August 1, 2007

STATEMENT OF REP. GARY L. ACKERMAN

CHAIRMAN

SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE MIDDLE EAST AND SOUTH ASIA

POLITICAL CRISES IN SOUTH ASIA

The subcommittee will come to order.  A person would have to live on a deserted island not to know that all is not well in South Asia and not well is putting it mildly.  The current political crises in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have created the potential for multiple failed states in the region. 

It was a failed state that gave us September 11.  Failed states are breeding grounds for terrorists and safe-havens for terrorist activities and failed states are precisely what we cannot have.

So the declaration by Francis Townsend, one of President Bush's top advisors in the war on terror, that as a consequence of Pakistan's failure to secure its border region with Afghanistan, the United States would have to consider using military force inside Pakistan if it identified key Al-Qaeda targets there, was a stunning admission that the policy of largesse toward Pakistan pursued by the Administration for the last 5 years had failed.  After Billions in military and economic aid, billions more in so-called “coalition support funds”, hundreds of millions in debt relief and the sale of sophisticated weapons including F-16s we are at precisely the same point we were immediately prior to September 11.  But don’t take my word for it.  According to director of national intelligence Mike McConnell, “Al Qaeda has been able to regain some of its momentum. The leadership’s intact. They have operational planners, and they have safe haven. ” 

            For the last five years I have been warning that despite our assistance, Pakistan was not making a complete effort to combat terrorism; that President/General Musharraf had made a strategic decision to have it both ways; that he would cooperate with us on al Qaeda, but turn a blind eye when it came to Pakistan’s former, and apparently current, friends the Taliban.  For years, I have advocated tying our military assistance to Pakistan, to more effective and complete cooperation in the fight against terrorism.  So I am gratified that the House has finally adopted that position last week as part of H.R. 1 which the President is expected to sign into law.

            But terrorism isn’t the only place where Pakistani efforts, and Administration policy, have been less than fully effective.  The return to a democratic government has been too long delayed and the prospect of elections this year should remind us all just how deeply flawed the 2002 elections were.  We cannot tolerate a repetition of the process that marginalized the moderate and secular political parties – flawed as they may be -- and produced Islamist majorities in the Northwest Frontier Province, a share of power for them in Balochistan and the biggest Islamist electoral victories on the national level in Pakistan’s brief history. 

The restoration of the Chief Justice earlier this month shows that the rule of law is still honored in Pakistan, if mainly in the breach.   President/General Musharraf should step down as Army Chief of Staff at the end of the year when his authority to hold both positions expires and he should stand for election as President after free and fair elections have produced a new national assembly.  There are dangers in elections to be sure, and no guarantee the outcome will be entirely to our liking, but a government of Pakistan that is the result of free and fair elections will have greater legitimacy with its own people to pursue the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

            In Bangladesh, a care-taker government backed by the Army has delayed elections until sometime next year and has instead arrested one former Prime Minister, is threatening to arrest another and has imprisoned hundreds if not thousands of politicians and business leaders on vague charges of corruption.  While I believe that neither of the two major parties in Bangladesh have brought any great good to the Bangladeshi people, I’m hard pressed to understand how an extra-constitutional process brings about political reform.  From where I sit this looks remarkably like what Musharraf did in Pakistan – clear the field of the mainstream parties and inadvertently open the door to the Islamist parties, some of whom have particularly odious associations with known terrorists and terrorist organizations.  The Administration has previously described Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim democratic state.  After the care-taker government gets done however, describing Bangladesh as moderate and democratic will strain credulity.

The 2002 ceasefire in Sri Lanka exists only on paper as both the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam have resumed full scale conflict resulting in over 4,000 dead, hundreds of thousands displaced and massive human rights violations committed by both sides.  In particular, the government of Sri Lanka seems intent on winning the conflict militarily and has resorted to alliances with pro-government Tamil militias, extrajudicial killings and disappearances of political opponents.  Hundreds of Sri Lankans have been detained under newly strengthened emergency regulations.  The expansion of emergency powers, the wide-spread use of extra-judicial killings and disappearances by the government and the free reign given by the government to Sinhalese nationalists only accelerates Sri Lanka’s descent into chaos and drift away from democracy.

            While Nepal had previously represented a bright spot in an otherwise dismal South Asian political scene, the delay of elections for a constituent assembly until November, the threat of Maoist withdrawal from the interim government, their uncertain commitment to a peaceful resolution to the insurgency and ethnic unrest in the Terai region have all pushed Nepal further from the restoration of democracy.  These delays provide a dangerous opportunity for the King and his supporters to reassert the monarchy in ways that can only be described as counter-productive.

Five months ago, at our hearing on South Asia, I noted that the lesson of September 11 is that we cannot afford to allow any state to succumb to any individual or combination of transnational threats -- that even if the smallest and most remote of states fails, it poses a threat to us and our allies.  Five months later, events in the four nations we are discussing today have gotten worse and the possibility of failure looms even larger.

Now, I’d like to recognize my friend from Indiana, the Ranking Member, Mr. Pence.

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