Propping Up the Weak as a Policy

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON

JUST how much President Bush’s goals abroad are now at the mercy of some of the world’s weakest leaders was clear last week in how the White House reacted to events in Pakistan.

Quietly, the administration cheered on an alliance of convenience between a once-unchallenged strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and an exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, whose turns in office in the 1980s and 90s were widely viewed as a mixture of incompetence, powerlessness and suspected corruption.

The administration was betting that a Musharraf-Bhutto combination, however fragile, would be the best bet for keeping a nuclear-armed state from descending into violence that could end Mr. Bush’s last hopes of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary.

General Musharraf is just one example of weak leadership. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has let pro-Shia loyalties inhibit progress toward the power-sharing compromises with the Sunnis. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas failed to rein in Hamas and end the endemic corruption in his own party when he first won power two years ago. And President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose authority over warlords is still a matter of daily challenge, now faces a resurgent Taliban.

If the nemesis of Mr. Bush’s first term was the Axis of Evil, the bane of his last 17 months in office may be the Nexus of Weakness.

The driving question inside the White House is how to build up these weak leaders or maneuver around them, at a time when arms sales, aid programs and presidential photo-ops yield diminishing returns.

A senior official said last week that in recent meetings, “Every once in a while you heard a debate about whether it’s time to cut one of these guys free — particularly Musharraf and Maliki. Then someone in the back of the room would ask, ‘Then what?’ ”

There are agonized searches for other alternatives, and the limited choices in Iraq were played out for more than an hour on Friday in the secure Pentagon room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet. Much of the talk, administration officials said, concerned how Mr. Bush could work around Mr. Maliki and reward Sunnis in Anbar Province for their recent decision to start shooting at Al Qaeda in Iraq, instead of at Americans forces.

The discussion included how to encourage early elections that would put Sunnis in government posts and how to get the central government to finance more projects in the region.

“It quickly became a discussion of the political and economic rewards we can encourage, rather than the math of how many forces we need to keep there,” said one official. He wondered aloud whether the United States would still be in Iraq if “we had the same conversation four summers ago.”

That point — how late in the game it is — also preoccupies Washington.

The administration’s critics and its war-weary veterans alike agree that using America’s remaining leverage in each place requires matching American promises of help with tangible results. For example, Mr. Bush has talked about bringing reconstruction to those countries. But the delivery has failed.

“Timing is to statecraft what location is to real estate,” said Dennis Ross, a Middle East expert who served under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and whose book, “Statecraft” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) lays out what he sees as missed opportunities.

With Mr. Abbas, he said, “We had a chance right after his election” in 2005, “and we didn’t show a sense of urgency, for example helping find way to lower 40 percent unemployment.” The Islamic movement Hamas exploited that and won the subsequent election, he said.

“Karzai is a weak leader whose problem from the beginning was that he needed a way to take on the warlords,” he continued. “We didn’t deliver with the kind of reconstruction that the president promised, or a way for him to extend his authority and writ beyond Kabul. And so he had to start cutting deals with everyone.”

Of course, missteps in Washington only contribute to a leader’s weakness; rarely do they cause it. Would General Musharraf’s suddenly tenuous position in Pakistan be stronger had the Bush administration given him the one thing he asked for most urgently after 9/11? He wanted duties on Pakistani textiles lifted, an action opposed by textile-manufacturing states here. It seems a stretch to think that lower duties would have made him more able to trap Qaedists in their Pakistani lairs today.

On the other hand, it is reasonable to ask whether things would be different in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinian territories had the administration had what Henry Crumpton, the former C.I.A. officer who helped oust the Taliban in 2001 and became the counterterrorism head at the State Department, calls an “expeditionary foreign service” that could help nations create courts, central banks and job programs.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sees the logic of that.

“I think we’ve begun to build that rudimentary capability, but it’s frankly something that the country has probably needed since the Balkans” in the mid-1990’s, she said a few weeks ago.

“You have to have a civilian capacity to do it,” she said. “And that’s the capability we’re trying to build now.”

A big problem, though, is that the leaders Mr. Bush wants to embolden know that Mr. Bush cannot promise anything past 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2009. Every day they calculate their own moves accordingly.

Mr. Maliki made the calculation out loud last week. Angered by the crescendo of calls in Washington for his ouster — by Democrats and Republicans — he warned that Iraq had “other friends” who “will support us in our endeavor.” He was clearly talking about Iran.