EDITORIAL: Pakistan's pendulum swings

By | Wednesday, July 2, 2008

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At least a few of the dividends of the Pakistani coalition government's new security strategy - and of continued American pressure - are on display this week. Under heightened scrutiny following its unprecedented Taliban negotiations and a surge of violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan ordered security forces to encircle Peshawar beginning Saturday. Targeted raids of militants in lawless corners of the nuclear-armed country are underway. On Monday, what may have been a U.S. drone reduced the house of a leading terrorist in Khyber district to rubble.

Militant chief Haji Namdar survived the attack, but, as Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani put it to The Washington Times in an Editorial Board meeting this week, "there will be several actions in the next few days that will make it completely clear that Pakistan wants total cooperation with NATO forces." Time will tell.

The reality is that Pakistan's new coalition government must engage in the same precarious balancing act that President Pervez Musharraf faced before February elections gave rise to this new government. These new powerbrokers provoked much consternation in recent months when they engaged in unprecedented negotiations with the Taliban and militants in border regions. Those talks appear to have broken down. So, for the time being, under mounting international pressure, we see a more muscular approach from a government that originally seemed likely to underperform rooting out terrorists.

But the balancing act remains the same: Any Pakistani government must reckon with the fact that its countrymen prefer negotiation over military action against al Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist militants. In a recent study by Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation, more than half of Pakistanis said the United States was to blame for violence inside the country today, as compared to only 8 percent blaming al Qaeda. This is a perception gap of enormous proportions, and a similarly epic public-diplomacy failure.

Mr. Haqqani's perceptive words regarding this public-diplomacy failure are worth recounting. He recounted youthful years studying inside an air-conditioned American library - this was the Cold War era - at a time when even well-to-do Pakistani families had few similarly attractive options (and exceedingly rare air conditioning). Where are public-diplomacy efforts today? The sorry truth is that they have failed in Pakistan just as they have in most Muslim-majority countries. Insofar as the United States can change this context, it creates room for Pakistan's government in the unpopular business of combating terrorism.

Toward that end, President Bush should heed his own words from 2005: "We are not doing a very good job of getting our message out."

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