What's the connection you ask? - Short term thinking. Not seeing what's in front of your nose.
It is being reported that Hillary Clinton called the leader of opposition the night before the long march in Pakistan and told him to back of the "Long March" of lawyers, which was set to culminate in Islamabad today, and guaranteed him that his state govt. would be restored in the province of Punjab. He refused and explained to her, very politely, that the "Long March" was not for his govt. it was for the larger goal of restoration of an independent judiciary and rule of law in Pakistan and how that in the future would guarantee stability and peace in the long run amongst the populous. His political party went on to support the lawyers movement that started 2 yrs ago, and the Justices that were thrown off the court by dictator Mushrraf were restored under pressure of the masses moving towards the capital.
The point - Hillary Clinton as the representative of Barrack Obama's admin. was asking the Pakistanis to sacrifice long term stability and a larger principle in order to gain short term benefits. Zibignew B. is the poster child for that.
Zibignew was the architect of the US foreign policy in the first Afghan war, the strategy very simply was to send out a call for Jihad and to train the afghans and fundamentalist Muslims from all around the world who came to fight the USSR. So the US fought a war with the USSR using Jihadis that later came to bite us all, and by all I mean THE WOLRD, as blowback.
In a 1998 interview Zibignew B. famously quipped ‘What is more important? The demise of the Soviet empire or a few stirred up Muslims?’ - A few stirred up Muslims? really? Is that how he sees Al-Qaeda and the insane amount of terrorist running around because he failed to calculate the outcome of arming religious fanatics? This man truly has no shame.
Not having the capacity to see what the future repercussions of such policy could be, he himself gave speeches justifying Jihad against USSR, did he know what it even meant to the fundamentalists he was training? and if he didn't is that not ignorance to an extreme, the kind that should disqualify him from ever speaking about this again for he has zero credibility on the subject, where’s the accountability?
In a discussion on Joe Scarborough's show a few months ago when another commentator pointed out how deeply Pakistanis want freedom and rule of law, Zibignew chided him and said he was wrong and that there is no evidence of that. Despite the fact that Pakistanis had been struggling for it and demanding both from the Bush backed dictator Mushraff for years. Now that the lawyer’s movement in Pakistan has prevailed, Zbignew was proven wrong yet again.
When I see him pontificate about the mess in the Af-Pak border and how Obama should go about handling it, I am reminded about how he is the master of short term thinking and of his role in instigating a policy that led to the mess we are in now. He has never apologized for this and he probably never will but his chastising even a foreign affair simpleton like Joe Scarborough seems disingenuous at best.
The Obama admin. should beware of such old school pundits who have proven that they were wrong time and again and lack the very basic understanding of human nature and national development needed to sustains peace and prosperity in regions.
The State dept. and Obama admin. made a mistake by not openly standing with the Pakistani people, this was a chance for them to depart from Bush's policy of supporting oppression and dictators (civil or military) -and they missed it. I am just afraid that they might be relying on fools like Zbignew B. for advice on the subject, I hope I am wrong.