The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (11 page)

Over the next two years, Holbrooke pressed for a strategy of engaging Pakistan. He thought engagement would get the most out of not only Zardari but also the generals who wielded real power in the country, and help promote stability there, too, which also matters (or should matter) to America. The White House tolerated Holbrooke’s approach for a while, but in the end decided that a policy of coercion and confrontation would better achieve our goals in Pakistan. That approach failed. The more America and Pakistan drifted apart, the less America got from Pakistan, and the less influence we now have in shaping the future of a dangerous and troublesome country that is only growing more so.
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When it comes to Pakistan, the country where the SEALs found and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the mood in America has turned
dark. High officials and average Americans alike are understandably wary of the place. But perhaps more important still, they are tired of trying to change its perverse ways. Political scientist Stephen Krasner captured this mood well when he wrote in the January/February 2012 issue of
Foreign Affairs
that after decades of efforts to buy Pakistan’s cooperation with generous U.S. aid, plenty of public praise, and outsized amounts of face time for its leaders, the country still supports extremist organizations. These groups, as then–Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22, 2011, “serving as proxies for the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers.” Mullen called the Haqqani network—a particularly vicious and brutish outfit that is an autonomous part of the Taliban—“in many ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” When he first became America’s top military officer, Admiral Mullen had called Pakistan “a steadfast and historic ally.”
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Now he was expressing a different sentiment, the one that the
Atlantic
magazine captured in a cover story titled “The Ally from Hell.”
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Such observations, Krasner argued, should lead us to treat Pakistan much the same way we treat Iran and North Korea—as a hostile power. Rather than assist, praise, and coddle Pakistan, we should think of how to contain it.
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We can fight terrorism without Pakistan’s help, the argument goes, since stepped-up drone attacks will do the job. And indeed, there is a growing sense that we are well on our way to confrontation with Pakistan.

However, what these critics don’t say is how drones can get the job done if we lose access to the timely, ground-level intelligence that currently provides drones with their targets, or what happens if Pakistan decides to start shooting down these low- and slow-flying pilotless planes. Drones are labor-intensive. They don’t need pilots, true, but they do require small armies of analysts and spies, including locals who are willing and able to attach homing chips to the people, vehicles, and buildings that drones are supposed to hit. For every one person on the ground that a jet-fighter mission needs, a drone mission needs ten. Pakistani authorities may not be able to stop U.S. drones from overflying their territory (though they can shoot them down), but they can cut the
chain of intelligence gathering, analysis, and chip planting that makes drones effective. They can blind the drones and render them useless.

For decades, America bought Pakistan’s cooperation through aid sweetened with public shows of friendship and support. In the ten years after 9/11, America poured $20 billion in civilian and military aid into the relationship. During its first two years in office, the Obama administration increased the flow of support and raised Pakistan’s profile as a vital ally even further. In return, we got intelligence cooperation—more agents, listening posts, and even visas for the deep-cover CIA operatives who found bin Laden. We got improved relations between Kabul and Islamabad, which, although not as warm as we would have liked, were nonetheless warm enough to help our counterinsurgency efforts. We got more distance between Pakistan and Iran. And we finally persuaded Islamabad to go to war (however reluctantly) against the Taliban on Pakistan’s own soil. Had the Pakistani military not taken on those Taliban forces, the fighting in Afghanistan certainly would have been worse. At least a measure of the battlefield success that the U.S. military has achieved in the Afghan theater—the success that has allowed President Obama to order troops home—can be ascribed to Pakistani cooperation.

There is plenty in Pakistani behavior to anger America too. Many observers think that Pakistan’s regional interests are so far removed from those of the United States that no degree of aid and friendship can bridge the gap, making a collapse in the relationship inevitable all along. American ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson captured this sentiment best in a September 23, 2009, cable: “Money alone will not solve the problem of al-Qaeda or the Taliban operating in Pakistan. A grand bargain that promises development or military assistance in exchange for severing ties will be insufficient to wean Pakistan from policies that reflect accurately its most deep-seated fears. The Pakistani establishment, as we saw in 1998, with the nuclear test, does not view assistance—even sizable assistance to their own entities—as a trade-off for national security.”
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Indeed, Pakistan has long been a “frenemy.” But in dealing with frenemies, the question is always whether it makes more sense—in view of one’s own interests and circumstances—to stress the friend part or the
enemy part. And one should also be ready to ask whether a frenemy relationship can be moved—ever so slowly—toward the “friend” column.

The critical turning point in America’s relations with Pakistan was the annus horribilis of 2011. That was the year in which a series of unfortunate events, mishandled by both sides, put relations in a deep freeze. It was also the moment when America decided to experiment with a whole new way of managing Pakistan, as an adversary rather than a friend, substituting pressure for engagement.

The twisted course of the year of horrors began with lethal gunplay on a traffic-packed Lahore thoroughfare. On January 27, 2011, an alleged undercover CIA agent named Raymond A. Davis shot and killed two Pakistani men on a motorbike, men he thought were going to rob him or, worse, abduct him. Pakistan put him in jail until the United States paid $2.4 million in compensation to the men’s families and the CIA agreed to revise the rules by which it was operating in Pakistan.
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By the time Davis was released on March 16, ties between Islamabad and Washington were severely strained, and it did not help that the very next day a massive drone strike hit a tribal gathering at Datta Khel in North Waziristan. Taliban commanders and fighters were killed, but also dozens of civilians. Then, at the beginning of May, helicopter-borne U.S. commandos flew from Afghanistan into Pakistan under conditions of utmost secrecy on a mission, launched and executed with no warning to Pakistan, to capture or kill bin Laden. They found him at a compound in the city of Abbottabad located in shockingly close proximity to the Pakistan Military Academy and the homes of numerous retired officers. The coup de grace came in November when American forces chasing Taliban fighters killed twenty-four Pakistani border guards in a botched firefight. Relations between the two countries went into deep freeze, and a real rupture, for the first time since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, became a distinct possibility.

Mistrust was thus already profound when Admiral Mullen spoke to the Senate in September, accusing Pakistan outright of involvement in attacks on U.S. targets in Afghanistan.

Ever since Pakistan was created out of portions of British India in 1947, America’s relations with the country have traveled a winding and
rocky road. There have been periods of intense friendship followed by long bouts of neglect and even alienation.
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Over time, the two sides have developed an unhealthy distrust of each other. Americans fear and resent Pakistan, and Pakistanis think American friendship is fickle and transient. Americans think Pakistan promised not to build nuclear weapons, and then went ahead and built them. Then it promised not to test more warheads, and broke that promise, too. That Pakistan deliberately cultivates Islamic extremism as the cornerstone of its regional policy has done little to assuage concerns over its nuclear arsenal. Nowadays it is quite clear that America’s favor lies with Pakistan’s neighbor and nemesis, India, and at times it seems as if Pakistan is reacting to that uncomfortable fact by embodying all the anti-American anger and angst that have washed over the Muslim world in the past few decades.

The relationship has been in a new and critical phase since 9/11. Experts well knew that Pakistan had been complicit in the creation of the Taliban and turned a blind eye to its support for al-Qaeda. But the Bush administration decided that conflict with Pakistan was not a good choice, and that buying Pakistan’s cooperation would be the better option. Pakistan’s military ruler quickly embraced the idea and aligned his country—for public consumption, at least—with the United States.

A cozy relationship soon took shape. Bush liked General Musharraf, who loved to talk a “moderate Muslim” game, and frequently complimented him as a staunch ally in the battle against terror as well as a reformer who would bring “enlightened and liberal Islam” to Pakistan. Evidence of Pakistani double-dealing was ignored as the emphasis was placed on the positive: the periodic nabbing of a terrorist (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, was captured with Pakistani help in Karachi in March 2003), Musharraf’s tough antiterror rhetoric, and his promise of changing Pakistan into a forward-looking democracy. Posing as a hero of counterterrorism required a degree of chutzpah bordering on performance art, and Musharraf proved a master at it.

Somewhere along the line, to my shock, it became clear that the Bush administration had started to believe the act. One day in 2006 I was giving a talk on the latest developments in Pakistan to a group of U.S. government analysts whose job was to keep up with, and make sense of, what was happening on the ground so they could inform their
higher-ups and provide options for possible action. As we were walking out, a young Pakistan watcher asked me what I thought of “Jinnah’s Islam.” General Musharraf had coined the phrase—a reference to Pakistan’s founding father, the Shia-with-a-secular-spin Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876–1948)—as a way of advertising his promise to reform Islam in Pakistan and imbue it with liberal values. Taking Islam back from extremists and making it something more like what the country’s liberal founder, a London-trained lawyer, would have liked seemed an attractive idea for a country in the grip of extremism.

The answer was easy. I said I thought the whole thing was a shameless autocrat’s cynical and transparent manipulation. The analyst, barely able to hide a smile, said, “Well, our customers [government lingo for members of Congress and senior administration officials] are very interested to know how we can support it.” I said, “Surely you’re kidding.” How could we possibly put any stock in the idea of a whiskey-chugging general posing as an Islamic Martin Luther? “The Pakistanis already hate us because they think we’re sinister,” I went on. “Now they’re going to think we’re stupid, too.” The analyst laughed and said, “You have no idea how much of this [our customers] lap up. We have to write a report.”

No, Musharraf was not the ally that Bush and his lieutenants made him out to be.
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The relationship was a magician’s act. It all rested on misdirection, with more than a dash of suspended disbelief. While the general was cozying up to the Bush administration, extremists were thrusting their roots deeper into Pakistani soil—Osama bin Laden in particular (who could have waved at General Musharraf as he jogged right by bin Laden’s house on a visit to Abbottabad) was getting comfortable in his new hideout in an army garrison town, protected by five military checkpoints. Also on Musharraf’s watch, the Taliban started rebuilding their forces in Pakistan in preparation for an all-out war against American troops and the Afghan government.

Musharraf helped Washington pretend—and even believe—that what was happening in Pakistan was not happening. The country we touted as a determined wayfarer on the shining path to moderation and democracy was sinking deeper into the morass of extremism and had put its shoulder to wrecking what we were building in Afghanistan. Cynics called the two-faced strategy Pakistan’s “double game.” But the delusion
of the Taliban being crushed with the aid of their straight-shooting partner Pakistan served a purpose, letting the Bush administration turn its gaze from Afghanistan and Pakistan and focus instead on the war in Iraq.

General Musharraf would later explain his motivation in cozying up to the United States by claiming that after 9/11 America had threatened to send Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it did not change course.
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Several U.S. policy makers had supposedly impressed that point on Musharraf’s intelligence chief, General Ahmad Mahmoud, who had by chance been in Washington on September 11. When Mahmoud, the godfather of the Taliban and the mastermind behind the 1999 coup that put Musharraf in power, reported back to his boss, he minced no words. So Musharraf summoned the army’s nine corps commanders—in effect his cabinet—and told them that Pakistan was in trouble. Pakistan was no Syria, he said, part of a larger Arab world that would defend it from America’s wrath. Pakistan was alone, facing a hostile India as always, and now inviting the enmity of the international community. To protect strategic assets such as its nuclear weapons program and its influence in Kashmir and Afghanistan, Pakistan would need to go along—or at least it would need to
act
like it was going along—with American demands. It would have to execute a kind of temporary tactical stand-down by helping America in Afghanistan, by dialing down the jihad against India in Kashmir, and by agreeing to fight al-Qaeda. The rewards would include not just billions of dollars in international aid, but also American support for military rule and an end to the international isolation that Musharraf’s coup had triggered. And, of course, America would eventually leave Afghanistan, after which there would be ample time and opportunity to rebuild what would have to be temporarily given up. There were dissenters, but by and large the top brass accepted Musharraf’s game plan.