The Fromson File

THE MYTH OF NATION-BUILDING The President’s assertion that the United States is working to bring democracy to Iraq, raises questions about his understanding of the region. The White House has few experts to call upon with a knowledge of the country’s language and culture. Ahmad Chalabi, who had hardly set foot on Iraqi soil in 40 years until the Pentagon and the CIA brought him back to Baghdad last spring, is one of the so-called experts upon whom U.S. policy hinges. If I’ve learned one thing in the all the years of reporting in the developing world, it is to beware of exiles. They are passionate, persuasive and, more often than not, implausible. Remember Cuba and the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation when the CIA was convinced that the people would join with the invasion forces to overthrow the Castro regime. That was 43 years and nine U.S. Presidents ago and Fidel still governs Cuba with an iron fist. It raises this question: Which Iraqis who personally have suffered through years of Sadaam’s terror are going to accept Chalabi who has spent the good life, living it up in London or the U.S. for so long? Lacking any exposure to Western values as we know them, Iraq always has been wracked by religious and ethnic animosities. Only Sadaam’s brutal repression brought them under control. Throughout the mid-1980s we chose to ignore his tyranny even when it was sufficient enough to have made Stalin blush. For expediency’s sake, we also turned the other cheek in confronting human rights violations in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. Freedom for Iraq did not become a high priority in Washington until 9/11. Nation-building usually has proven to be an illusive if marginal undertaking in most parts of the developing world, at least those that I have observed in many years of reporting from Asia, the former Soviet Union and Latin America. In a sense, when the British tried and failed to control Iraq in the 1920s by cobbling together the Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish and Christian populations into one nation. Largely, it was because they tried to graft an alien concept on to a region that if not an entrenched theocracy, bore many of the similarities to one. In the teachings and textbooks of the religious or public schools in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, Western ideals always have been considered blasphemous. Naively and rather blindly, we have convinced ourselves that the principles we have held dearly for more than 200 years are universally accepted when they are not. Imagine the mullahs in Cairo, Marrakech, Riyadh, Kabul or Karachi ever being kindred spirits of America? Not likely. Be it in Iraq, its neighbors or even some regions of the former U.S.S.R. like Chechniya, the Republics of Georgia or Azerbaijan, the idea of nation-building is a remote notion that collides not only with religious and fundamentalist beliefs, but also with ethnic and tribal traditions. In the mid-1950s, I heard officials of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul talking about nation-building in Afghanistan. Having just returned from the Khyber Pass where I got caught in the midst of a firefight between rival warlords, I wrote a dispatch for the Associated Press in which I noted that nation-building in that faction-ridden kingdom was as likely as trying to write a constitution for Mars. The simple fact is that in the aftermath of World War II, the United States not only stumbled into a power vacuum left by the former colonial rulers, but also naively acknowledged their convenient concepts of nationhood. What was once British-ruled Burma and now is Mynnamar was wracked by civil war for more than 30 years as the government in Rangoon tried to repress the Chins, Kachins and Shans of upper Burma, a conflict that remains unresolved. In Laos and Vietnam, the French used a policy of divide and conquer in order to control the divisive and ethnically different people in North (Tonkin), Central (Annam) and South (Cochin) Vietnam. In Indonesia, the Dutch finally surrendered their island empire of four principal islands and thousands of lesser ones, to Indonesian nationalists in 1948. But periodically, Sumatra, Kalimantan and the Celebes have feuded and fought the central government in Java in endless conflict. A cadre of ambitious colonels described the war as a Cold War conflict with the Communists which Washington swallowed. But the 1957-58 civil war I covered, on it was mainly a regional struggle. The colonels' smuggling operation that included shipping rubber, timber and copra to other countries of Southeast Asia, did not become known to us foreign correspondents until years later. Today, like every administration before it, the Bush White House is confronted by a perennial problem. Americans are conditioned by an expectation that quick solutions can be found for every complex problem. It drives policy and affects decision-making around the world, prompting American politicians and the public to expect notions like democracy in Iraq to be a reasonable expectation. But there is no concrete evidence to suggest that democracy can be anything but stillborn in many developing countries of the world. Meanwhile, the drip, drip, drip of American blood is bound to have a negative impact on public opinion and politicians in an election year. As if Iraq and even Afghanistan were not enough, the question of Pakistan has been brought front and center by two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf. The prospect of mounting instability in a country armed with nuclear weapons is a nightmarish prospect. No one wants to contemplate a scenario in which Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would fall into the hands of religious extremists or radicals hostile to the United States. It sends chills through the highest levels of the U.S. government and those in India, Israel, Russia, China and the capitals of Western Europe. In the years that I was reporting the activities of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and other security alliances forged by the Eisenhower Administration, Pakistan was one of the active partners of American-sponsored anti-Communist pacts from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. The inclusion of Pakistan in a Southeast Asia treaty seemed ludicrous on its face. It was the only Muslim country among the eight member nations and became even more remote to East Asia than ever before. So once East Pakistan declared its independence from Islamabad and became Bangladesh. Pakistan seemed even more remote to the treaty members' interests. Yet, one Administration after another, Democratic as well as Republican, coddled Islamabad in the belief that we were helping to forge a stronger nation. Ah, nation-building. Not exactly a new concept in American policy-making. After the deaths of its founding president, Ali Jinnah and its first prime minister, Liaquat Aly Khan in the years following independence, Pakistan’s treasury was fattened by the United States to prop up every military dictator or autocratic civilian who came to power. Largely, this marriage of convenience was an outgrowth of Washington’s irritation with India that not only had dared to strike a neutralist stance in the Cold War, but also accept large amounts of military and economic assistance from Moscow. That infuriated Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Pakistan became a staunch ally of the United States. It allowed us use of air bases from which high-flying U2 aircraft were able to fly over the old Soviet Union daily with impugnity for years. That was that was until an American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down in 1960. More to the point, Pakistan became the beneficiary of billions of dollars of military assistance over the next two decades that in part was responsible for the instability of Indo-Pakistani relations. U.S. military advisors made no secret of their presence in the country. The CIA had an active station in Pakistan. The U.S. Embassy often was headed by a senior American ambassador who could be counted on to lobby for even more weapons for the Pakistani armed forces. But given the nature of such a strong relationship, the inevitable question is why Washington now seems to be so marginalized in a drama that is unfolding in what once was our strongest ally in South Asia. Are we so bereft of good intelligence that neither the CIA or the Pentagon know who the Muslim extremists are within the Pakistani Army’s ranks? Why does the U.S. government seem to have so few chips to play after so many years of pouring billions of dollars into a country that lacks either democracy or prosperity? It is enough to say humbug to nation-building.