The American
President
(Part III: The Nixon Doctrine)
By Mohammad Ashraf
Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
The third model that is now
being tried is what is called The Nixon Doctrine.
Peter Beinart, in his insightful article, “Return
of the Nixon Doctrine”, published in Time,
January 15, 2007, writes, “It’s an
unwritten rule: each President gets one foreign
policy doctrine. James Monroe’s was defense
of the Americas. Harry S Truman’s was containment.
And George W. Bush’s – spelled out
after the defeat of the Taliban in 2002 - was
pre-emptive war to defeat terrorism and spread
democracy”. That was true then because at
that time the country was united, the military
was triumphant, the mood was resolute. Americans
were ready, literally, to take on the world. Now
it sounds crazy. The military is cracking from
wartime strain. Isolationism is on the rise. Americans
don’t want to sustain one pre-emptive war,
let alone start others”
He defines the Nixon doctrine as the foreign policy
equivalent of outsourcing, and Nixon unveiled
it in 1969 to a nation wearied by Vietnam. “No
longer would Americans man the front lines against
global communism.” He set Saigon on Vietnam;
Iran on the Soviets in the Persian Gulf; Pakistan
on the Soviets in Afghanistan in Reagan years;
declaring, “America would no longer be a
global cop; it would be a global benefactor, quartermaster
and coach-helping allies contain communism on
their own”.
In his words, now President Bush is trying something
similar. America has outsourced Ethiopia to deal
with Somalia where ruling Islamists, as they contend,
had terrorist ties. In Afghanistan America has
assigned the job of fighting the Taliban to NATO;
to deal with North Korea, the task have been given
to China; with regard to Iran, it is Russia and
Israel who have been asked for help; on Darfur
issue the peacekeepers from the African Union
are banked upon; in order to cripple Hizballah
in Lebanon, the job had been given to Israel.
And most importantly in Iraq, the US is relying
on Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite leader to defeat
the insurgents and to disarm the militia.
The problem with such an arrangement is, as says
Beinart, “When America relies on other countries
to do our bidding; they often end up doing their
own instead.” And it is absolutely true.
An emboldened Ethiopia has begun aspiring for
dominance in Africa’s horn. Somali Islamists
have already made the call for a guerrilla war,
a duplication of the Iraq and Afghanistan scenario;
if Ethiopia tries to make Somalia its puppet,
which it will, Eritrea will definitely jump in,
resulting in a full-scale regional war. The mother
of all problems, the Israel-Palestinian crisis,
meanwhile remained sidelined, and somewhat ignored.
Outsourcing not only often fails to deliver the
intended results; it also mostly carries with
it a high hidden price. A liberal Iran came to
be ruled by Ayatullahs; Afghanistan got the Taliban;
war lords in Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan got
both, weapons and dollars. Some liberal and democratic
countries also got a good rapping in the process.
Pakistan now faces a new religious resurgence
in sympathy to mass killings in Afghanistan; pro-Western
Lebanese government got destroyed in Lebanon,
wrecking what was once a crown jewel in Bush’s
campaign for Middle East democracy; sectarian
violence in a secular Iraq has gotten a new momentum.
All in all, the world appears to have become a
mad, mad, mad, world. Short-term solutions often
leave behind lengthy shadows and tedious problems.
The Economist, January 6, 2007, correctly sums
up what can happen when things don’t turn
up as planned. “Stockholm Syndrome-like
response to captivity, whereby hostages end up
sympathizing with their captors”, begins
to take place. “The Iraqi state that Saddam
had created was dismantled, but with such crudeness
that the wider polity he had built also began
to fall apart. As it did so, cracking with ever
greater force into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish components,
a slogan appeared on Baghdad’s walls: “Better
the tyranny of Saddam than the chaos of the Amerikan…
the sordidness of his hanging, and its ugly timing
on the day of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice-contrasting
with his composure before death- re-enforced the
Sunni sense of injury at the hands of what many
see as a puppet sectarian regime.”. Add
to it Saddam’s final noble call to the Iraqis,
“to unite and to forgive invaders for their
leader’s folly”. Same way, “as
in Iraq, every thing depends on what comes next”,
in Somalia. As says the Economist, “The
early signs are not promising. For a start, the
warlords are back in town… although the
Islamists were austere, they delivered security,
orderliness and even a sense of pride to many
in Mogadishu. Where the warlords had roadblocks,
the Islamists had street-cleaners”.
Feelings about these warlords are unequivocal.
“They are absolute bastards”, says
a Somali watcher, “illiterate, syphilitic,
irrational killers, some a little better, but
for the most part they remain motivated solely
by money, including what they can make from moving
arms and qat, the addictive narcotic lead on which
many Somalis waste their meager daily salaries”.
The description graphically befits their counterparts
in Afghanistan under whose rule ‘farmers
have harvested about 6,000 tonnes” of opium,
“amounting to 90% of total world output”.
Karzai, the champion of the blame-game, puts the
blame on the Taliban who had almost ended its
growth. As President of Afghanistan with the NATO
and American might at his back, is it enough for
him to say, drug business is his country’s
“worst enemy”? Countries do not run
on statements and on finger-pointing.
America must not let those who are part of the
problem benefit from the mistakes it has made
in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the words of former
UN envoy, Vendrell, “In 2002 the warlords
and commanders (in Afghanistan) were shaking in
their boots fearing they were going to be disarmed
or cast aside. Now it is much more difficult”.
“Where the road ends, the Taliban begins”,
says General Eikenberry. According to the Economist,
December 23, 2006, “Some 15m Pushtuns live
in Afghanistan or 50% of its population, and 28m
in Pakistan”. America brands all the Taliban
as terrorists like it did in Iraq through deBaathafication.
In a Bedouin culture of the Middle East, the most
important value in life is what they call, Muruwah,
(a term which means, courage, patience, endurance
and a dedicated determination to avenge), and
in tribal Afghanistan, its equivalent is what
they call, Nang or honor. “A Pushtun waited
100 years, then took his revenge. It was quick
work”. In the words of Economist, “His
honor besmirched -and here’s the problem
for the Americans - a Pushtun is obliged to have
his revenge, or Badal”. Zan, Zar and Zameen
(woman, money and land), are the three raw nerves
that can trigger in a Pushtun’s sense of
Nang/honor. The invasion has besmirched all the
three in both the countries.
The only way out that makes some sense, is that
America must lead by leaving. The perception that
America is an occupier and not a benefactor must
end. It is ironic that in the 1989-1994 civil
wars in Afghanistan, America left in haste when
it should not have. Now it is delaying its departure
when even Republicans like Sen. Hagel are saying,
“The President’s decision to send
more troops at this juncture is the worst foreign
policy blunder since Vietnam, and other Foreign
Relations panel comments were just as pungent”,
as is reported in the Wall Street Journal, Jan.
12. 2007. In order to separate the al-Queda members
from the insurgents, it is essential to make sure
that the majority Pushtuns do not get sidelined,
or remain deprived in the governance of that country.
Beinart is right in his article when he says with
regard to Iraq, “The return of the Nixon
doctrine is one of the hidden costs of the war
in Iraq. And it is another reason that, unless
Iraq’s leaders quickly forge a political
compact across sectarian lines, America must leave”.
The real test of American leadership is how it
cobbles the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds in the governance
of that country. Direct talks with Syria and Iran,
involving Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt can never
be harmful to American interests. President’s
tax-cut strategy, his desire to tackle ‘America’s
gathering heath-care crisis, and his attempts
to rein in costs, and his goal to achieve a just
and economically literate solution to the problem
of illegal immigration in American”, in
the words of Economist, Jan.6, cannot be achieved
without the Democrats who differ with him on the
Iraq policy so widely.
“Iraq is, potentially, a triple problem
for Mr. Bush as his presidency moves into its
final quarter”. First it is the hardest,
largest and the most time consuming issue; second,
“America’s slow defeat in Iraq makes
it hard” for the President to salvage his
reputation; and third, Iraq threatens to undercut
his domestic agenda too. The mistakes that he
graciously admits making, were neither ordinary
nor inconsequential. Look even at the choice of
a word like, “surge” being used for
the increase in the military in Iraq. It negatively
denotes an increase which swells like waves, is
transient, sudden, and instable like a brief violent
power outrage. What stability can come out of
a surge! Often it burns your electric equipments,
destroys your computer programs, and can even
set a fire alarm on. If peace and democracy are
the two stated aims that America strives to accomplish
in that region and in the world, then it must
know that the best way to finish the adversaries
is to “grow antennae, not horns”.
