Pakistan: Clinton’s blunt challenge

This wasn’t quite the “fence-mending tour” that Washington was

expecting, said Paul Richter in the Los Angeles Times. When Hillary Clinton visited Pakistan as secretary of state for the first time last week, she hoped to patch up relations with our reluctant ally in the war on terror. But on her second day, after a car bomb in Peshawar killed more than 100, she lit into her hosts for failing to root out Islamic extremists. “Al Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002,” she told a group of Pakistani journalists. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” In surprisingly blunt exchanges with Pakistanis at a number of stops, Clinton listened to complaints about U.S. policy, but gave as good as she got. When a journalist protested that Pakistan had done plenty for the U.S., Clinton shot back, “We have also given you billions.”

“Brava!” said Jonathan Capehart in WashingtonPost.com. With her frank talk, Clinton “gave voice to long-held yet never publicly uttered frustrations” with our unreliable ally. It’s about time, said Sumit Ganguly in The Wall Street Journal. Since 9/11, the U.S. has given Pakistan $11 billion in aid in hopes that Islamabad would take on the country’s Islamic terrorist groups. But until recently, Pakistan has largely ignored the Islamic militants hiding in the remote regions bordering Afghanistan. Even now, when the Pakistani army is on the offensive in the tribal regions, journalists and Westerners are being kept out, so it’s impossible to know whether militant leaders are being eliminated or just chased from place to place.

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If anyone’s to blame here, said the Peshawar Frontier Post in an editorial, it’s not us. When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, “they failed to put enough boots on the ground to mop up the fleeing rump of al Qaida and prevent them from escaping.” Since then, our military has killed scores of them. And for that, Clinton calls us “liars, cheats, and frauds.” There’s a pattern developing here, said Michael Crowley in The New Republic Online. When Clinton earlier this year dismissed North Korea’s leadership as “unruly teenagers,” and said in China that human rights really don’t matter, she appeared to be speaking off the cuff. Her comments in Pakistan also seemed unscripted. Clinton the candidate was famous for her “message discipline,” but as secretary of state, she’s proving to be surprisingly undiplomatic.