By Patricia Lee Sharpe
The U.S. must develop a public diplomacy program to convince Pakistanis that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are Pakistan’s enemies as well as America’s, according to recent comments by Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke actually said this after an eye-opening Pew poll revealed that support in Pakistan for Al Qaeda and the Taliban had dropped precipitously since 2002. At the same time approval ratings for the U.S. had reached a new low.
A Strange Choice
Now, if you were designing a public diplomacy program in Pakistan, a country whose cooperation may determine the outcome of the American struggle in Afghanistan, where would your emphasis be? Would you insert yourself gratuitously into Muslim politics in order to smear a bunch of backward-looking violent Islamists who have discredited themselves by their vicious intolerant rule in the Swat valley and by their tendency to kill civilians with suicide bombs throughout Pakistan?English speakers have a few clichés for such efforts. Like: hauling coals to New Castle. Or: gilding the lily. In short, the U.S. doesn’t need to do what’s been accomplished, gruesomely, by the Taliban themselves! The Taliban are now regarded as pariahs, bin Laden’s no longer a true prophet and advancing Islam by killing civilians has lost its noble veneer.
Why, then, is a supposedly brilliant diplomatic mind ready to spend scarce diplomatic capital in a manner that’s sure to make Pakistanis dislike us even more by telling them how to react to already discredited renegade fellow Muslims? Because, I suspect, the real problem is too painful for Washington or most Americans to contemplate.
We Americans are congenitally unable to believe that we may be genuinely disliked. It’s true of us as individuals and very much true of us as a nation. How can anyone possibly doubt the purity of our motives, the intensity of our good will, the rightness of our collective conviction that America is the best country ever to arise in the history of the world, the sincerity of our generous faith that every other country can, with a little effort at transformation, be exactly like us?
How can anyone reject us?
But Pakistanis do. This is the problem that needs to be addressed, and it’s a toughie, especially if the time line for success gets attached to the need for winning a war in Afghanistan before the American public gets fed up.American officaldom clearly hopes that the Kerry-Lugar Bill will sweeten the relationship, but miracles are clearly not in the offing. The reaction to Kerry-Lugar ranges from pragmatic—Why not just take the money?—to wary, if not hostile—Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. In any event, no amount of aid will be transformative, even if a decent percentage of the Kerry-Lugar largesse gets used productively, by which I mean doesn’t get siphoned off by greedy American sub-contractors or corrupt Pakistanis.
Meanwhile, Pakistani hostility to the U.S. has three aspects, which can be expressed like this: (1) You’re nice to us only when you want something from us. (2) You like India better. (3) Every time we’re seduced into thinking you’ve committed to a sincere, long term relationship, you’ve left us in the lurch. Each of these not entirely inaccurate, deeply-rooted beliefs needs to be addressed, if those poll figures are going to improve.
Pakistan’s not easy to understand. It’s South Asian, it’s Muslim, it consists of highly self-conscious sub-cultures with more people than most European countries. Its sensibilities range from cosmopolitanism to traditionalism of many kinds—and in so far as Pakistan is more or less democratic all clamor for a place in determining what Pakistan will be.
Dynamic Not Static
American administrations continue to look for the wrong kind of stability in Pakistan. Because they do not understand its multi-dimensional dynamics, they inevitably gravitate to supporting the dead hand of military rule, as was the case during the deeply inspiring days of the lawyers’ movement. Here was evidence of a vital civil society. Here was evidence that the majority of urban Pakistanis support the rule of law, parliamentary democracy and civilian control of the military, but little or no moral (or any other) support came from Washington.
So, how can Pakistanis trust us, respect us, like us? We say we support democracy, but not in Pakistan, evidently, where we talk with forked tongue. And then there’s the relatively new problem: the badly tarnished image of the U.S. as model nation. Americans justify torture now. They gut the Constitution in the name of national security. Congress has lost all sense of the common good, elections are bought, voting machines are unreliable, Wall street wins over Main Street every time, schools and universities are starving—need I go on?In conclusion, Mr. Special Envoy, the public diplomacy issue you really must address is the U.S. image in Pakistan. It's all too accurate, unfortunately.
Motivation that Works
The Kerry-Lugar bill provides 7.5 billion dollars “to promote an enhanced strategic partnership...and for other purposes.” This would intrude American accountability into most aspect of a nation’s life, a reality about accepting money that does not go down well in Pakistan. Meanwhile, all Pakistanis know that their country is—well—in a mess, but it’s their mess, their deadlock among competing interests, and they don’t need American outsiders to tell them how to fix it—especially since a large percentage of the leadership class has been educated in the U.S. Sit down with almost any Pakistani, and he or she will tick off everything that needs to be done: less corruption, more education, productive investment, an end to feudalism, a less corrosive relationship with India, which, in the meantime, serves as a convenient scapegoat for all problems.
The Kerry-Lugar Bill will shower a lot of money on Pakistan, but sustainable change will come only when Pakistanis themselves desire them, just as the campaign against the militants geared up only when it was seen to be in Pakistan’s interest. A serious Army operation in Waziristan is imminent, we’re told. The Obama administration should be happy about that, and Mr. Holbrooke should recognize this: the bomb that killed five people in the U.N compound in Islamabad two days ago will stiffen the Pakistani army’s determination to succeed in that operation far more effectively than an American anti-Taliban public diplomacy campaign (or a Pentagon propaganda effort) ever could.