The US And Pakistan

June 22nd, 2011
11:04 AM ET

Zakaria: Obama wants to rebalance U.S. foreign policy

I spoke with Anderson Cooper last night about Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here's the transcript of our conversation:

COOPER: So, there have been several incidents of insurgents in Pakistan abandoning bomb-making facilities after the U.S. informed the Pakistani regime about them. That certainly seems to play into all of the U.S.' concerns about collaboration between elements within the Pakistani military and terrorist groups.

FAREED ZAKARIA: Look, at this point, there's really no question. Everybody has noticed a pattern in which, when you ask the Pakistani military for help with regard to certain militants, certain groups, certain bomb-making factories, by the time you get there in 50 percent of the cases, the militants have been tipped off.

I think it's important to point out I don't think this is happening at the very highest level. I don't think General Kayani, the head of the army, or perhaps even General Pasha, the head of the ISI, the intelligence service, knows about this.

But that's even worse, because what it suggests is that there are elements of the Pakistani military that are infiltrated with this radical Islamist ideology, and they're being insubordinate. They have become rogue elements within the Pakistani military. This is very disturbing, because most of us always believed that, for all its problems, the Pakistani military was a professional military.

COOPER: And we have always talked about kind of lower-level elements in the ISI or in the military that may have connections, but now you have a brigadier general, highest-ranking senior officer, arrested in Pakistan and being held for links to a banned group in Pakistan.

ZAKARIA: Yes, this is quite striking, for the reason you say, a very senior guy, a brigadier general, and with a very nasty organization.

COOPER: Right. It's called - I had never heard of it. It's called Hizb ut Tahrir?

ZAKARIA: Right, Hizb ut Tahrir. It's a strange organization founded in the '50s, I think, in the 1950s in Jerusalem, really one of the original Pan-Islamic terrorist organizations, in a way a role model for al Qaeda, very strong in Central Asia.

COOPER: They want U.S. troops out of Pakistan, out of the region, and a Muslim caliphate?

ZAKARIA: Yes, they want - exactly. There goals are pretty much al Qaeda's goals. It's a caliphate. It's a hard-line Sunni organization. They don't believe in women being educated.

It's about as extreme as you can get. Musharraf tried to ban them. But in Pakistan, they haven't done any real violence yet. So a court order overturned the ban, because it said this is jut free speech.

But, still, they're a very nasty group. And the fact that he would be tied to them suggests that there is again some international dimension to this as well.

COOPER: Do you think his arrest is sort of an olive branch to the United States? Or do you think it's in Pakistan's best interests?

ZAKARIA: No, I think it's precisely that. I don't know if it's an olive branch, but I think that CIA and the Obama administration have been pressing the Pakistani military.

I know that they have given them a list of specific things they want them to do. And among them are to try and figure out really who has infiltrated within the Pakistani military. And they're trying to deliver on those things.

It is in Pakistan's best interests.

COOPER: Right.

ZAKARIA: But, unfortunately, that is not always how the Pakistani military sees it.

COOPER: Were you surprised by the announcement of the levels of the troop withdrawal that we're going to be seeing or allegedly will be seeing in Afghanistan?

ZAKARIA: I am not surprised, because I think Obama's heart was always more with Joe Biden. If you remember, there was this debate. Biden wanted a much smaller troop presence in Afghanistan and a focus on counterterrorism. Petraeus and Gates said, no, let's go in there and do the surge.

I think that Obama really was more in Biden's camp, but the military outfoxed him by leaking their recommendations, and a Democratic president can't go against certainly a military adviser like Petraeus.

COOPER: That's interesting. So you think he was really more wanting the more counterinsurgency strategy?

ZAKARIA: Yes. I think so. I think his his basic view is that we have too large a military footprint in these places, that what we need to do is draw down and broadly rebalance American foreign policy away from this massive investment in Afghanistan, Iraq and the broader Middle East.

He wants to move to dealing with issues relating to the rise of China, India, Russia. And this I think means that you stay bogged down, because when you have those many troops in a country, Anderson, as you know, 90 percent of a president's time ultimately is taken up on where American troops are.