http://chqdaily.com/2012/07/23/zakaria-choice-to-modernize-pakistan-must-be-pakistanis/
ON OBAMA SAYETH FAREED :
“Whatever you may think about President Obama’s economic policies — the things he’s done, the things Romney said he’s going to do — on foreign policy, I think it’s pretty indisputable that President Obama has done a pretty good job. I think you see this in two things. You see conservative columnists like David Brooks have written columns pointing this out, other conservatives like David Frum have pointed this out, and most importantly, you see this as the one issue that Mitt Romney is not raising in the presidential campaign. It’s an unusual situation for a Democrat to have an advantage in foreign policy. You would have to go back to John Kennedy to find the time when a Democrat could credibly claim that he was tough enough and smart enough to have an advantage in foreign policy over his opponent. Obviously Johnson did not have that opportunity during the Vietnam War, and since then, the Democrats have always been seen as weak. But Obama has done two or three things very effectively, I think. First is, he has drawn down the United States to a more manageable position in this broader campaign that we’ve been talking about in the greater Middle East. He got troops out of Iraq. Everyone said all hell would break loose. You notice hell did not break loose. That is a very good model for how to approach Afghanistan. Everyone is going to be kicking, and screaming and telling you terrible things are going to happen. Well, some things are going to happen, but they were going to happen anyway. A lot fewer terrible things are going to happen than people say. We should continue to rebalance ourselves in precisely this way, so that we have the flexibility, the resources to deal with all kinds of other challenges. Principally, nation-building at home. But also dealing with the other real foreign policy challenges we face in Asia, which is going to be the center of the world and the world economy. President Obama has pivoted to Asia very wisely and strategically. I think that in his policy toward China, you have the right balance of toughness and cooperation. In the policy toward Russia, you have the right balance where you try to get them to work with you on things like Libya and Syria, but you stand up to them when you need to. On the whole, it’s a very practical approach. I think a bunch of Democrats or liberals aren’t happy that he maintained some of the elements of the war on terror that the Bush administration did. Some wish that he were more expansive in his interventions on the basis of human rights, but I think he has been successful precisely because it has been a balanced, centrist, pragmatic approach, which is actually very much in the American tradition of successful diplomacy.”
—Transcribed by Rabab Al-Sharif
Fareed Zakaria, host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and editor-at-large for Time, introduces Chautauqua’s week of lectures on Pakistan Monday morning in the Amphitheater. Photo by Adam Birkan.
Laurence Léveillé | Staff Writer
Violence caused by jihads is a relatively new problem, but many people associate it with Islam as a whole.People first thought the cause of the Sept. 11 attacks had to do with Islam, a religion that has been around since the seventh century. Despite beliefs that the religion is the cause of some violence, countries such as Indonesia and India are peaceful and democratic societies, said Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large of Time magazine and CNN host, during Monday’s morning lecture. Zakaria was the first speaker of Week Five, themed “Pakistan: Straddling the Boundary Between Asia and the Middle East.” He informed the audience about the history of Westernization in the Arab world and Pakistan’s deeply rooted religious nationalism.
“It is easy to understand why people kill,” he said. “The whole history of humanity is full of that, unfortunately. What is more difficult to understand is why somebody would be willing to die in killing people.”
The problems behind the practice of jihad in the Arab world are of recent origin, Zakaria said. When the Arab world was decolonized in the early 1950s, there was promise and hope for it, he said. Leaders spoke of renewing the Arab world and used Western economic ideas to take steps toward modernization.
But by 1965, that same area was a political desert and an economic wasteland because the Western style of modernization had failed. Stagnation, corruption and dictatorship followed.
“It fails because the political model, which promised republics and democracy, turned into military dictatorship,” Zakaria said.
As the rest of the world faced changes in the early 1990s, the Arab world went backward in time. In Egypt, people had more freedom of the press in 1950 than they did in 1995, he said. The failure of the political model led to the rise of dissent.
Dissent could not develop in cafes, newspapers or parliaments of the Arab world. As a result, it became prominent in the only place it could not be banned: the mosque.
“Islam became the language of political opposition to these regimes, because it was the only language that was permissible,” Zakaria said.
The rise of violent political Islam was linked to those repressive, Westernized dictatorships, he said.
With his analysis of the Arab world in mind, Zakaria said the country the United States should worry about most is Pakistan, as it has 80 nuclear weapons and is run by a military regime rather than a civilian government.
Zakaria said the reason he believes the U.S. will not win its war in Afghanistan is because the jihadi have safe havens in Pakistan, which Pakistan lets exist.
When Americans go into conflict, he said, they simplify the issue into a “good guy versus bad guy” scenario. But asking Pakistan for support cannot be simplified due to its roots.
Pakistan was founded when the British decolonized India. When they left, some Indians worried they would not be secure in a secular democracy and created their own state.
In 1956, Pakistan became an Islamic state, because its president believed it would provide a source of legitimacy for his dictatorship against democratic forces in the country, Zakaria said.
“He could ally himself with the mosques, the clerics, the preachers, against the Westernized liberals who are trying to do silly do-good things like the rule of law and democracy,” he said.
Pakistan’s strategy is to fight India, to keep Afghanistan on edge and to lead an invincible Islamic resistance against the U.S., Zakaria said.
“We confront this very complex reality of what do we do with a country not whose policies are ones that we oppose, but in whose national DNA or political DNA is hardwired a certain kind of religious nationalism, a certain violent opposition to the forces of secular democracy and an intrinsic anti-Americanism,” he said.
To understand Pakistan’s rooted anti-Americanism, the forces of its existence and nationalism must be understood. It was not necessarily an intended decision, Zakaria said, but rather a consequence of creating a nation with religious nationalism.
When Americans ask Pakistan to stop supporting terrorists in North Waziristan, he said, they are asking the country to unravel a policy that has been around for decades.
“You’re asking them to act in a way that really is beginning to question the very idea of Pakistan,” he said.
