.
Mudy Ji :
Posting this "Long Article" as it is from a subscription site :
[url="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8712/friends-like-these-the-u-s-pakistan-strategic-partnership"][center][size="6"][color="#006400"]Friends Like These : The U.S.-Pakistan Strategic
Partnership![/color][/size][/center][/url]
Jeff M. Smith | 03 May 2011
The United States and Pakistan have sustained a decades-old partnership on the strength of a Cold War alliance and a set of narrow but shared vital interests. However, the relationship has undergone profound changes as a result of the Afghan War, which on one hand has forced the two countries into an awkward but necessary embrace, and on the other exposed deep and potentially irreconcilable differences.
At the core of this rift is Pakistan's duplicitous regional strategy, whereby Islamabad provides critical logistics and intelligence support to America while aiding or turning a blind eye to its extremist enemies. For years this provoked barely a whimper of protest from Washington, which was fearful of criticizing its volatile ally. That is now changing. In public statements and leaked accounts, the Obama administration, Congress and the U.S. military have demonstrated a profound evolution in thinking about Pakistan.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for instance, told a congressional committee in 2009 that Pakistan "poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world." President Barack Obama, we learned from Bob Woodward's "Obama's Wars," thinks his administration needs to "make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan." Even Pakistan's most ardent defenders in the administration are showing signs of fatigue. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who on more than 20 trips to Pakistan has always portrayed the relationship in a favorable light, recently raised eyebrows by publicly accusing Pakistan's military intelligence apparatus, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of having "a longstanding relationship with the Haqqani network," a ruthless Taliban ally. Such openly expressed criticisms from top American officials would have been heresy just a few years ago.
Indeed, the terms of Washington's debate over Pakistan are shifting. The new generation of policymakers have no fond Cold War memories to draw from, only a strong association between Pakistan and Islamist extremism. Behind closed doors, even Pakistan's many remaining advocates in Washington have lost the zeal to defend the country from charges that it is playing a "double game"; they have too few interlocutors left who would believe them.
However, there remains a fundamental disconnect between this maturing view of Pakistan and the policy it informs. At the same time that U.S. officials have become increasingly candid about Pakistan's malignant role in the Afghan War, they appear determined to pursue the same failed strategies that perpetuate this behavior. Only months after issuing a report to Congress stating that Pakistan's refusal to confront militancy "is as much a political choice as it is a reflection of an under-resourced military prioritizing its targets," the White House conducted a war review in December that concluded the U.S. must provide Pakistan with more military, intelligence and economic support.
One need only look at the views of the government's own experts to expose the absurdity of this strategy -- a task made easier by the thousands of diplomatic cables made public by the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks. In their own words, U.S. officials put the lie to the notion that Pakistan has the will to confront militants but remains in need of more capabilities and aid from America. Exposing this myth as false is the easy part. The real challenge is determining why Pakistan is playing this double game and what the U.S. can do about it.
No Shortage of Capability
At the risk of stating the obvious, a jihadist nexus comprising the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, al-Qaida and allied groups like the Haqqani network have for years used Pakistan's tribal regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as a springboard for attacks on Afghanistan and, increasingly, on Pakistan itself.
For years, Islamabad has explained away the existence of these safe havens by insisting it is perfectly willing to flush out the extremists but lacks the capability to do so. Successive U.S. governments have accepted and catered to this reasoning, despite its obvious dishonesty. The nuclear-armed, million-man Pakistani army is the most powerful institution in the country. Pakistan has already deployed six to seven divisions -- 120,000 troops -- to the violent border regions, with hundreds of thousands in reserve to the east. Yet there is little need to speculate about Pakistan's capabilities: We know the Pakistani military is able to confront the Taliban because it has done so with overwhelming force when Pakistan's leaders have deemed it in their interest. In the spring of 2009, the Pakistani Taliban was on a bloody march toward Islamabad. Feeling genuinely threatened, the military drew a line in the sand and handed the terrorist group stinging defeats in the Swat Valley and later that year in South Waziristan.
The operations demonstrated that Pakistan has abundant capability, thanks in no small part to the U.S., which has provided more than $10 billion in military assistance to Pakistan since Sept. 11. If civilian assistance and future pledges are included, the number is closer to $20 billion. But Pakistan's cavalier allocation of U.S. aid suggests that upgrading its counterterrorism capabilities is no great priority. The AP reported in 2009 that of $6.6 billion in U.S. military aid delivered to Pakistan from 2002 to 2008, all but $500 million was diverted to other nonmilitary programs. American funds were more likely to be channeled to domestic subsidies designed to prop up Pakistan's dysfunctional economy than to meet counterterrorism needs. Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has tirelessly lobbied Washington for large conventional weapons platforms -- and received more than a dozen U.S. F-16s last year -- while boosting its nuclear weapons arsenal at a faster rate that any country in the world. None of this describes a country desperately in need of aid for counterterrorism efforts.
In a 2009 State Department cable revealed by WikiLeaks, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson debunked the myth that confronting the Taliban simply requires the provision of more resources to Islamabad: "There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support for [militant] groups, which it sees as an important part of its national security apparatus against India." Indeed, far from bringing the desired results, aid has at times had the opposite effect. Nevertheless, despite the ambassador's prescient warning, the Obama administration approved an unprecedented $7.5 billion civilian aid package to Pakistan in 2009. The Pakistani parliament was incensed that certain conditions were attached to make Pakistan accountable for the funds. "Aid with strings attached would fail to generate the desired goodwill and results in Pakistan," said Prime Minister Yousef Gilani. He was right: It has generated neither results nor goodwill. Yet the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, appears undeterred, resolved to double down on a tainted investment.
[size="4"]Pakistan's double game . . . [/size]
And Not a Shred of Will
Islamabad has for years angrily denied the existence of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, even when confronted with volumes of U.S. intelligence showing they operate openly from the Pakistani city of Quetta, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. "Those who say that Quetta Shura or Taliban leadership exists in Baluchistan are involved in a conspiracy to destabilize the region. No extremist elements are present in the region," says the inspector general of Pakistan's Frontier Corps. Yet when the Taliban's second-in-command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, began a series of secret negotiations with the Afghan government in 2009, he was immediately arrested by Pakistani forces, who clearly knew the intimate details of his location and day-to-day activities. "We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us. We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians," a Pakistani security official explained to the New York Times.
The story demonstrates clearly that Pakistan suffers not from a lack of capability but a lack of will. This point was expressed most lucidly by the former vice chairman of the U.S. Army, retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane in an interview with PBS Newshour. "Make no mistake about it," said Keane. "The evidence is unequivocal that the government of Pakistan and the military leadership of Pakistan aids and abets [militant] sanctuaries. We have clear evidence to that [effect]. That's the reality. It's not a question of unable or unwilling. They willingly support those sanctuaries."
Keane's final point is worth restating: Pakistan's problem is not a passive lack of will. According to hundreds of news reports, intelligence intercepts, militant confessions and third-party investigations, Islamabad is actively supporting and sheltering militant groups. The intelligence community has resigned itself to this fact. A 2008 presentation to NATO by Peter Lavoy, now chairman of the National Intelligence Council, describes how the ISI "provides intelligence and financial support to insurgent groups to conduct attacks in Afghanistan against the Afghan government, [the U.S.-led coalition], and Indian targets." In a similar vein, a 2009 State Department cable by then-Ambassador Patterson warned that Pakistan will "dramatically increase support for Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan" if a pro-Indian -- meaning non-Taliban -- government takes power in Kabul.
Misguided Strategy
The evidence is so overwhelming and the consensus so broad that exposing Pakistan's double game is at this point elementary. Deciphering why Islamabad continues to support militant groups, however, is a more challenging task, and determining what the U.S. can do about it harder still.
We know the Pakistani military and the ISI have a long history of ties to Islamist militants, from supporting the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s; to backing the original Taliban movement as it swept to power in Kabul in 1990s; to fostering and empowering anti-India jihadist groups to sow terror in Kashmir. But why? The most basic answer is that Pakistan believes these groups advance its "strategic interests" abroad. In Kashmir and other parts of India, using militant proxies allows Pakistan to export terror to its arch-nemesis while avoiding direct confrontation with India's superior military and allowing Islamabad a sliver of implausible deniability.
In Afghanistan, the picture is considerably more complicated. Islamabad has determined that supporting the Taliban will ensure it the greatest level of influence in Kabul. However, the more pertinent question remains: Why is Pakistan so obsessed with influence in a country that lacks resources, infrastructure and access to the sea?
The most frequently cited explanation is that Pakistan seeks "strategic depth" in Afghanistan. Pakistan is geographically narrow and strategically vulnerable: Islamabad is just 50 miles from Indian-controlled Kashmir, and the industrial and cultural heartland of Pakistan, the Punjab, stretches along the Indian border. There is military value in having a desolate, mountainous space on the country's western flank to which Pakistani forces can retreat from a potential Indian invasion and from which they can subsequently counterattack. A less-recognized fear among Pakistanis is that Afghanistan, recently linked by road to the Iranian port of Chabahar, could challenge Islamabad's attempts to become an energy corridor linking Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.
However, the core reason behind Pakistan's support for the Taliban lies with the "Pashtun question," of which the Durand Line -- the colonial-era border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan -- is an integral part. In 1893, the British struck a deal with a weak Afghan government to stretch the northwest border of British India deeper into the Afghan frontier. London sought to use this territory as a buffer zone between India, their prized colonial possession, and the expansionist Russian Empire. However, the new border cut a line through the middle of the Pashtun nation, leaving half of this stateless, fiercely independent ethnic group in what would become West Pakistan. Today there are 25 million Pashtuns in Pakistan and 15 million in Afghanistan.
Since Pakistani independence from Britain in 1947, there have been sporadic periods of agitation among the Pashtun community, with some groups calling for an independent Pashtunistan and others seeking incorporation into Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan, dominated by Punjabis, is obsessively fearful of Pashtun nationalism. These fears were heightened after Pakistan lost 15 percent of its territory to another independence-minded ethnic group in 1971, the year that Bengali-majority East Pakistan fought a successful war for independence to form the country now known as Bangladesh.
Pakistan was formed on the notion that a common religion, Islam, was sufficient to bind together disparate ethnic groups with little shared history, language or culture. However, those bonds are at constant risk of fraying, which is why Pakistan is obsessed with Pashtun nationalism and, consequently, Afghanistan. For its part, Afghanistan holds a potent form of leverage over Pakistan: No government in Kabul, including the Taliban when they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, has ever recognized the Durand Line. Thus, Islamabad sees a strong Afghanistan that could challenge the Durand Line or, worse, incite Pashtun nationalism as an existential threat, and it considers a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as the best safeguard against this possibility.
Pakistan also views Taliban rule as a bulwark against foreign influence in its western neighbor. This foreign influence includes Iran, Russia and the Central Asian nations, who all supported the Northern Alliance in the late 1990s. But it primarily means India, which Pakistan obsessively believes is trying to encircle it despite New Delhi's benign role in Afghanistan thus far.
Finally, Pakistan supports the Taliban and other jihadist groups as a method to channel its own domestic cocktail of frustration, anger and extremism, all fed by grinding poverty, poor education, a dysfunctional judicial system and an army of radical preachers that have filled the country's yawning social void. This is outlined in a U.S. intelligence assessment revealed by WikiLeaks that stated, "Urging militant groups to be outwardly focused is perceived by Pakistani officials as a method to safeguard internal security." By fostering the sense of an impending threat from foreign infidels, Pakistan deflects Pakistanis' frustration with their own government.
[size="4"]The Afghan War limits U.S. influence . . . [/size]
What to Do?
Today, America's options to influence Pakistani behavior are seriously constrained by the Afghan War. It was not always this way. In an epic failure of U.S. foreign policy, America squandered an opportunity in the days after Sept. 11 to demand and ensure a complete end to Pakistani support for Islamist militancy. The Bush administration had Islamabad's full attention when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage warned Pakistani leaders the country would be "bombed back into the Stone Age" if it did not cooperate with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. However, that leverage was wasted when Washington identified al-Qaida as its top priority and looked the other way as Pakistan allowed the "defeated" Taliban to seek haven and regroup within its territory. Nine years later, America is in a much weaker position.
Dealing with Pakistan will always require unique sensitivity given its strategic location, its rivalry with India, its relationship with Islamist militants and, not least, its nuclear weapons arsenal. However, those complications are exponentially compounded by Pakistan's importance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. Geography makes Pakistan vital to the massive challenge of supplying more than 100,000 troops with enough food, fuel and arms to sustain a decade of war. Most of those supplies enter Afghanistan via two road links through Pakistan, after being offloaded at the Pakistani port of Karachi. The U.S. has doggedly pursued alternative logistics routes into Afghanistan, but even with the establishment of a Northern Distribution Network through Russia and Central Asia, and the airlift of sensitive military equipment and fuel, the Pakistani road links still account for at least half of all supplies. And it is improbable that share will be reduced much further.
Islamabad also has others means of leverage over the U.S. war effort. It could curtail the CIA's controversial unmanned aerial drone campaign, which is conducted from inside Pakistan; stop patrolling the already porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border; or cut off existing intelligence cooperation. Indeed, Pakistan has threatened such actions in the past, and twice shut the border -- in September 2008 and September 2010 -- to NATO supply trucks to protest crossborder raids into Pakistani territory. The risk that Pakistan may resort to such countermeasures has heightened in the aftermath of the incident surrounding Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who was detained on Jan. 27, 2011, in Lahore after shooting and killing two Pakistanis he alleged were trying to rob him. Davis was released months later after a grueling diplomatic spat between Washington and Islamabad, but the affair has sent intelligence cooperation to an all-time low. In the months since Davis' release, Pakistan's leadership has grown more vocal in publicly calling for an end to the drone strikes entirely. CIA Director Leon Panetta has rejected that demand, insisting the strikes were a part of his "fundamental responsibility." However, the reality remains that Pakistan has a potent set of sticks at its disposal should it choose to brandish them.
In short, Washington is hamstrung and facing a terrible dilemma: confront Pakistan forcefully and risk suddenly and critically undermining the Afghan war effort, or continue to play the friendly benefactor while allowing Islamabad to gradually undermine the war effort. Most everywhere else in the world this is known as blackmail; in Washington it is called "strategic partnership."
The optimal but elusive third way entails convincing Pakistan that abandoning militant groups is in its own interest. Using diplomatic persuasion and a carrot-heavy approach has failed successive U.S. administrations. Obama should instead focus on employing more sticks, ideally to find the perfect balance that coerces a change in Pakistani behavior without causing an open rift in the relationship. However, Washington should be prepared to deal with the consequences of that rift should it materialize. A falling out with Pakistan would indeed be disastrous for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, but it would be potentially fatal to the Pakistani government.
First, even if the U.S. is not in a position to force Pakistan's hand on the Taliban, nothing obliges Washington to provide Pakistan with billions of dollars in aid while it harbors the group. That so much of the aid is wasted, misspent and unappreciated simply adds insult to injury. Whether or not Pakistan could brave a cutoff of U.S. aid is open to debate. It weathered U.S. sanctions in the 1990s but is in a much weaker economic position today. However, it is inconceivable that Pakistan's economy would survive if the U.S. coordinated with Pakistan's other patrons to condition all aid to Islamabad on a verifiable end of support to all extremist groups. While Washington would likely find it difficult to bring China on board, it might enjoy more support from other Western partners and international institutions such as the IMF.
Even if it does nothing in the short-term, Washington should make it clear that when the Afghan War -- and with it a great deal of Pakistani leverage -- comes to an end, America is prepared to support a virtual aid embargo on Pakistan unless it decisively ceases its support for Islamist militant groups now. That is by no means the only tool available to the U.S. Multilateral sanctions can also be crafted at the United Nations. The provision of spare parts for military equipment can be suspended. Pakistani military and intelligence officials with known ties to the Taliban can be put on the terrorist watch list. If all else fails, the ISI itself can be added to the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
To be sure, wielding these sticks is far from an optimal solution, but neither is showering money on those who harbor one's enemies. There was a time when America insisted it wouldn't distinguish between terrorists and the states that shelter them. Pakistan has made a mockery of that pledge. At long last, U.S. officials seem to have recognized this travesty. Hopefully, in this case, admitting we have a problem will be the first step to recovery.
Jeff M. Smith is the Kraemer Strategy Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Cheers![[Image: beer.gif]](http://www.skyscrapercity.com/images/smilies/beer.gif)
Mudy Ji :
Posting this "Long Article" as it is from a subscription site :
[url="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8712/friends-like-these-the-u-s-pakistan-strategic-partnership"][center][size="6"][color="#006400"]Friends Like These : The U.S.-Pakistan Strategic
Partnership![/color][/size][/center][/url]
Jeff M. Smith | 03 May 2011
The United States and Pakistan have sustained a decades-old partnership on the strength of a Cold War alliance and a set of narrow but shared vital interests. However, the relationship has undergone profound changes as a result of the Afghan War, which on one hand has forced the two countries into an awkward but necessary embrace, and on the other exposed deep and potentially irreconcilable differences.
At the core of this rift is Pakistan's duplicitous regional strategy, whereby Islamabad provides critical logistics and intelligence support to America while aiding or turning a blind eye to its extremist enemies. For years this provoked barely a whimper of protest from Washington, which was fearful of criticizing its volatile ally. That is now changing. In public statements and leaked accounts, the Obama administration, Congress and the U.S. military have demonstrated a profound evolution in thinking about Pakistan.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for instance, told a congressional committee in 2009 that Pakistan "poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world." President Barack Obama, we learned from Bob Woodward's "Obama's Wars," thinks his administration needs to "make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan." Even Pakistan's most ardent defenders in the administration are showing signs of fatigue. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who on more than 20 trips to Pakistan has always portrayed the relationship in a favorable light, recently raised eyebrows by publicly accusing Pakistan's military intelligence apparatus, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of having "a longstanding relationship with the Haqqani network," a ruthless Taliban ally. Such openly expressed criticisms from top American officials would have been heresy just a few years ago.
Indeed, the terms of Washington's debate over Pakistan are shifting. The new generation of policymakers have no fond Cold War memories to draw from, only a strong association between Pakistan and Islamist extremism. Behind closed doors, even Pakistan's many remaining advocates in Washington have lost the zeal to defend the country from charges that it is playing a "double game"; they have too few interlocutors left who would believe them.
However, there remains a fundamental disconnect between this maturing view of Pakistan and the policy it informs. At the same time that U.S. officials have become increasingly candid about Pakistan's malignant role in the Afghan War, they appear determined to pursue the same failed strategies that perpetuate this behavior. Only months after issuing a report to Congress stating that Pakistan's refusal to confront militancy "is as much a political choice as it is a reflection of an under-resourced military prioritizing its targets," the White House conducted a war review in December that concluded the U.S. must provide Pakistan with more military, intelligence and economic support.
One need only look at the views of the government's own experts to expose the absurdity of this strategy -- a task made easier by the thousands of diplomatic cables made public by the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks. In their own words, U.S. officials put the lie to the notion that Pakistan has the will to confront militants but remains in need of more capabilities and aid from America. Exposing this myth as false is the easy part. The real challenge is determining why Pakistan is playing this double game and what the U.S. can do about it.
No Shortage of Capability
At the risk of stating the obvious, a jihadist nexus comprising the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, al-Qaida and allied groups like the Haqqani network have for years used Pakistan's tribal regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as a springboard for attacks on Afghanistan and, increasingly, on Pakistan itself.
For years, Islamabad has explained away the existence of these safe havens by insisting it is perfectly willing to flush out the extremists but lacks the capability to do so. Successive U.S. governments have accepted and catered to this reasoning, despite its obvious dishonesty. The nuclear-armed, million-man Pakistani army is the most powerful institution in the country. Pakistan has already deployed six to seven divisions -- 120,000 troops -- to the violent border regions, with hundreds of thousands in reserve to the east. Yet there is little need to speculate about Pakistan's capabilities: We know the Pakistani military is able to confront the Taliban because it has done so with overwhelming force when Pakistan's leaders have deemed it in their interest. In the spring of 2009, the Pakistani Taliban was on a bloody march toward Islamabad. Feeling genuinely threatened, the military drew a line in the sand and handed the terrorist group stinging defeats in the Swat Valley and later that year in South Waziristan.
The operations demonstrated that Pakistan has abundant capability, thanks in no small part to the U.S., which has provided more than $10 billion in military assistance to Pakistan since Sept. 11. If civilian assistance and future pledges are included, the number is closer to $20 billion. But Pakistan's cavalier allocation of U.S. aid suggests that upgrading its counterterrorism capabilities is no great priority. The AP reported in 2009 that of $6.6 billion in U.S. military aid delivered to Pakistan from 2002 to 2008, all but $500 million was diverted to other nonmilitary programs. American funds were more likely to be channeled to domestic subsidies designed to prop up Pakistan's dysfunctional economy than to meet counterterrorism needs. Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has tirelessly lobbied Washington for large conventional weapons platforms -- and received more than a dozen U.S. F-16s last year -- while boosting its nuclear weapons arsenal at a faster rate that any country in the world. None of this describes a country desperately in need of aid for counterterrorism efforts.
In a 2009 State Department cable revealed by WikiLeaks, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson debunked the myth that confronting the Taliban simply requires the provision of more resources to Islamabad: "There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support for [militant] groups, which it sees as an important part of its national security apparatus against India." Indeed, far from bringing the desired results, aid has at times had the opposite effect. Nevertheless, despite the ambassador's prescient warning, the Obama administration approved an unprecedented $7.5 billion civilian aid package to Pakistan in 2009. The Pakistani parliament was incensed that certain conditions were attached to make Pakistan accountable for the funds. "Aid with strings attached would fail to generate the desired goodwill and results in Pakistan," said Prime Minister Yousef Gilani. He was right: It has generated neither results nor goodwill. Yet the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, appears undeterred, resolved to double down on a tainted investment.
[size="4"]Pakistan's double game . . . [/size]
And Not a Shred of Will
Islamabad has for years angrily denied the existence of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, even when confronted with volumes of U.S. intelligence showing they operate openly from the Pakistani city of Quetta, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. "Those who say that Quetta Shura or Taliban leadership exists in Baluchistan are involved in a conspiracy to destabilize the region. No extremist elements are present in the region," says the inspector general of Pakistan's Frontier Corps. Yet when the Taliban's second-in-command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, began a series of secret negotiations with the Afghan government in 2009, he was immediately arrested by Pakistani forces, who clearly knew the intimate details of his location and day-to-day activities. "We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us. We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians," a Pakistani security official explained to the New York Times.
The story demonstrates clearly that Pakistan suffers not from a lack of capability but a lack of will. This point was expressed most lucidly by the former vice chairman of the U.S. Army, retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane in an interview with PBS Newshour. "Make no mistake about it," said Keane. "The evidence is unequivocal that the government of Pakistan and the military leadership of Pakistan aids and abets [militant] sanctuaries. We have clear evidence to that [effect]. That's the reality. It's not a question of unable or unwilling. They willingly support those sanctuaries."
Keane's final point is worth restating: Pakistan's problem is not a passive lack of will. According to hundreds of news reports, intelligence intercepts, militant confessions and third-party investigations, Islamabad is actively supporting and sheltering militant groups. The intelligence community has resigned itself to this fact. A 2008 presentation to NATO by Peter Lavoy, now chairman of the National Intelligence Council, describes how the ISI "provides intelligence and financial support to insurgent groups to conduct attacks in Afghanistan against the Afghan government, [the U.S.-led coalition], and Indian targets." In a similar vein, a 2009 State Department cable by then-Ambassador Patterson warned that Pakistan will "dramatically increase support for Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan" if a pro-Indian -- meaning non-Taliban -- government takes power in Kabul.
Misguided Strategy
The evidence is so overwhelming and the consensus so broad that exposing Pakistan's double game is at this point elementary. Deciphering why Islamabad continues to support militant groups, however, is a more challenging task, and determining what the U.S. can do about it harder still.
We know the Pakistani military and the ISI have a long history of ties to Islamist militants, from supporting the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s; to backing the original Taliban movement as it swept to power in Kabul in 1990s; to fostering and empowering anti-India jihadist groups to sow terror in Kashmir. But why? The most basic answer is that Pakistan believes these groups advance its "strategic interests" abroad. In Kashmir and other parts of India, using militant proxies allows Pakistan to export terror to its arch-nemesis while avoiding direct confrontation with India's superior military and allowing Islamabad a sliver of implausible deniability.
In Afghanistan, the picture is considerably more complicated. Islamabad has determined that supporting the Taliban will ensure it the greatest level of influence in Kabul. However, the more pertinent question remains: Why is Pakistan so obsessed with influence in a country that lacks resources, infrastructure and access to the sea?
The most frequently cited explanation is that Pakistan seeks "strategic depth" in Afghanistan. Pakistan is geographically narrow and strategically vulnerable: Islamabad is just 50 miles from Indian-controlled Kashmir, and the industrial and cultural heartland of Pakistan, the Punjab, stretches along the Indian border. There is military value in having a desolate, mountainous space on the country's western flank to which Pakistani forces can retreat from a potential Indian invasion and from which they can subsequently counterattack. A less-recognized fear among Pakistanis is that Afghanistan, recently linked by road to the Iranian port of Chabahar, could challenge Islamabad's attempts to become an energy corridor linking Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.
However, the core reason behind Pakistan's support for the Taliban lies with the "Pashtun question," of which the Durand Line -- the colonial-era border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan -- is an integral part. In 1893, the British struck a deal with a weak Afghan government to stretch the northwest border of British India deeper into the Afghan frontier. London sought to use this territory as a buffer zone between India, their prized colonial possession, and the expansionist Russian Empire. However, the new border cut a line through the middle of the Pashtun nation, leaving half of this stateless, fiercely independent ethnic group in what would become West Pakistan. Today there are 25 million Pashtuns in Pakistan and 15 million in Afghanistan.
Since Pakistani independence from Britain in 1947, there have been sporadic periods of agitation among the Pashtun community, with some groups calling for an independent Pashtunistan and others seeking incorporation into Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan, dominated by Punjabis, is obsessively fearful of Pashtun nationalism. These fears were heightened after Pakistan lost 15 percent of its territory to another independence-minded ethnic group in 1971, the year that Bengali-majority East Pakistan fought a successful war for independence to form the country now known as Bangladesh.
Pakistan was formed on the notion that a common religion, Islam, was sufficient to bind together disparate ethnic groups with little shared history, language or culture. However, those bonds are at constant risk of fraying, which is why Pakistan is obsessed with Pashtun nationalism and, consequently, Afghanistan. For its part, Afghanistan holds a potent form of leverage over Pakistan: No government in Kabul, including the Taliban when they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, has ever recognized the Durand Line. Thus, Islamabad sees a strong Afghanistan that could challenge the Durand Line or, worse, incite Pashtun nationalism as an existential threat, and it considers a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as the best safeguard against this possibility.
Pakistan also views Taliban rule as a bulwark against foreign influence in its western neighbor. This foreign influence includes Iran, Russia and the Central Asian nations, who all supported the Northern Alliance in the late 1990s. But it primarily means India, which Pakistan obsessively believes is trying to encircle it despite New Delhi's benign role in Afghanistan thus far.
Finally, Pakistan supports the Taliban and other jihadist groups as a method to channel its own domestic cocktail of frustration, anger and extremism, all fed by grinding poverty, poor education, a dysfunctional judicial system and an army of radical preachers that have filled the country's yawning social void. This is outlined in a U.S. intelligence assessment revealed by WikiLeaks that stated, "Urging militant groups to be outwardly focused is perceived by Pakistani officials as a method to safeguard internal security." By fostering the sense of an impending threat from foreign infidels, Pakistan deflects Pakistanis' frustration with their own government.
[size="4"]The Afghan War limits U.S. influence . . . [/size]
What to Do?
Today, America's options to influence Pakistani behavior are seriously constrained by the Afghan War. It was not always this way. In an epic failure of U.S. foreign policy, America squandered an opportunity in the days after Sept. 11 to demand and ensure a complete end to Pakistani support for Islamist militancy. The Bush administration had Islamabad's full attention when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage warned Pakistani leaders the country would be "bombed back into the Stone Age" if it did not cooperate with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. However, that leverage was wasted when Washington identified al-Qaida as its top priority and looked the other way as Pakistan allowed the "defeated" Taliban to seek haven and regroup within its territory. Nine years later, America is in a much weaker position.
Dealing with Pakistan will always require unique sensitivity given its strategic location, its rivalry with India, its relationship with Islamist militants and, not least, its nuclear weapons arsenal. However, those complications are exponentially compounded by Pakistan's importance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. Geography makes Pakistan vital to the massive challenge of supplying more than 100,000 troops with enough food, fuel and arms to sustain a decade of war. Most of those supplies enter Afghanistan via two road links through Pakistan, after being offloaded at the Pakistani port of Karachi. The U.S. has doggedly pursued alternative logistics routes into Afghanistan, but even with the establishment of a Northern Distribution Network through Russia and Central Asia, and the airlift of sensitive military equipment and fuel, the Pakistani road links still account for at least half of all supplies. And it is improbable that share will be reduced much further.
Islamabad also has others means of leverage over the U.S. war effort. It could curtail the CIA's controversial unmanned aerial drone campaign, which is conducted from inside Pakistan; stop patrolling the already porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border; or cut off existing intelligence cooperation. Indeed, Pakistan has threatened such actions in the past, and twice shut the border -- in September 2008 and September 2010 -- to NATO supply trucks to protest crossborder raids into Pakistani territory. The risk that Pakistan may resort to such countermeasures has heightened in the aftermath of the incident surrounding Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who was detained on Jan. 27, 2011, in Lahore after shooting and killing two Pakistanis he alleged were trying to rob him. Davis was released months later after a grueling diplomatic spat between Washington and Islamabad, but the affair has sent intelligence cooperation to an all-time low. In the months since Davis' release, Pakistan's leadership has grown more vocal in publicly calling for an end to the drone strikes entirely. CIA Director Leon Panetta has rejected that demand, insisting the strikes were a part of his "fundamental responsibility." However, the reality remains that Pakistan has a potent set of sticks at its disposal should it choose to brandish them.
In short, Washington is hamstrung and facing a terrible dilemma: confront Pakistan forcefully and risk suddenly and critically undermining the Afghan war effort, or continue to play the friendly benefactor while allowing Islamabad to gradually undermine the war effort. Most everywhere else in the world this is known as blackmail; in Washington it is called "strategic partnership."
The optimal but elusive third way entails convincing Pakistan that abandoning militant groups is in its own interest. Using diplomatic persuasion and a carrot-heavy approach has failed successive U.S. administrations. Obama should instead focus on employing more sticks, ideally to find the perfect balance that coerces a change in Pakistani behavior without causing an open rift in the relationship. However, Washington should be prepared to deal with the consequences of that rift should it materialize. A falling out with Pakistan would indeed be disastrous for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, but it would be potentially fatal to the Pakistani government.
First, even if the U.S. is not in a position to force Pakistan's hand on the Taliban, nothing obliges Washington to provide Pakistan with billions of dollars in aid while it harbors the group. That so much of the aid is wasted, misspent and unappreciated simply adds insult to injury. Whether or not Pakistan could brave a cutoff of U.S. aid is open to debate. It weathered U.S. sanctions in the 1990s but is in a much weaker economic position today. However, it is inconceivable that Pakistan's economy would survive if the U.S. coordinated with Pakistan's other patrons to condition all aid to Islamabad on a verifiable end of support to all extremist groups. While Washington would likely find it difficult to bring China on board, it might enjoy more support from other Western partners and international institutions such as the IMF.
Even if it does nothing in the short-term, Washington should make it clear that when the Afghan War -- and with it a great deal of Pakistani leverage -- comes to an end, America is prepared to support a virtual aid embargo on Pakistan unless it decisively ceases its support for Islamist militant groups now. That is by no means the only tool available to the U.S. Multilateral sanctions can also be crafted at the United Nations. The provision of spare parts for military equipment can be suspended. Pakistani military and intelligence officials with known ties to the Taliban can be put on the terrorist watch list. If all else fails, the ISI itself can be added to the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
To be sure, wielding these sticks is far from an optimal solution, but neither is showering money on those who harbor one's enemies. There was a time when America insisted it wouldn't distinguish between terrorists and the states that shelter them. Pakistan has made a mockery of that pledge. At long last, U.S. officials seem to have recognized this travesty. Hopefully, in this case, admitting we have a problem will be the first step to recovery.
Jeff M. Smith is the Kraemer Strategy Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Cheers