Author: Molly Ivins

Now is no time to quit worrying. Keep up that nail-biting, team. Foreign policy is like chess: It’s necessary to think at least three or four moves ahead.

According to The New York Times, the Pakistanis are deeply unhappy with us. They don’t trust the Northern Alliance worth squat. Unhappy Pakistanis may strike you as no skin off your nose, but the problem is that General Pervez Musharraf is not firmly in the saddle, as it were.

Since he took over in a coup, his support base is the military, and the Pakistani army has a lot of Islamic hard-liners. Bush told Musharraf we would keep the Northern Alliance out of Kabul, but we couldn’t stop them. Then they slaughtered at least 100 Pakistani fighters holed up in a school in the battle for Mazar-e-Sharif.

From the Pakistani point of view, it looks as though their enemies in the Alliance are taking over the whole country and that the everybody-in government we promised them is a pipe dream.

If Musharraf falls to an Islamist coup, that puts 20 nukes in the hands of some loony mullahs, in turn causing India, also a nuclear power, to freak out. This is precisely the kind of unintended consequence of a military action we’ve seen before — remember the Khmer Rouge? So much depends on how captured Pakistani Taliban fighters are treated, and apparently most of them are being sent to General Abdul Rashid Dostum — my personal fave among our Northern Alliance allies. He’s the one who’s changed sides nine times.

Then we have this claque of right-wingers here pounding the drum for war with Iraq. We haven’t even got bin Laden yet. Could we take this one step at a time?

I’m also getting the uneasy impression that American television, in its zeal not to offend any of our professional patriots, is doing a bad job of reporting how the rest of the world sees all this. Remember, we are still a huge superpower bombing the beejeezus out of one of the most unfortunate countries on earth. That’s a hard sell.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, so much is coming down it’s hard to keep track of it all. In the middle of everything else, zinging out of nowhere, sort of like John Ashcroft’s decision to prosecute Oregon doctors, comes an executive order from President Bush holding off access to Ronald Reagan’s presidential papers.

The law says most presidential papers are to be opened five years after a president leaves office, and all but the most sensitive documents are to be opened after 12 years. Both national security and personal privacy are protected by the law. Bush just ignored the law and issued an order giving himself and future presidents the power to withhold documents, even if the former leaders want them released.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists leaped to the conclusion that the Reagan papers contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

If you are wondering why civil libertarians are upset about Bush’s order on military tribunals, since it only applies to non-citizens, try reading the thing. It applies to those we have “reason to believe” (but we don’t have to produce any evidence) have committed acts of terrorism — or aided, abetted, or conspired to commit acts — “that have caused or threaten to cause injuries or adverse effects on the U.S., its citizens, its national security, foreign policy or economy.” Broad enough for you?

That qualifies everyone from French farmers mad at McDonald’s to Roman pickpockets. We already see the unhappy results, as Spain is now refusing to turn over eight suspected terrorists they arrested because they don’t think they can get a fair trial here.

Don’t put away those worry beads yet.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and for Creators Syndicate, Inc. Her work appears periodically in the Flyer.

It now looks, with 20-20 hindsight, as though we should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar-baby that is Afghanistan. We’re running out of time for three reasons — winter, Ramadan, and the prospect of millions of people starving to death.

We’ve run out of time to set up a bridge or coalition government and so, of necessity, are throwing our lot in with the Northern Alliance. According to one Afghan women’s organization, the Northern Alliance is as bad as the Taliban and, in addition, consists of minority tribes who have always warred with the majority Pushtan.

We seem to have bombed everything bombable, including the Red Cross, twice. At this point, it seems to me, we can give it another month and call the war for the season, which is what the Afghans do, and wait ’til next year without any disgrace. What would be worse than disgraceful is causing mass starvation. The humanitarian-aid folks are getting frantic about this, and we need to stop and figure out what we can do about it.

The trick to smiting back those who smote us is to first figure out where they are. This means using creative diplomacy and plain police work. We need to hit them without killing the innocents around them, and, as Jim Hightower observes, that calls for a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. If it takes years, it takes years.

The administration is in some danger of sacrificing one of its most important assets, which is the trust of the American people. The problem is not that everyone isn’t singing off the same page but that some parties are being less than frank. And that is fatal to trust. There is no point in telling us our “surgical, precision bombing” doesn’t kill civilians — we’re grown-ups. We know.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, Congress is engaged in criminal folly. Not only has the House passed this sickening bundle of tax cuts to benefit IBM, General Motors, and General Electric, but they’re telling us that to defend freedom we must surrender freedom. In the name of democracy, we must abandon democracy. There are 51 emergency anti-terrorism bills packaged under the meretricious title of the “Proved Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act” — stands for patriot. Cute, eh? Among the more staggering proposals, PATRIOT authorizes indefinite detention of anyone “suspected” of any terrorist connection. The definition of “terrorist activity” is left largely to the FBI and the CIA, which have had notable difficulty grasping democratic principles in the past.

As though this weren’t bad enough, the CIA wants the power to assassinate people, just like terrorists. And the FBI, according to Walter Pincus, wants to break uncooperative prisoners by using drugs or “Israeli-style” methods. Why not just break out the bastinado and the rack?

Bush has already created the infelicitously named Office of Homeland Security (such a weird, Orwellian ring) and given it powers to match the National Security Agency with no congressional oversight of its activities or budget.

There is not the slightest evidence that any of the measures will do dog to stop terrorism. From what we know of how September 11th happened, we have a visa system so full of holes it’s a disgrace and a problem with airport security. There really is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. We can’t make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free. All that happens when we make ourselves less free is that we’re less free.

We also have an obligation to consider what kind of society we’re making in unseemly haste and leaving to our children and future generations. We urgently need a serious national dialogue about these issues, but all we’re getting from television is 24-hour exploitation of the anthrax scare.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Forth Worth Star-Telegram and a member of the Creators Syndicate; her work appears periodically in the Flyer.

So the military is out there doing its thing, in its obscure Pentagonese
language, while some of us nail-biters at home have gotten into a bitter
argument. The pundit class seems to have fallen into Manichean error — that’s
the one where everything gets oversimplified into good/bad, light/dark. Among
our more excitable brethren, a few have concluded that anyone who advocates an
Israeli-Palestinian accord is playing Osama bin Laden’s game and is the moral
equivalent of the 1930s appeasers of Hitler. Get a grip.

Bin Laden is so appalling that if he were in favor of sunshine
and laughter, one would be tempted to vote for dark and gloom. But that would
give him control. There is a mild parallel to this situation in G.W. Bush’s
foreign policy prior to September 11th. As near anyone could tell, the sole
unifying theme of his policies was to be for whatever Bill Clinton had been
against and vice versa.

Clinton pushed mightily for a settlement between Israel and the
Palestinians, therefore Bush would not push. Clinton was for the Kyoto Accord
and various international treaties banning biological weapons, small-arms
trade, etc., therefore Bush was opposed to same. And so it went.

One unhappy consequence of this unthinking pattern was that we
seriously ticked off the European allies. Their generous support post-
September 11th is especially commendable given that they were Not Happy
Campers up to that time.

The point is that policy needs to be judged not on who is for it
or against it — for all we know Saddam Hussein may be right about something –
– but whether the policy works. We are the shrewd, pragmatic Yankees,
remember? It is in our interest and the interest of Israel and the
Palestinians to get that situation settled, so let’s get it done. Who cares if
bin Laden is for it too? (He’s not, of course. He wants to destroy Israel and
the West. No one is appeasing bin Laden — you can’t appease a fanatic.)

The main reason we want to try something new as regards both the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraqi sanctions is because what we’re
doing now clearly doesn’t work worth squat. There is no percentage in letting
a bad situation get worse. Pragmatism may not be a great moral philosophy, but
it is useful. Liberals, as usual, are accused of being naive, warm-and-fuzzy
peaceniks (when not being labeled Hitler-appeasers).

To use a homely phrase, someone here doesn’t have his thinking
cap on straight, and as far as I can see, the only actual thinking, rather
than reacting, is being done on the left.

Come on, let’s get some new ideas in here. Or even some good old
ones. I go back to the much-agreed point that the most successful American
foreign policy of the 20th century was the Marshall Plan. The United States
helped rebuild Europe with that plan, including Germany — a place of which we
then had no reason to be fond. But it was very smart of us.

Looking way down the line, we need to rethink our role in the
arms traffic. According to a congressional study published in August, world
arms sales to developing countries rose by 8 percent last year, with the
United States dominating the market. Weapons sales came to $36.9 billion, with
the United States accounting for about half, $18.6 billion.

We’ve been shot at with our own weapons all over the world. We
armed the mujahedeen (different war), but we didn’t stick around to help glue
the pieces back together when it was over. Bush said recently, “We’re not
into nation-building,” as though it were a venereal disease.

The question is, would it work? We all have 20-20 hindsight on
Afghanistan now — better that than this.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-
Telegram and a member of the Creators Syndicate; her work appears
occasionally in the Flyer.