Bit by bit, the Republican candidates are going to have to lay out how their foreign policy vision differs from that of the Bush administration. I found these comments by Rudy in USA Today a good start.
“I said it a long time ago … America is too consumed with Iraq,” he said. “We’ve got to be patient and committed (in Iraq), but we’ve got to multitask. We’ve got to have conversations beyond Iraq. We’ve got to talk about Iran — Iran is more dangerous than Iraq — and we have to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.”
He said that might involve reorganizing United Nations forces, committing more U.S. resources, considering U.S.-led airstrikes on al-Qaeda targets in northern Pakistan or taking a tougher line with Musharraf — or pursuing all those steps.
Giuliani expressed little patience with the Pakistani president, who last fall brokered a cease-fire with tribal leaders in northern Pakistan that let them police their own territories. The White House said this week that the deal helped open the way for al-Qaeda to rebuild its infrastructure.
“Musharraf is important to us to the extent that he helps us remove this existential threat to him and to us,” Giuliani said.
“And to the extent that he recognizes that it’s an existential threat to us and to him, he’s valuable to us. To the extent that he doesn’t, he isn’t,” Giuliani said.
Pakistan is a thorny Gordian knot, to mix a metaphor. We suspect that Musharraf is telling us what we want to hear, and not really committed to rooting out al-Qaeda on his own soil. But if we push him too hard, he’s seen as our stooge, and maybe there’s a coup against him, and then we face the prospect of Islamists seizing control of a country with nuclear weapons. We want to push him just hard enough, but not too hard. I’m open to the argument that the Bush administration has had too soft a hand with Musharraf, but I’d like to see better ideas about how to twist his arm… and for candidates to openly acknowledge the risks entailed with that approach.
Perpetual bipartisan committee member Lee Hamilton, for one, is apparently feeling like a gambler: “When he was asked whether such action could cause the Musharraf government to fall, Mr. Hamilton responded, ‘It is a risk, and it is a risk I would be willing to take.’”