Pakistan in Peril

On Jan. 14, the American Strategy Program hosted a panel discussion featuring journalist Nicholas Schmidle and New America's Peter Bergen, Steve Coll, Steven Clemons and Flynt Leverett. A brief summary follows, while an MP3 audio recording of the full 90-minute event can be downloaded below and video can be viewed at right. To watch a brief post-event discussion featuring Bergen, Clemons and Coll, please click here.

Leverett, a former NSC staffer and a Senior Fellow at New America, kicked off the event's discussions by reminding the audience that it is impossible to think about Pakistan and Afghanistan separately, and observed that there are finite limits to the help Pakistan's leaders are able and willing to give the United States in fighting the war on terror. Leverett said the Bush administration's biggest mistake in this war was not "finishing the job" with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and allowing al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders to escape into Pakistan. He also noted that the United States has an unsuccessful history of supporting Western-educated leaders in exile in the Middle East, pointing to Ahmed Chalabi of Iraq. Micromanaging domestic politics doesn't work, Leverett argued.

Bergen, also a Senior Fellow at New America, and author of "The Killer Question" in the Jan. 30 New Republic, hypothesized about the answers to three key questions concerning the recent assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto: What killed her? Who killed her? What does this mean for Pakistan?

Bergen supported the Pakistani government's official line that Bhutto was killed when she struck her head on the sun roof of the vehicle she was in during the suicide attack, though he noted that there was no formal autopsy, making those conclusions impossible to confirm. Bergen believes that al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, which have morphed together strategically and tactically in the past two years, are responsible for Bhutto's death, pointing to the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud as a prime planning suspect. Bergen predicted that in the next election in Pakistan, scheduled for Feb. 18, Islamist parties will be soundly defeated by the Pakistan Peoples Party, which was led by Benazir Bhutto until her death.

Schmidle, the author of "Next Gen Taliban" in the New York Times Magazine and a fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs, recounted the story of how, following publication of this crucial article, he was visited by agents from the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, and effectively deported from Pakistan. He spoke of his two years in that country, noting that today's Taliban in Pakistan is not the same as Mullah Omar's Taliban of several years ago, citing the July 2007 rebellion in the Red Mosque as evidence of the fracturing within the traditional religious establishment in Pakistan. Schmidle added that less than a week ago, ISI agents came to his home several times, and despite his efforts to gain more time, was escorted to the airport with his wife on Friday, Jan. 11.

Coll, the President and CEO of New America and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, further emphasized that the different bands of radicals in Pakistan are "not a coherent monolith," and drew distinctions between the few hundred core foreign fighters of al-Qaeda, the separate leadership of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani Taliban. "The insurgency is gathering strength while the Pakistani state is weakening," Coll commented. History has no analogue for Musharraf, he noted -- a civilian president who used to lead the military, who appointed the head of the intelligence services, and is mentoring the next chief of the army. Coll argued that the most important person in Pakistani politics in the next year will be General Ashfaq Kiyani, who has not offered an agenda yet but called 2008 the 'year of the army.' Coll was pessimistic about the chances of a successful partnership between Kiyani and Musharraf.

The robust Q&A session, moderated by American Strategy Program Director Steven Clemons, touched on a variety of topics, including the possibility of a rapprochement between Bhutto and Musharraf before her assassination, freedom of press in Pakistan, and the relationship between the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other subjects that came up included the effects of instability in Pakistan on India and the Kashmir region, potential independence for Pakistan's Sindh and Baluchistan provinces, the safety of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, and democratization as a means of fighting the war on terror. -- Event Summary by Katherine Tiedemann

Participants

• Nicholas Schmidle
  Fellow, Institute of Current World Affairs
  Author, "Next Gen-Taliban," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 6, 2008

• Steve Coll
  President, New America Foundation
  Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Ghost Wars
  New Yorker Staff Writer
  Co-Director, Terrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative, New America Foundation

• Peter Bergen
  Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
  CNN Terrorism Analyst
  Co-Director, Terrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative, New America Foundation

• Flynt Leverett
  Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
  Director, Geopolitics of Energy Initiative, New America Foundation
  Former Senior Director, Middle East Affairs, National Security Council

• Steven Clemons
  Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation
  Publisher, www.TheWashingtonNote.com