Strategic leadership and statecraft — Part I

For Pakistanis in their present condition, it would be irrelevant to discuss strategic leadership and statecraft without reference to the realities that prevail in the world and their country.

Constitutionally, Pakistan is supposed to be a democracy. Given the recent electoral farce, however, it is not surprising that the Economist Intelligence Unit recently downgraded Pakistan from a ‘hybrid democracy’ to an ‘authoritarian regime’ or non-democracy. As such, no national or provincial elections conducted in Pakistan can have international credibility.

Pakistan today barely pretends to be a democracy. It is in truth an autocracy in violation of its constitution, the Pakistan Movement, the vision of its founding father, and the aspirations of its people. This has been abetted by a managed legislature, a servile executive, a restricted media, an unprotecting judicial system, and not least, the whip hand of the US which treats Pakistan – a nuclear power with a population going on a quarter of a billion people – as a country without options.

In such a context, what can we possibly mean by strategic leadership and statecraft? Pakistan’s location and size endow it with a certain strategic potential that can only be realized through efficient statecraft which in turn is a synonym for good governance on behalf of the economic and human development of all its peoples. The very first condition, however, for such an endeavour is a government that is seen by the vast majority of the people to represent their choice and their interests rather than those of their domestic oppressors and external exploiters. In a country whose people are by force of circumstance as politically aware as in Pakistan, it is all too clear how far they see this first condition being met, if at all.

Unfortunately, people in Pakistan have been conditioned to have minimal expectations and resign themselves to accepting that they are not the priority of those who govern them, and they can do very little about it. Statecraft, in these circumstances, becomes the containment of the people’s expectations and the protection of domestic and external elite interests against their occasional outbursts of anger. It undermines the very possibility of strategic leadership and becomes instead the management of strategic dependence.

This requires skill, determination, vigilance, violence and cynicism dressed up as patriotism and religious idealism. It rules out statesmanship or political leadership in the interests of the nation and the people. It constrains the freedom of the people in the name of law and order and denies them resources for the protection and fulfillment of their basic entitlements and rights. It is essentially illegal and corrupt.

In speaking about strategy, one cannot avoid discussing the late great practitioner of this art, Dr Henry Kissinger, who combined prodigious historical knowledge and theoretical insight with a genius for negotiating realistic if not always principled compromises. As a practitioner of realpolitik or power politics, Dr Kissinger relegated the moral or ethical factor to a decidedly secondary position, not because he was necessarily immoral, but because he saw strategic leadership as an essentially amoral exercise of power between nations even if it required his countrymen to see it as an expression of their unique morality.

When asked how he felt about being regarded as a genius, Kissinger said geniuses were one in a hundred whereas “good people” were far fewer and he would, accordingly, prefer to be regarded as a good person rather than a mere genius. Unfortunately, when he recently died at the age of 100, he was overwhelmingly remembered as a genius instead of a good person. His strategy to bring an end to the Vietnam War, which combined brutal massacres all over Indochina with brilliant bilateral and multilateral negotiations, was ultimately successful, but at the cost of his reputation as a decent human being.

The writings of Dr Kissinger are nevertheless essential reading for anyone wishing to gain an insight into what strategy and realpolitik entail. His book, ‘A World Restored’, published in 1957 when he was a young Harvard professor, is a classic. He notes: “The attainment of peace is not as easy as the desire for it. Not for nothing is history associated with the figure of Nemesis, which defeats man by fulfilling his wishes in a different form, or by answering his prayers too completely. Whenever peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community.”

Kissinger was, of course, writing about post-Napoleonic Europe and referring to Germany muscling itself into the front rank of European powers. But how ironic that it should apply even more accurately to his adopted country today whose foreign policy he shaped so fundamentally.

Kissinger goes on to say that stability, the objective of strategic leadership, “has commonly resulted not from a quest for peace but from a commonly accepted ‘legitimacy’ which should not be confused with ‘justice’ but rather an international agreement about workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy.” This is what the US today calls ‘a rules-based world order’, with the rules framed by itself for the rest of the world to follow in greater or lesser measure in accordance with their capacity to resist its pressures.

Kissinger qualifies his statement by observing that it “implies the acceptance of the framework of the international order by all major powers, at least to the extent that no state is so dissatisfied that, like Germany after the Treaty of Versailles, it expresses its dissatisfaction in a revolutionary foreign policy.” A legitimate order, he says, does not make conflicts impossible, but it limits their scope.

Ironically, this essential proviso is absent from today’s hegemonic rules-based order pursued by the US. Other major powers, like China and Russia, are certainly dissatisfied with the world order the US seeks to impose and are, accordingly, following “a revolutionary foreign policy” such as Germany pursued in the 19th century. Kissinger notes that diplomacy as the adjustment of differences through negotiations “is possible only in legitimate international orders.” Such a legitimate international order today can only be based on the United Nations Charter which the US observes largely in the breach. Diplomacy, which Kissinger defines as the art of restraining the exercise of power, cannot function in such an environment.

What Kissinger says on behalf of the world’s most powerful country can be generalized to apply to smaller powers including Pakistan. He visited Pakistan on two occasions. The first was in 1971 when he made his now famous secret visit to China from Pakistan to prepare for then-president Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Kissinger had a seminal meeting with Chairman Mao which paved the way for Nixon’s historic visit and initiated a US-China détente that altered the course of the cold war. That was strategic leadership.

Five years later, he visited again to dissuade PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from proceeding with a nuclear reprocessing plant. Despite using threats, incentives and humour, Kissinger failed to persuade Bhutto to drop the idea. Nevertheless, the mutual respect between the two leaders enabled them to engage in humorous banter at a public banquet on the word ‘reprocessing’ which showed the role of humour and personal relations in strategic leadership if only to soften the impact of failures that inevitably happen from time to time.

[In memory of Dr Kissinger]

To be continued

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.He can be reached at: ashrafjqazi@gmail.com