Matthew Yglesias claims that he has no idea who in the US would benefit politically from a worsening situation in Pakistan… but then argues that who should benefit is not the “toughserious” hawks who focused on Iraq, but rather “cowardly cowards like Brian Katulis though it was more import (sic) to focus on Pakistan.”

The quoted link is to a piece titled “Strategic Reset” by Katulis, Lawrence J. Korb and Peter Juul.    The text does not mention Pakistan.  The full report it supports mentions Pakistan twice, in passing.

Katulis, however, has written about Pakistan quite a bit recently.  For example, at the TPM Cafe, he wrote:

A survey of America’s top national security thinkers from both sides of aisle conducted by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine earlier this year demonstrates that while experts understand the challenges posed by Pakistan, they don’t have a clear idea about what to do. When asked which countries in the world would most likely become the next Al Qaeda stronghold, the leading response was Pakistan, not Iraq.

Fully 74 percent of respondents named Pakistan as the country most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists in the future. But when asked what the United States should do to combat extremists groups and Al Qaeda in Pakistan, these experts gave no clear answer; they were divided between threatening to cut off aid, increasing assistance, sending in U.S. troops, and simply doing nothing because there wasn’t anything effective to do.

So what does the “soft-focus” Katulis advocate?

When it comes to Pakistan, there are no easy answers. Perhaps one starting point is to look beyond the narrow, two-dimensional view of “you’re either with us or against us” perspective, one that has been heavily dependent on relationships with individual leaders – whether it is Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, or even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe another step forward would be focusing on how the United States can bring to bear the full range of its considerable powers – including economic and diplomatic powers, as well as its military and intelligence – in policies that help build functioning institutions that expand stability and prosperity in places like Pakistan.

Notably, Katulis says nothing about what the alternatives are to Mubarak and Abbas.  However, Katulis had this to say about the alternatives to Musharraf:

Sharif and Bhutto’s past performance on these issues is far from stellar – under Bhutto, the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), provided support to the Taliban in the 1990s. Her successor, Nawaz Sharif, did little to rein in these extremists.

Moreover, some observers note that Bhutto is not the savior for democracy as she claims to be, including Bhutto’s niece in a recent biting opinion editorial in the Los Angeles Times. Of course lest we not forget that Sharif was the leader when Pakistan first tested a nuclear weapon in 1998, and all three of these leaders stood by while Pakistan nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father Pakistan’s nuclear program built an international network that led to dangerous transfers of nuclear technology.

Katulis understates Sharif’s record.  He would have been more accurate to note that Sharif has been linked with Osama bin Laden, supported the Taliban and tried to impose Shari’a as the law of Pakistan.  Sharif’s track record as a democrat is summarized by Stanley Kurtz:

After having been displaced in the middle of his first term (a term which was, in any case, the product of a manipulated election), Sharif began his second term determined to destroy all political opposition. Sharif bought glowing press coverage with a steady stream of bribes (Musharraf has allowed much more press criticism), while launching tax investigations against critical voices in the press. (By the way, virtually no-one in Pakistan pays taxes. The Pakistani “state,” such as it is, survives on taxes collected from less than one percent of citizens – and nearly half of that is pocketed by the tax collectors themselves. So “tax investigation” is a synonym for “jail.” But let’s get back to Pakistani “democracy” under Sharif.) In his second term, Sharif saw to it that newspapermen not already silenced by tax investigations were directly arrested and beaten.

Having bought off and intimidated the press, Sharif blocked political opposition by pushing through a constitutional amendment requiring all members of Pakistan’s National Assembly to vote along party lines. So much for parliament. Meanwhile, Sharif got rid of troublesome judges by transferring them, and saw to it that local elections were fixed. The boldest move of all was a physical attack on Pakistan’s Supreme Court by a mob of furniture-smashing Sharif supporters when the Court was about to restrict the Prime Minister’s actions. That’s right, the same Supreme Court so rudely and recently strong-armed by Musharraf was even more crudely attacked by the man the media has now anointed as one of Musharraf’s premiere “democratic” opponents.

Sharif and Bhutto were the leaders of the two main opposition blocs; if this is their record, who does Katulis think the US should be supporting in Pakistan?

Katulis presumably would answer that focusing on”who” has been the root problem of US policy, which should be directed toward supporting the institutions of civil society in Pakistan.  The main virtue of that answer, however, is that it avoids recognition of the reality that institutions are ultimately comprised of — and led by — people, which leads inexorably back to the “who” question.

The ostensibly liberal, secular, middle-class Pakistani opposition outside the Sharif and Bhutto-led blocs has been small and splintered. 

Katulis, in writing about Pakistan, relies on sources like the leaders of Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan, which he admits is an Islamist political party. 

Katulis also has quoted Asma Jahangir, former chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.  Katulis may have missed her track record:

While serving as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Asma Jahangir defended 18 Pakistani nationals deported by the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on a platform provided by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), declaring that “they do not have the resources to defend themselves against the tyrannical behavior of a superpower.”[11] Jahangir, former chair of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, strongly opposed U.S. military action against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by demonstrating on the streets of Lahore[12] and subsequently undertook a 10-day investigative mission to Afghanistan to probe alleged “massacres” of captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance.[13] Early in 2002, Jahangir had called for an urgent investigation into reports, quickly discredited, of “summary executions” of Palestinians by Israeli troops at the Jenin refugee camp.[14] The UN’s own inquiry into Jenin subsequently concluded that there had been no massacre by the Israeli Defense Force.[15]

Supporting people and groups like this — even if successful — would tend to empower people who are no more friendly to the US than those we have supported or are trying to support now.  This would give folks on the Left another chance to moan about the “blowback” of US foreign policy, but that is hardly a good reason for making that type of support US foreign policy.

Inasmuch as Yglesias derides the “toughserious” approach that placed the focus on Iraq, it can presumed that he will be unhappy to learn that US Special Forces are set to increase their presence in Pakistan amid assessments that the country is to become the central battlefield for al Qaeda — precisely because it is being driven from Iraq.  Part of that unhappiness can derive from the “toughseriousness” of the approach.  Part of that unhappiness can derive from the fact that it shows one of the reasons for the growing instability in Pakistan is that we — and the Iraqis — are driving al Qaeda out of Iraq.