On Buner: The Most Reliable Eyes in Pakistan

For those following the events in Pakistan, this is the point at which my former colleagues Carlotta Gall and Zahid Hussain are worth their weight in gold. In the New York Times, Carlotta weighs in with an eye-witness report from the outskirts of the fighting in Buner, where Pakistani commandos are attempting to take back the city from the Taliban. From Islamabad for the Times of London, Zahid provides his usual first-rate analysis of why the Taliban capture of Buner represented a strategic foothold that Pakistan’s Army could not accept if it intended to hold on to power. He points out the chess moves that would doubtlessly follow. Meanwhile, Farhan Bokhari and James Lamont at the Financial Times report that -- in order to allay Western fears of nuclear weapons falling into Taliban hands -- Pakistan has briefed Western officials on safeguards it has in place. There is a lot of hot air out there; I myself will stick with the minds that have proven reliable over the last decade and more.

For Writers Only: Joseph Ellis on Being a Historian

When I met with Joseph Ellis at Mt. Holyoke, part of my interest was the art of historical writing. Ellis' work is elegant; it sparkles. But he has also attracted a broad audience -- and a Pulitzer -- because he breaks new ground. Ellis clearly has a knife out for critics who say he is a mere popularizer; he also seemed to have slight regard for colleagues who are happy in the weeds. (To be fair, Ellis has his own skeleton -- the matter of his vivid imagination regarding Viet Nam). Here is an edited version of this part of our chat:

O&G – You think that a pure historian would not engage in the exercise of comparing one president with his predecessors?

Ellis – A pure historian would resist the notion that you can compare now and then without a very, very large translation. They speak a different language back there. The context in which the problems were being perceived were not the same as now. So the straight-forward literal comparison without some kind of recognition of the context is different. The L.A. Times calls me and asks me to write something on what George Washington would do about Iraq. I said, ‘Well first of all he wouldn’t know what the hell Iraq was. Nobody would. It didn’t exist then. It didn’t get created until 1920 by the British. But secondly he wouldn’t know about Osama bin Laden, the weapons of mass destruction, CNN, the 24-hour news cycle. He’s in a different world, brother.’ Now, having said that, if you want to write the op-ed piece, then you say, ‘If you read Washington’s correspondence and life, the conclusion I would reach is …’ – not to say that Washington himself would. You can’t bring Washington into the present – ‘… is that the United States in Iraq is mired down in the same kind of military situation that the British were in North America during the American Revolution. They don’t have enough troops. They cannot subjugate the entire population, and eventually they are going to do what the British did. The British didn’t lose. They just decided it’s not worth it. And get out.’ So my take is that there is something to be learned from that, but it’s more of a historian having written about Washington, but it’s also reading about Iraq on a day by day basis. That’s what I’ve learned based on my knowledge of Washington. But to say that Washington would know that is ridiculous.

Q – Full disclosure – did you vote for Obama?

A – Yes.

Q – And did you vote against Bush?

A – Yes.

Q – Would you wish you were writing about someone whom you could watch in the flesh?

A – We know more about Abigail and John Adams’s relationship than we will know about any relationship of any 21^st century president. Because they wrote letters.

Q – This is the new book you are writing.

A – Yes. But what I’m saying is that the telephone and the cellphone and the Internet eliminate evidence for a historian. And I think the way it really works in my case. I’m pretty much a news junkie. Not a blog junkie though. I think when I go back tonight to try to write a paragraph about Abigail’s relationship to her daughter, Nabby, what I’ve seen today in the paper will affect me somehow. Or to put it more pointedly, watching the way Obama moves physically matches with people’s statements about Washington. He was an athlete, he was a dancer. He was the best rider. He is physically overwhelming. Now, Obama is not overwhelming, but watch the way he gets to a podium. He’s almost running. It’s like a stride. It flows, too. The guy is together. So there’s a back and forth to me as a historian so instead of the past helping me understand the present, which sometimes it does, the present sometimes helps me reinterpret the past. I live more of my time in the late 18^th century than I do now. I appreciate the opportunity to watch things on CNN, but my mind is always using that to try to explain a specific research problem I am facing at that very time. I’m not very smart. It takes me a lot to do that. It’s 99% perspiration. Just hanging in.

Q – But you teach and you write.

A – I’ve really made a conscious effort to be writing to people like you – serious American readers of history who read the New York Times, etc., not to other historians. Some other historians like what I have to say, you know a serious contribution to scholarship, but that’s not my audience. Some of them, it’s clear, would like a larger audience – who wouldn’t? But they don’t know how to do it. There is a socialization process that has occurred in many instances that has prevented them, created a new vocabulary, of references that nobody else cares about. And they are not only writing for other historians, but the framing of the problems they address are themselves done by other academics. ‘We should develop the theory of public space that so-and-so has … you know, study the constitutional convention using [Jurgen] Habermas’ theory of public space.’ Okay! If that’s what you want to do. For me it’s the primary sources, all the stuff that they actually said and wrote or were said and written about them in their time. I’ve read Charles Beard, I’ve read hundreds of books about the Constitution to be sure. But my job is to come to the primary material, read it with as much intelligence and imagination as possible, and write about it with as much clarity and cogency and at times lyricism as I can muster. That’s it.

A New Age in Pipeline Politics?

For the last decade and a half, the main theater for U.S.-Russian fireworks has been pipeline politics. Washington won the first battle with the construction of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which broke Russia's monopoly on energy exports from the Caspian Sea. But Moscow zoomed ahead in the second round, winning overwhelming backing for its proposed new natural gas pipelines to Europe. Then came the global financial crisis, and the plunge in world energy prices. Suddenly pipelines have seemed passe, and the rivalry instead turned to who controls what military base in Central Asia.

Scroll forward to a European energy summit last weekend in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. While Washington's new Eurasian energy czar, Richard Morningstar, seemed almost blase about the West's preferred pipeline plan, called Nabucco, he also appeared to re-open the energy contest.

Morningstar's predecessor, Steven Mann, had dubbed the West's promotion of the pipeline as "Nabucco hucksterism." He was describing what he thought was an invalid elevation of the value of a Nabucco line, and its chances for materialization, all the while putting much U.S. prestige at risk in pushing to get it built. Indeed, as recently as three weeks ago, for instance, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza was still talking up the virtues of Nabucco.

Against that backdrop, Morningstar fell in with Mann's line of thinking: "Pipelines are just part of the puzzle," Morningstar said in Sofia. "Nabucco is not the Holy Grail that will solve the problem."

Morningstar's aim seemed to be to take down the temperature. After all, as much as Nabucco is a politically driven project targeted against Gazprom dominance of Europe, South Stream is an equally political response to Nabucco. So if the imperative for Nabucco is removed, what is the place for South Stream?

Hence, Morningstar also said: "Our feeling is that the financing of South Stream will be costly, and it is not clear how the material will come."

Along the same lines, last week U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of State George Krol was even more dramatic. In the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat, Krol opened the door to shipping Turkmen gas via Iran, according to a piece by Dierdre Tynan at Eurasianet. If that happens, it is truly a new age in pipeline politics.

Greatness and Treachery in Power. The Oil and Glory Interview: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Presidential Historian Joseph Ellis

At O&G, we are using the occasion of Obama's 100th day in office as an undisguised pretext to interview one of my favorite historians. In 2000, Joseph Ellis won the Pulitzer Prize for his slender Founding Brothers, a masterful collection of portraits of seven of America's revolutionary leaders. We visited in his office at Mt. Holyoke College.

Ellis proved to be a lot of fun. Among the takeaways: He much likes Obama, thinks that George Washington's treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, would do well in Tim Geithner’s seat today – though given the menacing description, that might not be such a good thing. And he thinks that the nation’s prior tests – the Civil War, the Revolution and the Great Depression – all tower above our current travails in terms of a threat to the country. The edited interview:

O&G – The press has been filled with stories comparing Obama with Franklin Roosevelt mostly, but also with Kennedy, with Johnson, with Lincoln …

Ellis – Lincoln is Obama’s favorite

Q – Is it legitimate to compare? People just don’t know how to take him on his own merits?

A – We’re experiencing something akin to the Great Depression. Therefore to what extent is FDR or references to the greatest challenges that presidents faced coming into office? Lincoln had the greatest, and Roosevelt right after him. This doesn’t rate in quite that category. Those were nuclear explosions. This is still only a conventional explosion.

Q – Are his fans trying to put him up on a pedestal?

A - I think there are more people who are pro-Obama engaged in that enterprise. But once it starts, Fox News will do it too as a way of developing a critical perspective on Obama.

Q – In His Excellency, you write that only Roosevelt and Lincoln faced a comparable challenge to Washington’s. How do you rank the presidents?

A – I would put [Washington] at No.1 and Lincoln second. But I’m a late-18^th century historian. I’ve got my own biases. I just think that coming at the beginning has enormous advantages and has enormous risks. He made all the big decisions right. That’s one of the things I see in Obama. I don’t agree with some of his decisions. I don’t agree with the Afghanistan decision. I don’t agree with the failure to nationalize. I think he’s still under the influence of [economic adviser Larry] Summers and [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner. Eventually they are going to have to [nationalize]. But we’ve had him under the microscope of national media for over two and a half years now, and I’ve never seen a guy perform so well. And even though the European trip – we didn’t get the NATO support for Afghanistan, but that was never going to happen; and even though we didn’t get Germany to stimulate their economy, that also was never going to happen. It’s clear it’s a breath of fresh air. Finally there’s an adult in charge.

Q – You think the economic situation is not a nuclear explosion.

A – I don’t think the survival of the republic is at risk. I think it was at risk in 1861 and 1933. Not just the Depression, but it was beginning to appear that a totalitarian form of government was the wave of the future – fascism, Nazism or the [Hedeki] Tojo Japanese version. And capitalism itself was at question. And by the way I think the terrorist threat has been hyped out of the ballpark. The greatest threat to national security is global warming. It’s not terrorists. They can’t do much to us – blow up a city maybe, but that’s the worst. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But this was constructed by the Bush administration with the support of the media.

Q – I’m intrigued by your description of Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary. You write that Washington handed over to him the books – ‘please fix this,’ he said. Of course you can’t compare him directly with Tim Geithner because he was with Washington, as you described, during the war …

A – He was. He was his aide de camp.

Q – And he was a huge personality. Geithner doesn’t have a personality.

A – And Hamilton creates an American fiscal policy. There is nothing. Geithner’s got to fix it. But it’s already there. Hamilton would have gotten the highest grade on the SATs of all of the founders back then. He’s the smartest. He’s brilliant. He’s fast, too – he’s not deliberative; he’s on a dime. You know the Federalist Papers were written overnight. Like, bing bing bing. And he’s also the most dangerous. And as long as he operates within Washington’s aegis, both during the war and during Washington’s presidency, his creative abilities are channeled into unbelievably productive things. Once Washington leaves, Hamilton goes nuts and he becomes a very dangerous man during the Adams presidency. When you see what Hamilton is doing in 1797, ’98, ’99, he’s attempting to raise an Army of 50,000 troops responsible to him on the basis of a pumped-up threat of a French invasion. That’s the reason I’m so sensitive about the terrorists being pumped up. That’s where you get the Alien and Sedition Acts, he’s behind that. He’s got the cabinet of Adams in his hands. They report to him, not to Adams. And he envisions declaring war against France, taking his Army south and imprisoning all the Jeffersonians who have opposed him, continuing to Florida and the Gulf coast, which is Spanish-owned and therefore we’ll claim it because Spain is an ally of France, then going all the way to New Orleans and claiming the Louisiana territory, and if possible heading south and taking Mexico. I’m not kidding. That’s what he said he was going to do. That would have ended the whole American republic.

Q – What are the lessons from Hamilton on fiscal matters?

A – Hamilton would have been happy with the New Deal. Jefferson would have been devastated. Hamilton foresees the creation of a powerful American nation state with a powerful federal government and a global power.

Q – And what would he think about the bailouts, the stimulus?

A – If you could somehow bring him back alive and make him aware of all the stuff that’s happened since, he’d be brilliant. But it’s another world. I do think there are parts of his fiscal policy that clearly suggest that he thinks that free markets are not always the best thing.

Q – Such as what?

A – I mean you’ve got to regulate industry. And he wants subsidies for American manufacturers. He wants protective tariffs. And his stuff on manufacturing, which is the most imaginative part of his fiscal policy, nobody reads it but he really is a New Dealer. But he’s coming at the beginning. He’s trying to start the engine. He knows the incredible resources we have. The North American continent is unbelievable. He’s trying to create an engine that’s going to take make use of the extraordinary wealth that’s inherent in our location, our geology and our geography. I think that at some point since 1980, a much greater part of the economy became dependent on finance. We don’t make anything. We gotta make stuff again. I think he’d say that. Even though he helps the bankers, he wouldn’t be a guy to run a hedge fund. He has too much of a public commitment. He thinks it’s wrong if some guy is making $15 million a year.

Q – A final question: Bush and Condoleeza Rice have said repeatedly – ‘They are still figuring out about George Washington today. No one knows how we will be seen.’ Comment?

A – The bottom is still [Warren G.] Harding and the guy who precedes Lincoln (James Buchanan). So you ask, are there cases where presidents have been low, and then they went up? Yea! Truman is the classic example. Truman left with horrible poll numbers. And so theoretically it’s possible for that to happen to Bush, too. However, the following things have to happen: A) It has to be seen that global warming is a myth. B) Iraq has to produce this flowering democracy in the Middle East that wins hearts and minds. In other words, things of that magnitude have to happen that are very unlikely. In fact, it’s going to get worse. And in fact, the eight-year delay on global warming may be his most serious blunder. Bush and his people are theologians. They have committed themselves to a cause that is religious. And they believe that God will save them. Ain’t gonna happen. This is going to go down as one of the worst presidencies in American history.

Would a Taliban Regime Bring a Truly Different Pakistan?

For the last several days, I've been surprised by the response of friends to the topic of the Taliban's march in Pakistan. The takeaway, according to them: A Taliban government would change little for the vast majority of Pakistanis; certainly, such a shift in power does not threaten the Pakistani state.

That is correct if public floggings, hangings and amputations -- all hallmarks of Taliban rule in Afghanistan -- are not a shift for Pakistanis; for my friends concerned with the metric of political risk, it will be interesting to watch the market's reaction to Taliban control of the country's nuclear weapons.

According to some excellent pieces published the last couple of days, a sentiment of lethargic resignation prevails in Pakistan itself. In a sobering lament in yesterday’s Washington Post, the BBC’s Mohammed Hanif described this atmosphere:

“As a Taliban insurgency gains strength in Pakistan, my country seems to be preparing to surrender. In areas where the Taliban formally hold sway, such as Swat, people have bowed to their guns. And in the heartland, in Punjab and other regions, there is a disquieting acceptance of the inevitability of the Taliban's rise to power.”

At Registan, Josh Foust takes note of the Hanif report, and now seems more concerned about the news than he expressed previously.

The latest reports are that the Pakistan Army is fighting back with helicopter gunships. The Taliban has pulled back a bit. But the fighting will go on. A cleric who has been brokering talks between the government and the Taliban has severed the negotiations, accusing the government of violating the peace accord by attacking the militants who themselves moved beyond the peace zone of Swat and seized the neighboring district of Buner.

A lot of Pakistanis are terrified because they can’t count on the military to protect them, so they must make a decision on survival. The Financial Times’ James Lamont and Farhan Bokhari dissect the Army’s problems in an excellent piece today in the paper. Pam Constable talks about the sense of foreboding in Islamabad in the Washington Post.

But, according to Hanif, a lot of his middle-class friends in the Punjab simply think that the Taliban will recognize that, while their ways suit Afghans and the Pashtuns of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, the culture of the Punjab is different. The Talibs will live and let live. Over at the National Journal on-line, Georgetown Professor Paul Pillar argues similarly.

But this is contrary to the Taliban’s history – as anyone like me who visited Afghanistan at the time knows, the movement wholly displaced the ways and thinking of the Persian-speaking populations of Kabul, Herat and elsewhere; the traditions of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras were displaced by the distinct culture of conservative villages outside southern Kandahar. Yet people in such situations do tend to hope for the best regardless of the reality.

I checked out the Hanif report with a couple of friends in Pakistan – one in Peshawar, one in Islamabad. Both said the piece is accurate.

The Peshawar friend is worried for his kids: “Already they have been made to learn security precautions in school in case of a bombing.” This friend went on:

“The military is taking its sweet time, not willing to go the epicenter of the problem, Waziristan. What they don’t realize or are unable to do is to take out the militant leadership [based in Waziristan] that will solve much of the problem.”

Validation of that thinking came from an interesting source today. Prince Turki al-Faisal – the former Saudi intelligence chief who ran the kingdom’s Afghanistan policy during the 1980s and financed many of that period’s most militant leaders -- appeared this morning at the New America Foundation. In terms of the U.S. approach to the Pakistani crisis, Turki urged the U.S. to go laser-like after the militant leaders, and forget about nation-building and democracy. “Kill the terrorist leaders, declare victory, and get out,” he said.

Turki said that the presence of NATO in the region, along with the use of unmanned drones to attack militants along the border, “undermines the glue that holds Pakistan together, which is the Army.” Hanif said much the same thing:

“There is not a single Pakistani who supports these attacks or the way they are being conducted. They have made being pro-American radioactive. And they have also made opposing the Taliban that much more difficult,” Hanif wrote.

The Pakistan Army has a history of distorted thinking. This was brought home most dramatically to me in 2002. Following the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, a few of us went in to see Gen. Pervez Musharraf. I asked the general what he thought of the shift in the capabilities of the militants in Pakistan after 9/11.

“What shift?” Musharraf replied.

Musharraf may have been putting us on. If he was not, he did not seem to recognize that the militants, having shifted their base from Afghanistan into Pakistan, had wholly elevated their capacities by the use of technology, especially the Internet.

Later in the year, I interviewed Musharraf again. The general was angry with Zahid Hussain, the Journal’s Pakistan-based correspondent and one of the best analysts on the ground. Because of Hussain’s coverage, Musharraf wouldn’t allow Hussain to join me in the interview. What did such coverage mean? “I think he’s on India’s side,” Musharraf said.

That’s another dimension of the trouble in Pakistan – an obsession with India and the supposed predominant mortal threat it presents to Pakistan. So, while the Taliban marches from the West and from within Pakistan, the Army is busy protecting the Eastern borders. That India would try to exploit the Taliban threat by attacking Pakistan is preposterous; a Taliban government would threaten India, too.

A general quoted in the FT dismisses concerns about Pakistan’s integrity:

“Has anyone considered that the Punjab is home to six of the nine corps of the Pakistan army? The military’s headquarters are in Rawalpindi, while the air force and navy headquarters are in Islamabad. Do you seriously believe the Taliban can simply walk over this area?”

This general misses the point. The Taliban can’t attack and defeat the Pakistan Army directly. But it also won’t have to. The danger is that the Army itself will invite them in. As a diplomat tells Lamont and Bokhari in the FT piece, “The army has been Islamized over the long term. For them, jihad is the guiding principle.”

Moment for Regrouping in Pakistan

Pakistan's Army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, has seemed to suffer a scare. The normally taciturn general came out publicly today with a warning against Taliban forces who took advantage of the shaky president to march into a district of 1 million people just 65 miles from the capital of Islamabad. The Taliban have responded by initiating a retreat from Buner.

That's good news. But it's wise to stay mindful of the Taliban's history in Afghanistan. Their two-year, 1994-'96 march from Kandahar to Kabul was not smooth and without setbacks. To the contrary, in 1995, Ahmad Shah Massoud delivered a fierce punch that forced them back reeling. And the following summer, they appeared to be dead in the water. As O&G readers know, that's when Osama bin Ladin showed up with $3 million in cash, which, along with materiel and personnel support from Pakistan's military, carried the Taliban through Jalalabad and on to the Afghan capital.

For excellent perspective, read my friend Ahmed Rashid on the BBC website.

The Taliban are a patient bunch. They have support in the Pakistan military, particularly the InterServices Intelligence directorate. Over at Registan, Josh Foust has an interesting post in which he cautions not to get alarmed. Perhaps Josh means that we shouldn't run around with our arms in the air shouting. But the seriousness of the developments I think is profound. The current events in Pakistan are more blowback from a series of monumental blunders by Pakistan's politically expedient military and political leaders going back to the 1970s. This is an important, important moment, as Kayani's uncharacteristic response demonstrates.

Where is the Pakistani Army?

The most telling detail in the Taliban's trademark step-by-step march on Islamabad is the invisibility of the vaunted Pakistan Army. It tells us about all we need to know about the staying power of the Asif Zardari government: It may not be long.

In dual reports today, my friend Zahid Hussain -- one of the sharpest observers in Pakistan -- finds that the Army has elected to meet the shift of the Taliban to within 65 miles of the capital with a token, ragtag force of 300 fighters from the Frontier Corps. (Here is Hussain's report in The Times of London; here is his report in The Wall Street Journal.)

For those familiar with how coups happen and capital cities fall -- I've seen over the last couple of decades in Baku, Dushanbe, Islamabad, Kabul and Manila -- the opposing force doesn't have to actually enter or even come near to the capital. Bargaining among power brokers begins long before that.

It's anyone's guess as to where the tipping point is over Islamabad. In today's New York Times, Jane Perlez quotes an unnamed law enforcement official as identifying that pivotal place as the nearby provincial city of Mardan -- second only to Peshawar in size in the Northwest Frontier. "They take over Buner, then they roll into Mardan, and that's the end of the game," the official said.

But the Army, and in particular its intelligence arm, the InterServices Intelligence directorate, has been in cahoots with the Taliban, al Qaeda and the region's other militants for almost three decades. For the last two decades, the ISI has asserted that it has no further operational links with the militants, only to be proven to be prevaricating (see O&G, chapter 16, about the ill-fated Unocal pipeline through Afghanistan).

So which is it -- is the Pakistan Army supporting the current civilian government; or is it backing a Taliban takeover of the country?

In 21 years of living in, traveling to and watching Pakistan, and observing all the various missile strikes, coups, and so forth, this is the first time I have felt a serious threat to the country.

If events continue along the current trajectory, look for serious instability -- a serious and far-reaching reaction.

From Condi's Former Counselor: A Comment on Torture

Susan Glasser, the Washington Post's former Moscow co-bureau chief and now editor over at Foreign Policy, is sending around a fresh blog post from the FP's impressive site by Philip Zelikow, Condoleeza Rice's former counselor. Now that the Obama administration has released memos written by former President George W. Bush's legal team, Zelikow says he is free to air the in-house dissenting opinion he expressed while in the administration. He says that, when he did so at the time during the Bush administration, "The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

For those like myself immersed in torture issues as they pertain to Uzbekistan and other countries in the region, the issue has resonance. I met Zelikow while I was at Stanford writing O&G. At the time, I found him to be a loyal soldier of the Bush doctrine: When someone in the audience asked about the validity of the Iraq war given that no WMDs were found, Zelikow responded, "The election is over," as though the fact that Bush won a second term trumped any further questioning of political matters.

But Zelikow earned high marks for his leadership of the 9/11 Commission, and the reasoning behind his dissidence, as expressed in the blog post, is worth reading.

Zelikow's conclusion:

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail. In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.

As usual, among the best crunching of the torture issue is found at Scott Horton's blog at Harper's.

Labyrinth Out in Paperback

The updated version of Putin's Labyrinth is out today. It brings events in Russia up to date, including the collapse of the economic miracle with the plunge in oil prices and the global financial crisis, and the January natural gas stand-off with Ukraine. This version is also indexed. Your comments are welcomed.

The Most Important Place in the World

It's clear now that almost the entire U.S. foreign policy agenda is second in importance to Pakistan and Afghanistan. I steer clear from alarmism, but the events from Swat especially are sobering; Pakistan especially can destabilize large parts of the world should matters continue to deteriorate.

I like a lot of friends and acquaintances who have lived in Pakistan over the last decade or two are astounded by the turn of events from the days when we drove up to Swat, Chitral and environs for time off.

All of this is in the way of recommending Pam Constable's piece in today's Washington Post (in addition to this New York Times piece last week by Sabrina Tavernise, and this one by the Wall Street Journal's Zahid Hussain and Matthew Rosenberg.).

Also, the NYT's Chris Chivers weighs in today with this eye-opening, on-the-spot report of a Taliban ambush. It must be a cliche by now, but no one familiar with the history could miss the similarities to what I and my colleagues witnessed in the Soviet experience.

A Front-Row Seat to Momentous Events. The Oil and Glory Interview: Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha

Albania has had a prime view of some of the most dramatic events in Europe of the last decade and more. Most recently, they have included the West's showdown with Russia over Kosovo's independence, which led directly to Moscow's effective absorption of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In addition, while Russia has opposed further expansion of NATO, Albania along with Croatia became the alliance's newest members three weeks ago.

When I was last in Albania – during NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbian troops in Kosovo – I had a great time, but the country was overrun with criminal gangs. There were Mercedeses everywhere – all of them absent license plates since Albania served as the way-station for stolen vehicles traversing Europe. It also was a smuggling route for people of all sorts seeking to migrate illegally to Europe; I watched a couple of boatloads of these migrants traveling fast late one evening on to Italy. Today, with the country a NATO member and seeking to join the EU, those old days seem largely gone.

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha has traversed this entire period. A 65-year-old trained cardiologist, he was Albanian president for five years during the 1990s, before losing the post in a huge investment scandal. After ten years in the opposition, he returned to power in 2005. I called Berisha in his Tirana office. The edited interview:

O&G – The International Monetary Fund calls Albania “highly vulnerable.” Yet it is one of the few economies in the world expected not to shrink this year. How is the country withstanding the financial crisis? How are remittances from Albanians abroad holding up?

Berisha – I have high esteem for the IMF. But it should not [encourage] a panic. It’s not helpful, in my view. I told them, ‘Look, you’re a very, very crucial institution. I’m glad that the G20 provided you with a new role.’ But many governments are hesitant to work with them because their scheme at a time of social unrest could create more problems than it solves. I don’t consider the [Albanian] economy as highly vulnerable. It’s a real economy. Remittances are not coming [to the same degree] because of the loss of jobs in Greece and Italy. But we are encouraging tourism.

Q – Is NATO membership a right? Russia, while opposing Kosovo independence, for instance, has vigorously opposed NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, and made that a benchmark for good relations with the West.

A – For my country, NATO membership was the most important achievement since independence day. Albania suffered more than any country from security problems. It suffered from isolation and self-isolation. It was an orphan nation. Now it’s part of an alliance. We have all the potential to build freedom. It means high credibility for Albania in the world. It is high credibility for investors. Albania will never walk alone.

Q – Is NATO membership a right?

A – For a free nation, yes. NATO proved to be a shield of nations. NATO has faced no difficulty adapting to the new situation. It has brought freedom everywhere.

Q – Is it valid for Russia to make good relations with it contingent on opposing NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine?

A – I know no country that is afraid of Russia. I know only countries that are willing to work with Russia. Based on some imperial heritage, if you go into their history, expansion is in their psychology. What effect would Georgia or Ukraine have on Russia? What effect would NATO expansion have on Russia? [The assertion of a NATO threat to Russia] is nonsense. It will take time, but with realism [Georgian and Ukrainian membership] will happen.

Q – The decisive factor in deciding who should be a member of NATO is whether it would send troops to defend that country, Article V of the NATO charter. Would NATO defend Ukraine or Georgia if need be?

A – Is Russia intending to attack Ukraine or Georgia? If Russia intends to partake an aggression, NATO must firmly stand, because that would mean the new Russification of Europe.

Q – What is your view of the August war between Russia and Georgia?

A – Who attacked first is unclear. But a [Russian] scenario was there to invade Georgia. The Russians moved not only into Ossetia. They moved into Abkhazia, and toward Tbilisi. Russia probably wanted to occupy Georgia. The stand of the international community worked.

Q – How will Albania respond to President Obama’s call for more NATO troops in Afghanistan?

A – Albania is sending a new company, doubling our current number of troops. We also sent 20 nurses and doctors.

Q – Is Afghanistan a threat for NATO countries?

A – Afghanistan and Pakistan must both be helped. It is difficult terrain. Politics at home aren’t easy. But I think the strategy will be effective. The U.S. sent a man over there who is highly skilled in negotiations.

Q – [Richard] Holbrooke?

A – Yes. Holbrooke. It’s very important to promote peace there.

Q – Unlike elsewhere in Europe, President Bush seemed highly popular when he visited Albania in 2007. Can you explain why?

A – First, he was the first U.S. president to visit my country. Second, we suffered more than any country from dictatorship. So we definitely support toppling dictators, including Saddam Hussain and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar. Third, he came with great messages here – support for Kosovo independence, and NATO membership for us.

Medvedev's Signal: Don't Kill Novaya Gazeta Reporters

Dmitry Medvedev has noted in the past that Russians tend to look for signals from their leaders. But, since the Russian president doesn't come from the siloviki -- he is a former law professor, not a retired KGB or military officer -- nor from politics, he is not as noted as his predecessors for skillfully communicating through gesture.

So what was today all about? Why did Medvedev give Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov bragging rights for publishing his first Russian newspaper interview (English version)?

My own thinking is that Medvedev is right -- to some degree, ruling in Russia is about signals, often informing a power group or an individual to watch its or his step. And one signal that's been clear over the last several years is that certain murders can take place with impunity -- killers somehow have correctly understood that they will not be held to account.

Novaya Gazeta, long the fiercest critic of Vladimir Putin's rule, wears its bloody past on its sleeve. To this day, the home page of its English-language web site is a full-page tribute to its fallen. They include Igor Domnikov, killed in 2000, Yuri Shchekochikhin, who died in 2003 from a mysterious illness, and, most dramatically, Anna Politkovskaya, slain in 2006.

There had been something of an interregnum since the November 2006 nuclear poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinenko. But in January, that apparent intermission ended. Human rights lawyer Stanislaw Markelov was shot in the back of the head by a killer on a crowded Moscow street in daylight, along with Anastasia Baburova, a Novaya Gazeta reporter who tried to intervene. Being abroad still doesn't make one safe. Last month, Chechen Sulim Yamadayev was shot dead in Dubai.

Medvedev is saying that he's a break from the past -- at a minimum, he doesn't support the targeting of Muratov's reporters. Indeed, this was Medvedev's second such signal -- he met with Muratov in January to mourn the Markelov-Baburina murders.

It's unclear that Russia's killers will honor the signal, nor whether Medvedev is yet a leader whose signals are generally respected. After all, the system of unpunished murder has seemed larger than even ultra-powerful Putin, who publicly mourned the death of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, whose murder nonetheless was never solved.

Yet, the gesture was clear.

Nabucco Hucksterism, Iran Pollyanishness, and a $5 Billion Bribe. The Oil and Glory Interview: Steven Mann

On Thursday, a ceremony in the State Department will mark the retirement of Steven Mann, Coordinator for Eurasian Energy Diplomacy, after 32 years with the U.S. diplomatic service. The 58-year-old Mann served most of the last 17 years in senior positions in the Caucasus and Central Asia: He opened the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan in 1992, was ambassador to Turkmenistan, and tried to negotiate a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Nagorno-Karabakh. For the last several years, Mann was America’s man on the spot in the New Great Game on the Caspian Sea.

I visited Mann at his Chevy Chase home. Amid stacked up magazines and books, Mann told me that Europe’s “energy security” is not necessarily at peril. And, for O&G readers, he broke one bit of historical news: Remember the demise of the trans-Caspian pipeline in the chapter An Army for Oil? The one in which then-Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov persisted in demanding a $500 million bribe of the Bechtel-General Electric consortium? It turns out that Niyazov originally requested $5 billion. The edited interview:

Q – Does the U.S. need a high-level ambassador on Eurasian energy? And what is your advice going forward?

A – Yes it is helpful. But we also have to get away from Nabucco hucksterism.

Q – What is that?

A – In terms of the wrong lessons learned from [the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline], the wrong lesson learned is to adopt a project and attempt to bring it about through political will. I think so much of the governmental activism on both sides of the Atlantic the last few years has been devoid of a commercial context. There have been quite a number of officials who know very little about energy who have been charging into the pipeline debate. Nabucco is a highly desirable project, don’t get me wrong. But there are other highly desirable projects besides Nabucco. And the overriding question for all these projects is, Where’s the gas?

Q – South Stream was Putin’s response to Nabucco. Did the U.S. blunder by promoting Nabucco before having the commercial context?

A – In terms of whether we are talking EU or US diplomacy, I think you have to be credible. All too often we’ve gotten out ahead of the commercial realities of Nabucco. You have to be able to point to an upstream supply. You have to have a commercial champion. And governments don’t build successful pipelines. Consortia do. The object of any envoy should be to get all those stars aligned before you give the full embrace to any project.

I think Secretary Clinton will bring a more unified focus to the U.S. effort. In the previous administration, we had six special envoys on energy in the State Department, and three deputy national security advisers on the [National Security Council] staff.

Q – Is that too many?

A – It’s four too many in State. And three too many at NSC.

Q – The stated reason for Nabucco is to diversify Europe’s energy supply. Is that a valid enough reason for U.S. involvement? And is European energy security a genuine issue?

A – Anyone who makes that argument knows very little about energy. And I often heard those arguments in the White House Situation Room. Diversification is an objective good. But it can be achieved in ways other than pipelines. The best thing Europe could do for its security is to link its energy grid, which it’s already doing.

Q – Is there alarmism on the subject?

A – The January cutoff of gas through Ukraine only affected 2-3% of European consumers.

Q – So it is overplayed.

A – Yea, I think it was overplayed. What also was underplayed was how successful the Europeans were in shifting gas, linking grids. That’s the untold story of [the January cutoff].

Q – The corollary – that Russian domination of supply equals a political threat in Europe – is that also alarmist?

A – With the EU, I think it’s hard to make that case. That’s the kind of argument that has to be dissected on a country-by-country basis. But Gazprom has been an extremely reliable supplier for 25 years. And I think Gazprom will continue to be an extremely reliable supplier to Europe.

Q – So really one should not be vexed if and when Nord Stream and South Stream are built? And if it takes some time for the ducks to be lined in a row for Nabucco, so be it?

A – Basically, yes. I think Nabucco is far more important to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan than it is to the EU.

Q – In the late 1990s, there was the initial effort by Bechtel and GE Capital to build a trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan to Baku.

A – What happened was that Niyazov, with his Soviet mentality, demanded so-called preliminary financing. That is, an upfront payment to do the project. [The consortium] already paid a signing bonus of $10 million. But then Niyazov demanded in the range of $5 billion. Then it came down to $3 billion. And the consortium said, ‘This is utterly unrealistic.’ Niyazov thought they were bargaining. So he dropped the demand to $1 billion; then it came down to $500 million. The consortium said, You have until March 2000 or we walk. And at that time, they walked.

The fundamental problem, and it’s relevant today, is that a foreign investor cannot rely on a governmental entity [in Turkmenistan] to supply the upstream, to supply the product.

Q – Was it ever realistic that Niyazov was going to hook up with the East-West Corridor?

A – It was and it is realistic. Without alternatives to the Gazprom monopoly, Turkmenistan has to accept the price that Gazprom is willing to pay. There is a powerful commercial logic to a trans-Caspian pipeline.

Q – What is the best way today for a Caspian republic to get along in the region?

A – Kazakhstan is a good model of how to develop a Eurasian energy sector. You’re good partners with Russia, but you take advantage of foreign technology and capital.

Q – Does Russia have a role in helping to create a thaw between the U.S. and Iran?

A – Every time there is a substantial political change in the U.S., the oil and gas industry gets up on its tip-toes and says, ‘Aren’t we about to have a change in policy?’ You saw this with the Bush-Cheney election in 2000; the industry thought now was the time it would happen. You saw it after the [2001] invasion of Afghanistan, with certain cooperation and contact between the U.S. and Iran. You’re seeing it now with the advent of the Obama administration. So this is something that the oil and gas industry is always waiting for – that change.

Q – You are saying that this is nothing new.

A – It is nothing new.

Yes, But Will An Obama Visit Put the U.S. Back in the Great Game?

President Obama has told a senior Kazakhstan official that he intends to visit the Central Asian nation, a senior American official has told me. The visit comes as Russia has rolled back U.S. power in the region after a decade in which Washington established military bases there and encouraged the construction of non-Russian energy pipelines to the West.

Yesterday, Reuters reported on a Kazakhstan statement about an invitation issued to Obama by Kazakhstan Senate Chairman Kasymzhumart Tokayev, who is second in the line of power to President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

In an email exchange, a senior Obama administration official confirmed the report. He told me that Tokayev issued the invitation while meeting with the U.S. president in Istanbul this week. Tokayev happened to be in town for a conference called the Alliance of Civilizations, and Obama met him along with a dozen heads of delegation.

On meeting Obama, Tokayev invited him to Kazakhstan. "Obama responded that he knows well the importance of Kazakhstan and intends to visit, but does not yet have a fixed date scheduled to do so," the administration official said. One opportunity would be July, when Obama plans to visit Moscow.

No U.S. president has ever visited any Central Asian country, though the U.S. had a military base in Uzbekistan until it was ejected in 2006, and another in Kyrgyzstan, which is scheduled for closure in July. The closure of the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan came in February after Russia promised the country more than $2 billion in loans.

For an excellent synthesis of the retrenchment of U.S. power, and its replacement by Russia, read this piece by the FT's Charles Clover and two colleagues.

In the post-Machiavellian World, Economics, Not War, Rule

The outlines of the Obama administration's foreign policy are becoming plain. And they are as audacious as his domestic policies.

Among the interconnected aims so far are: Engineer fully normalized relations with Syria and a strategic partnership with Russia, paving the way to a rapprochement with Iran, and shaking up the power equation in the Middle East.

You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes, but wait. We've discussed previously how the financial crisis potentially changes the chessboard in numerous ways. But there's also something qualitatively different in the administration's approach from its predecessors' -- how far it appears willing to go.

Among ideas under consideration, last Friday the Financial Times's Daniel Dombey reported that Washington could allow Iran to enrich uranium as long as it's under strict observation; and it's been clear that the administration is willing to delay or even cancel the George W. Bush-era plan to station missile defense positions in Poland and the Czech Republic, as long as Russia offers up something equivalent in exchange (according to a report by the Washington Post's Craig Whitlock, the Czechs may pull out of the plan unilaterally in any case). In terms of Syria, read Seymour Hersh's exhaustive account of American diplomacy and what it could bring in last week's New Yorker.

Interestingly, helpful offers are coming from elsewhere to ease this process. Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, for instance, is offering to host a "nuclear bank" of fissile material that nations such as Iran could tap in order to feed nuclear reactors without having to develop their own enriched uranium, report the Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman and Marc Champion. According to the WSJ story, President Obama is seriously considering the offer, which seems reasonable: Kazakhstan is a stable country, and the offer is part of its continuing efforts to get back in the West's good graces after its years of pummeling on political rights grounds. Over at Registan, Josh Foust rightly says the jury is out on whether the bank will actually be created. Yet the fact that it's even getting such consideration demonstrates the administration's will to wedge into a thaw with Iran.

Against this backdrop, Leslie Gelb, the uber-analyst who formerly ran the Council on Foreign Relations, weighs in with a new book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy. The book, which has been reviewed well elsewhere, is written as a letter to Obama.

Gelb's narrative explicitly jumps off from Machiavelli's The Prince, arguing that for much of five centuries, a national leader's main power has ultimately rested on fear of what he might and could do militarily. Yet Gelb is at heart a pragmatist. Gelb -- last week, I attended a talk by him before a small group of think-tank types and reporters over at the Council's Washington office -- has no time for ideologues or idealists who "ensnare our leaders into thinking about what they 'must' do, rather than about what they can do." He skillfully weaves the current tapestry of global events into the history of what brought us here.

Yet what I found most interesting in the book was Gelb's steady description of how power in the world has changed fundamentally since Machiavelli wrote his job application to Lorenzo de' Medici. Today, economics, and not warmaking, are at the center of power, a point that we discussed last week with Paul Kennedy.

Over at The National Interest, Daniel Drezner writes that this is a problem with the book. Drezner says Gelb fails to handle the economics portion well. I disagree. While Gelb is obviously more comfortable with the politics, the message on economics is clear and, more important, spot on.

I have my own problems with the book, primarily that Gelb seems not to consider that a nation's power can stem not only from its basic military or economic strength, but also from its capacity to muck up the works. In the talk, Gelb called Iran "a third-rate power," verging on fourth-rate, suggesting that it thus shouldn't be looked at as a central player in the Middle East or elsewhere. But what about Iran-supported Hezbollah and Hamas, and their threat to Israel and stability in Lebanon? Iran does occupy a pivotal place, specifically because of its nuisance value.

Conversely, both Iran and Russia -- another nation that delights in confounding U.S. initiatives abroad -- showed in the wake of 9/11 that they are willing and able to work within the construct of international consensus. Both nations played crucial roles in the U.S. dislodging of the Taliban in October 2002.

Russia's Vladimir Putin intuitively grasps the shift in global affairs. That's demonstrated in his energy policy, which despite the financial crisis continues to work to shift Russian power into Europe through the construction of natural gas pipelines and the purchase of energy infrastructure.

But, as Gelb suggests, the U.S. still seems locked into Machiavelli's world:

The linking of trade, investments, and resources to foreign policy and military affairs has been second nature to most nations for centuries. But this has not been the case in America, where principle and politics unite to 'protect' economics and business from government intrusion (except where needed), where the departments of State and Treasury still avoid collaborating on policy, and where intellectual apartheid separates economics and politics departments at universities.

Power Rules gets the new rules right.

The Khodorkovsky Rule

Before you slink away for the weekend given the wonderful weather, take a look at a piece today by the FT's Charles Clover, my former Almaty roommate. In it, Clover weighs in along with a couple of colleagues on the tectonic shift under way in the great game in Central Asia: The U.S. is out, and Russia is in.

The August events in Georgia triggered this shift -- the countries along Russia's western and southern borders learned that friendship with Washington is worth only so much when Moscow is willing to use actual troops in defense of its sphere of influence.

The most interesting part of the long piece is a quote from Dimitri Simes, the head of the Nixon Center in Washington. In Simes' view, Russia has conveyed the following message for neighbors that want to remain on friendly terms:

Number one: you can't join a military alliance with an outside power. Number two: do not deploy third-party military forces without Russia's consent. Number three: do not move third-party military forces through your country without Russia's consent."

I don't doubt that Simes is right. In more than one way, those rules bear a striking resemblance to those set out by Vladimir Putin in 2000 for Yeltsin-era oligarchs. The popular version of the story is that Putin presented the oligarchs a choice -- get out of politics, or lose your fortunes. But the truth is probably that the oligarchs themselves, seeing the writing on the wall, sought the deal. As I wrote in Putin's Labyrinth, the oligarchs, including Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, did so

to head off a Putin attack on all of them. One oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, told [John] Lloyd, the Financial Times writer, that he and the other billionaires deserved Putin’s wrath. In an interview at the time, Fridman said they asked only that past wrongs be forgotten. “I think the best plan would be if Putin were to declare an amnesty on everything that happened in the past,” Fridman said.

As Central Asia's leaders are all cognizant, Khodorkovsky refused the deal, and consequently has languished in prison. It will be difficult if not impossible for the U.S. or anyone else to again break the region from a similar fear.

Reset: Russia, yes; Iran, Kinda

Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation, will be the chief U.S. negotiator for nuclear arms reductions with Russia. The goal is to sign a completed deal by Dec. 15, when Start I expires.

That's not a surprise -- Gottemoeller negotiated one of Washington's single most-important successes in the post-Soviet era, which was the removal during the Clinton administration of 4,000 nuclear warheads from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

It's also not a surprise that presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev today made the re-negotiation of Start I the core of a reset of U.S.-Russia relations. Arms reduction, highly favored in Russia, "is the most productive vehicle to start with," Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, told me by phone. "It doesn't mean we will be finished by December, but the statement provides which systems will be included" in the talks.

Yet in a post-mortem with reporters, two senior U.S. officials seemed downright giddy after today's meeting between Obama and Medvedev in London, where the Group of 20 summit will be held tomorrow. One reason was that the two leaders were even able to agree on a final agenda going forward; and second was a stronger agreement on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program.

All of this has an economic component -- energy. Geopolitics in the region are highly inter-connected: Better relations with Russia can help fertilize the ground toward a thaw of U.S. relations with Iran, which could then significantly improve global natural gas supplies, particularly to Europe, which is highly dependent on -- who else? -- Russia. It's all fairly circular. Iran has the world's second-largest natural gas reserves, and whenever the financial crisis tamps down, Europe's energy thirst is going to resume its rise.

What Obama officials said on the four-page Obama-Medvedev statement itself: "I'll tell you honestly, I was not optimistic when we started this process of negotiating this that we would get it done for this meeting. ... It started very differently several weeks ago, and that he got his government to engage in it in a very serious way and get it done in time for our meeting today I think is a statement of the possibilities in U.S.-Russian relations."

And on the statement's position on Iran: "I've dealt with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov over the last several weeks and they've always said Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon -- 'We have no evidence of that; show me that this is there.' And this was a different tone than that."

The two sides will continue to meet ahead of a planned Obama trip to Moscow in July.

In a blog post at Democracy Arsenal, Adam Blickstein seems as delighted as the Clinton officials. Matthew Yglesias is of a similar mind.

On Iran, progress isn't as clear-cut. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made much of a brief conversation yesterday in The Hague between U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh. The diplomats were all there as part of a parlay on Afghanistan.

Michael van der Galien of PoliGazette blogged on that the encounter was significant, as simple as it was. John Boonstra at UN Dispatch thinks it's good news that Iran is even "in the mix."

Alas today, Iran denied that the Holbrooke-Akhunzadeh encounter took place. The political ground in Tehran is apparently not as far along toward a thaw than it is in the U.S.

This must be why experts say a true rapprochment between Washington and Tehran will be years away.