Sunday, January 06, 2008
Opinion, Stephanie Ramage

Passing around the peace pipeline

The Bush administration says that Pakistan is top priority for its foreign policy agenda over the next 12 months...

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov (second from left) meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin (fourth from left) and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran last October. CREDIT: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

The Bush administration says that Pakistan is top priority for its foreign policy agenda over the next 12 months, and candidates on the presidential campaign trail have fallen all over themselves to praise the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, who would have undoubtedly won election as prime minister and was quite friendly to the United States.

But it is extremely important to recognize that Bhutto’s self-appointed successor, her estranged husband Asif Ali Zardari, is not Bhutto. And it’s equally important for the United States to find a way of dealing effectively with Pakistan regardless of who’s in power there.

Zardari’s actions, and his motives, bear closer inspection. Zardari spent most of his time away from Bhutto—living in an apartment in New York for at least the past three years, while she lived out almost nine years of self-imposed exile in various Middle Eastern countries before returning to Pakistan in October.

Zardari’s plans for Bhutto’s son Bilalwal to head the Pakistan People’s Party invite scrutiny as well. It may well be that Bilalwal, currently enrolled at Oxford as his mother once was, is a real chip off the ol’ Benazir block. But notice that his immediate ascension to the head of the party is not what Zardari is proposing. Makes sense, you might say, since the boy is only 19 and needs to finish school. But there’s something else going on here. Those who say that Bilalwal’s selection is merely a nod to the dynastic tradition of central Asia are missing the point entirely. They needn’t look at any Asian traditions for the template for what’s going on—there are plenty of examples in Europe’s medieval royal families. Zardari has appointed himself as regent until his son has finished school because a lot can happen in three years.

Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the Pakistan Peoples Party candidate, will in all likelihood be elected in February (if anyone is actually elected, if the elections actually happen), but Zardari will be pulling his strings. Zardari means to rule. “Mr. Ten Percent,” as the Pakistani people nicknamed him for his racket of kickbacks from foreign companies doing business in Pakistan, is back in town.

It was also Zardari who allegedly cooked up a $1.5 billion embezzlement scheme in the early 1990s for which a Swiss court found both Zardari and Bhutto guilty in 2003. Bhutto was appealing the decision at the time of her murder.

Zardari has at least as many problems as President Pervez Musharraf. And the Muslim League candidate, Sharif Nawaz, though in the eyes of many Pakistanis at least less authoritarian than Musharraf, isn’t likely to win the election (which is probably a good thing, considering that his answer to India’s nuclear muscle-flexing is for Pakistan to flex its own nuclear muscles). We all saw Pakistan’s participants in democracy burning down polling stations as a sign of their grief; their election will be nothing of the sort. It will be a burnt offering to honor Bhutto, with no thought for the future. If history is any indication of the future, Zardari and Co. will expect to be paid for Pakistan’s loyalty. And although we’ve done that shtick plenty, we never like doing it.

In 1801, the fledgling American nation went to war with the Barbary pirates rather than pay them off—which is what all the European powers had done for centuries. As related by historian Michael B. Oren in his book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present,” former President George Washington said that it was disgraceful for America to pay “such banditti who for half the sum that is paid them [could] be exterminated from the earth.”

But the Barbary pirates didn’t have a bomb, and Pakistan does. Thus, we’re going to find ourselves in a bidding war for Pakistan’s goodwill. And any Western power that secures that fickle fealty will always find it threatened by the violence of extremists, unless those extremists are neutralized.

A better option might be to use America’s most powerful weapon—our business community.

Just for the heck of it, consider this: According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Natural gas accounts for the largest share of Pakistan’s energy use, amounting to about 50 percent of total energy consumption. Pakistan currently consumes all of its domestic natural gas production, but without higher production Pakistan will need to become a natural gas importer. As a result, Pakistan is exploring several pipeline and LNG [liquefied natural gas] import options to meet the expected growth in natural gas demand.”

Oddly enough, as of New Year’s Eve, Turkmenistan, one of the largest natural gas providers in the region, had cut off its gas exports to its next door neighbor, Iran, claiming rather fishily that it needs to make some repairs. The Iranians say the Turkmen want to double the price of gas. It’s worth noting that quirky Turkmenistan also shares a border with Afghanistan to the South, which shares a border with its southern neighbor, Pakistan. Russia runs basically all of the energy pipelines in Central Asia, a circumstance that chaps the arses of its former vassal states. (Turkmenistan has jacked up the price of its gas exports to Russia by 50 percent since last summer.)

Helping to transport Turkmenistan’s gas through Afghanistan—which already gets some of its gas from Turkmenistan—to Pakistan would be one distinctly American way of thumping off the increasingly rapacious Russian paw while sticking it to Iran, cozying up to Turkmenistan, creating jobs in Afghanistan and securing a little Pakistani cooperation with the International Security Assistance Forces—regardless of who’s in Pakistan’s prime minister’s seat—all without sparking more violence.

It’s just a thought, but, if some enterprising American company did pick up such an option, things could get extremely interesting. SP