a $250,000 matching grant, a Texas couple donated another $250,000, and 6,000 individual donors gave $400,000 in the first 24 hours after the initial Komen decision.

How, you might ask, could an almost universally-celebrated organization (almost, with emphasis) that focuses on breast cancer end up at the center of a debate about abortion?  The American political debate about a woman’s right to choose, of course, is so bitter and so divisive that it spills over to almost anything to do with women’s health.  In the past, HIV/AIDS programs and reproductive health services worldwide that were funded by US government programs were hobbled by the global gag rule.  It is an unfortunate (and ridiculous) truth that women’s health is inherently politicized.  It is also true that with or without legal protections for reproductive choice, some women will still seek out abortions, whether legal and safe or illegal and dangerous, which Foreign Policy Blogger for Children, Cassandra Clifford, discussed last week.  To quote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.  In fact, Secretary Clinton just says it all:

The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protesters and the recent virtual protests against SOPA and PIPA and Komen’s decision have a vector in common: the power of the Web.  In the past, grassroots activism has been a long and slow road–such as that for HIV/AIDS awareness, ARV access, and increased investment in prevention and treatment programs.  Social media platforms have transformed into global megaphones, where people around the world can connect with each other, pass along news even before it breaks on mainstream media sources, and demand change.  This week’s events have illustrated the potential of the Internet as a grassroots platform to call for more awareness about and funding for global health.  As I’ve written too many times in the past, precarious funding situations and underfunding are the major barriers to improved health worldwide.  With the strength of online grassroots activism, global health advocates have an ideal tool to promote their messages and to secure funding.  They must hone these tactics to initiate viral awareness and fundraising campaigns across social media and other web-based platforms.  After all, it doesn’t count if it’s not on Facebook.

Header photo by WeNews, CC BY 2.0.

Does Pakistan figure in the face-saving deal that the US is trying to thrash out with the Taliban in Doha?

By S. M. Hali

Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, a staunch and ardent supporter of the Kashmiri cause, is an American citizen of Kashmiri origin, from Indian Occupied Kashmir. He was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on July 19, 2011 for allegedly accepting monetary support from Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to lobby and influence the US government on the Kashmir conflict in violation of Foreign Agents Registration Act. His arrest came at a time when relations between Pakistan and the United States were already strained in the aftermath of the raid that eliminated Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Dr. Fai, who has been pillar of strength for the Kashmiri cause, organizing seminar, roundtable discussions and colloquiums for creating awareness in the world regarding the sad plight of the Kashmiris in Indian Occupied Kashmir, is a harmless person, devoting his life to the cause of his downtrodden brethren.

The United States of America, which is a melting pot of different ethnic origins, has been magnanimous in welcoming them. In fact, the Statue of Liberty, located at the mouth of New York harbor on Ellis Island, faces outward toward the nations, holding aloft the torch of freedom, the flame of hope, the promise of the future. She holds this torch high in the daytime and during the night as well. She shines her light in the midst of darkness. This symbol of freedom and hope was presented by the people of France to the people of the United States in 1886 in honor of the friendship between the two nations. Yet, the Statue belongs to all people.  Her message is universal, speaking to the hearts of those who cherish freedom everywhere.

Liberty’s image is one of strength, majesty, and hope, visible in her eternally raised right arm which carries the torch of freedom.  Holding aloft a light that never fails, she represents hope to the hopeless, welcome to the poor, courage to the meek. Facing outward toward the ocean, her lamp is a beacon on stormy seas, drawing to her shores, those from afar who seek a better life.  For these, and for countless others who embrace her message, the Statue of Liberty represents the Golden Door, which is the entrance into liberty and freedom from oppression that is the promise of America—a land, a people, a way of life. It is also the freedom of spirit and of choice that was declared an inalienable right in the US Declaration of Independence—a document whose date of execution, July 4th, 1776, is inscribed on the tablet she carries. The Statue welcomes all to this door—the lost, the needy, the rejected, and the exiled.  She invites them to step through it into freedom.

Immortalized in the poem of Emma Lazarus, the Statue speaks eternally the words of compassion: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." These words from the "The New Colossus," written in 1883, appear on the Statue’s pedestal.

For a nation, committed to the oppressed and downtrodden, victimizing Dr. Ghulam Nabi, a dedicated and unswerving freedom fighter is extremely contemptible. The decision to arrest Dr. Fai was taken while the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was touring India. It is apparent that the famed social worker was taken into custody only to please India. The overtures to the latest US paramour India have compelled it to take a number of unpleasant decisions, to woo it. Pakistan has been victimized and targeted while Kashmiri freedom fighters are now being incarcerated at the behest of India. The US is forgetting that Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai was also in contact with Indian diplomats and other officials. Besides carrying out activities with their involvement, he has also been gathering their support in organizing various Kashmir related functions. This does not make Dr. Fai a criminal. On December 7, 2011 Fai pleaded guilty to felony, conspiracy and tax evasion charges, but not for being an ISI agent.

The action against Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai has exposed US sincerity towards resolution of Kashmir Issue. President Obama, during his run up to the US presidential elections, had taken cognizance of the Kashmir issue and had promised that if elected, he would use his good offices to help resolve the flashpoint of Kashmir imbroglio, which has the potential of erupting into a war between nuclear weapons equipped India and Pakistan. The rivals have gone to war thrice during the last six and half decades and been on the brink of war on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, President Obama reneged on his promise to help resolve the Kashmir issue and cut the Gordian’s knot and bring peace into the region. When President Obama visited India, he was presented a petition signed by 4500 persons including the Kashmiri Diaspora and parliamentarians from the UK and US but Obama chose to disregard the petition.   

A legal question that arises is that in case, US law was being breached, why US authorities have taken so long to take action against Dr. Fai. It is now amply clear that the Indo-US nexus has chosen to victimize Dr. Fai a harmless human being only to pressurize Pakistan. His arrest was condemned by separatist Kashmiri leaders including Syed Ali Shah Geelani who called his arrest "a conspiracy by India to weaken the freedom struggle in Kashmir". The sentencing of Dr. Fai is scheduled for March 2012. Fai faces a five year sentence for the conspiracy charge and an additional three years for tax evasion. As part of his guilty plea, Fai signed an 81-paragraph "Statement of Fact" cataloging his crimes, with specific details as to the instructions and payments he received. The US judicial system should take into cognizance, that in pursuit of drawing US and international attention towards the trampling of Kashmiris’ rights, Dr. Fai had obtained the support of US legislators and parliamentarians like Dan Burton, Joseph R. Pitts and others. To single out Dr. Fai for victimizing him and incarcerating him for pursuing his noble mission is despicable

I have recently read an opinion by Fehim Tastekin, a Turkish Caucasus expert, who regularly writes for the Turkish daily Radikal. I find the article very important, so I translated it to the attention of FPA Blogs followers:

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http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalYazar&ArticleID=1073865&Yazar=FEHIM-TASTEKIN&Date=30.12.2011&CategoryID=100

Amidst its growing engagement in the Middle East and the Arab Spring, as well as its resurrecting Kurdish insurgency problem, Turkey installed the NATO Missile Defense Shield in September 2011. Many observers interpreted Turkey’s decision as a move against Iran, as a response to its expanding nuclear and missile capabilities, while Turkish officials indicated that the installment of this missile shield in Turkey was agreed upon much earlier and has nothing to do with Iran. The purpose of the missile shield also exposed differences within NATO countries. For example, French President Sarkozy had claimed “We call a cat, a cat; today’s threat is Iran”, while Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said “We also call a cat, a cat, but we haven’t specified a threat like [Iran]“. Hillary Clinton too had commented on the matter by “The shield is not directed against Russia; in fact it has to do with Iran”.

Russia wasn’t convinced however; Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov indicated “words fly, military technic is permanent; we want written guarantees”. To follow up, Russia’s decision to re-direct Kaliningrad missiles to European capitals increased the interpretations of a ‘new Cold War’. Yet, some observers indicate that Russia’s Kaliningrad move is not a mere reaction, but a part of a more profound thinking. According to Nevazisimaya Gazeta, Kremlin was informed of a U.S.-backed Israeli air raid against Iranian nuclear facilities and argued “… there will soon be a surprise raid. Iran will retaliate and the war will spread out. If Iran is invaded, Russia will not sit idly and will certainly send military aid.” Indeed, Russia Minister of Defense supported this perception, explicitly warning the United States in a Reuters interview that “an attack against Iran would be a wrong decision”.

Though more troublesome perhaps, is that Russia’s mistrust towards NATO’s missile shield was not confined to words. Soon after the installment of the missile shield, Russia made the following moves:

- Complete and urgent modernization of the 102nd Military base in Armenia
– Units close to Yerevan were deployed to Gumru, closer to the Turkish border
– Military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were put under alarm on December 1, 2011
– Some ships from Russia’s Black Sea fleet were re-deployed closer to the Georgian territorial waters.
– Missile command base at Dagestan was ordered to be ready for battle
– Guided missile frigates in the Khazar fleet were re-deployed to Mahackale and Kaspiysk.
– Alexander-E missiles were sent to the Krasnodar base, their range covering the NATO missile shield in Malatya
– Kuznetsov aircraft carrier was sent to Tartus, which is interpreted as a dual move against a possible military intervention to Iran and Syria

Russia also considers the possibility of an Azeri military move towards Karabakh to reclaim that territory lost to Armenia. When Russia extended its use of Armenia’s Gumru base, it also signed an agreement to protect Armenia against external attacks. Additionally, Russia is worried about its military presence in Armenia because of Georgia’s annulment of the treaty that enabled Russian troops to use Georgian territory to be transferred further south. The necessity to bolster Russian military presence in Armenia may lead Russia to force its way through Georgia. Meanwhile, Russia also needs to guarantee its use of the Gebele radar installation in Azerbaijan whose lease ends in 2012. Azerbaijan raised the cost of the installation from 7 million to 100 million US dollars per annum, while hints at the possibility of negotiating the cost in exchange for Russian support for its territorial demands over Karabakh.

Russia also considered Gebele radar installation as a test case for American intentions. When the Bush administration considered the installation of the radar site in Poland in 2007, Russia suggested that two countries should use Gebele radar base (with 6000 kilometer range extending from the Indian Ocean to North Africa) together. Bush government’s refusal was interpreted by Russia as a sign of American expansionism, as the Gebele radar base is more than sufficient to act as an early warning system against Iran. Together with the installation of the NATO missile defense shield in Turkey, Russia no longer believes that this is intended as protection against Iran.

On the other hand, NATO shield was an interesting move on the part of the Turkish government. It successfully silenced those who interpret Turkish foreign policy as ‘moving away from the West’ and also those who criticize Turkey for deteriorating relations with Israel as well as those who question Turkey’s commitment to its partnership with the United States. It allowed Turkish diplomats to argue “see, we are protecting Israel at the expense of deteriorating our relations with Iran and Russia”.

[end of article]

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All this makes me think that Turkey might be returning back to its ‘lone wolf’ foreign policy and siege mentality:

The problem is, just as Assad’s suppression methods and Turkey’s belligerent stance against him had caused the collapse of Turkey’s ‘zero problems policy’ in the south, NATO missile shield not only caused the collapse of this doctrine vis-à-vis Iran, but also vis-à-vis Russia and by extension, the Caucasus. Systemic constraints are pushing Turkey back to its pre-2002, traditional foreign policy understanding and a return back to its Cold War role: covering NATO’s southern flank. What makes Turkey’s new role ‘updated’ is that the Middle East is more active and more relevant to American interests than it was through the Cold War and therefore, Turkey may be the bridgehead of a new and more difficult dual-containment policy against Shia and Russian influence.

The new Cold War v2.0 is more complex and difficult for Turkey, which requires quicker balancing and more intricate set of interdependencies. At a time when Turkey’s domestic Kurdish problem is intensifying, simultaneously countering Russian AND Iranian influence at such proximity is a heavy burden for any country. Following months will create more visible cross-regional entrenchments and the United States must find a way to re-assert its relevance and weight in the wider region, certainly for Turkey, for any strategy of containment to succeed – if there still is such a strategy.

Arif Ali / AFP – Getty Images

A Pakistani boy drinks tea in a makeshift shelter at a livestock market ahead of Eid al-Adha in Lahore on Nov.5. The annual Islamic holiday, is marked by the ritual sacrifice after morning prayers of sheep, goats, cows and other livestock whose meat is then shared with the poor.

Mk Chaudhry / EPA

People carry posters of Pakistani cricketers Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif, who were sentenced by the London’s Southwark Crown Court to jail for their role in a fixing affair around a test match against England last year, during a protest in Multan on Nov. 3. The suspects were charged after an undercover reporter from the now defunct News of the World paper recorded Mazhar Majeed, the agent of the players, as saying he could arrange fixing schemes with Pakistan players. Butt was sentenced to 30 months and Asif received a sentence of one year. Teammate Mohammad Amir received a 6 month sentence.

Bilawal Arbab / EPA

Pakistani police officials inspect the site of a planted bomb blast in Karkhano market Peshawar, Nov. 2. One man was killed and at least 13 were injured when the bomb planted in a car exploded.

Aamir Qureshi / AFP – Getty Images

Supporters of Pakistani politician Imran Khan and chief of Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party, burn a replica drone during protest rally in Islamabad, Oct. 28. Khan staged a rally along with tribal elders in Islamabad against the continued US drone attacks in tribal areas which they said were killing hundreds of innocent people. Nearly 60 US drone strikes have been reported in Pakistan so far this year, dozens of them since Navy SEALs killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the garrison city of Abbottabad in May.

Aamir Qureshi / AFP – Getty Images

Pakistani politician and chief of Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party, Imran Khan, left, waves to supporters during protest rally in Islamabad on Oct. 28.

Rahat Dar / EPA

The gun of a member of the Pakistani police guard rests on a rooftop as supporters of the main opposition party Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) rally against the ruling Pakistan People Party, in Lahore, Oct. 28. The opposition protested against prolonged electricity outages and urged the government to take steps to address endemic corruption and price hikes.

Dsk / EPA

A still image from the video released by Taliban militants and made available to members of the media on Oct. 25, shows Swiss couple Daniela Widmer, 28, left, and Olivier David Och, 31, right, at an undisclosed location near the Pakistani-Afghan border, Oct. 15. Taliban militants holding the couple released the video in which the hostages call on the Swiss, Pakistani and the United States’ governments to release a Pakistani woman, Aafia Siddiqui, who has been convicted in the U.S. on charges of terrorism. Talibans have warned that if Aafia was not released, then their Islamic court would decide the fate of the Swiss and they will not hesitate to carry out any punishment, an indirect reference to the past executions. The Swiss couple was seized by gunmen on July 1 in the Loralai district after entering Pakistan from India.

A. Majeed / AFP – Getty Images

Pakistani internally displaced girls wait for food at the Jalozai camp in Nowshera district on Oct. 25. At least 18,000 people have fled their homes in Pakistan’s tribal district of Khyber. Families streamed out of the district, a flash point for Taliban and other violent groups on the NATO supply line into neighboring Afghanistan, after the army ordered them to leave because of military action going on in the area.

Arif Ali / AFP – Getty Images

Activists of ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) light candles in remembrance of former first lady Nusrat Bhutto in Lahore on Oct. 24. Thousands of mourners led by President Asif Ali Zardari turned out for the burial of former Pakistani first lady Nusrat Bhutto, the mother of assassinated prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The widow of Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and mother of Benazir Bhutto, died in Dubai at the aged 82 after a long illness.

Aamir Qureshi / AFP – Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leaves the Pakistani Foreign Ministry after talks with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Kharm, right. in Islamabad on Friday, Oct. 21, 2011. Clinton urged Pakistan to take “strong steps” to deny Afghan militants safe haven and to encourage the Taliban to reconcile after 10 years of fighting.

By Bill Keller for The New York Times

As an American visitor in the power precincts of Pakistan, from the gated enclaves of Islamabad to the manicured lawns of the military garrison in Peshawar, from the luxury fortress of the Serena Hotel to the exclusive apartments of the parliamentary housing blocks, you can expect three time-honored traditions: black tea with milk, obsequious servants and a profound sense of grievance.

Talk to Pakistani politicians, scholars, generals, businessmen, spies and journalists — as I did in October — and before long, you are beyond the realm of politics and diplomacy and into the realm of hurt feelings. Words like “ditch” and “jilt” and “betray” recur. With Americans, they complain, it’s never a commitment, it’s always a transaction. This theme is played to the hilt, for effect, but it is also heartfelt.

“The thing about us,” a Pakistani official told me, “is that we are half emotional and half irrational.”

For a relationship that has oscillated for decades between collaboration and breakdown, this has been an extraordinarily bad year, at an especially inconvenient time. As America settles onto the long path toward withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan has considerable power to determine whether the end of our longest war is seen as a plausible success or a calamitous failure.

There are, of course, other reasons that Pakistan deserves our attention. It has a fast-growing population approaching 190 million, and it hosts a loose conglomerate of terrorist franchises that offer young Pakistanis employment and purpose unavailable in the suffering feudal economy. It has 100-plus nuclear weapons (Americans who monitor the program don’t know the exact number or the exact location) and a tense, heavily armed border with nuclear India. And its president, Asif Ali Zardari, oversees a ruinous kleptocracy that is spiraling deeper into economic crisis.

But it is the scramble to disengage from Afghanistan that has focused minds in Washington. Pakistan’s rough western frontier with Afghanistan is a sanctuary for militant extremists and criminal ventures, including the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the notorious Haqqani clan and important remnants of the original horror story, Al Qaeda. The mistrust between Islamabad and Kabul is deep, nasty — Afghanistan was the only country to vote against letting Pakistan into the United Nations — and tribal. And to complicate matters further, Pakistan is the main military supply route for the American-led international forces and the Afghan National Army.

On Thanksgiving weekend, a month after I returned from Pakistan, the relationship veered precipitously — typically — off course again. NATO aircraft covering an operation by Afghan soldiers and American Special Forces pounded two border posts, inadvertently killing 24 Pakistani soldiers, including two officers. The Americans said that they were fired on first and that Pakistan approved the airstrikes; the Pakistanis say the Americans did not wait for clearance to fire and then bombed the wrong targets.

The fallout was painfully familiar: outrage, suspicion and recrimination, petulance and political posturing. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the army and by all accounts the most powerful man in Pakistan, retaliated by shutting (for now and not for the first time) the NATO supply corridor through his country. The Pakistanis abruptly dropped out of a Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan and announced they would not cooperate with an American investigation of the airstrikes. President Obama sent condolences but balked at the suggestion of an apology; possibly the president did not want to set off another chorus of Mitt Romney’s refrain that Obama is always apologizing for America. At this writing, American officials were trying to gauge whether the errant airstrike would have, as one worried official put it, “a long half-life.”

If you survey informed Americans, you will hear Pakistanis described as duplicitous, paranoid, self-pitying and generally infuriating. In turn, Pakistanis describe us as fickle, arrogant, shortsighted and chronically unreliable.

Neither country’s caricature of the other is entirely wrong, and it makes for a relationship that is less in need of diplomacy than couples therapy, which customarily starts by trying to see things from the other point of view. While the Pakistanis have hardly been innocent, they have a point when they say America has not been the easiest of partners.

One good place to mark the beginning of this very, very bad year in U.S.-Pakistani relations is Dec. 13, 2010, when Richard C. Holbrooke died of a torn aorta. Holbrooke, the veteran of the Balkan peace, had for two years held the thankless, newly invented role of the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The antithesis of mellow, Holbrooke did not hit it off with our no-drama president, and his bluster didn’t always play well in Kabul or Islamabad either.

But Holbrooke paid aggressive attention to Pakistan. While he was characteristically blunt about the divergent U.S. and Pakistani views, he understood that they were a result of different, calculated national interests, not malevolence or mere orneriness. He was convinced that the outlooks could be, if not exactly synchronized, made more compatible. He made a concentrated effort to persuade the Pakistanis that this time the United States would not be a fair-weather friend.

“You need a Holbrooke,” says Maleeha Lodhi, a well-connected former ambassador to Washington. “Not necessarily the person but the role.” In the absence of full-on engagement, she says, “it’s become a very accident-prone relationship.”

On Jan. 27, a trigger-happy C.I.A. contractor named Raymond Davis was stuck in Lahore traffic and shot dead two motorcyclists who approached him. A backup vehicle he summoned ran over and killed a bystander. The U.S. spent heavily from its meager stock of good will to persuade the Pakistanis to set Davis free — pleading with a straight face that he was entitled to diplomatic immunity.

On May 2, a U.S. Navy Seals team caught Osama bin Laden in the military town Abbottabad and killed him. Before long, American officials were quoted questioning whether their Pakistani allies were just incompetent or actually complicit. (The Americans who deal with Pakistan believe that General Kayani and the director of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were genuinely surprised and embarrassed that Bin Laden was so close by, though the Americans fault the Pakistanis for not looking very hard.) In Pakistan, Kayani faced rumbles of insurrection for letting Americans violate Pakistani sovereignty; a defining victory for President Obama was a humiliation for Kayani and Pasha.

In September, members of the Haqqani clan (a criminal syndicate and jihadi cult that’s avowedly subservient to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar) marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with two theatrical attacks in Afghanistan. First a truck bomb injured 77 American soldiers in Wardak Province. Then militants rained rocket-propelled grenades on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, forcing our ambassador to spend 20 hours locked down in a bunker.

A few days later the former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, spread his arms to welcome an emissary from the Taliban to discuss the possibility of peace talks. As they embraced, the visitor detonated a bomb in his turban, killing himself, Rabbani and the talks. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, without any evidence that American officials are aware of, accused Pakistan of masterminding the grotesque killing in order to scuttle peace talks it couldn’t control.

And two days after that, Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took to Capitol Hill to suggest that Pakistani intelligence had blessed the truck bomb and embassy attack.

His testimony came as a particular shock, because if the turbulent affair between the United States and Pakistan had a solid center in recent years, it was the rapport between Mullen and his Pakistani counterpart, General Kayani. Over the four years from Kayani’s promotion as chief of the army staff until Mullen’s retirement in September, scarcely a month went by when the two didn’t meet. Mullen would often drop by Kayani’s home at the military enclave in Rawalpindi, arriving for dinner and staying into the early morning, discussing the pressures of command while the sullen-visaged general chain-smoked Dunhills. One time, Kayani took his American friend to the Himalayas for a flyby of the world’s second-highest peak, K2. On another occasion, Mullen hosted Kayani on the golf course at the Naval Academy. The two men seemed to have developed a genuine trust and respect for each other.

But Mullen’s faith in an underlying common purpose was rattled by the truck bombing and the embassy attack, both of which opened Mullen to the charge that his courtship of Kayani had been a failure. So — over the objection of the State Department — the admiral set out to demonstrate that he had no illusions.

The Haqqani network “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” he declared. “With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck-bomb attack as well as the assault on our embassy.”

Several officials with access to the intelligence told me that while the Haqqanis were implicated in both attacks, there was no evidence of direct ISI involvement. A Mullen aide said later that the admiral was referring to ISI’s ongoing sponsorship of the Haqqanis and did not mean to say Pakistan authorized those specific attacks.

No matter. In Pakistan, Mullen’s denunciation led to a ripple of alarm that U.S. military “hardliners” were contemplating an invasion. The press had hysterics. Kayani made a show of putting the Pakistani Army on alert. The Pakistani rupee fell in value.

In Washington, Mullen’s remarks captured — and fed — a vengeful mood and a rising sense of fatalism about Pakistan. Bruce O. Riedel, an influential former C.I.A. officer who led a 2009 policy review for President Obama on Pakistan and Afghanistan, captured the prevailing sentiment in an Op-Ed in The Times, in which he called for a new policy of “containment,” meaning “a more hostile relationship” toward the army and intelligence services.

“I can see how this gets worse,” Riedel told me. “And I can see how this gets catastrophically worse. . . . I don’t see how it gets a whole lot better.”

When Gen. David H. Petraeus took over the U.S. military’s Central Command in 2008, he commissioned expert briefing papers on his new domain, which sprawled from Egypt, across the Persian Gulf, to Central Asia. The paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan began, according to an American who has read it, roughly this way: “The United States has no vital national interests in Afghanistan. Our vital national interests are in Pakistan,” notably the security of those nuclear weapons and the infiltration by Al Qaeda. The paper then went on for the remaining pages to discuss Afghanistan. Pakistan hardly got a mention. “That’s typical,” my source said. Pakistan tends to be an afterthought.

The Pakistani version of modern history is one of American betrayal, going back at least to the Kennedy administration’s arming of Pakistan’s archrival, India, in the wake of its 1962 border war with China.

The most consequential feat of American opportunism came when we enlisted Pakistan to bedevil the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Pakistan — with help from Saudi Arabia — created the perfect thorn in the Soviet underbelly: young Muslim “freedom fighters,” schooled in jihad at Pakistani madrassas, laden with American surface-to-air missiles and led by charismatic warriors who set aside tribal rivalries to war against foreign occupation.

After the Soviets admitted defeat in 1989, the U.S. — mission accomplished! — pulled out, leaving Pakistan holding the bag: several million refugees, an Afghanistan torn by civil war and a population of jihadists who would find new targets for their American-supplied arms. In the ensuing struggle for control of Afghanistan, Pakistan eventually sided with the Taliban, who were dominated by the Pashtun tribe that populates the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. The rival Northern Alliance was run by Tajiks and Uzbeks and backed by India; and the one thing you can never underestimate is Pakistan’s obsession with bigger, richer, better-armed India.

As long as Pakistan was our partner in tormenting the Soviet Union, the U.S. winked at Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. After all, India was developing a nuclear arsenal, and it was inevitable that Pakistan would follow suit. But after the Soviets retreated, Pakistan was ostracized under a Congressional antiproliferation measure called the Pressler Amendment, stripped of military aid (some of it budgeted to bring Pakistani officers to the U.S. for exposure to American military values and discipline) and civilian assistance (most of it used to promote civil society and buy good will).

Our relationship with Pakistan sometimes seems like a case study in unintended consequences. The spawning of the mujahadeen is, of course, Exhibit A. The Pressler Amendment is Exhibit B. And Exhibit C might be America’s protectionist tariffs on Pakistan’s most important export, textiles. For years, experts, including a series of American ambassadors in Islamabad, have said that the single best thing the U.S. could do to pull Pakistan into the modern world is to ease trade barriers, as it has done with many other countries. Instead of sending foreign aid and hoping it trickles down, we could make it easier for Americans to buy Pakistani shirts, towels and denims, thus lifting an industry that is an incubator of the middle class and employs many women. Congress, answerable to domestic textile interests, has had none of it.

“Pakistan the afterthought” was the theme very late one night when I visited the home of Pakistan’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh. After showing me his impressive art collection, Shaikh flopped on a sofa and ran through the roll call of American infidelity. He worked his way, decade by decade, to the war on terror. Now, he said, Pakistan is tasked by the Americans with simultaneously helping to kill terrorists and — the newest twist — using its influence to bring them to the bargaining table. Congress, meanwhile, angry about terrorist sanctuaries, is squeezing off much of the financial aid that is supposed to be the lubricant in our alliance.

“Pakistan was the cold-war friend, the Soviet-Afghan-war friend, the terror-war friend,” the minister said. “As soon as the wars ended, so did the assistance. The sense of being discarded is so recent.”

A Boston University-educated economist who made his money in private equity investing — in other words, a cosmopolitan man — Shaikh seemed slightly abashed by his own bitterness.

“I’m not saying that this style of Pakistani thinking is analytically correct,” he said. “I’m just telling you how people feel.”

He waved an arm toward his dining room, where he hung a Warhol of Muhammad Ali. “We’re just supposed to be like Ali — take the beating for seven rounds from Foreman,” he said. “But this time the Pakistanis have wised up. We are playing the game, but we know you can’t take these people at their word.”

With a timetable that has the United States out of Afghanistan, or mostly out, by the end of 2014, Pakistan has leverage it did not have when the war began.

One day after 9/11, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, summoned the head of Pakistani intelligence for a talking to. “We are asking all of our friends: Do they stand with us or against us?” he said. The following day, Armitage handed over a list of seven demands, which included stopping Al Qaeda operations on the Pakistani border, giving American invaders access to Pakistani bases and airspace and breaking all ties with the Taliban regime.

The Pakistanis believed from the beginning that Afghanistan had “American quagmire” written all over it. Moreover, what America had in mind for Afghanistan was antithetical to Pakistan’s self-interest.

“The only time period between 1947 and the American invasion of Afghanistan that Pakistanis have felt secure about Afghanistan is during the Taliban period,” from 1996 to 2001, says Vali Nasr, an American scholar of the region who is listened to in both academia and government. Now the Bush administration would attempt to supplant the Taliban with a strong independent government in Kabul and a muscular military. “Everything about this vision is dangerous to Pakistan,” Nasr says.

Pakistan’s military ruler at the time, Pervez Musharraf, saw the folly of defying an American ultimatum. He quickly agreed to the American demands and delivered on many of them. In practice, though, the accommodation with the Taliban was never fully curtailed. Pakistan knew America’s mission in Afghanistan would end, and it spread its bets.

The Bush-Musharraf relationship, Vali Nasr says, “was sort of a Hollywood suspension of disbelief. Musharraf was a convenient person who created a myth that we subscribed to — basically that Pakistan was on the same page with us, it was an ally in the war on terror and it subscribed to our agenda for Afghanistan.”

But the longer the war in Afghanistan dragged on, the harder it was to sustain the illusion.

In October, I took the highway west from Islamabad to Peshawar, headquarters of the Pakistan Army corps responsible for the frontier with Afghanistan. Over tea and cookies, Lt. Gen. Asif Yasin Malik, the three-star who commanded the frontier (he retired this month) talked about how the Afghan war looked from his side of the border.

The official American version of the current situation in Afghanistan goes like this: By applying the counterinsurgency strategy that worked in Iraq and relying on a surge of troops and the increasingly sophisticated use of drones, the United States has been beating the insurgency into submission, while at the same time standing up an indigenous Afghan Army that could take over the mission. If only Pakistan would police its side of the border — where the bad guys find safe haven, fresh recruits and financing — we’d be on track for an exit in 2014.

The Pakistanis have a different narrative. First, a central government has never successfully ruled Afghanistan. Second, Karzai is an unreliable neighbor — a reputation that has not been dispelled by his recent, manic declarations of brotherhood. And third, they believe that despite substantial investment by the United States, the Afghan Army and the police are a long way from being ready to hold the country. In other words, America is preparing to leave behind an Afghanistan that looks like incipient chaos to Pakistan.

In Peshawar, General Malik talked with polite disdain about his neighbor to the west. His biggest fear — one I’m told Kayani stresses in every meeting with his American counterparts — is the capability of the Afghan National Security Forces, an army of 170,000 and another 135,000 police, responsible for preventing Afghanistan from disintegrating back into failed-state status. If the U.S. succeeds in creating such a potent fighting force, that makes Pakistanis nervous, because they see it (rightly) as potentially unfriendly and (probably wrongly) as a potential agent of Indian influence. The more likely and equally unsettling outcome, Pakistanis believe, is that the Afghan military — immature, fractious and dependent on the U.S. Treasury — will disintegrate into heavily armed tribal claques and bandit syndicates. And America, as always, will be gone when hell breaks loose.

General Malik studied on an exchange at Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C., and has visited 23 American states. He likes to think he is not clueless about how things work in our country.

“Come 2015, which senator would be ready to vote $9 billion, or $7 billion, to be spent on this army?” he asked. “Even $5 billion a year. O.K., maybe one year, maybe two years. But with the economy going downhill, how does the future afford this? Very challenging.”

American officials will tell you, not for attribution, that Malik’s concerns are quite reasonable.

So I asked the general if that was why his forces have not been more aggressive about mopping up terrorist sanctuaries along the border. Still hedging their bets? His answer was elaborate and not entirely facile.

First of all, the general pointed out that Pakistan has done some serious fighting in terrorist strongholds and shed a lot of blood. Over the past two years, Malik’s forces have been enlarged to 147,000 soldiers, mainly by relocating more than 50,000 from the Indian border. They have largely controlled militant activities in the Swat Valley, for example, which entailed two hard offensives with major casualties. But they have steadfastly declined to mount a major assault against North Waziristan — a mountainous region of terrorist Deadwoods populated by battle-toughened outlaws.

Yes, Malik said, North Waziristan is a terrible situation, but his forces are responsible for roughly 1,500 miles of border, they police an archipelago of rough towns in the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, and by the way, they had a devastating flood to handle last year.

“If you are not able to close the Mexican border, when you have the technology at your call, when there is no war,” he said, “how can you expect us to close our border, especially if you are not locking the doors on your side?”

Americans who know the area well concede that, for all our complaints, Pakistan doesn’t push harder in large part because it can’t. The Pakistan Army has been trained to patrol the Indian border, not to battle hardened insurgents. They have comparatively crude weaponry. When they go up against a ruthless outfit like the Haqqanis, they tend to get killed. Roughly 4,000 Pakistani troops have died in these border wars — more than the number of all the allied soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

“They’re obviously reluctant to go against the Haqqanis, but reluctant for a couple of reasons,” an American official told me. “Not just the reason that they see them as a potential proxy force if Afghanistan doesn’t go well, but also because they just literally lack the capability to take them on. They’ve got enough wars on their hands. They’ve not been able to consolidate their gains up in the northern part of the FATA, they have continued problems in other areas and they just can’t deal with another campaign, which is what North Waziristan would be.”

And there is another, fundamental problem, Malik said. There is simply no popular support for stepping up the fight in what is seen as America’s war. Ordinary Pakistanis feel they have paid a high price in collateral damage, between the civilian casualties from unmanned drone attacks and the blowback from terror groups within Pakistan.

“When you go into North Waziristan and carry out some major operation, there is going to be a terrorist backlash in the rest of the country,” Malik told me. “The political mood, or the public mood, is ‘no more operations.’ ”

In late October, Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad, leading a delegation that included Petraeus, recently confirmed as C.I.A. director, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, Mullen’s successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Petraeus used to refer to Holbrooke as “my diplomatic wingman,” a bit of condescension he apparently intended as a tribute. This time, the security contingent served as diplomacy’s wingmen.

The trip was intended as a show of unity and resolve by an administration that has spoken with conflicting voices when it has focused on Pakistan at all. For more than four hours, the Americans and a potent lineup of Pakistani counterparts talked over a dinner table.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the dinner was the guest list. The nine participants included Kayani and Pasha, but not President Zardari or Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who provided the dining room at his own residence and made himself scarce. The only representative of the civilian government was Clinton’s counterpart, the new foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, a 34-year-old rising star with the dark-haired beauty of a Bollywood leading lady, a degree in hospitality management from the University of Massachusetts and, most important, close ties to the Pakistani military.

For a country that cherishes civilian democracy, we have a surprising affinity for strong men in uniform. Based on my conversations with American officials across the government, the U.S. has developed a grudging respect for Kayani, whom they regard as astute, straightforward, respectful of the idea of democratic government but genuinely disgusted by the current regime’s thievery and ineptitude. (We know from the secret diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks that Kayani has confided to American officials his utter contempt for his president and “hinted that he might, however reluctantly, have to persuade President Zardari to resign.”) Zardari, whose principal claim to office is that he is the widower of the assassinated and virtually canonized Benazir Bhutto, has been mainly preoccupied with building up his patronage machine for elections in 2013. The Americans expect little from him and don’t see a likely savior among his would-be political challengers. (As this article goes to press, Zardari is recovering from chest pains in a hospital in Dubai; there are rumors he won’t return.) So, Kayani it is. The official American consensus is less enamored of Kayani’s loyal intelligence underling, General Pasha, whose agency consorts with terrorists and is suspected of torturing and killing troublemakers, including journalists, but Pasha is too powerful to ignore.

The day after the marathon dinner, Clinton’s entourage took over the Serena Hotel for a festival of public diplomacy — a press conference with the foreign minister, followed by a town meeting with young Pakistanis and then a hardball round-table interview with a circle of top editors and anchors.

Clinton’s visit was generally portrayed, not least in the Pakistani press, as a familiar ritual of America talking tough to Pakistan. In the town meeting, a woman asked why America always played the role of bossy mother-in-law, and that theme delighted editorial cartoonists for days.

But the private message to the Pakistanis — and a more careful reading of Clinton’s public performance — reflected a serious effort to reboot a troubled relationship. Clinton took care to pay tribute to Pakistani losses in the war against terror in the past decade — in addition to the military, an estimated 30,000 civilian dead, the equivalent of a 9/11 every year. She ruled out sending American ground troops into Pakistani territory. She endorsed a Pakistani plea that U.S. forces in Afghanistan do a better job of cleaning up militant sanctuaries on their own side of the border.

Questioned by a prominent television anchor, she repudiated Mullen’s testimony, not only disavowing any evidence of ISI complicity in the attack on America’s embassy in Kabul but also soft-peddling the spy agency’s coziness with terrorists.

“Now, every intelligence agency has contacts with unsavory characters,” she said. “I don’t think you would get any denial from either the ISI or the C.I.A. that people in their respective organizations have contacts with members of groups that have different agendas than the governments’. But that doesn’t mean that they are being directed or being approved or otherwise given a seal of approval.”

That particular riff may have caused jaws to clench at the C.I.A. compound in Langley, Va. The truth is, according to half a dozen senior officials with access to the intelligence, the evidence of Pakistan’s affinity for terrorists is often circumstantial and ambiguous, a matter of intercepted conversations in coded language, and their dealings are thought to be more pragmatic than ideological, more a matter of tolerating than directing, but the relationship goes way beyond “contacts with unsavory characters.”

“They’re facilitating,” one official told me. “They provide information to the Haqqanis, they let them cross back and forth across the border, they let this L.E.T. guy (the leader of the dangerous Lashkar-e-Taiba faction of Kashmiri terrorists) be in prison and not be in prison at the same time.”

And yet the Pakistanis have been helpful — Abbottabad aside — against Al Qaeda, which is America’s first priority and which the Pakistanis recognize as a menace to everyone. They have shared intelligence, provided access to interrogations and coordinated operations. Before the fatal border mishap Thanksgiving weekend, one U.S. official told me, anti-terror cooperation between the C.I.A. and Pakistani intelligence had been “very much on the upswing.”

The most striking aspect of Clinton’s trip, however, was her enthusiastic embrace of what is now called “reconciliation” — which is the polite word for negotiating with the Taliban.

Pakistan has long argued that the way to keep Afghanistan from coming to grief is to cut a deal with at least some of the Taliban. That would also mean Afghanistan could get by with a smaller, cheaper army. The notion has been anathema to the Americans tasked with killing Taliban; a principled stand against negotiating with terrorists is also a political meme that acquires particular potency in election seasons, as viewers of the Republican debates can attest.

Almost unnoticed, though, reconciliation has moved to a central place in America’s strategy and has become the principal assignment for U.S. officials in the region. Clinton first signaled this in a speech to the Asia Society last February, when she refocused Afghanistan strategy on its original purpose, isolating the terrorists at war with America, meaning Al Qaeda.

The speech was buried beneath other news at the time, but in early October, Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, met Kayani in Abu Dhabi to stress to skeptical Pakistani leaders that she was serious. Clinton’s visit to Islamabad with her generals in tow was designed to put the full weight of the U.S. behind it.

Clinton publicly acknowledged that the ISI (in fact, it was General Pasha in person) had already brokered a preliminary meeting between a top American diplomat and a member of the Haqqani clan. Nothing much came of the meeting, news of which promptly leaked, but Clinton said America was willing to sit down with the Taliban. She said that what had once been preconditions for negotiations — renouncing violence, shunning Al Qaeda and accepting Afghanistan’s constitution, including freedoms for women — were now “goals.”

In diplomacy, no process is fully initiated until it has been named. A meeting of Pakistani political parties in Islamabad had adopted a rubric for peace talks with the Taliban, a slogan the Pakistanis repeated at every opportunity: “Give peace a chance.” If having this project boiled down to a John Lennon lyric diminished the gravitas of the occasion, Clinton didn’t let on.

Within the American policy conglomerate, not everyone is terribly upbeat about the prospect of reconciling with the Taliban. The Taliban have so far publicly rejected talks, and the turban-bomb killing of Rabbani was a serious reversal. There is still some suspicion — encouraged by Afghanistan and India — about Pakistan’s real agenda. One theory is that Pakistan secretly wants the Taliban restored to power in Afghanistan, believing the Pashtun Islamists would be more susceptible to Pakistani influence. A more cynical theory, which I heard quite a bit in New Delhi, is that the Pakistani Army actually wants chaos on its various borders to justify its large payroll. Most Americans I met who are immersed in this problem put little stock in either of those notions. The Pakistanis may not be the most trustworthy partners in Asia, but they aren’t idiots. They know, at least at the senior levels, that a resurgent Taliban means not just perpetual mayhem on the border but also an emboldening of indigenous jihadists whose aim is nothing less than a takeover of nuclear Pakistan. But agreeing on the principle of a “stable Afghanistan” is easier than defining it, or getting there.

After Clinton left Islamabad, a senior Pakistani intelligence official I wanted to meet arrived for breakfast with me and a colleague at Islamabad’s finest hotel. With a genial air of command, he ordered eggs Benedict for the table, declined my request to turn on a tape recorder, (“Just keep my name out of it,” he instructed later) and settled into an hour of polished spin.

“The Taliban learned its lesson in the madrassas and applied them ruthlessly,” he said, as the Hollandaise congealed. “Now the older ones have seen 10 years of war, and reconciliation is possible. Their outlook has been tempered by reason and contact with the modern world. They have relatives and friends in Kabul. They have money from the opium trade. They watch satellite TV. They are on the Internet.”

On the other hand, he continued, “if you kill off the midtier Taliban, the ones who are going to replace them — and there are many waiting in line, sadly — are younger, more aggressive and eager to prove themselves.”

So what would it take to bring the Taliban into a settlement? First, he said, stop killing them. Second, an end to foreign military presence, the one thing that always mobilizes the occupied in that part of the world. Third, an Afghan constitution framed to give more local autonomy, so that Pashtun regions could be run by Pashtuns.

On the face of it, as my breakfast companion surely knows, those sound like three nonstarters, and taken together they sound rather like surrender. Even Clinton is not calling for a break in hostilities, which the Americans see as the way to drive the Taliban to the bargaining table. As for foreign presence, both the Americans and the Afghans expect some long-term residual force to stay in Afghanistan, to backstop the Afghan Army and carry out drone attacks against Al Qaeda. And while it is not hard to imagine a decentralized Afghanistan — in which Islamic traditionalists hold sway in the rural areas but cede the urban areas, where modern notions like educating girls have already made considerable headway — that would be hard for Americans to swallow.

Clinton herself sounded pretty categorical on that last point when she told Pakistani interviewers: “I cannot in good faith participate in any process that I think would lead the women of Afghanistan back to the dark ages. I will not participate in that.”

To questions of how these seemingly insurmountable differences might be surmounted, Marc Grossman, who replaced Holbrooke as Clinton’s special representative, replies simply: “I don’t know whether these people are reconcilable or not. But the job we’ve been given is to find out.”

If you look at reconciliation as a route to peace, it requires a huge leap of faith. Surely the Taliban have marked our withdrawal date on their calendars. The idea that they are so deeply weary of war — – let alone watching YouTube and yearning to join the world they see on their laptops — feels like wishful thinking.

But if you look at reconciliation as a step in couples therapy — a shared project in managing a highly problematic, ultimately critical relationship — it makes more sense. It gives Pakistan something it craves: a seat at the table where the future of Afghanistan is plotted. It gets Pakistan and Afghanistan talking to each other. It offers a supporting role to other players in the region — notably Turkey, which has taken on a more active part as an Islamic peace broker. It could drain some of the acrimony and paranoia from the U.S.-Pakistan rhetoric.

It might not save Afghanistan, but it could be a helpful start to saving Pakistan.

What Clinton and company are seeking is a course of patient commitment that America, frankly, is not usually so good at. The relationship has given off some glimmers of hope — with U.S. encouragement, Pakistan and India have agreed to normalize trade relations; the ISI has given American interrogators access to Osama bin Laden’s wives — but the funerals of those Pakistani troops last month remind us that the country is still a graveyard of optimism.

At least the U.S. seems, for now, to be paying attention to the right problem.

“If you stand back,” said one American who is in the thick of the American strategy-making, “and say, by the year 2020, you’ve got two countries — 30 million people in this country, 200 million people with nuclear weapons in this country, American troops in neither. Which matters? It’s not Afghanistan.”

Bill Keller, a former executive editor of The Times, writes a column for the Op-Ed page.

Filed under: Afghanistan, Democracy, India, Nuclear, Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Pakistani Taliban, Pakistanis, President Obama, Taliban, terrorism, United States, US-Pakistan Relations Tagged: Afghan National Army, Afghan Taliban, Afghanistan, Asif Ali Zardari, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Husain Haqqani, Mike Mullen, Mitt Romney, NATO, Northern Alliance, Nuclear, Pakistan, Pashtun, Peshawar, President Obama, Soviet Invasion, Taliban, United Nations, United States

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DEA operations are small change

The mainstream media gets it wrong again…after all I’ve written about spin, diversion, and just plain sloppy reporting on Fast and Furious, New York Times reporter Ginger Thompson lands on page A1 with a claim that DEA agents are ‘walking’ narco-dollars into Mexico and back to the cartels the same way ATF, we now know, has been ‘walking’ lethal, military-grade weapons across the US-Mexico border into the hands of cartel killers.

Bunkum.

US Drug Agents Launder Profits for Mexican Cartels isn’t true or fair or even journalism.

What it is, instead, is public relations, a business that, unlike old-fashioned reporting, is safe, simple, and sure to enhance the bottomline for all concerned–corporate owners, editors, and reporters. PR is the new news, the art of pitching client-friendly narratives by pinning them to the general assumptions and limited fact set of the audience. The New York Times is not the first to go, nor will it be the last.

The point is–it’s working.

Thompson’s ‘revelations’ are reverberating through mediaville–even Fox News is dancing to her tune–and Congress, the House Oversight Committee, no less (which has done a reasonable job so far of keeping its eye on the ball) is tapping its toes as well, its spokespeople rushing to substantiate the NYT report via a pledge to include DEA’s money laundering tactics as a corollary to the investigation of Fast and Furious.

Puh-leeze, Mr. Chairman, tell me it isn’t so.

Facts one might want to consider: Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican billionaire seemingly bent on acquiring every media outlet Warren Buffet misses, increased his share holdings in the New York Times less than a week before Thompson’s front-page article hit the stands.

A staunch Calderon/PRI supporter and Forbes’ ‘richest man in the world,’ Slim, I’m guessing, is not displeased: not only does Thompson’s article reinforce the welcome (to DOJ) notion that Fast and Furious was a ‘botched operation’ (translation–inept and intrusive attempts by US law enforcement to wage ‘the war on drugs’ succeeded only in arming cartel militias), the piece also posits a direct correspondence between the tactics used by ATF in the ‘implementation’ of Fast and Furious and the tactics used by US enforcement agencies engaged in undercover money laundering investigations.

Message from Mexico

Note to USA–lay off those Bozo ploys to make Mexico look bad and admit, already, that the drug violence, the corruption, the decapitations, mass graves, the muzzling, mutilation and murders of Mexican journalists, the 40,000 citizens gunned down (including US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry slain on US soil) on both sides of the border–all of it is your fault.

Yeah.

What Thompson has served up is an easy and false comparison, an apology for policies Mexico continues to endorse as alternatives to what it likes to call an ‘unsuccessful war on drugs,’ a slick argument that engages a lot of well-meaning citizens in this country, and that, thanks to reports like Thompson’s and the endorsement of such eminent vehicles as the New York Times, seem to be gaining purchase.

But superficial claims and specious comparisons deserve closer reading than Ginger Thompson provides, because the NYT article that ran December 4th, its subtext and its aim, is not to explain, but to persuade, to sell us—lock, stock and barrel—on a policy shift of someone else’s making that works to someone else’s advantage.

There is, you see, another view, a close-hold perspective that mostly belongs to the men and women who work in law enforcement—that it is not the law that’s failing the citizens of this country and of many others, but the people capable of determining the ways and extent to which our laws are enforced: politicians, political appointees and bureaucrats whose take on who’s right and who’s wrong, who should be investigated and who should not, is too often determined by political expedience and self-interest.

Let’s call it a case of conflicting priorities–not a new problem, right?

Politics versus the law

So, Ginger Thompson and the New York Times does us a disservice, not just because they play to our concern for the 40,000 men, women and children already lost to political corruption and criminal greed, but because they portray the commitment of the American people to the rule of law as naïve, misplaced, and unattainable.

Indeed, what the reporter suggests (Is this her aim or just bad research?) is that US law enforcement has proved it is unable to make a difference, that federal agents are bunglers or miscreants, and that, if we aren’t careful, the ‘good guys’ sent in to solve the problem may instead become the worst part of it.

Back up, Ginger.

Let’s consider the parallel drawn between DEA’s money laundering tactics and Fast and Furious: the latter, a ‘secret’ ATF operation under investigation by two House Committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee belongs to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice—Holder will be back testifying before Issa-Grassley investigators again this week about ATF’s ‘withdrawal’ of a February 4th letter his office sent to Congress disavowing any ‘gun walking’ on the part of ATF, a letter Holder now says contained ‘inaccuracies.’

Fast and Furious not a by-the-book operation

ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious facilitated the illegal sale and cross-border trafficking of more than 2000 lethal, military-grade weapons to Mexican cartels—an AK-47 used to gun down Brian Terry, a US Border Patrol Agent, on US soil has been identified as one of the weapons ATF allowed ‘to walk.’

The existence of Operation Fast and Furious only came to light via the testimony of ATF Agent John Dodson, a whistleblower who questioned the seeming lack of an operational rationale for the undertaking, and for whom Terry’s death was the final straw—as Dodson told Congress, ‘We were killing our own guys.”

Dodson testified that, contrary to prior ATF protocol, in the case of Fast and Furious, there was no plan in place at any time to trace the weapons ATF agents pressured US gun dealers to sell to ‘straw buyers,’ nor were there plans in place to interdict the weapons before they went missing in Mexico.

The weapons, whose serial numbers ATF did record in its eTrace database (imagine), would only be recovered after they had been used to commit a crime (generally a homicide), and Mexican authorities returned them to ATF for short ‘time to crime’ identification as weapons purchased illegally in the US.

ATF’s part in the sale and smuggling of these weapons would never be mentioned—that part of the plan was, in fact, in place from the beginning.

The Department of Justice and administration spokespeople continue to characterize Fast and Furious as a ‘botched operation,’—a description the NYT reiterates.

Whether Fast and Furious was, in fact, a ‘botched operation’ (just an ‘accident’), or a deliberate attempt (inspired by anti-gun ideologues) to use a federal law enforcement agency to supply evidence in support of Mexico’s allegation that the violence in its streets has been fueled by the criminal actions of US arms dealers is, of course, the question that could set the Department of Justice and the administration on its ear. While this kind of upset might be exactly what justice demands, beating the administration bushes for bigger game could boomerang, throwing a wrench into the best-laid plans of both parties to beat the opposition in 2012.

Don’t think this kind of conversation isn’t happening on Capitol Hill.

Politics versus the law

Again.

As a result, we have right now a bi-partisan chorus bleating for Eric Holder’s resignation, a move that might offer consolation (some hope) to the family of Brian Terry while at the same time preempting the need for a genuine investigation into a federal law enforcement operation in which administration actors, according to Representative Connie Mack (R-Fla), have almost certainly violated US law (the Arms Export Control Act) and made themselves vulnerable to criminal indictments and serious prison sentences—think Iran Contra.

Let me tell you what the New York Times doesn’t explain—the difference between a legitimate, ground-up, approved, supervised and outcome-driven undercover money laundering investigation and a top-down, unapproved, unsupervised and aimless ‘gun tracking’ investigation (linked to the murder of a US agent) no one in Washington, DC seems to have known existed before they heard about it ‘in the press.’

It blows the comparison, and the paper’s pitch, to pieces.

A legitimate undercover investigation belonging to any enforcement agency doesn’t just happen: its proponents typically jump through a series of hoops designed to guarantee that the ‘good guys’ remain at all times on the right side of the law. If they don’t, they go to jail. No passing go.

DEA and US Customs, formerly an agency belonging to the US Department of the Treasury, have been in the money laundering investigation business for a long time: today, DEA, under the aegis of Justice, and ICE, now a part of DHS, retain jurisdiction for money laundering investigations.

Here’s now it generally works, regardless of which agency is involved: an idea is born, usually out of real-time and real-world encounters with a criminal enterprise in a certain district or region (money laundering—LA, Miami, Houston, etc).

The enforcement architects of a counter-plan, an investigation designed to eliminate the criminal threat, take a proposal to a district or regional director (the Special-Agent-in-Charge, for example).

They get sign-off, and the plan goes to the next level—to Headquarters. Again, the plan’s supporters lobby for sign-off, and if HQ approves the plan, the request goes to the Bureau, to Homeland Security, or to Justice, for example, where it is scrutinized, criticized, and torn apart by an assembly of bureaucrats and high-ups—department directors, assistant secretaries, and the heads of relevant organizations (Holder, Napolitano, and such).

If the plan makes it through this obstacle course, it proceeds to a Joint Undercover Investigation Committee in DC, a panel of representatives from each and every agency that might have a dog in the fight. If ATF had brought the plans for Fast and Furious, for example, to this committee, DOJ and ATF officials would no doubt have been grilled by reps from ICE/DHS, the FBI, State, deputy US attorneys from relevant districts, and perhaps DOD. The list of players is flexible.

Armed with a detailed presentation, the architects of Fast and Furious would have had to reassure departments and agencies with shared interests and overlapping jurisdictions that the plan was legal, workable, well-planned, well-managed, and larded with deadline-driven, concrete objectives and measurable outcomes.

If the Joint Committee gives the plan a green light, the team of agents who ‘own’ the operation begin implementation, but that’s not the end. Every few months, the team has to go back to the oversight committee for subsequent reviews and authorization.

There is a rigorous uniform structure, a recertification process rooted in codified law and statutory authority, which makes it impossible for any agency or group of agents to abandon the reservation or to act without the knowledge of their superiors and the approval of agency, bureau and department heads.

Big questions

We know, from congressonal testimony, that this isn’t the way Fast and Furious evolved. So how is it that an undertaking which never passed through Committee review, and whose executors never applied for recertification, managed to stay up-and-running long enough to send thousands of weapons, illegally, across the US border? How could this happen without top-down guidance and support?

But that’s not all. Trafficking weapons across the US-Mexico border, even as part of a federal undercover investigation, requires exemptions to the Arms Export Control Act, waivers which would most logically be requested by ICE (the agency with jurisdiction for this type of investigation) or by DOJ from State (which issues the waivers).

But both Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, have told Congress they were never briefed in regard to the existence or operational status of Fast and Furious.

What does this suggest? DHS knows nothing. State knows nothing. Congress, which the law says must be informed of any operational decision to traffick weapons valued in excess of $1 million, knows nothing.

But ATF agents in the field were told by superiors that orders to ‘stand down’–not to interdict–came from ‘the top.’

Think about it.

Then consider the DEA operations that Thompson attempts to explain in her NYT article.

DEA–sheep, not wolves

DEA undercover money laundering investigations are by-the-book stings duly authorized to trace narco-dollars back to their ultimate beneficiaries–or, in the case of ‘system-based’ money laundering investigations (which no one does anymore), to identify and dismantle the infrastructure on which the criminal enterprise depends. Agents jump through all the hoops, and believe me, Justice knows how to crack the whip.

Unlike Fast and Furious, which critics suggest was triggered, as opposed to impeded, by politics, money laundering and other undercover investigations can be aborted on short notice when they run counter to political or trade agendas too ‘strategically vital’ to disturb.

In other words,the political ‘overseers’ for undercover money laundering investigations (in the case of DEA, that’s the Attorney General of the United States, who take his counsel from the President) can pull the plug if an investigation ‘gets too hot’ politically and threatens the relationship between the US or the current US administration and a geopolitical ally.

The US is in the business of protecting its relationships with allies, especially Mexico, our 2nd largest trading partner, not jeopardizing those relationships. If DEA’s money laundering operations are on the up-and-up (and the strings DOJ imposes on the DEA ops, the $10 million limit on money laundered, the $500k limit on individual pickups, the six-month time limit, guarantee Holder’s office never drops the operational or political reins, so you can trust me on this) then Thompson’s theory about US agents laundering narco-dollars for cartel thugs falls apart.

The truth is that DOJ policy (and DEA is part of Justice) regarding the implementation of undercover money laundering investigations is so stringent that DEA’s efforts in this area are virtually meaningless, ‘baby operations’ capable of generating occasional headlines about US efforts to curb cartel money laundering (similar to the empty ‘drug tunnel’ stories that periodically surface).

Thompson’s article references a DEA agent who describes the dilemma when he asks what an agent is supposed to do when a trafficker approaches an undercover agent with a request to launder more money than the agent is authorized to handle.

“You have to do it,” says the DEA spokesperson.”Or they kill you.”

Such are the operational conundrums faced by DEA agents tasked with ‘laundering’ criminal money. Sure, there may be rare and unappreciated exceptions if an agent is staring death in the face, but DEA, given its current rules and regulations, runs money laundering ops deliberately designed to net mid-level traffickers, relatively small fish that ensure continuing congressional appropriations at budget time and decent press. Nothing more.

Ginger’s molehill-into-a-mountain narrative misses the mark.

Interestingly enough, the NYT reporter does allude to a Customs money laundering operation in play from 1995 to 1998, suggesting it was a watershed event in the history of federal money laundering investigations, and, in this case, she’s got it right.

But not for the reasons she thinks.

What Thompson doesn’t seem to understand is that this particular Customs (not DEA) investigation, tagged Operation Casablanca, stands to this day as a perfect example of the way politics has and continues to undermine the effective enforcement of US law, and the ways in which the advocates of realpolitik try to shield the public from this fact.

Casablanca was a huge success (which insiders say accounted for its early demise), and one reason was that money laundering policies within Treasury did not limit the amount agents could accept or launder to $10 million or less. Customs agents running Casablanca could accept up to $100 million, with long and renewable timelines, policies to which DOJ objected from the beginning.

Unanticipated victory

Here’s some background: Customs’ Operation Casablanca was a response to the misuse of Mexican bank drafts. Money launderers linked to the Juarez cartel were using Mexico’s banking system to clean up their drug dollars. The operation itself represented five years of work, two years of bureaucratic infighting (with DOJ trying to impose its own restrictive policies, $10 million limits, etc. on Treasury/Customs), and three years devoted to actual implementation.

Undercover agents first ingratiated themselves to black-market brokers based in Cali; these were guys who worked for roughly 20 percent of the 60 percent the Colombians retrieved after the laundering process was over. The brokers, who tried to move at least $1 million per day, managed smuggling and laundering for the Cali and Medellin cartels, using organized crime syndicates in Mexico to do the heavy lifting.

At this point, in the mid-90s, the Mexicans were still only intermediary players, but they were moving up fast, building powerful infrastructure in LA, Chicago, Houston, Miami and NYC, alliances still going strong today.

Here’s how the Mexican bank draft worked, a process Thompson alludes to in her NYT article: before Customs penetrated the operation via Operation Casablanca, traffickers were smuggling bags of dirty money across the SW border any way they could, and smuggling bulk cash is a bad proposition—the weakest point in the process.

Once the drug money reached Mexico, eager Mexican bankers stood willing and able to take millions in narco-dollars and deposit them into any kind of account, shell company, corporation or devise any kind of financial construct that might hide the origin of these criminal deposits.

What the Cali and Medillin cartels didn’t know was that the new best friends of the brokers they employed in Colombia were really undercover agents working for US Customs, and that when these agents volunteered to collect the drug dollars right off the streets in LA and other US cities, deposit it into their own ‘special’ accounts in the US (eliminating the need for smuggling bulk cash), and then transfer the funds electronically to bankers in Mexico, it was the beginning of the end.

After US agents wired cartel funds to banks to Mexico, bank drafts drawn on the US accounts of those Mexican banks were delivered back to the same undercover agents in the United States, who made copies of the drafts as evidence before sending the funds out across the world again.

When the money traveled, during this final laundering cycle, to accounts in Colombia, it was available to the cartels in pesos. When it went to the Caribbean, to Europe, to Asia, it materialized in any form and in any currency the cartels and their brokers specified.

When Operation Casablanca concluded in 1998, Customs had evidence that every bank in Mexico and several financial institutions in Venezuela were actively competing for cartel business, for billions in drug dollars.

Agents had over 3000 hours of videotape documenting criminal activity in LA, Miami, New York, Chicago, Italy, Venezuela and Mexico. All that was left was to make the arrests and seize the money, simultaneously if possible, to prevent the suspects from fleeing and the evidence from disappearing.

The take-down plan was implemented over a three-day period in LA, Chicago, New York, San Diego, Las Vegas, Milan, Aruba and Bogota. More than 200 agents from Customs and partner agencies were in place on four different continents, waiting to make the arrests and seize the cash. In every location, meetings were scheduled between undercover agents and the bankers, brokers and traffickers who had engineered the Mexican bank draft scheme.

In the end, Customs agents running the operation had evidence implicating every Mexican bank operating in that country at that time, 16 total, in the money laundering scheme. 193 suspects were under arrest for money laundering, conspiracy and other criminal violations. Agents seized more than $100 million in cash during its ‘seize and freeze’ campaign; the Federal Reserve issued cease and desist orders for 6 Mexican banks, and three of these banks were indicted and convicted.

Why only three?

Yes, there is a backstory here.

Six months into this particular undercover operation, the team running the investigation out of LA started to feel pushback from Washington, especially from the Department of Justice, which had battled to take control of the operation or at least to persuade Treasury to impose restrictions similar to its own on the Customs money laundering investigation.

As the evidence started piling up, as the list of suspects grew, and the number of Mexican banks possibly involved in the criminal scheme increased, so did the ‘noise’ coming down Pennsylvania Avenue.

During periodic reviews–those rigorous recertification reviews that ATF’s Fast and Furious somehow circumvented–the joint undercover team challenged the ability of the Casablanca team to acquire enough evidence to indict more than a few Mexican banks.

There was also concern about the amount the team was laundering (note: the cartels were paying the undercover team a 12 percent commission on the dollars laundered which went back onto the US government’s books).

And then, of course, there were questions about whether the undercover team had fully briefed our Mexican counterparts.

The answer, despite a NYT report by Tim Golden published soon after the operation shut down, was ‘yes.’

Customs insiders confirm that an agent leading the operation traveled to Mexico City to brief the US Ambassador, and he also visited, per the instruction of the US Ambassador, Mexico’s Hacienda to brief the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General for Enforcement.

The Mexican official, according to law enforcement sources, had only one question: How can we help?

The Customs undercover team told the Attorney General of Mexico that they would let them know as the operation drew to a close.

At one point in the operation, during the summer of 1996, the pressure to close the effort down (administration appointees continued to dog the investigation) led to a meeting with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury.

Rubin, who had been advised to join in the call to terminate Casablanca, listened to the team leader outline the operational successes to date, and suddenly he was onboard. Enthusiastic. And determined to protect the operation from outside and inside interference.

According to the agent tasked with briefing the Treasury Secretary about the operation, Rubin asked how many Mexican banks appeared to be implicated in the money laundering scheme. When the reply was “All of them,” the Treasury Secretary’s response was “We’ll end this when we put the last Mexican involved in the paddy wagon!”

More telling, says the Customs operation leader, was Rubin’s follow-up orders to the people in his office that day: “I don’t want anything said here today shared with anyone outside the group in this office now. Not with the White House, not with the National Security advisor, not with the Drug Czar’s office and not with State.”

Now, I may be wrong, but it sounds a lot like Rubin was concerned about avoiding political ambushes. What do you think?

As Casablanca drew to a close, however, in 1998, word of its operational details were in fact leaked to the White House, as was the startling information that undercover agents running the op from LA had been approached by a Mexican banker and a Juarez cartel representative who told the agents he needed $1.15 billion dollars belonging to a high-place Mexican official laundered as well.

That official, said the cartel’s man, was Enrique Cervantes, Mexico’s Minister of Defense.

When undercover agents sent that information back to higher-ups in Washington, the game was over.

While the evidence implicating all 16 Mexican banks was identical to the evidence that resulted in the indictment of the three targeted by the US Attorney’s office (Bancomer, which was shortly thereafter acquired by Citicorp for 12.5b; Banomex, and Banco Serfin), the US Attorney and Department of Justice officials declined to prosecute the remaining 13 banks.

The undercover team was told to step away from any request to launder funds belonging to a member of the Mexican Cabinet, and the allegation that a cartel rep had even made such a request was soon discounted, pushed into the background, and forgotten. One senior law enforcement official told reporters that the cartel rep had probably been ‘puffing,’ or exaggerating. The fact is that the admininstration never tried, or wanted to test that theory: Casablanca was shut down before agents had a chance to transform an allegation into concrete evidence.

President Zedillo, tipped off to the allegations implicating his Cabinet, claimed the Mexican government had never been briefed on Casablanca, that Customs agents had violated Mexico’s sovereignty, and demanded that the agent in charge of the operation be extradicted to Mexico for prosecution (an eventuality prevented only by a special act of the US Congress).

The Clinton administration, in an effort to placate our Nafta-partner, sent Attorney General Janet Reno to Texas where she met with her Mexican counterpart to sign what has become known as ‘the Brownsville Agreement,’ a document that prohibits the US from opening an undercover investigation into any enterprise involving Mexico without fully briefing the Mexican government in advance.

The upshot, of course, is that advanced briefings offer Mexican officials who may be involved in any criminal or corrupt enterprise the opportunity to elude investigators when the operation finally gets underway.

There are a number of principals who were close to Casablanca and the blowback it provoked who will tell you that the Customs operation was one of the last real opportunities this country had, not just to follow the money to its headwaters in Mexico, but also to dismantle the global infrastructure used by organized crime in Mexico and elsewhere to launder billions in criminal proceeds from every kind of underworld enterprise.

Unlike current DEA money laundering investigations, which attempt to follow dirty money backwards to its source, Casablanca was ‘system-based,’ meaning it targeted the Colombian brokers who acted as trafficking/laundering ’roundabouts’ or hubs for the Cali cartel, and who, as a result, could lead agents deep into the complex infrastructure that made the process possible.The idea is that destroying actors without dissembling the infrastructure is ineffective.

Enforcement insiders will tell you as well that it was politics that trumped law enforcement in the case of Casablanca, that neither the US admininstration nor the Department of Justice (which critics claim is invariably, then as now, a political handmaiden to the Executive) was ever willing ‘to go the distance’ with this particular money laundering investigation, and that after the transfer of Customs from Treasury to Homeland Security, DOJ’s restrictive policies, which replaced the rules governing Casablanca, have rendered money laundering investigations by DEA and other agencies ineffective in the genuine pursuit of high-level targets and infrastructure.

Congress should be asking DOJ why DEA’s money laundering investigations produce so little in the way of outcome. Issa should be asking DOJ how we can expect US law enforcement to uphold the law when the Attorney General has a chokehold on the agents who want to do it.

So, Ms. Thompson, are we straight on this?

Bad news: US Agents Launder Profits for Mexican Cartels is great PR but not much in the way of investigative journalism. The comparison between the operational tactics used in Fast and Furious and the tactics used today by DEA (not the wolves you warn us about, but sheep…) doesn’t hold up.

Good news: as a diversionary tactic, especially since Holder meets with the Oversight Committee tomorrow about Fast and Furious, it’s working. Good job. We can only hope that investigators (with prodding from Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla) keep their eyes fixed on the real–and the real big–crime underlying Fast and Furious, multiple violations of the Arms Export Control Act.

Breaking news: The New York Times, one of America’s most venerable and respected newspapers, has published a front page article designed to convince readers that US law enforcement is aiding Mexico’s cartels in their drug-driven campaign of corruption and violence.

Why? Now, this is a story…

Why would a paper as influential as the New York Times blunder into this kind of FUBAR reportage?

The day DEA becomes “the world’s largest money launderer” is the day the Office of the Attorney General becomes an elective office and the AG answers directly to the people of the United States.

Truth? The facts in Thompson’s report are skewed, the sources selected to support a pro-Calderon, anti-law-enforcement perspective, and the processes outlined by the Times reporter are sketchy and misleading.

In spite of this, the message is traveling fast, distracting the public and Congress from the hunt for the primary architects of Fast and Furious, a DOJ undercover investigation that Representative Connie Mack says involved the violation of the Arms Export Control Act, and which may have been triggered, like Iran Contra, by the ideological fervor of political appointees at the highest levels of the US government.

It’s been quite a year for human rights. Almost as soon as the year began, popular revolts shook the foundations of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Using the power of social media, people organized in opposition to autocratic rule across the Arab world. In Tunisia and Egypt, these movements overturned (or at least initiated the process) decades of authoritarian rule using non-violence. In response to the fairly quick collapse of these regimes, some autocrats took a pragmatic approach, promising reform in exchange for a few more years of stability.

Other despots dug in, and promised to crush the opposition. In Libya, the international community took the unprecedented step of authorizing military action to protect civilians from Qaddafi’s iron fist. But, what began as a narrowly defined civilian protection mission soon turned to regime change. Russia, China and others protested at NATO’s de facto expansion of the mission, dashing any hopes that the Security Council would replicate the “Libya model” elsewhere. Meanwhile, autocrats responded with brute force to protestors in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, eliciting mere condemnation from the international community.

2011 also saw a shift in how the Obama Administration is waging its campaign against al Qaeda and associated terror organizations. Rather than fight expensive wars, the Obama Administration has opted for drones strikes, targeted raids like the one that killed Osama Bin Laden, and providing allied governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia with the support they need to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. Part of the shift has to do with the expected decrease in U.S. military expenditures. But, the Administration also seems to believe it can better accomplish its goals with these tactics, which also promises fewer U.S. casualties.

While the increased use of drone strikes reduces the threat of U.S. casualties, it is doubtful that such strikes result in zero civilian casualties, as the Administration claimed this past summer. The New America Foundation’s drones database, which is the most compelling study I have found, claims that the non-militant fatality rate from strikes conducted in Pakistan since 2004 is 17%. Of course, casualty counts are all based on the idea that we can firmly distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, an incredibly difficult task in this type of war.

The Obama Administration’s use of surgical strikes also elicited increased criticism from human rights and civil liberties groups in 2011. While the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was largely free of any controversy, the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen raised constitutional concerns. Al-Awlaki was a dual citizen of both the U.S. and Yemen, and many suspected that he had inspired the Fort Hood shooting and the Christmas day bomber. As I wrote in September, such accusations still do not strip a U.S. citizen of his right to due process by an independent judiciary, and thus I believe the strike against Al-Awlaki violated U.S. constitutional law.

As 2011 winds down, the Obama Administration is also ending the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and trying to ensure it will be able to do the same in two years time in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan as “Fight, Talk, Build.” Under this three pronged strategy, the U.S. has been ramping up offensive operations to eliminate the safe havens in Pakistan, while encouraging talks with the Taliban and facilitating trade and investment in Afghanistan.

International forces have also been conducting joint operations with the Afghan national security forces and plan to gradually hand over more responsibility to Afghan forces in preparation for the security transition in 2014. This past summer, the U.N. and numerous human rights groups raised concerns about accountability and professionalism in the Afghan National Security forces, suggesting the training and equipping of these forces is inadequate. The result has been poor compliance with human rights and humanitarian norms by the Afghan security forces, and the lack of efficient institutional mechanisms to lodge complaints when these forces do violate the law.

I could go on, but that is a brief rundown of 2011 from a human rights perspective. Of course, there are some notables to mention. While the Arab Spring certainly caught many off guard, the most unexpected event was the Security Council’s rapid and decisive action on Libya, including the abstentions from China and Russia. Rarely has the Security Council ever worked, much less worked so fast. While China and Russia have been willing to abstain from these type of interventions in the past, typically it has required more than a couple weeks for diplomacy to secure such an agreement.

Many remarkable individuals played a part in the Arab Spring this year, but the most notable person of the year is a man named Ryan Boyette. I first read about Boyette in Nick Kristof’s column a month ago. Boyette moved to the Nuba Mountains in Sudan in 2003 to work for Samaritan’s Purse, a U.S. based aid group. When the Sudanese government began a military offensive against rebel elements in the area, many humanitarian workers left. Boyette stayed and organized a network of people to record the Sudanese government’s atrocities, which were submitted to groups like the Enough Project, which used Boyette’s information in its human rights advocacy. When it was convenient to leave, Boyette risked his life, literally dodging the Sudanese government’s bombing raids, to document atrocities and support the community he had lived with for more than seven years.

With much of what began this past spring still unsettled, 2012 promises to be another important year for human rights. While not an expert on any one of these situations, here are my predictions for 2012. The hard work of fostering governance that is both democratic and capable of meeting the needs of the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is only beginning. Instability in Egypt and Libya will continue in 2012 as the political will and capacity of both interim governments to move the respective countries towards democracy will be questioned.

Syria’s Bashar al – Assad will fall in 2012, either from a military assault launched by defectors from Syria’s military or outside military intervention. Elements inside Syria seem to be organizing against Assad, and while the Security Council is unlikely to authorize coercive action again, a coalition of countries may soon decide that enough is enough – it’s time to replicate the “Libya model” in Syria. While it’s unclear whether local forces or the international community will be the deciding factor, Assad will no longer be Syria’s head of state this time next year.

Expected cuts to the U.S. defense budget will speed up efforts to leave Afghanistan. While the war in Afghanistan has been costly, in terms of lives and treasure, the U.S. and NATO must focus on more than just “getting out.” As I noted earlier this month, international forces have largely focused on “quantity over quality,” in terms of training and equipping the Afghan national security forces. Training must improve to ensure Afghan forces have the skills necessary not just to rout the Taliban, but also to conduct basic policing functions. The international community must also use its leverage to ensure the Afghan government puts the necessary accountability mechanisms in place, such as a functioning military justice system.

Improved training and accountability mechanisms are necessary to ensure the Afghan government can manage security pursuant to the rule of law when combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014. Given the deteriorating security situation, there may be a tendency to overlook human rights concerns within the Afghan National security forces. But, turning a blind eye to abuses would be a recipe for disaster as the stability of the Afghan government depends on its legitimacy and popular support. Even while the security situation gets worse, I am optimistic that the U.S. and NATO allies will take decisive steps in 2012 to ensure the Afghan national security forces better adhere to human rights norms. Whether or not such steps will be effective will be answered in 2013.

That is my forecast for 2012. Curious to hear other thoughts and opinions.

“One Vision, One Identity, One Community” is the motto of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Was that the case in 2011? The region was predictably under-covered by the US mainstream media. I tried my best to bring unique, insightful coverage of the region as best I could from afar, highlighting a different country or issue every post. However, I may be providing some on-the-ground reporting in 2012 if all goes according to plan, so stay tuned. The following is a review of the region’s political happenings for 2011.

Summary of 2011

One of the biggest stories of the summer was the election of Yingluck Shinawatra as the first female Prime Minister of Thailand. Her election capped a remarkable comeback for her Pheu Thai party which, under a previous incarnation, saw its leader, and Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin, deposed in a coup no more than five years ago. Her victory was part of a much broader story about class struggle in Thailand, which had been underscored by street protests staged by supporters of both the Shinawatra’s and the opposition since Thaksin’s overthrow in 2006.

Events in the South China Sea seemed to vindicate scholar Robert Kaplan’s postulation that the area would be “the future of conflict.” The dispute over the Spratly Islands, claimed by six countries, intensified most acutely between China and Vietnam, who have an afflictive history of hostility with one another over territorial spats. Tensions appear to be ameliorating thanks in part to ASEAN’s intervention and calls for peace, but the South China Sea is one of the world’s hottest flashpoints at the moment and is worth keeping an eye on.

2011 is concluding on a sad and tragic note as the worst flooding in years has inundated the region from the Philippines all the way to Bangkok. Hundreds have died, thousands have been forced to flee or remain trapped in isolated areas, farm land has been destroyed, and livelihoods have been lost.

Most Unexpected Event

The ruling military junta in Myanmar established a civilian political party, predictably won elections held at the end of 2010 — elections which were boycotted by the main opposition — but then made a previously inconceivable overture to reformers by releasing 100 political prisoners. There are now plans to release hundreds more over the coming weeks and months.

Just recently, President Barack Obama announced that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Myanmar, the first American official to do so in five decades. This comes on the heels of a pronouncement by the country’s democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, that her political party, the National League for Democracy, will re-register and stand in upcoming by-elections. In a recent piece, I posited that perhaps Burma was finally opening up to the world in the wake of pro-democracy movements all around the globe.

Person/Group of the Year

My group of the year for 2011 is the Red Shirts of Thailand, organized as the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship. The Red Shirts draw their base support from the poor, rural regions of the country, a demographic which for decades had been marginalized and shut out of the political process by the elites of Thailand. When populist Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in 2006, eventually being replaced by the opposition Democrat Party in December 2008, the Red Shirts took to the streets in protest. Despite several harsh crackdowns in which more than one hundred people were killed, the Red Shirts resolve never wavered. In July 2011, their favored candidate, Yingluck Shinawatra, was elected Prime Minister. Her resounding electoral victory was a testament to the unyielding pertinacity of the Red Shirt movement, which is sure to be studied and duplicated in other countries of the Global South. Here is a brief audio voice over I produced for the Foreign Policy Association’s Expert Minute series over the summer on the issue.

Forecast for 2012

Will Yingluck be able to politically survive her bungling of the flood response? She rose to the Premiership on a tidal wave of support from the poor, rural majority. Yet she allowed large swaths of farmland to be flooded in order to spare Bangkok, which was inevitably flooded anyway. It will be interesting if she pays a significant price for that in terms of political capital.

Will the latest Khmer Rouge tribunals finally bring closure to the darkest chapter in Cambodia’s history? The tribunal’s commencement has been hit by several delays due in large part to the current Cambodian government’s meddling. Ascertaining guilt is not an issue; we know what those on trial have done. But Prime Minister Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge cadre himself, now reformed, and has publicly questioned the need for the trials to go forward. The start of Case 002 has just begun in the last few days at the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts in Cambodia (ECCC), and already tales of horror are being recounted by the prosecution team in vivid details. On trial are brother Number Two Nuon Chea, one-time head of state Khieu Samphan, and former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary.

There are several flashpoints to take note of as well. The South China Sea is one, but also worth following are two Islamic insurgencies taking place in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand.

There are many things to look forward to in Southeast Asia in 2012, I look forward to continue writing about them for FPB. Thanks for reading!