Hillary on Pakistan: An “Existential Threat”
By SusanUnPC on April 23, 2009 at 7:41 PM in Afghanistan, Current Affairs, Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Taliban
I treasure the Hillary Clinton who spoke to the House Foreign Affairs committee members: She’s feisty, focused, determined, no-nonsense, outspoken, nobody’s fool, and thanks to hard, hard work and burning of midnight oil, armed with a full knowledge of history and current issues at her fingertips. [Update: Watch the entire hearing. h/t B.] This is a follow-up to my earlier story, “Taliban Encroachment in Pakistan Grows at Terrifying Pace: What Does the U.S. Do?.” (Stay tuned for another story on Pakistan by John Batchelor.)
“Video: Hillary Clinton Says “Existential Threat” in Pakistan (22 April 2009),” EnduringAmerica.com, April 22, 2009:
Hillary Clinton has made headlines this morning with this warning: “I think that we cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by continuing advances, now within hours of Islamabad, that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state, a nuclear-armed state.”
Clinton has called on the Pakistani people to rise up against the threat in the Northwest Frontier Provinces: “”I don’t hear that kind of outrage and concern coming from enough people that would reverberate back within the highest echelons of the civilian and military leadership of Pakistan.”
On April 23, 2009, at the House Foreign Affairs Hearing:
MORE from Hillary on Pakistan, and the government ceding territory to the insurgents:
The State Department has posted Secretary Clinton’s entire opening remarks and video, “National Security Through Diplomacy,” from the April 23rd hearing. Here is the portion related to Pakistan:
But progress in Afghanistan, we believe, depends on progress in Pakistan. And we do seek supplemental funding of $497 million. I take very seriously Chairman Obey’s comments and cautions. And Mr. Chairman, my view on this is that in order to manage, we have to make these commitments. We have to keep our pledge at the Tokyo Donors’ Conference. Other nations seek Pakistan as we now do, and therefore came forward with $5.5 billion in commitments. We have to try to strengthen civilian law enforcement, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the Northwest Frontier Province.
And there are humanitarian needs that we think serve our national security interests, which we have, in my view, never sufficiently built on. Following the earthquake in Pakistan, Pakistani public opinion toward America improved dramatically, because we were there with both military and civilian assets to help the people who had been stricken by the earthquake. We never followed through. We never had a strategy to say, “We’ve made some progress in these areas. What more do we need to do to consolidate that?”
Key to our new strategy for both Afghanistan and Pakistan is to hold ourselves and our partners accountable and we are committed to doing that. We obviously are going to set performance measures. I remember very well for six years on the Armed Services Committee trying to get accountability measures for both Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to get what we then called benchmarks. We never got them. We’re going to prepare them. We’re going to share them with you. We’re going to work with you to try to figure out what are the ways we can tell whether we are successfully managing and/or solving our challenges. …
FULL VIDEO:
Additional reports and video:
From Secretary Clinton’s opening remarks to the House committee on Foreign Affairs:
Now, I know that many of your questions today will deal with longstanding concerns: Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, certainly the Middle East, the fallout from the global financial crisis. I will speak briefly to those, and I look forward to answering any questions you might have.
As you know, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the President has outlined a strategy centered on a core goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida, and to prevent their safe return to havens in Afghanistan or Pakistan. We combined our strategic review with intensive diplomacy, and nations from around the world are joining our efforts. More than 80 countries and organizations participated in the international conference in The Hague, and a donors’ conference just concluded in Tokyo raised over $5 billion.
by Ronald Scott
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