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With her penetrating style, Caroline Glick examines recent Pakistani politics, indicating how U.S. failure in backing the Musharraf regime indicate deep flaws in U.S. anti-terror policies:
Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, America's overarching policy towards the Islamic world has been clear enough. The US sought to empower forces opposed to the jihad, and to fight with them against the jihadists. The policy itself is correct. But it has been poorly implemented.
In Pakistan, the US placed all of its eggs in Musharraf's basket after September 11 and expected that faced with an outraged superpower, he would share America's interest in destroying the Taliban. But this is not what happened.
Musharraf's policies were always determined by his interest in retaining his grip on power. And while the US never made a credible threat to his grip on power, the jihadists and the non-Islamist political forces opposed to his military dictatorship did. And so, rather than combat the jihadists, he sought to appease them. And rather than work with democrats, he repressed them.
In his bid to accommodate the jihadists, Musharraf rejected US requests to interrogate Khan about his nuclear proliferation activities. So, too, Musharraf rejected repeated US requests to deploy its forces inside of Pakistan. He rejected US offers to train Pakistani counterterror units. He refused to purge jihadists from the ranks of the Pakistani army or the Inter-Service Intelligence organization that itself is the founder of al-Qaida and the Taliban. Rather than defeat the Taliban, Musharraf allowed the Pakistani military to be humiliated and signed "peace accords" with the Taliban in North and South Waziristan effectively ceding sovereignty over the areas to the jihadist group. With no competent counter-insurgency plan in place in the areas, the local populations under Taliban rule largely maintained their traditional, tribal support for the group.
Although Pakistan's nuclear arsenal no doubt informed much of the US's decision to handle Musharraf with kid gloves, the fact is that the US's inability to properly identify and support social forces and individuals in Pakistan that share its desire to defeat the jihadists has been the rule rather than the exception in its post-September 11 treatment of the Islamic world in general. The US's dealings with the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia are clear examples of the same misguided American embrace of leaders who do not oppose the jihadists.
THE MOST striking example of this post-September 11 American penchant for choosing its allies unwisely is the Bush administration's embrace of Fatah in the Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian example stands out because while the US may have strategic interests in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that as in Pakistan make it leery of muddying the political waters with liberalism too aggressively, no such interests exist in the PA. The Palestinians do not have oil, a large, US-trained army, or nuclear bombs to threaten US interests with. And in Israel, the US has a strong, loyal, democratic ally with the means to combat Palestinian jihadists. And yet, rather than turn its back on Fatah, the US has lavishly supported it politically and financially, and has trained Fatah militias while opposing any Israeli military plan to defeat Fatah on the military or political battlefields. And like the US's support for Musharraf, the US's support for Fatah has come back to haunt it and will continue to haunt it in the future.
Just as the Clinton administration upheld Yasser Arafat even as he built his terror armies while negotiating with Israel, so the Bush administration upholds Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as he follows in Arafat's footsteps. Like Arafat, Abbas is a master of double-speak. While waxing poetic about his yearning for peace in his talks with Israelis and Americans, inside the PA he supports terrorists, and in addresses to Arab audiences he explains that he shares the terrorists' strategic goal of destroying Israel.
On Thursday, Jordan's Al-Dustur daily ran an interview with Abbas. There the supposedly moderate Palestinian leader and US ally in the war on terror made clear his support for jihadists and their goal of destroying Israel. Abbas boasted about his refusal at the Annapolis conference last November to accept Israel's Jewish identity. He argued that the only difference he has with Hamas - which he hopes will join Fatah in a unity government - is that he thinks that the use of violence against Israel is counterproductive today. As he put it, "At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different."
Glick concludes:
THE SITUATION in Pakistan is grave. And its implications are clear. As the leader of the fight against the forces of global jihad, the US must redouble its efforts to seek out and cultivate the anti-jihadist forces in the Islamic world. Until it does so, rather than win the war, it will continue to stymied by the Musharrafs, Zardawis, Sharifs, Mubarak's and Abbases of the world who promote jihad while speaking of moderation, stability and democracy.
Sounds good to me.
The United Nations is a classic case of good intentions gone horribly awry. Founded in 1945 to provide a multilateral basis for the institutionalization of world peace, the organization's devolved into a rank Third World talking shop of anti-Western demonization.
Does that sound a little rough? Well, check out today's Wall Street Journal for a bit on this:
When it comes to the U.N. Human Rights Council, is there anything left to say? Well, yes. In a break with precedent, this product of former Secretary General Kofi Annan's "reforms" has found a country other than Israel to criticize. The United States.
This week, two Council "experts" -- an American lawyer and an Indian architect -- accused the Department of Housing and Urban Development of denying the "internationally recognized human rights" of New Orleans residents whose former homes in public housing complexes are scheduled for demolition. The demolitions, say the experts, "could effectively deny thousands of African-American residents their right to return to housing from which they were displaced by the hurricane."
The public housing in question includes the notorious 1930s-era St. Bernard complex, which was already in a bad state before Katrina hit and an even worse state after it. The local housing authority intends to replace the complex with mixed-income housing developments, and in the meantime is granting housing vouchers to former tenants. But some of the new housing will be offered at -- horrors! -- a "market rate," to which the U.N. naturally objects. We don't remember the U.N.'s human-rights czars being quite so vocal when Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe evicted 200,000 people from their homes in 2005.
Meanwhile, the Council will soon release a 25-page report by South African "investigator" John Dugard that is its most comprehensive defense yet of Palestinian terrorism. "Common sense," Mr. Dugard writes, "dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation." Mr. Dugard goes on to lament the "Judaization" of Jerusalem, which if nothing else is a revealing use of language.
We doubt Mr. Dugard's words provide much solace to the relatives of Israelis blown up on buses, in cafes and discotheques. But at least we now know what passes for "common sense" at the United Nations.
The U.N. embodies fundamental elements of international politics, as well as unfulfilled promise.
Maybe the next U.N. ambassador will get a chance to shake things up under a new presidential administration, even picking up where Ambassador Bolton left off?
Voter turnout this primary season is shattering records, right, especially among the youth cohort? No so fast says Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal:
Turnout has been high this primary season, particularly in Democratic races. Voting experts agree on that much. What’s fodder for debate is whether high turnout is surprising these days. Academics disagree on whether there really was a steady decline in turnout rates since 1972, when Americans aged 18, 19 and 20 first got the right to vote. That was the conventional wisdom until 2001, when a paper questioned the belief. But some turnout experts maintain that turnout fell between 1972 and 2000, with a sharp uptick in 2004 amid strong feelings among members of both major parties toward President Bush.
My print column this week examines the debate, which was spurred in part by a recognition that non-citizens are a growing portion of the population, and shouldn’t be included in turnout calculations because they aren’t eligible to vote. “The real thing to look at here is that the population of the country has a larger and larger proportion of people not eligible to vote because they are not citizens,” Ray Wolfinger, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. This has many political implications besides just turnout rates, of course. One of these is that voters in states with relatively high proportions of non-citizens — such as California, 16% non-citizens in 2000, compared with 7% nationwide — have disproportionate clout, because Congressional seats and presidential electors are apportioned by population regardless of citizenship.
The turnout debate is also spurred in part by uncertainty in these numbers. While the Census Bureau takes pains to ensure respondents are honest about their citizenship status, immigrants may remain wary of government questionnaires (I wrote about the fuzziness of immigration stats in 2006). Turnout rates also must be corrected for felons who have lost their right to vote, another group that I’ve written is hard to count. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau doesn’t count Americans who live abroad. Michael McDonald, a turnout researcher at George Mason University, has tried, using information from consulates and the military, but says federal data in the area has grown more sparse.
What do you think? Have turnout rates declined? Are there long-term trends at play, or merely unique features of each election? Will turnout increase or decrease in November, compared to 2004? Please let me know in the comments.
Further reading: Mr. McDonald publishes his turnout estimates here. Walter Dean Burnham, a pioneer in the field, published his electorate numbers in December in the Journal of the Historical Society, which has promised to share the numbers free on its Web site. Curtis Gans, another leading turnout expert, told me he has nearly completed his own archive of turnout figures.
Hmm, what do I think?
I think, for one thing, that states with high rates of illegal immigration are getting a boost in their congressional and Electoral College representation based on their disproportionate numbers of resident aliens, AND this should be a big topic in the immigration debate but it hasn't. It reminds me of the Three-Fifths Compromise at the Consitutional Convention, whereby blacks in slaveholding states would be counted in total population tallies at three-fifths their total number for purposes of representation in Congress. The practice was inherently undemocratic, and it took a Civil War to fully eliminate all aspect of that peculiar bargain.
Besides that, Bialik doesn't quite say it here, but how is voter turnout being measured? The proportion of the eligible electorate that votes on election day?
Bialik actually does address this in his print column:
Turnout rates are easy to define: You divide the number of people who voted into the number of people who could have voted. But they're hard to calculate in the U.S. The 50 states and the District of Columbia run the show, and they generally don't keep an accurate count of eligible voters.
In other words, turnout numbers are inherently unreliable because of the potential flaws and variability in state level counting.
Not only that, Bialik's got a full passage on the unrepresentativeness of Census Burueau counting methods:
Up through the 2000 elections, researchers generally divided total votes into the U.S. Census Bureau's count of the voting-age population. That number, however, excludes Americans living abroad, who can vote. And it includes those declared mentally incompetent and felons, who are not allowed to vote in some states. Most important, it also includes noncitizens, a nonvoting population that has grown much faster than the general population -- to 18.6 million. That's more than a fivefold increase from 1970, compared with an overall population growth of just 38%.
What this signifies, essentially, is that the numbers on turnout that political science professors are throwing out every semester to their students in American Government 101 are essentially meaningless, or at least, the data requires the accompanyment of a lot of methodological disclaimers.
As long as the same data counting methods are used from election to election, then we should have some comparability. If turnouts increased over the years, the numbers would have to be adjusted for the proportion of eligible voters, felons, and what not, but other than that, not bad. Right?
Wrong. Things don't sound so good for voter turnout studies - we might as well be looking at crystal balls (it's not just illegals, who are today a larger share of the population than in the 1970s, which means we can't compare turnout rates over time withhout factoring out those who're ineligible; and don't even get going about those in prison, paroled, or what have you, who are 1 in 100 of the population, many of whom are disenfranchised).This means that rather than using hard, rigorous statistics, professors will have to refer to all the Obamaniacs the Illinois Senator's managed to turnout out in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses.
Good grief, Charlie Brown!!
