Did the US Avert a Coup in Pakistan? No.

And now an enlightening tale of the Internet and how to substitute an exaggeration for the real story:

This morning there are stories flying around the Web that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, may have stopped a military coup in Pakistan through a series of phone call to General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, through a series of phone calls.

It is being reported by more reliable sources like Al Jazeera that Kiani and President Asif Ali Zardari have clashed in the last 24 hours, but Mullen didn't intervene to stop a military takeover. Here's how the rumour, and distortion, started.

On Thursday night, Mullen was interviewed by Charlie Rose of the US Public Broadcasting System. Here's the video and transcript of the key exchange in the discussion:

CHARLIE ROSE: But you see reports today of increasing strife between Zardari, the leader of Pakistan, and his opposition, worrying some people that it might become Musharraf all over again.

MICHAEL MULLEN: Sure. We’re watching -- obviously watching this lawyers march very carefully. And I’ve been engaged from the standpoint of understanding what’s going on there, and I know that there are people are concerned that this could degenerate into a situation that could very possibly generate a crisis, which may cause actions to be taken on the part of the military.

I don’t think that possibility is out there as a high probability right now, but certainly it’s a concern. And I’ve interacted with my counterpart in Pakistan upwards of 10 times. I mean, I’ve been with him
upwards of 10 times over the last year, and he is committed to a civilian government. He’s committed to the democracy that’s there. In my view, the last thing in the world he wants to do is become -- is take over as President Musharraf did.

CHARLIE ROSE: He wants to stay out of politics?

MICHAEL MULLEN: He does want to stay out of politics. He also -- he wants to do the right thing for Pakistan. And he’s in a very, very tough spot. He also knows his country well, and so obviously he’s paying a lot of attention to this as well, as we all are. And I’m just hopeful that this doesn’t turn into another crisis in Pakistan.

This is straightforward: those pushing the "coup" question have turned Mullen's 10 exchanges with Kiani over the last year, which include recent meetings in Washington and Kabul, into 10 phone calls from Mullen to Kiani in recent days. Those discussions were on broader military matters, notably the handling of the insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Provinces.

The US Government does not want a coup in the middle of this crisis. If Washington thinks Zardari is too damaging to stay in power, then it will look for his replacement, but at a quieter time and a less dramatic process.

If those jumping to coup conclusions had listened to the next section of Mullen's interview, they would have gotten to the real heart of the story:

CHARLIE ROSE: How do you get the army chief of staff, Kiyani, to take those military forces and use them not in anticipation of conflict with India, but more in pursuit of forces that want to destabilize Pakistan?

MICHAEL MULLEN: Well, first of all, he recognizes that he has an extremist threat in Pakistan. They’ve lost many, many citizens. And in fact, there’s -- if you look at the suicide bombings which have occurred over the last year or so, they’ve actually moved towards -- and a couple of them have actually occurred in Islamabad. So he recognizes there’s a serious extremist terrorist threat inside his country, and in fact his forces have fought very hard this year up in Bajaur, which is in Mohmand, up on the western border.

Clearly, the Mumbai attacks in India put him in a position where he had to focus more on the Indian border, and he has. I mean, he’s a chief who’s got threats coming from both directions. It’s very important -- and I give President Musharraf and Prime Minister Singh a lot of credit - because they actually detentioned [sic] that border during President Musharraf’s time, and in fact the tourism started to flourish, there was trade which started to flourish across that border, and all that got suspended with the Mumbai attacks.

So General Kiyani knows what he has to do. He needs to move more troops to the west and he needs to train them in counterinsurgency.

There you have it. As Josh Mull has noted on this site, the Obama Administration wants to keep the Pakistani military focused on the "sanctuary" in the northwest and wants the Pakistani Government firmly behind Pakistani, US, and joint operations there. There should be no conflict with India distracting from that effort.

And --- here is the point of the US policy towards the Long March --- there should be no distraction of domestic politics from that overriding objective. So Washington's efforts over the last few days have been not to topple Zardari but to get the President to back off from a showdown with political rivals like Nawaz Sharif and to be careful in his handling of the lawyers' movement.

If Zardari continues to see political and judicial opponents as Public Enemies Number One, and thus loses the plot on the approach to the "real" insurgency, then he may have to go.

But not now.

UPDATED Obama and Iran: Engagement, Muddle, and Hysteria

Update: Iran's Foreign Ministry has replied to Mullen's comment, ""All these statements regarding the production of a nuclear bomb are very baseless. It is baseless from a technical point of view and has propaganda connotations."

On Friday, after President Obama's speech on Iraq and its recommendation for talks with Iran and Syria, we wrote, "Watch the manoeuvres of those who are hostile to any engagement not only because they don’t like 'rogue states'."

And so it goes.

In a travesty of an interview on Sunday, CNN's John King led Admiral Mike Mullen (pictured), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, down the sensational road to Mullen's statement that Iran "has enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb": "And Iran having a nuclear weapon I’ve believed for a long time is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world."

Unsurprisingly, those sentences have become bold-letter headlines this morning. Here, though, is the essential context for what was either 1) an Admiral being manoeuvred into a very silly mistake or 2) another example of the US military trying to bump others in the Obama Administration into a harder line.

Near the end of an interview which was devoted mainly to Iraq and Afghanistan, King and Mullen stood in front of one of those multi-coloured plasma maps that CNN uses as eye-candy as the CNN anchorman said, "If we come down to the right here, Iran, obviously, the International Atomic Energy Agency said last week they think that they were wrong in the past, that Iran might now have enough fissile material to make a bomb. Does Iran have enough to make a bomb?"

King, who has risen through the CNN ranks because of chiseled looks and broad shoulders rather than any detail of knowledge, had asked an question based on a falsehood. The IAEA did not say "they were wrong in the past". Their report explained that quantities of Iran's enriched uranium were one-third higher than previously stated because the amounts were verified by observation rather than estimates. And the IAEA, while saying that Iran might soon have a quantity of uranium sufficienct for one bomb, also said that the uranium was not of sufficient quality (it is enriched to 4% and 90% is the magic number needed).

Mullen could have said, "The Administration is currently conducting a review of policy towards Iran" (or, in a dream world, "John, you're a mannequin posing as a reporter"). He could have left it at that, as there was little time left in the interview. Instead, he nodded at King and the multi-coloured map and said:

We think they do, quite frankly. And Iran having a nuclear weapon I’ve believed for a long time is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world.

And that was it for Tehran. CNN spun the lights and the geography to North Korea so King could ask about their bomb, to which Mullen gave a more sensible response, one guaranteed not to make headlines:

Secretary Gates and I have made no recommendations. But it’s -- it’s an area that we watch with great concern. And I would hope that North Korea would not be provocative.

It is notable that Mullen did not say a word about Iran in his other Sunday interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News. And it's even more notable that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates slapped down Mullen's claim when he talked with David Gregory on NBC's Meet the Press:

[The Iranians are] not close to a uranium stockpile. They’re not close to a weapon, at this point, and so there is some time.

Indeed, Gates' much-longer answer on Iran is the one that deserves to be dissected this morning. He effectively laid out the "engagement" strategy. Negotiate with Tehran --- if the talks aren't satisfactory, then Washington has the cause for tougher economic sanctions:

GATES: I don’t think that either the last administration or the current one have been distracted from the growing problem with Iran and its nuclear program in the least over the last number of years. We worried about it well before even the Bush administration.
So I -- I think that there has been a continuing focus on how do you get the Iranians to walk away from a nuclear weapons program?
They’re not close to a stockpile. They’re not close to a weapon, at this point, and so there is some time.
And the question is whether you can increase the level of the sanctions and the cost to the Iranians of pursuing that program at the same time you show them an open door if they want to engage with the Europeans, with us, and so on, if they walk away from that program.
Our chances of being successful, it seems to me, are a lot better at $35 or $40 oil than they were at $140 oil because there are economic costs to this program, they do have economic challenges at home.
GREGORY: You do see the need, though, for a -- some kind of strategic relationship between the U.S. and Iran?
GATES: Well, I think that -- that’s really up to the Iranians. I’ve been -- as I like to say, I’ve been in this search for the elusive Iranian moderate for 30 years. I’m still looking.

Unfortunately, it's Mullen who has played into the more-established, if inaccurate, media line that Iran is about to get The Bomb. And with newspapers like The Times of London running hysterical campaigns on the Tehran threat --- see analyst Bronwen Maddox's Friday scenario of an Iranian invasion of Bahrain and Sunday's article claiming Tehran is funneling missiles to the Taliban --- it is that wave that could sink the Obama strategy of engagement.