Gary Sick: Pakistan's Plan B deficiency
[Gary Sick, a senior research scholar at Columbia University, served on the National Security Council under presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan and was the principal White House aide on Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis.]
What is happening today in Pakistan takes me back to the time when the Iranian revolution was brewing, when I was the desk officer for Iran on the National Security Council.
The ultimate reason for the U.S. policy failure then was the fact that the U.S. had placed enormous trust and responsibility in the shah of Iran.
He -- and not the country or people of Iran -- was seen as the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf. Everything relied on him. There was no Plan B.
As a consequence, the endlessly mulled-over U.S. response to Iranian instability was that we had no choice except to support the shah.
This was fortified by the belief (or wishful thinking) that the shah would pull himself together and deal with the growing crisis before it was too late. By the time it became inescapably obvious that that was not going to happen, the situation was too far gone for anything to stop it.
This is a gross simplification, of course. But in retrospect, this was the essence of the problem. We had placed all of our eggs in the shah's basket; we had no visible alternative. So policy tended to settle on "more of the same" and fear of "rocking the boat" in a way that would undercut the shah, combined with much wringing of hands and wishful thinking.
Those policies were so unsuccessful that they gave rise to endless conspiracy theories among the Iranian elite (many of whom fled the country in hopes that someone else would defend their interests) in which the Carter administration was determined to replace the shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Absurd as that appeared to those of us on the inside, it was an all-too-human attempt to square what the Iranians regarded as an omnipotent United States with a policy of neglect and error.
All of this comes to mind as I watch the situation in Pakistan.
I am no expert on that country, but I see the U.S. locked in much the same kind of policy vise that bedeviled us in Iran.
We have bet the farm on one man -- in this case, Pervez Musharraf -- and we have no fallback position. ...
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What is happening today in Pakistan takes me back to the time when the Iranian revolution was brewing, when I was the desk officer for Iran on the National Security Council.
The ultimate reason for the U.S. policy failure then was the fact that the U.S. had placed enormous trust and responsibility in the shah of Iran.
He -- and not the country or people of Iran -- was seen as the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf. Everything relied on him. There was no Plan B.
As a consequence, the endlessly mulled-over U.S. response to Iranian instability was that we had no choice except to support the shah.
This was fortified by the belief (or wishful thinking) that the shah would pull himself together and deal with the growing crisis before it was too late. By the time it became inescapably obvious that that was not going to happen, the situation was too far gone for anything to stop it.
This is a gross simplification, of course. But in retrospect, this was the essence of the problem. We had placed all of our eggs in the shah's basket; we had no visible alternative. So policy tended to settle on "more of the same" and fear of "rocking the boat" in a way that would undercut the shah, combined with much wringing of hands and wishful thinking.
Those policies were so unsuccessful that they gave rise to endless conspiracy theories among the Iranian elite (many of whom fled the country in hopes that someone else would defend their interests) in which the Carter administration was determined to replace the shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Absurd as that appeared to those of us on the inside, it was an all-too-human attempt to square what the Iranians regarded as an omnipotent United States with a policy of neglect and error.
All of this comes to mind as I watch the situation in Pakistan.
I am no expert on that country, but I see the U.S. locked in much the same kind of policy vise that bedeviled us in Iran.
We have bet the farm on one man -- in this case, Pervez Musharraf -- and we have no fallback position. ...