Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung report in the Washington Post that no one on the American side seems to be able to convince the Pakistanis to help us clear North Waziristan of militants. This is a rather important problem because our own war strategy depends on Pakistan agreeing to do this.
[Gen. Ashfaq] Kayani, who as Pakistan’s army chief has more direct say over the country’s security strategy than its president or prime minister, has resisted personal appeals from President Obama, U.S. military commanders and senior diplomats. Recent U.S. intelligence estimates have concluded that he is unlikely to change his mind anytime soon. Despite the entreaties, officials say, Kayani doesn’t trust U.S. motivations and is hedging his bets in case the American strategy for Afghanistan fails.
Again, a key point here is that (by our own intelligence estimates) Kayani’s lack of action pretty much ensures the failure of our strategy.
Pakistan is not a simple place and our alliance with Pakistan is our most complicated state-to-state relationship in the world. It’s easy to point out seeming hypocrisy or examples of illogical or self-defeating behavior on both sides. I don’t want to engage in lazy sniping. I do find it frustrating though that we have such an adversarial relationship with the Pakistani people. I see USAID really working hard to help the Pakistani people and I feel (sometimes) like the money is just being wasted.
When it comes to military aid, I believe India is correct in their assessment that it is far in excess of what is needed to “fight terror” and that it is being diverted for potential use against them. In truth, the main reason that Gen. Kayani doesn’t want to stamp out militancy in Pakistan is because he finds it to be a useful buffer against India. It’s also not unimportant that the persistence of a terror threat emanating from his territory pushes US officials to pay him ever bigger bribes. If he solved our problem for us, wouldn’t we start bitching about human rights and threatening to cut our assistance package? You bet your ass we would.
What’s ironic, and which proves the byzantine nature of U.S.-Pakistani relations, is that the recent Wikileaks dump showed that Kayani is supposed to be “our man.”
“I am not Benazir, and I know it,” Zardari told US ambassador Anne Patterson after his wife’s death.
The Pakistan President reportedly feared a fresh army coup.
According to the ‘Guardian’ report based on US cables, Pakistan opposition leader Nawaz Sharif had a “notoriously difficult personality” while his family is noted to have “relied primarily on the army and intelligence agencies for political elevation”.
In a May 2008 meeting with a visiting American Congressional delegation, Zardari reportedly said: “We won’t act without consulting with you.”
Sharif repeatedly told the US ambassador that he was “pro-American”, despite his often-critical public stance. He thanked the US for “arranging” to have Kayani appointed as army chief.
“The best thing America has done recently,” he said.
The same Wikileaks dump revealed that Kayani dislikes Sharif intensely and that Zardari fears that Kayani will have him killed. So, I don’t think it’s safe to assume you know who is whose man, or where various alliances are aimed. If Kayani is “our man” then he is balking at doing what we consider necessary.
Kayani reportedly was infuriated by the recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables, some of which depicted him as far chummier with the Americans and more deeply involved in Pakistani politics than his carefully crafted domestic persona would suggest. In one cable, sent to Washington by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad last year, he was quoted as discussing with U.S. officials a possible removal of Pakistan’s president and his preferred replacement.
On the eve of the cable’s publication in November, the normally aloof and soft-spoken general ranted for hours on the subject of irreconcilable U.S.-Pakistan differences in a session with a group of Pakistani journalists.
The two countries’ “frames of reference” regarding regional security “can never be the same,” he said, according to news accounts. Calling Pakistan America’s “most bullied ally,” Kayani said that the “real aim of U.S. strategy is to de-nuclearize Pakistan.”
That last sentence may be the most important one, and the most interesting. If there were some way to de-nuclearize Pakistan we would have to consider that a high priority. But I don’t think it is U.S. policy to deal with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons independently of India’s. I think it is more accurate to say that we have contingency plans, worked out with India, for securing and destroying Pakistan’s nuclear program if the country should ever fall into chaos. But our overriding policy is to prevent Pakistan from falling into chaos. The question, then, is if our request for action on the Afghanistan border is a potentially destabilizing request.
Kayani has cultivated the approval of a strongly anti-American public that opinion polls indicate now holds the military in far higher esteem than it does the weak civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. Pakistani officials say the need for public support is a key reason for rebuffing U.S. pleas for an offensive in North Waziristan. In addition to necessitating the transfer of troops from the Indian border, Pakistani military and intelligence officials say such a campaign would incite domestic terrorism and uproot local communities…
…Several U.S. officials described Kayani as straightforward in his explanations of why the time is not right for an offensive in North Waziristan: a combination of too few available troops and too little public support.
From Kayani’s point of view, the U.S. is asking him to take actions which will strengthen domestic opposition to the government and the army, and which could lead to the exact kind of chaos that would justify America and India teaming up to strip Pakistan of their nuclear weapons. He may think we are asking him to dig his (and his country’s) own grave. And this is supposed to “our guy.”
So, faced with this kind of nuclear-tipped house of mirrors, isn’t it tempting to say “screw it, let’s get the hell out of there”? I know I feel that way a lot of the time. I know there is a deeper game going on here that involves both good and bad motivations. But, on balance, I think we need to stop worrying about “terrorist strongholds” in North Waziristan and stop thinking we can prop up a government in Kabul that can govern the countryside. The sooner we stop fighting the unwinnable battles, the sooner we can get back to protecting ourselves in a cost-effective and sane manner.
I wouldn’t worry too much. We’ve got our man Petraeus over there, and he’s the reincarnation of Napoleon and Sun Tzu. It’s just in our newly complex world victory takes so much longer than it used to, so all the smart defense analysts agree its gonna take us 10-20 years to sort this all out and get a nice jeffersonian democracy set up on the central asian plateau.
What is our strategy? What is our goal? Keep killing until they like us?
Actually, our strategy is to secure a swath so that that TAPI pipeline can be built. Pretty simple.
So it looks like things are going according to plan.
Pakistan really is a failed state. I don’t have a solution, but I am friends with a lot of Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans; their fears are far worse because their brothers and sisters believe in mass-conspiracy on a mass-scale, and never ever blame their own government for their problems.
Pakistan is not a failed state yet. The military knows that there are two politicians with popular support, and the one they are most comfortable with is named Zadari.
The US insistence on a full Pakistani assault on North Waziristan like the ones carried out elsewhere in the Northwest Territories and FATA last year is not grounded in reality. It never was. North Waziristan is ruled by a strong ally of the central government, unlike some of the other territories and tribal areas. And the leadership in North Waziristan has shown itself quite willing to root out foreign fighters who oppose the regime.
The key thing to understand is that “Taliban” does not mean in Pakistan what it has become to mean in the US; it does not equal “terrorist”. And not all of the groups labeled as Taliban by the US are in fact Taliban organizations — most notably the Haqquani network, which was allied with the US during the Soviet Afghan War and has publicly committed to expulsion of al Quaeda fighters as a negotiating commitment.
Pakistan has a very clear foreign policy with regard to authentic Taliban groups. They will not attack those that support the Pakistani government and they will support the ones in Afghanistan that they think are best able to counterbalance Iranian-aligned groups in the west and Indian-aligned groups in the north. And Pakistan has diplomatic ties with China, which wants to see the US out of an area that they have identified as key to their national interest.
Once Afghanistan no longer is a haven for al Queada, the US has no legitimate national interest in Afghanistan. Rational US policy would concede this in practice as it has in rhetoric.
There are, however, folks in the US who cannot grapple with the new reality that Bush’s hubris has brought to the US’s geopolitical position. They still have the illusion that we are the “hyperpower” of the 1990s. Or the economic giant of the 1950s and 1960s.
Those days are gone. We cannot recapture them by taxing ourselves more and more for military hardware, operations, and an overblown intelligence network that has so much data coming in that it is incapable of providing basic intelligence.
We need a new national security structure more matched to the threats we actually face over the next 40 years. And continuing the journalistic alternation between flag-waving and hand-wringing will not allow our elites (the only ones who actually read the Washington Post anymore) to push the government (for only the elites control government anymore) to fix it.
The Pakistani government is being set up as a US scapegoat. And yet in the past decade the Pakistani government has done some very difficult things: reversion to civilian government, resignation of Musharraf, the operations in the Northwest Territories and FATA last year and continuing on a limited basis this year, and coping with a major flood that devastated the heartland of the country (and for which the US provided limited relief aid compared to its scale).
Pakistan has proven to be a more reliable ally to us over the past decade than we have to them.
It’s time for the US to stop lecturing governments in the region about what they should be doing and understand the political realities of the region. And right now the political realities of the region argue for rapid US withdrawal and reliance of frontline states to provide stability. Our continued presence in Afghanistan is now a destabilizing factor in a way that it hasn’t been. Having a date certain for withdrawal helps push the parties toward agreement but until that agreement is reached things are still dicey. There are some who want to use US power to gain what they would not gain otherwise.