by Afrah Jamal

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power
By David E Sanger Harmony; Pp 472

Today, US Vice President Joe
Biden believes that the US foreign policy is once again respected in the world. While the new face of this policy — composed of something old, something new and something borrowed — unveiled a year ago was a prelude to Obama’s uphill battle to regain the military/political high ground; the fallout from the old policy is the dominant theme here.

The Inheritance is a dramatic playback of events that follows parallel timelines to determine how certain parts of the world were shaping during the Iraq war. David Sanger has logged seven years of covering the White House and uses insights gained during his time as chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times to ascertain the opportunities missed by one president, identify forthcoming challenges for the next and explore options still left in the smouldering ruins of disastrous decisions. He uses solid arguments based on interviews (on/off the record) with key officials to crucify where needed and credit where appropriate.

This skilfully drawn sketch captures key moments that defined the presidency and redefined history. Post-Iraq, the troika (think axis of evil) are emboldened to pursue dangerous agendas (page 85), abandoned nations become epicentres of trouble while savvy ones find ways to profit. An unsparing look at the Bush administration shows the unintended side effects of Iraq leading “‘Dear Leader’ in North Korea to build a nuclear arsenal and ‘Supreme Leader’ in Iran to assemble a nuclear capability” (page 85). There are several instances where the administration also concedes its failure (page 236). Then there is the tragic irony where actual evidence of nuclear proliferation was held back because of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fiasco.

Sanger demonstrates Iraq as a vortex that sucked away aid — $ 18 billion for Iraq in 2004 vs $ 720 million for Afghanistan (page 141) — and resources from the primary war at a critical juncture that might have prevented a resurgence of the Taliban. Along the way, he appreciates that the US is a nation that wields the largest hammer, but not every problem is a nail (page 134).

Sanger’s visit to the Strategic Plans Division in the GHQ, home to Pakistan’s nuclear keys (page 176), betrays the prevalent fear about the safety of its nuclear arsenal and widens the discussion to build a case for the invasion of an ally. The composite drawn from talks with US Director of National Intelligence bolsters his view of Musharraf as a master of the double game (page 234): a government that is complicit based on one officer’s fiery speech about supporting the Afghan Taliban and an intercepted call where Pakistan Army chief General Kayani allegedly calls Hekmatyar a ‘strategic asset’.

Heightened distrust, backed by credible sounding intelligence led to a gradual shift in the US administration’s attitude towards their ally, giving greater latitude to drones and ‘special’ forces. Among the accusations are repeated claims of the Pakistani forces actively supporting the Taliban with Pakistan quietly arming/training militants and other insurgent groups in an effort to gain greater influence over the tribal areas (page 121). Of course, to conclude that these are not rogue ISI agents but sanctioned policies is pure conjecture. There have been enough attacks on the Pakistani security forces to disprove the theory. Referring to the trim houses and well-tended lawns in Chaklala Cantt, he is left to conclude that “….both army and ISI have reserved society’s best privileges for themselves” (page 176). Perhaps if the local bodies took better care of their districts, the disparity between the two halves would not be so striking, or embarrassing for that matter.

While some of the suspicions (that militants and intelligence agencies are hand in glove) are shared by Pakistanis as revealed by Imtiaz Gul’s book The Al-Qaeda Connection, they are just that — suspicions. Confronted with such a devastating brew of insinuations and ‘cherry picked intelligence’, the reader wonders why would you not invade such an ally, if, of course, one truly believed the said ally was in effect blatantly subverting the US interests from the safety of its well-tended lawns. Fortunately, the recent capture of a key Afghan Taliban figure in a joint CIA-ISI operation goes against the carefully built up case against Pakistan. Besides these maddening declarations, The Inheritance slips up when it asserts that the Pakistani cabinet was to dine at Marriott the day it was bombed in 2007. The government did try to portray itself as a target, but the author missed Marriott’s owner Hashwani’s testimony (see BBC, CNN) where he dismissed the government’s claim.

A jaded worldview of Pakistan aside, the book’s strength lies in its ability to infuse excitement in an otherwise drab subject matter. This widescreen view also ponders on the implications of China’s burgeoning economy already slated to overtake Japan, credits Bush with getting several China priorities right (page 395) and seeks ways to manage, not contain, the Chinese, given their increasing interdependence. A very delightful, if imaginary, conversation between Obama and the Chinese has also been thrown in. Finally, we flash-forward to a couple of nightmarish scenarios to demonstrate the US’s preparedness against a nuclear/biological/cyber attack.

David Sanger retrofits history with his version of a Global Positioning System (GPS) to serve a dual purpose: as a navigation device it gives the new administration manoeuvring space; the benefit of hindsight surely provides a nicer looking roadmap.

Afrah Jamal is a freelance journalist and former editor, Social Pages. She can be reached at afrahjh@hotmail.com