By Eric Robinson

The Washington Post recently published a series of excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s War.” Inside, the author offers an insider’s view of the President’s foreign policy team, their personalities and the factors upon which they rendered their decisions. Woodward wrote four enormously successful books on the Bush administration’s deliberations over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this new volume will likely follow a similar procedure. What has stuck me, however, is how Woodward’s book has continued a lengthy narrative within the United States regarding Pakistan. The new book quotes President Obama as stating “…we need to be clear…the cancer is in Pakistan” in November 2009, demonstrating official recognition that one of the main reasons the war in Afghanistan is going so poorly is that Pakistan’s troubles are spilling across the Durand Line.

Before the fanfare over “Obama’s Wars,” the WikiLeaks controversy briefly dominated media attention. The publication of a range of intelligence reports (all illegally obtained, of course) failed to truly shock anyone in the United States – it simply continued a long standing suspicion over the complicity of the Pakistani government with the regional insurgency. Nothing was revelatory, besides that there were now official documents suggesting deep Pakistani involvement in the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Neither WikiLeaks or Bob Woodward are likely to seriously affect American policy in Afghanistan. The association of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate with regional insurgents has been known since the Carter administration. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have tried to contend with this fact; if anything WikiLeaks and Bob Woodward’s revelations demonstrate that their attempts in this regard have been unsuccessful. For those watching casualty counts coming out of Afghanistan this is hardly surprising.

This recognition leads me to the Woodward/WikiLeaks effect. I suppose these efforts, if anything, have helped to shape US public opinion on Pakistan, and in a sharply negative way. A Google search of “US Popular Perception of Pakistan” provides links to “Pakistani Perceptions of the US” or some variation to it. As might be expected, the US does not come out favorably in these polls. Perhaps another, if entirely unscientific, metric of the Woodward/WikiLeaks effect is to examine the US response to the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan.

Americans, despite being remarkably philanthropic as a society, have had to be petitioned by Secretary of State Clinton to contribute relief to this disaster. According to an NPR report, private individuals and organizations donated just $25 million in the wake of the flooding in Pakistan. Compare this to the $900 million donated to Haiti in the five weeks after their January 2010 earthquake, or the US response to the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, and it becomes impossible to not see a major discrepancy. It must be admitted that the death toll in the tsunami and the Haiti earthquake were far more severe, and in a shorter timeframe. Furthermore, these events are momentarily cataclysmic, while a long season of excessive flooding is not as dramatic. Still, and while once again this is an unscientific form of comparison, but there may be politics at work.

Pakistan, according to the late Prime Minister Ali Bhutto, was willing to “eat grass” in order to develop a nuclear weapons program. Insurgents based in Pakistan have conducted a variety of attacks into India for decades, helping maintain the world’s most dangerous armed state-to-state standoff. Pakistan, admittedly with the US and Saudi Arabia writing the checks, made itself home for a new breed of religiously-motivated terrorism throughout the 1980s. In the next decade, Pakistan helped the Taliban conquer most of Afghanistan, standing idle as they brutally oppressed women , committed massive human rights abuses against ethnic minorities and allowed Al Qaida a base to conduct their worldwide operations. Now, as NATO and US forces are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, the Woodward/WikiLeaks effect has help lift a long-standing veil, and shown that the Pakistani government is not a reliable or noble strategic partner. This pattern of events is not lost on the American public.

The government of Pakistan, with half the country apparently on fire from insurgency and terrorism, and the other half underwater from flooding, remains incapable of even providing the “grass” that Ali Bhutto guaranteed his country’s citizens. The US and the international community therefore should provide as much humanitarian assistance to Pakistan as possible. It is simply a moral imperative on behalf of the vast majority of the more than 160 million Pakistanis who have nothing to do with their nation’s military-intelligence complex, their reckless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, their complicity with the Taliban or their dire domestic political circumstances.

While recognizing the moral imperative behind this, one cannot disassociate it from the political realities behind it. I imagine that the lack of trust in the Pakistani government will continue to hinder the international aid effort, and that is a sad reality. Expect US donations to continue to trickle. I imagine we will not see a star-studded telethon in primetime. This sad state of affairs, if anything, is the most current evidence of a Woodward/WikiLeaks effect.