Last night, as DaJuan Summers scored a career-high 24 points across town and as political junkies watched early Super Tuesday results across campus, a small crowd gathered in the SFS Frat House to listen to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll speak about the on-going crisis in Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf’s weaknesses and which 2008 candidates are capable of dealing with Pakistan.

Coll, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a former managing editor of the Washington Post, has been covering Pakistan for 20 years, with his most recent piece, on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, appearing in the Jan. 28 issue of the New Yorker.

Currently, Pakistan’s direction is unclear, Coll said, with the Pakistani Taliban “controlling territory in three-dimensional ways” and Musharraf no longer heading the Pakistani army (”the end of an era”).  “There’s something about that character of this moment … that is new,” he said.

Coll went on to call Musharraf “quite a clumsy politician,” pointing to a press conference in which Musharraf seemed to be inventing the roll he would play in the Pakistani government following his resignation as army chief.  “Are you saying that in the hopes of if you say it, it will be true?” he asked of Musharraf.

Though at one point Coll said he didn’t want to get too wonky, his speech was sprinkled with references and acronyms that would have been lost upon those without familiarity with the region.  Fortunately, the majority of the crowd of 22 (17 guys, only 5 girls) seemed to have little trouble following along as with Coll’s detailed analysis.

Coll also spoke about the U.S.’s relationship with Pakistan, opining that the Pakistani army is much better at managing its relationship with the U.S. than the U.S. is at managing its relationship with the Pakistani army.

“They wake up in the morning and they spend 8 to 10 hours thinking about how to manage [their relationship with the U.S.],” he said.  For the U.S. “at best, it’s a 30 minute item in a 6-hour Iraq day, a 3-hour China day.”

At the end of the event, talk turned to the 2008 election.  When asked which of the candidates was capable of dealing with Pakistan, Coll gave an answer he jokingly called  “mealy-mouthed,” saying that Clinton and McCain both have solid diplomatic experience in South Asia, though he was unsure what McCain’s actual policy would be.  As for Obama, Coll said, “His intuition about our place in the world seems to be sound.”

Then Coll was off to watch the primary returns.  “Boy, this is the most exciting [election] that I can remember,” he said.  “Not on the Republican side, frankly.”

Photo by Sam Sweeney

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Campus News, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.