The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (13 page)

Pakistanis and Afghans did not like the shorthand, mostly because they don’t like each other. But seeing Afghanistan and Pakistan through a single policy lens made sense. Richard Holbrooke had coined the AfPak term even before he was tapped to run the policy area. This was not just an effort to save five syllables. It was an attempt to drive home awareness of the reality that there is a single theater of war straddling an ill-defined border.
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Holbrooke became more convinced of this imperative after he started working on the problem. The problem with Afghanistan was Pakistan, and without a solution to Afghanistan, Pakistan would explode into an even bigger problem than al-Qaeda and the Taliban combined. If the Pakistani state was brought to its knees—which in 2009 was a serious worry in Washington, especially after TTP extremists in the Swat Valley started pushing toward Islamabad—then Afghanistan would be unsalvageable; and if Afghanistan collapsed into chaos and extremism, then Pakistan would be imperiled. America would have to pour in ten times more resources to protect that much bigger—and nuclear—country. That was how Holbrooke explained “AfPak” to anybody who asked.

The wisdom of the argument was clear, but the war was being fought in Afghanistan; that was where our troops were risking life and limb, so that is where our focus remained and where we spent our money. We proceeded to look for victory on the battlefield. Obama was convinced that is where we would find it when he sent 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan shortly after taking office.

But he was putting the cart before the horse. The key to ending the war was to change Pakistan. Pakistan was the sanctuary the Taliban insurgency used as a launching pad and as a place to escape American retaliation. We knew by then that Pakistan allowed it and we knew why. It was Pakistan’s strategic calculus that we had to change, not troop numbers in Afghanistan.

That was Holbrooke’s argument. More troops in Afghanistan would be useful if they could put pressure on Pakistan, sending Islamabad a signal that we were determined, and that it would be futile to persist
in supporting an insurgency in an effort to control Afghanistan. Conversely, Holbrooke felt that it would not be wise to dispatch more soldiers simply to duke it out toe to toe with the Taliban. But to convince Pakistan that we meant business, we had to first prove that we were going to stay. The Pakistanis never believed that American intervention was more than just a bump in the road, and they did not have to wait long to be proven right. Holbrooke thought that we had a shot at changing Pakistan’s strategic calculus, or at least at convincing them that they did not need the Taliban to realize some of their strategic objectives. They could work with us and the Karzai government. It was a long shot, and it had to begin with putting much more effort into fixing our relations with Pakistan. Even if we did not convince Pakistan of the wisdom of change, keeping them engaged around this discussion might pay us the dividend of more time and space to change things in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, not keeping them engaged is what they had come to expect.

Pakistan’s double-dealing was in part a symptom of its bitterness over having been abandoned and then treated as a rogue state after a previous Afghan war, against the Soviets, had been won and the Soviets driven out in 1989. Pakistan was also deeply insecure about India’s meteoric rise and growing strategic value to the West. Pakistanis were playing things very close to the vest. We had to get them to open up. Could we convince them that our plans for Afghanistan would address their strategic interests in the country? If we could, perhaps in time they might reassess their strategic interests in a way that was more favorable to ours.

Holbrooke argued that we had important interests in Afghanistan but vital interests in Pakistan, and that we had far more opportunity to realize our strategic goals in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. If we did that, it would be better for us and for the world. We will live to regret our insouciance, he warned, and the consequent loss of an opportunity to set things on the right track. If we don’t set Pakistan on a different course, he would say, in twenty years the place will be a vast 300-million-person Gaza: out of energy, out of water, radical, and nuclear-armed to boot. It reminded me of what a senior CIA official once told me: “We will be concerned with Pakistan for a long time … my grandchildren will be waking up in the middle of the night worried about Pakistan.” It was
easy to convince people in Washington that Pakistan was a looming disaster. It was harder to convince them we should do something about it.

Holbrooke understood that the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA wanted Pakistan to cut ties with the Taliban and do more to fight terrorism. But that would never happen without at least some semblance of a normal relationship between the two countries. Holbrooke favored an iceberg metaphor: “There is an above-water part to the relationship,” he would say, “and a below-water part.” The part below the water was the intelligence and security cooperation that we craved, while the part above water was the aid and assistance that we gave Pakistan. This is where the iceberg metaphor broke down. With countries, unlike floating chunks of ice, making the above-water part bigger will make the whole situation more stable—at least that is what Holbrooke was arguing. In 2011, after he was gone, it simply sank to the bottom.

Already in 2009, half the American diplomatic mission in Pakistan worked on intelligence and counterterrorism rather than diplomacy or development. Our consulate in Peshawar was basically bricks shielding antennas. And it paid big dividends. The CIA collected critical intelligence in Pakistan that made possible drone strikes on al-Qaeda targets and on more than one occasion prevented a terror strike in the West. The Obama administration began carrying out drone strikes in Pakistan on an industrial scale, decimating al-Qaeda’s command-and-control structure and crippling the organization.
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Even with all the Pakistani double-dealing and foot dragging going on, there was still cooperation between the CIA and the ISI on al-Qaeda, and everything the administration claimed by way of success against al-Qaeda depended on it.
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But hunting terrorists was not popular in Pakistan, and drone strikes in particular angered Pakistanis. In public the authorities denied making any deal with the United States, but it was obvious to citizens that the drones flew with their knowledge and even cooperation. Pakistanis thought the drones were daily violating their country’s sovereignty, showing it to be feeble and defenseless. There were wild rumors about collateral damage, civilians dying unnecessarily as drones targeted suspected terrorists. It did not matter that drones killed many terrorists, including TTP chieftain Baitullah Mehsud, the notorious jihadi who had claimed responsibility for scores of bombing attacks on civilians and
was believed to have killed the popular former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. The anger would only get worse as the number of drone attacks grew through 2009 and beyond.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy around drones suited Pakistani leaders but had a corrosive effect on U.S.-Pakistan relations. We knew that the drone issue was a problem on TV talk shows and in Pakistan’s big cities, but our hands were tied. There was a case to be made for the program—in the places where the drone strikes were actually happening, up in the FATA, they were less of a provocation. There the locals knew exactly where the missiles were landing and on whom, and the locals had no love for many of those being targeted. But drones were a deeply classified topic in the U.S. government. You could not talk about them in public, much less discuss who they were hitting and with what results. Embassy staffers took to calling drones “Voldemorts” after the villain in the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, “he who must not be named.”

By 2012, drones had become a potent political issue in Pakistan. The populist politician and former cricket star Imran Khan built a powerful political movement in part around protesting drone strikes, which he argued were responsible for growing extremist violence inside Pakistan. Drones then had two sets of targets: “high-value” ones, meaning known al-Qaeda leaders, and “signature targets,” which meant concentrations of suspected bad guys—or what some in the Pentagon called MAMs (for “military-aged males”). Most of the controversy revolved around whether drone strikes on MAMs were really eliminating terrorists or killing civilians and producing anti-American fervor. Pakistani intelligence was able to exploit the controversy—when drones started targeting Taliban fighters in 2011, the ISI started fueling anti-drone opposition in a bid to force the United States to agree to a more limited target list.

At this time Pakistan asked repeatedly for joint ownership of the drone program, which meant we would work together on gathering intelligence (previously intelligence was gathered by the CIA and then selectively shared with Pakistan) and operating the drones. They also asked if we would sell them drones; Pakistanis would not object if drones killing terrorists had Pakistani markings on them. They also suggested we let them hit the targets given to drones with their F-16 fighter jets.
The CIA’s answer every time was no. We will not sell Pakistan drones, jointly operate them, or let them use their planes to hit the same targets. The program would remain “American.” And as such it would invite anti-Americanism.

We knew from early 2009 that the drone problem meant the intelligence relationship with Pakistan was headed for trouble. During my early days working with Holbrooke, when we were crafting a new Pakistan policy, one of Holbrooke’s deputies asked him, “If we are going to seriously engage shouldn’t we make some changes to the drone policy, perhaps back off a bit?” Holbrooke replied, “Don’t even go there. Nothing is going to change.” We had to build ties despite the drag the drone program had on building normal relations with Pakistan.

Holbrooke believed all along that by showing Pakistan a road map to a deeper relationship with America you could distract attention from the intelligence relationship. The key to winning over Pakistan was simply giving Pakistan more (much more) aid for longer (far longer), in order to change the dynamic of the relationship through economic engagement. If Pakistani leaders had a good story to tell their people, the CIA’s job would become easier, and in time Pakistan would become vested in a different relationship with America. Average Pakistanis had to see a benefit in having a relationship with America, and in 2009 they didn’t. It is easy to be angry at America if you think you don’t get anything from the relationship other than drone strikes and retaliations for them in the form of devastating suicide bombings.

To counter that narrative, Holbrooke started by calling together the newly created Friends of Democratic Pakistan in an international gathering in Tokyo to help Pakistan rebuild its economy. He got $5 billion in pledges to assist Pakistan. “That is a respectable IPO,” Holbrooke would brag, hoping that the opening would garner even more by way of capital investment in Pakistan’s future.

Holbrooke thought that we should give Pakistan much more aid, and not just the military kind. We should do our best to be seen giving it, and to make sure that it improved the lives of everyday Pakistanis in meaningful ways. Holbrooke had gleaned these insights from talking to Pakistanis high and low. Pakistan’s finance minister (and later foreign minister) Hina Rabbani Khar gave Holbrooke a tutorial on U.S. aid to
Pakistan. They met on the veranda of the magnificent Chiragan Palace Hotel in Istanbul, a former home to Ottoman sultans that was the venue for an international conference on Pakistan. Khar said to Holbrooke:

And that became Holbrooke’s objective. American aid could make a difference if it was visible and effective. Only then would Pakistanis think that there was value to a relationship with America.

If we wanted to change Pakistan, Holbrooke thought, we had to think in terms of a Marshall Plan. After a journalist asked him whether the $5 billion in aid was not too much for Pakistan, Holbrooke answered, “Pakistan needs $50 billion, not $5 billion.” The White House did not want to hear that—it meant a fight with Congress and spending political capital to convince the American people. Above all else, it required an audacious foreign policy gambit for which the Obama administration was simply not ready.

Yet in reality we were spending much more than that on Afghanistan. For every dollar we gave Pakistan in aid, we spent twenty on Afghanistan. That money did not go very far; it was like pouring water into sand. We would have been doing ourselves a big favor if we had reversed that ratio. It seems we had no problem spending money, just not on things that would actually bring about change and serve our interests. Even General Petraeus understood this. I recall him saying at a Pakistan meeting: “You get what you pay for. We have not paid much for much of anything in Pakistan.”

In the end, we settled for far more modest assistance to Pakistan. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation of 2009 earmarked $7.5 billion in
aid to Pakistan over a five-year period—the first long-term all-civilian aid package. It was no Marshall Plan, and Congress could still refuse to fund the authorization, but it made a dent in suspicious Pakistani attitudes.

Holbrooke also believed we needed more aggressive diplomacy: America had to talk to Pakistan, frequently and not just about security issues that concern us, but also about a host of economic and social issues that they cared about. The more often American leaders met their Pakistani counterparts and the more diverse the set of issues they addressed, the more broad-based the relationship would become. And if Pakistanis saw something tangible coming out of these meetings they would warm up to closer ties with the United States. Holbrooke knew from the many hours he had spent with Pakistani leaders, academics, and journalists that they wanted to see a long-term relationship with the United States—a commitment to friendship that was not limited to the duration of our engagement in Afghanistan. It was critical for us not to peddle a so-called transactional relationship but to show interest in something more strategic.