It's not going to stop

  

Christopher Hitchens has a typically great column in this month's Vanity Fair exploring the US's truly toxic relationship with Pakistan. Hitchens, being Hitchens, doesn't fail to fire with both barrels, referring to this ostensible "ally" of ours as a "shameful" and "degraded" country, one that is "completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred." He goes on to write that

our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation. In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs. “The smiler with the knife under the cloak,” as Chaucer phrased it so frigidly.

These are strong words, no doubt, and would be forgiven for regarding it as yet another example of the standard Hitchensian hyperbole and overstatement. And yet, at the end of the day, I find it quite difficult to take much issue with anything he's written here. The column effectively catalogs a litany of crimes and offenses committed by Pakistan against both the global political community (giving aid and comfort to terrorists, selling nuclear arms technology to the highest bidder, maintaining a dangerously antagonistic relationship with India, disclosing the identity of the CIA's station chief in Islamabad after the bin Laden raid, etc) as well as against the basic tenets of human decency (honor killings, legally enforced rape, etc), and by the end one can't help but cringe in shame and disgust at the fact that we as a nation continue to openly and happily do business with such a politically duplicitous and morally bankrupt political entity.

And yet, for as bleak and depressing as the material contained within Hitchens's column is, it does not bring up what is perhaps the single most dispiriting thing about the situation in Pakistan, which is that there does not appear to exist even the slightest possibility that it might resolve itself peacefully. At the end of the column, Hitchens himself proposes that we simply stop pretending like Pakistan is an ally and throw our full geopolitical weight behind India, writing that:

We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?

This would certainly be a less shameful course of action than the one we are currently on, though it is by no means an ideal solution. The most obvious critique, of course, would be that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a policy shift as sweeping as this one--especially if it involved an open declaration of hostilities on the part of the US--could inflame tensions in the region to unmanageable levels and send the Pakistani military over the nuclear precipice. This certainly holds some water, but given Pakistan's well-established predilection for openly spiting the US, I do not believe that maintaining the gossamer-thin fiction that we are "allies" with them would in any real way impinge upon Pakistan's decision to use nuclear weapons or not. If they decide to flip the switch on the doomsday machine, they will almost certainly do so regardless of their nominal position with regard to the United States.

 This, then, gets at the point I was making above regarding the seemingly total hopelessness of this whole situation. Perhaps this is simply a failure of imagination on my part but, unique among contemporary global "hotspots," I cannot even begin to fathom a resolution to the Pakistan problem that is not utterly catastrophic. With nearly every other troublesome or problematic nation one can, via certain mental gymnastics, imagine relatively peaceful conclusions to the current conflicts: Reform tendencies could take hold in Iran, the Arab Spring could sweep away despots all across the Middle East, a peace treaty could be worked out in Israel, Iraq might one day rebuild itself into a working nation, the DPRK might simply implode on itself, and so on. These are of course largely fanciful, and the probability of any of them occurring in such a clean and neat fashion is quite slim, but there is at least hope there. No such potential rosy future seems to be dwelling on the horizon for Pakistan. The civilian government cannot control the military, the social order is largely dominated by a virulently regressive religious ideology, international political pressure appears to have negligible impact on the nation's decisions, they share a border with a country toward which they have an almost constitutional enmity, and they possess a full compliment of nuclear weapons. How can this not end badly?

Or am I missing something here? Because I sure hope I am.

  

Michelle Goldberg has a pretty great piece on Michele Bachmann over at The Daily Beast. Among other things, the article provides a nice potted history of Bachmann's political and ideological development, exploring in detail the "intellectual" foundation of the radical Christian worldview that she picked up while studying law at Oral Roberts, and includes a few juicy anecdotal nuggets such as this one:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

 More importantly, though, the piece serves as a useful corrective to a lot of the reporting on Bachmann that's come out since her supposed "break-out" performance at Monday's Republican Presidential "debate" in New Hampshire. Nearly every report, response, scorecard, and take-away published by a mainstream, inside-the-beltway news organ in the aftermath of that farcical dog and pony show has pimped the same basic narrative: "Romney looked good because no one went after him, Tim Pawlenty fell on his face because he refused to go after Romney, and Michele Bachmann emerged as a surprisingly serious contender." The line of thinking here seems to be that because Pawlenty disappointed, and because Bachmann didn't go all crazy eyes and start shrieking about a radical gay Muslim conspiracy or whatever, she has now effectively made the transition from "quack running a hopeless vanity campaign" to "real candidate," effectively positioning herself as a "serious" right-wing, Evangelical alternative to milquetoast, moderate, Mormon Mitt.

What's most dispiriting about these pieces is the fact that none of them go to any great lengths to call bullshit on Bachmann's new act, choosing instead to simply praise her "reasonable, measured" performance and exalt her savviness. But the Michele Bachmann who appeared on stage at St. Anselm College on Monday is, in fact, the same Michele Bachmann who once hid behind some bushes to spy on a gay rights rally in DC, the same Michele Bachmann who once called for the media to conduct an investigation into the "anti-American" activities of Congressional Democrats, and the same Michele Bachmann who once said, "Literally, if we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” The only difference between the "sane and reasonable" Michele Bachmann who burst onto the scene this week and the lunatic who was (rightfully) pegged as being laughably unelectable when she first started making noises about running for President is that Bachmann Mk II has a seasoned team of crack political advisers who have no doubt told her that if she wants to have a shot she'll have to tone down the wild-eyed nuttiness just a tad. 

Unfortunately, the narrative that has emerged in the last week has not been "Crazy lady pretends to be level-headed, reasonable, serious Presidential candidate," but rather "Michele Bachmann is now a serious Presidential candidate." This, sadly, is the sort of thing that happens when you have a press corps that tends to be more interested in the construction of over-arching campaign narratives (and meta-narratives, and meta-meta-narratives) than it is in actually looking at candidates critically. Bachmann and her team seem to have caught on to this tendency and are currently exploiting it for all it's worth. I still kind of doubt that she actually has what it takes to topple the Romney juggernaut, but the odds have now swung ever so slightly in her favor. She may still be a million miles away, but Michele Bachmann is closer to the White House today than she was a week ago, and that alone is sort of terrifying.