[The generals who run Pakistan have not abandoned their obsession with challenging India. They tolerate terrorists at home, seek a Taliban victory in Afghanistan and are building the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. They have sidelined and intimidated civilian leaders elected in 2008. They seem to think Pakistan is invulnerable, because they control NATO’s supply line from Karachi to Kabul and have nuclear weapons.]
By Bruce O. Riedel
AMERICA needs a new policy for dealing with Pakistan. First, we must recognize that the two countries’ strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan’s army controls Pakistan’s strategic policies. We must contain the Pakistani Army’s ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy.
As Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee last month, Pakistan provides critical sanctuary and support to the Afghan insurgency that we are trying to suppress. Taliban leaders meet under Pakistani protection even as we try to capture or kill them.
In 2009, I led a policy review for President Obama on Pakistan and Afghanistan. At the time, Al Qaeda was operating with virtual impunity in Pakistan, and its ally Lashkar-e-Taiba had just attacked the Indian city of Mumbai and killed at least 163 people, including 6 Americans, with help from Pakistani intelligence. Under no illusions, Mr. Obama tried to improve relations with Pakistan by increasing aid and dialogue; he also expanded drone operations to fight terrorist groups that Pakistan would not fight on its own.
It was right to try engagement, but now the approach needs reshaping. We will have to persevere in Afghanistan in the face of opposition by Pakistan.
The generals who run Pakistan have not abandoned their obsession with challenging India. They tolerate terrorists at home, seek a Taliban victory in Afghanistan and are building the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. They have sidelined and intimidated civilian leaders elected in 2008. They seem to think Pakistan is invulnerable, because they control NATO’s supply line from Karachi to Kabul and have nuclear weapons.
The generals also think time is on their side — that NATO is doomed to give up in Afghanistan, leaving them free to act as they wish there. So they have concluded that the sooner America leaves, the better it will be for Pakistan. They want Americans and Europeans to believe the war is hopeless, so they encourage the Taliban and other militant groups to speed the withdrawal with spectacular attacks, like the Sept. 13 raid on the United States Embassy in Kabul, which killed 16 Afghan police officers and civilians.
It is time to move to a policy of containment, which would mean a more hostile relationship. But it should be a focused hostility, aimed not at hurting Pakistan’s people but at holding its army and intelligence branches accountable. When we learn that an officer from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, is aiding terrorism, whether in Afghanistan or India, we should put him on wanted lists, sanction him at theUnited Nations and, if he is dangerous enough, track him down. Putting sanctions on organizations in Pakistan has not worked in the past, but sanctioning individuals has — as the nuclear proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan could attest.
Offering Pakistan more trade while reducing aid makes sense. When we extend traditional aid, media outlets with ties to the ISI cite the aid to weave conspiracy theories that alienate Pakistanis from us. Mr. Obama should instead announce that he is cutting tariffs on Pakistani textiles to or below the level that India and China enjoy; that would strengthen entrepreneurs and women, two groups who are outside the army’s control and who are interested in peace.
Military assistance to Pakistan should be cut deeply. Regular contacts between our officers and theirs can continue, but under no delusion that we are allies.
Osama bin Laden’s death confirmed that we can’t rely on Pakistan to take out prominent terrorists on its soil. We will still need bases in Afghanistan from which to act when we see a threat in Pakistan. But drones should be used judiciously, for very important targets.
In Afghanistan, we should not have false hopes for a political solution. We can hope that top figures among the Quetta Shura — Afghan Taliban leaders who are sheltered in Quetta, Pakistan — will be delivered to the bargaining table, but that is unlikely, since the Quetta leadership assassinated Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former Afghan president, last month. The ISI will veto any Taliban peace efforts it opposes, which means any it doesn’t control. Rather than hoping for ISI help, we need to continue to build an Afghan Army that can control the insurgency with long-term NATO assistance and minimal combat troops.
Strategic dialogue with India about Pakistan is essential because it would focus the Pakistani Army’s mind. India and Pakistan are trying to improve trade and transportation links severed after they became independent in 1947, and we should encourage that. We should also increase intelligence cooperation against terrorist targets in Pakistan. And we should encourage India to be more conciliatory on Kashmir, by easing border controls and releasing prisoners.
America and Pakistan have had a tempestuous relationship for decades. For far too long we have banked on the Pakistani Army to protect our interests. Now we need to contain that army’s aggressive instincts, while helping those who want a progressive Pakistan and keeping up the fight against terrorism.
Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad.”
@ The New York Times
CHINA'S NEXT REVOLUTION IS IN FITNESS
[But something is going on behind the scenes: it is hardly an athletic revolution of the people, but the foundation for one may be forming. Anecdotal evidence shows that more people are participating in amateur sports. Gyms, clubs and gear shops are growing in number. And the state is supporting not just future Olympians, but also fitness at the grass-roots level.]
CHINA'S NEXT REVOLUTION IS IN FITNESS
[But something is going on behind the scenes: it is hardly an athletic revolution of the people, but the foundation for one may be forming. Anecdotal evidence shows that more people are participating in amateur sports. Gyms, clubs and gear shops are growing in number. And the state is supporting not just future Olympians, but also fitness at the grass-roots level.]
By Tom Sims
 |
Tom Sims/International Herald Tribune
Dalian's Olympic Square features a statue of Liu Changchun,
a sprinter who competed in the Olympics in 1932.
|
Mr. Liu did not live to see China win a gold medal, but a lot has changed since his death in 1983. China, now the world’s second-largest economy, increasingly is a major force at the elite level of sports, fitting for the most populous nation on the planet. China won the most gold medals at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and it is churning out tennis champions like Li Na and basketball stars like Yao Ming. The government preaches that only a nation of strong bodies is truly strong.
But as the country grows richer, the expanding middle class appears to be only slowly growing fitter. The athletic fields at Olympic Square one recent afternoon are all but empty, though the nearby McDonald’s is doing good business.
Unlike Sydney, London and Paris, hardly a cyclist or jogger is to be seen in this city of six million, where bike lanes are clogged with cars and the only runners are pedestrians trying to get safely across eight-lane roads. The World Health Organization says that the obesity rate in some Chinese cities is close to 20 percent.
But something is going on behind the scenes: it is hardly an athletic revolution of the people, but the foundation for one may be forming. Anecdotal evidence shows that more people are participating in amateur sports. Gyms, clubs and gear shops are growing in number. And the state is supporting not just future Olympians, but also fitness at the grass-roots level.
Wang Rui, 30, sits beside the pool underneath the Dalian Oriental Houston Hotel as several women swim laps.
As a child, Mr. Wang swam in the sea because there were few pools. Today, he can quickly name six public pools in the city, not including the hotel pools with general admission like this one.
Pools in Dalian can easily be filled with 200 people at any given time, he says, and swimmers must often wait their turn. Sun Lin, this pool’s lanky lifeguard, says: “Compared to before, fewer people come to just talk.”
Across town is Bally Total Fitness, a swank gym in the heart of the financial district that opened nine years ago as a partnership between the local government and a U.S. chain. It has 27 treadmills and machines that in quality stand up to those in the West. It is mostly empty on a late afternoon, but Zhang Zifan, a marketing manager, says that it will fill up in the hours ahead.
A second Bally’s has since opened. and the two gyms count about 10,000 members, up from about 4,000 four years ago, despite costing 6,000 renminbi, or $940, a year, according to Mr. Zhang. Fitness centers often average about 2,500 renminbi a year, he says.
Meanwhile, social clubs focused on sports are on the rise. Li Kai, a 26-year-old lawyer, joined the Lawyer Associate Badminton Club three years ago. At the time there were 200 members. Today, the club has 500. A Web site allows members to schedule matches to play one of China’s most popular sports.
Mr. Li likes badminton because it is “elegant,” he says, and he plays the sport about six hours a week.
Mr. Li strolls through an underground athletic complex below the Sweetland Hotel, not far from Olympic Square. It is an enormous maze of badminton courts, gyms, bowling alleys, and gear shops. Never mind that the Internet cafe was the most frequented spot one particular afternoon. Mr. Li insists that China is getting fitter.
One would certainly have to believe him based on the number of sport shops around town. In one of the city’s main pedestrian zones, billboards touting Adidas and Li-Ning, China’s homegrown brand, compete for space with the likes of Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz and Omega.
The Dalian Sporting Goods Store, which opened in 1986, was the city’s first such shop. Su Fei, the director, says that the shop drew people from all over the region. Business is still strong, but growth is not what it once was, she says. Ms. Su says the slowdown in growth is not due to shoppers losing their enthusiasm, but because of the abundance of competitors around town. There is Decathlon out near the Ikea, and the many shops below the Sweetland Hotel that the badminton clubs frequent.
But like so much of what happens in China, it may be the state that will determine how fit the nation’s people will be.
Xu Guangsong walks through the halls of his Shahekou Qizhi School for the disabled, where he is a sports teacher. Mr. Xu, 40, explains that when he began teaching 20 years ago, pupils’ physical education grades counted for nothing. Today, they are a factor in overall scores, just like math, history and language.
For Mr. Xu’s pupils, sports play an especially important role. The students here are mentally disabled, but physically capable.
The school’s successes decorate the halls. Mr. Xu points to the portrait of one student who won the world record for the 100-meter dash in 2007 in Shanghai at the Special Olympics’ World Summer Games. Another student won a gold medal in the long jump.
All the athletes have to train on is a small patch of Astroturf; there is no proper track or sandbox. But Mr. Xu says the city government is going to change that. Next year, he and his students will move from their 36-year-old grounds into a brand new campus with a standard outdoor track and underground gymnasium. Mr. Xu says the move is a reflection of his school’s success and the government’s desire to improve infrastructure, even for the disabled.
At the same time, the government is showing its financial support for training more elite athletes. Sun Xiaofei, 22, has not been to school since he was 15. He has not needed to. He is a professional swimmer and employee of the state.
Mr. Sun is ranked No. 2 in Liaoning Province in the butterfly stroke and No. 5 in the backstroke.
One recent evening, Mr. Sun sipped a mocha frappuccino at a Starbucks some distance from his dorm, where there is little risk of being spotted by a coach he said would be angered by his slipping off campus. He is perspiring after a full day of training, and creases from his goggles still circle his eyes.
Mr. Sun does not expect to ever go to the Olympics, but it does not seem to matter. He is happy with his life, in part because the government is pouring more resources into people like him. When he began seven years ago, dinners consisted of four dishes and two kinds of bread and rice. Today, there are 10 dishes and six types of bread and rice. A new pool cuts the number of people swimming per lane to three from six.
An hour of video games are on the agenda before bed. The remains of his frappuccino in hand, Mr. Sun leaps over a chain barrier as he takes a shortcut back to his dorm on the path to a fitter China.
