Articles

As Pakistan has forced its way into America's national con sciousness over the past few years, bookshelves have grown crowded with publications devoted to deciphering the murky politics behind this nuclear-armed nation in perpetual crisis. The latest entry to this roster, "The Pakistan Cauldron: Conspiracy, Assassination and Instability," is a welcome one, and comes to us from James Farwell, a strategic communications guru and longtime adviser to U.S. Special Operations Command and Strategic Command.

TODAY, the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report on Iran’s nuclear program. It provides the most convincing evidence to date that Iran is close to producing a nuclear weapon.

But as Iran nears the nuclear threshold, the best way to stop it may be by punishing the Chinese companies that supply Tehran and enable its nuclear progress.

In recent years, the United States has imposed a punishing sanctions regime on Iran’s banking sector. To further increase Tehran’s level of financial pain, a great number of congressional and advocacy groups have repeatedly called on the White House to blacklist the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Doing so, the thinking goes, would seriously hamper the Islamic republic’s ability to abuse international markets in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet unbeknownst to most lawmakers and Washington policymakers, the U.S. Treasury actually hasblacklisted the CBI, and not once, but twice in recent years. The real question is why the U.S. government has not enforced its own sanctions regime.

Tragic is the word most often used to describe the life of Syed Saleem Shahzad. A celebrated Pakistani investigative journalist, Shahzad nearly became a household name in May 2011 after his mysterious murder made international headlines. Reviled by terrorists and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) alike for his penetrating reporting, months before his murder the forty-year-old reporter repeatedly warned friends of specific threats to his life from Pakistani intelligence agents. One day after publishing a report about militant infiltration into Pakistan’s security services, Shahzad was kidnapped. His body was found, dumped in a canal and bearing obvious signs of torture, two days later. Widespread accusations leveled at the ISI inside Pakistan were privately echoed by U.S. officials, marking another grim chapter in the history of the world’s most notorious intelligence service.

It is something of a truism that in Washington, bad ideas never truly go away. Instead, they keep cropping up at the most inopportune moments. So it is with American policy toward Iran. Stymied in recent months by the resilience of Iran's increasingly mature nuclear effort and complicated by the unfolding turmoil of the “Arab Spring,” policymakers inside the Beltway are once again flirting with the idea that some sort of diplomatic rapprochement with the Islamic Republic is in fact possible.