Pakistan and Harold Lasswell

At the risk of losing everyone as soon as they see the title...

There's been a lot of coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the last couple of weeks. Obama visits, Taliban makes gains, nuclear weapons are safe, etc. etc... I don't know much about South and Central Asia, but out Central Asian policy seems pretty incoherent. I'm not sure that we really know what we're trying to do over there.

What should our goals be? Stopping the Taliban? Preventing terrorism? Promoting democracy? Nation building? Balancing Pakistan against India and China? I don't think we've defined a series of clear goals at all.

I would propose that perhaps, given the difficulty of state building, the political problems with military involvement inside Pakistan, and the low probability that we will be able to defeat the Taliban decisively, maybe we should focus on (1) attempting to prevent anti-US terrorism and (2) promoting long-term economic relations with South Asia in a way that may tend to permit long-term economic growth. It seems unrealistic to believe that we could decisively end this conflict that has, after all, been going on since at least the late 1970s in Afghanistan in Pakistan, but it also seems irresponsible not to attempt to undermine anti-US terrorism in the region.

If we believe (as I do) that the growth of Islamic extremism is fundamentally a problem driven by economic underdevelopment and the long term absence of democracy, it seems apparent that the most important goals over the long term are to promote democratization and economic growth. But, because democratic transitions can often be fertile ground for violence and instability (the apparent democratic transition Pakistan's experiencing right now seems to be a good example of that), we should be careful about the ways in which we choose to promote democracy--probably, shying away from the kinds of extreme policies we've undertaken in Iraq is a good idea.

At the same time, it seems unlikely that we will be able to promote the kind of long-term stability the Pakistani people need (for economic growth, if nothing else) through the Pakistani state. Although, again, I'm no Central Asian scholar, it seems clear that the state doesn't control the situation on the ground in many parts of Pakistan (Waziristan, Balochistan, etc.), and if we seek to promote our interests in those parts of the country through the Pakistani state, we're bound to fail. Seems kind of like asking the Taiwanese government to solve our problems with mainland China. Should we be seeking relationships with the people that control the situation on the ground? Are we doing this?

Obviously, we face significant problems in developing relationships with people in the region, but it seems as though seeking to develop relationships with the tribal and feudal groups in the frontier regions of Pakistan through our intelligence apparatus may be more fruitful, over the long term, than our current apparent focus on airstrikes and airborne intelligence-gathering.

I worry that our current policy is driven by an inappropriate focus (under the circumstances) on the nation-state (Pakistan seems to be neither a nation nor a state) and an ignorance of the individual- and community-level dynamics that are driving the rise of the Taliban in the region.