U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has assured Pakistani President Asif Al Zardari of his support for democracy in the frontline nation during a telephone call on Friday, Pakistan’s official state agency said.

Obama’s conversation was part of a round of phone calls he made to world leaders including Britain, Israel, Japan, Australia, France and Germany, mainly to thank them for their messages of congratulation following his victory.

Pakistan’s The News in a report from Washington said Obama conveyed his full support to help Pakistan overcome its financial difficulties as also face down the threat from militants.

He said he was keen for better ties between the two allies in the war against militancy and to settle differences arising from U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistan, the newspaper said.

The call came days after Pakistan’s leaders told the head of the U.S. central command, General David Petraeus, to stop missile strikes into Pakistan because they were counter-productive and difficult to explain in a democracy..

How will this play out? There are lives involved, and if women and children are going to continue to die in these strikes, the cautious enthusiasm with which  Pakistanis have greeted Obama’s ascent to power will quickly dissipate. 

Obama himself several times during the campaign said that he was willing to strike targets inside Pakistan if Islamabad was unable or unwilling to do so. Will that hold?

Meanwhile over the border in New Delhi, the press at least is working itself up into lather over the Obama phone call that never came.  The idea that the U.S. President-elect called leaders of 15 nations and especially Pakistan, and not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, doesn’t help advance India’s great power ambitions.

But The Times of India quoted an Indian diplomat as saying that New Delhi shouldn’t be over-reacting, arguing that it should consider itself better off that it was “not in the same crisis league”, referring obviously to Pakistan

And in any case, India has cried itself hoarse in the past that U.S. relations with India and Pakistan should not be a zero-sum game. So why this re-hyphenation?

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In his new book about the Pakistan Army, “War, Coups and Terror”, Brian Cloughley recounts how the British general, the Duke of Wellington,  responded to democracy in his first cabinet meeting as prime minister: ”An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.”

The story is told as part of an argument about why the Pakistan Army has never been particularly successful at running the country.

“All Pakistan’s army coups have been bloodless, successful and popular - but popular only for a while,” writes Cloughley. “The trouble is that military people are usually quite good at running large organisations, even civilian ones, but generally fail to understand politics and government, and the give-and-take so necessary in that esoteric world.”

That idea is very much in vogue in Pakistan. Former president Pervez Musharraf has been forced to resign by a new civilian government, and Pakistan Army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, has pledged to keep the military out of politics. 

But how long will this idea hold? In a country which has been ruled by the army for much of its life, the possibility of a military coup will always be higher than in a country where democratic institutions have had time to establish themselves over decades or over centuries. On top of this, the fledging civilian government ushered in by elections in February faces the multiple challenges of near-economic collapse, the possibility of having to adopt unpopular measures prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, Islamist militancy and frequent missile attacks delivered by U.S. drones inside Pakistani territory.

All that makes its democracy fragile, and Barack Obama’s presidential election victory all the more important for those who see it as a triumph of the democratic process over decades of institutionalised prejudice. (Most analysts, at least temporarily, have set aside their anxieties about Obama’s pre-election pledge to go after al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan.)

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The war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is really the central front in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama kept saying throughout his campaign, and within hours of his famous victory, he seems to have been thrown a challenge.

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai said 40 people had been killed in a U.S. air strike in the southern province of Kandahar, most of whom were members of a wedding party, according to other officials. The Afghan leader, who is facing his own election next year, demanded that Obama stop the killings of civilians which this summer have mounted as overstretched U.S.-led coalition forces faced with a resurgent Taliban step up air strikes.

Among the wounded was the bride, this Reuters story  said, quoting her relative.

What is Obama going to do?  Is this going to come up at the intelligence briefing he is set to receive on Thursday, his first since winning the election?

During the campaign, Obama said that he favoured a “surge” in Afghanistan, so that the United States  does not have to rely on air power so much as an anti-insurgency tool. And he, as this columnist wrote in the The Los Angeles Times at the time, spoke of how civilian deaths were causing America enormous problems in Afghanistan. Those remarks triggered attacks from his rivals but the columnist argued the logic of his argument was unassailable.

Is this then one of his first reality checks?

Barack Obama has hit a raw nerve in India by suggesting the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute so that Pakistan can focus on hunting down Islamist militants on its north-western frontier — who in turn threaten stability in Afghanistan — rather than worrying about tensions with India on its eastern border. India is extremely sensitive to any suggestion of outside interference in Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral dispute, though Pakistan itself has long chafed against this position.

“The most important thing we’re going to have to do with respect to Afghanistan, is actually deal with Pakistan,” Obama said in an interview last week with MSNBC. “And we’ve got work with the newly elected government there in a coherent way that says, terrorism is now a threat to you. Extremism is a threat to you. We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants.” (more…)

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stressed important differences in approach to Pakistan in their first debate.

On the surface, Obama advocated a tougher line, as he has done since the start of his campaign. “If the United States has al Qaeda, (Osama) bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out,” he said. He talked about the $10 billion Washington had given to Pakistan in aid over the last seven years, saying it had failed to rid the border region of al Qaeda and the Taliban

“You have got to deal with Pakistan,” the Illinois senator said, and I coudn’t help thinking how those words will play out in a nation already under immense pressure from both the militants  and the United States.

McCain was more considered, saying he would work with the Pakistan government and that new President Asif Ali Zardari’s  (whose name he seemed to have mis-pronounced) had his plate  full. And he accused his rival of threatening Pakistan with military strikes. “You don’t say that aloud. If you have to do things, you have  to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government,” he  said.

As the New York Times said, Obama’s position is closer to President George W. Bush who this summer is reported to have authorised American special forces to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border into Pakistan’s tribal areas that al Qaeda and the Taliban have used as a sanctuary.

At its core, the candidates’ argument was about the “central front” in the war on terror. Obama said it was, and always has been, Pakistan’s tribal areas and the neighboring areas of Afghanistan. Iraq, he argued, was a dangerous distraction. McCain made the case that Iraq was the central front, noting that bin Laden himself had declared it the battle ground with America.

But Obama isn’t about to be attacking Pakistan and it would be a mischaracterisation to say he was advocating that position, says Changing up Pakistan blog. During the debate the Democrat made no mention of an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty, on its people, or on the government, it said.

So how much is the difference between Obama and McCain’s positions on Pakistan one of presentation rather than substance? And equally importantly, would Obama’s strong words on Pakistan come back to haunt him if he were elected president and then compelled to carry through on his threat?
 
 
 

The irony is hard to miss. Just as Pakistan is struggling with the fallout of the first known breach of its territorial sovereignty by U.S. ground troops and all the odium associated with it in a proud nation, India has been welcomed into the nuclear high table, almost entirely at America’s behest.

Two unrelated events but coming days apart seemed to underline the divergent paths the two nations are embarked upon.  One has a gun pointed to it; the other is being wooed.

On Saturday, America railroaded whatever opposition there was from smaller countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to civilian nuclear trade with India, despite its refusal to give up nuclear weapons and sign the NPT. As far as New Delhi is concerned the approval is a momentous decision as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, because it ends 34 years of sanctions and isolation following the first nuclear test in 1974.

I remember an Indian defence scientist telling me way back that the sanctions were so pervasive that some institutions blacklisted by the United States on suspicion they were involved in the nuclear weapons programme couldn’t even import a toothbrush from there.

In one stroke, and in line with the way in which the Bush administration has gone about remaking the world in its own image, all that has changed. India’s nuclear weapons aren’t a problem any more as America builds a new strategic partnership that many see as aimed at balancing China.

And what of Pakistan ? A seat at the nuclear table is probably the farthest thing on anyone’s mind including perhaps Islamabad’s as it struggles with  more fundamental issues of territorial integrity at this point. The raid this week by U.S. forces may signal an even more intense attacks as this report says.

But the Pakistan government, says Gary Leupp, a history professor at Tufts University, has provided more assistance to the United States than any other as it pursues its goals in southwest Asia. No country has been more dramatically destabilized as the price of its cooperation.
 
“But not only does the U.S. political class take this disastrous compliance for granted, it wants to further emphasize Islamabad’s irrelevance by attacking the border area at will,” he writes. And ominously it’s not just the Bush crowd; Senator Barack Obama has been saying that the United States must do more to press Pakistan to act against the Islamist militants as an earlier post on this blog pointed out.