Tag: India
The damndest problem
Somehow this invitation to a discussion of India/Pakistan relations prompts me to ask a different but related question: how should the United States deal with Pakistan?
I confess to colossal ignorance when it comes to anything east and south of the Durand line. All I really know is that Pakistan is populous (170 million), ethnically complex (Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and many others) and mostly poor (about $1000 per capita GNP). It has nuclear weapons and an enduring existential fear of India. The army plays an often outsized role, but civilian politics can be dauntingly agitated as well.
So why should this matter? It is the nuclear weapons that really count to the United States–they are approaching 100 warheads. Their main purpose seems to be to prevent an Indian attack, or to respond to one. American concern is not only that Pakistan might use them, triggering an unpredictable but likely devastating series of events, but that they might fall into the hands of terrorists. Pakistan has a record of having exported nuclear technology to North Korea and elsewhere.
For at least as long as U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, there will be another concern: terrorists harbored in the Pakistan’s border areas. We can quarrel about whether the Pakistani government knew Osama Bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, but it is clear that at least some religious extremists have de facto permission from the Pakistani government to destabilize the southern and eastern provinces of Afghanistan, in order to gain “strategic depth” for Islamabad (that is, deny India a foothold in a stable Afghanistan). Our many drone strikes inside Pakistan, with something like tacit permission from Islamabad, are the current stopgap in deal with this problem.
What are our options in dealing with Pakistan?
1. Walk away. Too complicated, too difficult, too far away. We’ve tried this several times over the last few decades. We always end up regretting it and going back, whether because of the nukes or the border with Afghanistan.
2. Get engaged. Pakistan has lots of problems: political, economic, security. We could try to engage more actively in resolving some of these. Dick Holbrooke is said to have thought we needed to help resolve the India/Pakistan conflict, especially over Kashmir, if we wanted Pakistan to help us out more against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But what makes us think we can have much impact on Pakistan’s internal political and economic problems, never mind its more than 60-year conflict with India?
3. Get selectively engaged. So some things are too hard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ante up to get Pakistan to do the things we need done, like police its border with Afghanistan more effectively and guard its nuclear weapons more carefully. This is pretty much current policy, plus the drone strikes. We don’t know if the American assistance on guarding the nuclear weapons is effective, but we do know that the Pakistani military has been pocketing a lot of our assistance and doing very little in return. So we’ve cut off some of that assistance and they are cozying up to the Chinese.
4. Go with India and contain Pakistan. India is Pakistan’s natural regional rival. We could just throw in our lot with the Indians and use them as a counterbalance to Pakistan, which in turn would become a Chinese surrogate. This kind of “offshore” balancing is much the rage these days among those who resist American intervention abroad but recognize the national security problems that motivate it. But offshore balancing in this case amounts to putting our interests in the hands of New Delhi–does that sound wise? And it might do nothing to prevent nuclear war or nuclear terrorism, and certainly nothing to prevent Pakistan from destabilizing Afghanistan, which are our main concerns.
5. Go regional. Rather than splitting Asia between American and Chinese spheres of influence, we could try to promote the kind of regional cooperation that has proved so effective in Europe and Latin America. Freer trade and investment would eventually lead India and Pakistan to have a bigger stake in peace and stability that they would maintain themselves. But at best this is a long-term bet, not one that produces results in the next year or two, or even five or ten.
Having trouble choosing your preferred option? That’s what I said: the damndest problem.
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Sometimes at odds, sometimes not
I owe a debt of gratitude for this piece to Dennis Kux, author of The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, a retired State Department South Asia specialist, and currently a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He writes:
Osama bin Laden died in a fashion that could not have been better from the American standpoint or worse for Pakistan. For Americans, the end to the man who organized 9/11 and other deadly, if less bloody, Al Qaeda operations was like the script of a Hollywood movie. The good guys–the Navy Seals–swoop out of the sky, get their man, suffer no casualties, and return to base. The only hitch, the loss of a helicopter, provides suspense, but is not a game stopper since there is fortunately a back-up chopper available.
The episode brought a sense of closure over the horrors of 9/11. In a victory lap, President Obama symbolically visited Ground Zero in New York City and then flew to Fort Bragg, Kentucky to salute the Navy Seals who performed so flawlessly. The US admittedly carried out the operation inside Pakistan without the knowledge, let alone permission, of the government of Pakistan. Indeed, as CIA Director Leon Panetta told the media, informing the Pakistanis in advance would have risked operational security.
So it was a great day for Uncle Sam. Osama is no more. The master terrorist has gotten his just reward. Furthermore, the present occupant of the White House revealed himself a cool and decisive Clint Eastwood not, as many previously thought, a distant intellectual who had trouble making up his mind.
For Pakistan, the episode was a major disaster. Even Pakistani liberals who applauded the death of bin Laden were embarrassed by way it happened. They were irate that the al Qaeda leader could have been hiding almost next door to their country’s West Point in a city full of military installations and supposedly tight security. If Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the ISI, did not know that bin Laden had been in Abbottabad for five years, it was woefully incompetent. If ISI knew who lived in the high-walled compound, it was guilty of hiding the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Either way, it was enormously embarrassing. This observer is skeptical that something as conspicuously different as the bin Laden compound from the rest of the neighborhood would not have attracted the attention of the omnipresent ISI, especially over half a decade. In turn, Pakistan’s security establishment, and a large section of the public, were infuriated by the US’s blatant disregard for their country’s sovereignty and were red-faced that the Americans were able to fly across more than a hundred miles of Pakistani territory undetected by the vaunted air defense system.
Thus, while there was enormous satisfaction and pride in the US, for Pakistan, the response was very conflicted. This was reflected in the stark contrast between President Zardari’s op ed in the May 2 Washington Post applauding the US action and the querulous statement issued the same day by the Foreign Ministry. The latter mentioned bin Laden’s death almost in passing, waxed indignant about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty, and said menacingly that any repetition would shake the relationship between Washington and Islamabad. The Pakistan military leadership issued a similar warning after a meeting of the powerful corps commanders and the army chief General Kayani. The army leadership further announced that US military personnel in Pakistan would be reduced to the “bare minimum.”
Many Pakistanis, while unhappy about the unilateral US action and the violation of sovereignty, directed their ire against the security establishment, alleging that the army and the ISI were guilty of either incompetence or complicity. To counter these charges, pro-military media outlets tried to place the blame on the wobbling civilian government, generally regarded as having little say in national security matters. The opposition Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) predictably joined in the chorus of voices calling for the president and prime minister to resign.
On Monday, Prime Minister Gilani, speaking in the National Assembly, stoutly defended Pakistan’s record. He said that many intelligence agencies failed, not just Pakistan’s, blamed the US for allowing bin Laden to flee into Pakistan, warned that any attack on the countries “strategic assets” (i.e. its nukes) would be answered with a robust riposte, and stated that Lt. General Iqbal (an officer supposedly close to Kayani) would lead an inquiry into the episode. Gilani announced that parliament would meet in camera on May 13 to consider the report. At the same time, the prime minister also stressed the importance of good relations with the US. Someone obviously less concerned about US-Pak ties leaked the name of the CIA station chief to an English-language newspaper considered close to the ISI.
So how will this all play out for the US-Pak partnership against terrorism? In Washington, the Obama administration has made clear its belief that a cooperative relationship with Pakistan is important for a satisfactory outcome in the war in Afghanistan. The president chose his words carefully in his lengthy interview with 60 Minutes last Sunday. While not blaming the Pakistani authorities, he pressed for answers regarding the support network that helped bin Laden during his lengthy stay in Abbottabad. Irate Congressmen have called for slashing US aid to Pakistan, but administration supporters have argued that this would hurt, not help, US interests in the region. Washington hopes that a chastened Pakistan will prove more, rather than less, cooperative in the days ahead.
It remains unclear how events will play out in Pakistan. Possibly, the military’s embarrassment will lead to a stronger civilian voice over national security matters. Although the military is more vulnerable now than in many years, it is very uncertain that the wobbly civilian leadership will be able to take advantage of the situation. The jury is also out whether Pakistan will agree to crack down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network (seen as useful proxies to defend Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan) and the Lashkar-i-Toiba and related groups that have in the past served as proxies against India. Public pressure by US officials will not sway the Pakistanis, but perhaps private persuasion may prove more effective in the post bin Laden era. Reportedly, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry will be on his way in a few days to try his hand.
Until such a change occurs, the basic contradiction in the US-Pak relationship will continue: specifically that while Pakistan and the US see the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as a common foe, only the US considers the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-i-Toiba as enemies. To Islamabad, these groups remain potentially useful instruments to promote Pakistan’s policies in Afghanistan and against India. This kind of strategic disconnect has periodically undermined US-Pakistan alliance relations ever since Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the mutual security agreement with Pakistan in 1954. In 2011, as in the past, US and Pakistani interests and policies in part coincide and in part conflict.
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It takes a region
The Pickering/Brahimi report on negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan is on less than firm ground in claiming that its publication happens to coincide with the perfect moment to launch negotiations to end the insurgency in Afghanistan (see my previous post), but its discussion of the regional interests in Afghanistan is better framed. They do not limit themselves to Pakistan, as so many reports seem inclined to do, but look farther to Iran, India, China and Russia.
Still, they leave me with a lot of question marks. They don’t deal with Pakistan’s ISI, which seems rather more wedded to the Taliban than the rest of the Pakistani government. In fact, they treat “Pakistan” as a unified actor, which is certainly not the way it has acted in the past, and I don’t know many analysts who expect it to act that way in the future.
They cite Iran’s interests in controlling drugs, protecting Shia, preventing the Taliban from returning to power and maintaining influence in Herat. But they don’t deal with Tehran’s apparent willingness to provide some military support to Taliban insurgents inside Afghanistan.
The report counts China as a possible influence in the right direction on Pakistan. Beijing might certainly wish it so, as Afghanistan’s minerals are appetizingly close by. But I wonder whether the Pakistan that would have to be influenced is all that interested in what the Chinese have to say on Afghanistan. Again there is that unified actor question.
The treatment of “Central Asian states,” (aka the Stans, I think) and Russia is rather cursory, with a reference to their interests in a stable Afghanistan, their worries about U.S. presence and the possibility of jihadis breaching their borders. It seems to me that they have been surprisingly non-meddling, even helpful. How do we account for that, and is there something more they can do?
The discussion of how the proposed international “facilitator” would deal with the various layers of neighborly and other international interest is well done. The idea would be a series of bilateral consultations, to precede any multilateral meeting (one coming up in Istanbul).
The suggestion that international peacekeepers may be needed post-settlement I find mind-stretching. It’s a bit difficult to imagine Afghanistan safe for peacekeepers, Muslim or not, rather than peace enforcers. But of course that is just the point: if there is a broad political settlement, most of the insurgency would presumably go away.
All of this may be wishful thinking. But it is more realistic wishful thinking–maybe even “visionary” thinking–than believing we are going to be able to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014 without a negotiated political settlement.
I have feared the terms of that settlement inside Afghanistan for human rights, in particular for women. I’ve too often sat in State Department meetings where assistant secretaries promised not to sell out human rights, only to discover a week later that is precisely what was done. And what real leverage do we have over how women are treated in a Helmand governed by Taliban? The best of intentions somehow go astray when faced with the need for a power-sharing agreement with people who have been violating human rights for years, if not decades. That conflict of interests and values, again.
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