Pakistan and the United States: frenemies in need can be friendsindeed
By Arif Rafiq, October 20, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 8:34 PM
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Senior Pakistani and U.S. officials meet today in Washington to start what's being billed as the third in a series of high-level "strategic dialogues" between the two war on terror partners.
Over the remainder of this week, thirteen working groups on a wide variety of issues, ranging from energy to women's empowerment, will finalize their recommendations for enhancing cooperation and furthering objectives that are said to be mutually shared. A few major transactions, including a new $2 billion military aid package, will reportedly be announced. But the pomp, circumstance, and scale of the pledges belie the reality that Islamabad and Washington are as much strategic competitors as they are partners.
Glaringly, the two governments are pursuing separate and largely antagonistic endgames to the Afghan war. Recent press reports claim that NATO is facilitating peace talks between the Karzai government and Afghan insurgents, including the infamous Haqqani network that the Pakistani military allegedly sponsors to purge Afghanistan of arch-rival India's influence.
General David Petraeus is promoting (or wants us to believe he is) a peace process in Afghanistan sans Pakistan but with the very groups that the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus has urged the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to reach out to. Yet, at the same time, the United States is asking Pakistan to smack the hornets' nest in the North Waziristan tribal area, home to the Haqqani network.
Why would Pakistan create bad blood with an entity that could very well be integrated into the Afghan power structure in the coming years in a U.S.-endorsed reconciliation process? So its own Taliban-style insurgencies can live on even after the Afghan war comes to an end?
Unlike the United States, Pakistan cannot engage in a front-loaded withdrawal from the region. Barring a dramatic subcontinental drift, Pakistan and Afghanistan are -- in Karzai's words -- "conjoined twins." What goes on in Afghanistan doesn't always stay in Afghanistan -- it often bleeds into Pakistan. The thousands of Pakistani civilians and security personnel killed since 9/11 are case in point.
Pakistan and the United States can continue their transactional relationship. But no amount of money will induce Pakistan to commit strategic suicide. And no American president can be indifferent toward a safe haven in Pakistan where terrorist plots against the United States have been and continue to be plotted.
Maintenance of the status quo will not produce a lasting peace in Afghanistan, which is essential to the security of both Pakistan and the United States. Only a joint effort by the United States, (the predominant occupying force in Afghanistan) and Pakistan (the entity with the most leverage over Afghan insurgents) can end the thirty-year conflict in Afghanistan once and for all, and thereby seriously weaken regional and transnational militants in Pakistan's border areas, such as al-Qaeda, that have thrived off of instability and foreign occupation across the Durand Line.
Pakistan, as the glue holding together a peace deal between the many Afghan factions and armed with a potent counterinsurgency force to man its frontier with Afghanistan, can serve as the guarantor for an enduring Afghan peace. But for this formula to even be fathomable requires adjustment by both Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan needs to take more seriously the threat posed to the United States and Western Europe by al-Qaeda and its affiliates inside its border regions with Afghanistan. And the United States will have to accommodate Pakistan's legitimate fear that rising Indian influence in Afghanistan will result in it being strategically encircled by an emerging superpower on a $50 billion dollar military spending spree with which it's fought three wars.
Peace in Afghanistan and containment or defeat of al-Qaeda are not possible if Pakistan and the United States work at cross-purposes. And so if the status quo continues, it will remain mission unaccomplished for both countries.
Arif Rafiq is president of Vizier Consulting, LLC, which provides strategic guidance on Middle East and South Asian political and security issues. He writes at the Pakistan Policy Blog (www.pakistanpolicy.com).
Pak-US are on the same roads....... in Afghanistan
"Haqqani network that the Pakistani military allegedly sponsors to purge Afghanistan of arch-rival India's influence. "
1. If we believe above allegation to be tru even, does this prove that Pak-US interests are on cross roads? US should themselves eliminate Indian influence from Afghanistan, to prevent encirclement of Pakistan.
2. Haqqani belongs to Paktika province, Afghanistan. He was a beloved mujahiden leader of CIA during Soviet era and believed to have visited white house during Reghan administration. He was a mininter during mujahideen government and Taliban times in Afghanistan.
3. Haqqani is an Afghan, enjoys wide support in provinces of Khost, Paktika, Lugar, and Ghazni .(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haqqani_network)
He has all the rights to have share in a government in Kabul for a durable peace in Afghanistan.
4. Pakistan looks at every US policy in the region from the Security Prism. The allies need to understand the dynamics of the region, where integrity of Pakistan have not only been threatened but Pakistan has been dismambered in the last half a century.
US-Pakistan, a cursed alliance
U.S. - Pakistan is a cursed alliance.
1. US policy keeps up the pretense that the real terrorist threat springs from al-Qaeda, even though the published US intelligence assessment admits al-Qaeda has been weakened to the extent that its remnants are holed up in mountain caves and is in no position to seriously endanger US homeland security.
2. Washington draws a specious distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban to treat the former as inveterate foes of America and the latter as made up of many "reconciliables". Another deceptive distinction is to tie the Taliban with Islamist ideology, rather than directly with terrorism. President Barack Obama repeatedly has labeled the Taliban militia as obscurantist rather than terrorist a tag he reserves exclusively for al-Qaeda.
3. US policy has split the Taliban into the Afghan and Pakistani parts. The US is going after the Pakistani Taliban, led by Baitullah Mehsud, while it encourages the Pakistani intelligence to continue to shelter the entire top Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan province. Mullah Muhammad Omar and other members of the Taliban's inner shura (council) have been ensconced for years in the Quetta area and are No. 1 killer of US/NATO troops in southern Afghanistan. Yet, US drones have targeted militants in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), but not the Afghan Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Baluchistan. US ground-commando raids also have spared the Taliban's command-and-control network in Baluchistan.
4. While employing the Saudi, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence for back-channel negotiations with the Afghan Taliban shura over a political deal, the Obama administration is dramatizing the Pakistani Taliban threat but ignores Pakistani government and Army’s shelter and support of Afghan Taliban headed by Mullah Omar who control the current Taliban insurgency from his base in Quetta.
5. Washington continues to pretend that terrorist safe havens exist only along Pakistan's western frontier while nothing can be further from the truth. Terrorist safe havens exist in entire Pakistan - in Karachi, in Punjab, in Baluchistan and even in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as well as in Pakhtunkhwa.
6. The fact that America has helped amass a huge sum of money in international aid for Pakistan (not counting Chinese assistance) shows it will not allow its long-established pawn to become a failed state. But when Pakistan is most vulnerable to external pressure, Washington refuses to exercise leverage to force Pakistan to snap its ties to terror.
No wonder US continues to have troubles in its Afghan mission. These troubles are of US’s own making.
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