Officials and voters in the United States often cite a "trust
deficit" to explain the perennially tumultuous, frequently tortured, and
always tenuous relationship between the United States and Pakistan over the
last ten years. Many are wont
to point out how the United States "failed Pakistan" throughout its history
beginning in 1962 when it armed Pakistan's nemesis India during the latter's
war with China. This narrative of Washington routinely disappointing Pakistan moves
through its failure to support Pakistan in its wars with India in 1965 and 1971,
and crescendos with the final straw of perceived perfidy: the American decision
to invoke the Pressler
Amendment sanctions in 1990 as a result of Pakistani efforts to develop
nuclear weapons. This move notoriously deprived Pakistan of a fleet of F-16s for
which they had already paid. However, this history
is at best misleading, often wrong, and does little to forge a better
understanding of Pakistan and the limits of engaging the country's political
and military leadership.
While it is true that the United States supported India in
1962 and did little to support Pakistan in its 1965 or 1971 wars with India
despite being allied to Pakistan through the Central
Treaty Organization and the Southeast
Asia Treaty Organization, Pakistan began both wars. Do treaty partners have
an obligation to assist a member state which commences hostilities? Second,
despite being a treaty partner of the United States, Pakistan did not go to
Vietnam or Korea. In fact, the Pakistanis demurred from declaring China to be
an aggressor in the former conflict. And
with respect to the F-16 canard, Pakistan
helped forge the Pressler Amendment, because this instrument allowed the
United States to arm Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad while Pakistan continued developing nuclear weapons.
Few U.S. policymakers or analysts seem remotely aware that
Washington first sanctioned Pakistan in April
of 1979, under the Symington amendments
to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, or that Pakistan viewed the passage of
the Pressler Amendment as an important
victory for Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
because the legislation provided a simple way to manage two competing
interests: Pakistan's desire to continue developing nuclear weapons on the one
hand, and American requirements to provide security assistance to a known
proliferator in contravention of U.S. law on the other. From April of 1979
until the 1985 passage of Pressler, military assistance to Pakistan was enabled
by a presidential waiver by which the American president attested that
providing security assistance to Pakistan is in U.S. national interest even though Pakistan remained
noncompliant with U.S. requirements for such assistance. The Pressler
Amendment essentially moved the red lines of sanctionable nuclear
proliferation under the Foreign Assistance Act to a simple certification by the
U.S. president that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear bomb.
In the end, Pakistan made a strategic calculation, and chose
nuclear capabilities over F-16s. Pakistan knew full well that the time would
come when Pakistan would no longer remain indispensible to U.S. interests and
that the president would refuse to certify Pakistan as nuclear weapons-free,
and thus bring into force the sanctions that resembled the sanctions that were
imposed more than decade before in 1979.
Thus, what bedevils U.S.-Pakistan relations is not a
pervasive distrust of the other; rather, the two states want fundamentally
different things for South Asia, and their strategic interests have only minor
-- and quickly vanishing -- overlap. The two
countries' intelligence agencies operate
against each other as much if not more than they cooperate with each other.
Pakistan fights its Islamist militant foes while helping those that target U.S.
troops even while America redoubles its resolve to kill Islamabad's proxies.
All of this activity plays out across
a backdrop of some $20 billion dollars, paid overtly to Pakistan,
ostensibly to support the war on terrorism rather than undermine the same.
***
Pakistan's strategic elite are right to opine that the
Americans were astonishingly ignorant of the region and have a simplistic view
of Pakistan's security perceptions vis-à-vis Afghanistan and India. In quick succession, Washington broke three
critical promises made to President Pervez Musharraf in September 2001, and
likely did not understand the importance of these early missteps.
First, Washington promised that the Northern Alliance would
not take Kabul. By December 2001 the Northern Alliance did precisely that.
Washington failed to understand that the Northern Alliance had
been nurtured and aided by India.
From Rawalpindi's perspective, the United States had handed the keys of
Kabul to the Indians. To compound matters, the interim Afghan government was
dominated by the Northern Alliance. It took the 2005
elections to alter this significantly -- but not completely.
Second, the United
States assured President Musharraf that it would take a more active role in
resolving the conflict over the disputed province of Kashmir. While such
promises were likely absurd in the first instance, the United States quickly drew
back from that commitment as well. Over the years, the United States has taken
little public interest in India's continued mishandling of Kashmiri
Muslims' grievances or of the vast challenges its Muslim
populations face.
Third, the United States assured Pakistan that its "strategic
assets" (its nuclear program) would remain intact. While technically this pledge
was honored, it was eviscerated by the
2005 U.S.-India civilian nuclear deal and concomitant guarantee that the United States
would help India become a global power. The nuclear deal was all the more problematic
because-despite its name-it was designed
to assist India's development of nuclear weapons directly and indirectly as
a part of U.S. grand strategy to manage China's regional influence with a
growing Indian counterweight. American
declarations of such support to India no doubt rankled Pakistan. By 2005,
Pakistan's substantial
facilitation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan had galvanized a
sanguineous insurgency that spread from the tribal areas throughout Pakistan.
Admittedly, though, this insurgency was fueled by erstwhile proxies
who turned their guns against the state, exposing the fragility of Pakistan's continued
reliance on militants as part of its strategy to secure its interests in India
as well as Afghanistan.
While Pakistan was doing a U-turn on its U-turn against the
Taliban and while the Afghan Taliban were gearing up for a reinvigorated
insurgent campaign, the United States and NATO blithely assumed that major
combat operations were complete in Afghanistan. Historians will decide,
however, if Pakistan had ever made a genuine change with regards to the Taliban
in the first instance, and whether that ostensible shift was intended to be
permanent.
The United States, meanwhile, remained insouciant about the
developments in Pakistan. Even as it
became increasingly clear that Pakistan continued supporting the Afghan Taliban
and the notorious Haqqani network, the United States depended ever more upon
Pakistan for its logistical support through ground and air lines of
communication to supply the war. Moreover, Washington needed Pakistan to help
it continue
to capture al-Qaeda operatives. Washington simply did not want to badger
Pakistan about the Taliban. And Washington did not admonish Pakistan for
supporting groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which were
killing Americans in Afghanistan since 2004. It took the 2008 Mumbai
carnage to convince Washington that such groups are not simply "India's
problem."
As the Americans grasped the problem of the Taliban, it
shifted its focus from al-Qaeda -- long vanquished from Afghanistan -- and made
the Afghan Taliban its enemy to defeat in Afghanistan. However, despite efforts to bolster a
northern distribution route through Central Asia, the surge that the United
States inserted into Afghanistan in 2009 only
increased Washington's dependence upon Pakistan even while Pakistan was
becoming ever more acutely the source
of the Taliban's strength.
As this farce unfolded, Pakistan concluded that the current
situation in Afghanistan was deeply dystopian. For one thing, not only had the
Americans embraced Pakistan's enemy as its key South Asian ally, India had
taken advantage of the American security umbrella to re-establish its presence
in Afghanistan, to Pakistan's deepest vexation. While Pakistan had concluded
that America's allies were its enemies (e.g. India), America's enemies were
increasingly becoming those very groups that Pakistan embraced as its own
allies -- the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and savage terrorist groups like LeT.
Washington was slow to understand the changing currents. President Bush
remained enamored of President Musharraf and his purported commitment to
turning back the tide of Islamist extremism, even while his government was busy
forging peace deals with a variety of murderous militants in Pakistan's tribal
areas and reinvigorating ties with the Afghan Taliban. The United States
remained committed to the belief that through military and financial
allurements Pakistan's fundamental strategic calculus could be changed: that it
could become a partner for peace in Afghanistan and that it could reconcile its
vast differences with India and accept India's obvious and inevitable hegemony
over the region. The United States and its officials simply could not grasp
that to do so would be tantamount to defeat for Pakistan generally and the army
in particular, which above all else seeks to retard India's rise and its
presumed desire to render Pakistan little more than a nuclear-armed Bangladesh.
Worse, by patronizing Pakistan's military, Pakistan's citizenry and political
systems became ever more disempowered.
After a full decade of the global war on terror, the United States has finally concluded what the Pakistanis had long known:
our interests and allies are incompatible.
As the American endgame in Afghanistan looms, the American government
and polity alike are increasingly unwilling to tolerate Pakistan's support of
the very organizations killing American troops and attacking its embassy.
Pakistan, for its part, is tired of participating in a war
effort with the United States -- albeit on highly selective terms -- that is
fomenting increased domestic tension, while the United States seems deaf or
indifferent to its security concerns including those centered on India's
defense modernization and the U.S. role facilitating it; the impact of the
U.S.-India civilian nuclear deal for Pakistan's own nuclear program; the nature
of India's presence in Afghanistan and Pakistani beliefs that India is
supporting subversive elements in Pakistan from Afghanistan, among other related
issues
The next decade of
U.S.-Pakistan relations
While Pakistan's leaders issue statements full of bravado
that it no longer needs the United States because China will step
into the breach, astute Pakistanis know that this is manna pedaled to
appease a wary population burdened with economic hardship, an uncertain future,
and ceaseless violence -- all of which are deferred or ignored by an indifferent
political class. China never helped Pakistan during any war with India (1947,
1965, 1971, 1999) and shares international concerns about terrorist groups operating
from or on Pakistani soil. In contrast to American grant-based aid, China's
assistance is generally loan-based. Moreover, while Pakistan has correctly
assessed that it does not need American aid, it is loathe to concede that it still
needs America's
support at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is perennially
allowing Pakistan to abscond from its own commitments to fiscal
reform-including expanding its tax net. Pakistan has correctly concluded that
the world sees Pakistan as too dangerous to fail and will not encourage the IMF
or other multilateral institutions to cut off Pakistan's economic life support.
However, these policies have miserably failed Pakistanis, the vast majority of
whom are hard-working, reject
violence, and deserve a better future. Pakistan's recent
brinkmanship with the IMF will no doubt be leveraged for even greater
concessions, because of Pakistan's confidence that the world will not let
Pakistan fail. Apparently limping along in a financially comatose state
satisfies Pakistan's leaders, who are insulated from the fiscal woes of
ordinary Pakistan.
But Washington also still needs Pakistan. While in principle
Pakistan could offer opportunities as partner for peace and stability in the
region, such naive optimism cannot be justified amidst the accumulating evidence
to the contrary. However, the most pressing U.S. national security interests are
resident in Pakistan -- not Afghanistan or in Iran: nuclear weapons, a raft of
terrorist and insurgent groups with varying degrees of official support, the specter
of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, and evolving fears about Islamist
militants infiltrating
the ranks and officer corps of Pakistan's armed forces.
The United States and Pakistan need to forge a more
sustainable relationship based upon a cold assessment of reality. Washington's
khaki addiction has undermined U.S. interests, and has undermined
prospects for Pakistani ownership of its own war on terror, as the army is seen
as a collaborator with the United States -- if not a rental army. This perception
has no doubt arisen in part because of the way in which the army handled its
internal operations. President
Musharraf was famous in the early years of the war for saying that Pakistan was
fighting America's war on America's behest. The only way forward is to
think smaller, and focus on outcomes of democratization and human development
rather than strategic shifts. A lower profile is critical, as the United States
could hardly be more despised in Pakistan. The Soviet Union may offer a model
of engagement: contain the threat, invest in opportunities for change, while
preparing for the worst at home and abroad.
The worst outcome is a Pakistan that has no investment in
the West and consequently nothing to lose. Such a Pakistan -- backed into a
corner -- may be much more dangerous than it is now. The United States must
work with its allies and Pakistan's allies to ensure that Pakistan does not
become a North Korea that is increasingly dangerous, unpredictable and opaque
to all. This will require fortitude in Washington. The U.S. Congress will have
to resist its strongest impulse to simply cut
off Pakistan. There is simply too much to lose by choosing any path other
than engagement, however difficult and maddening such a path may be.
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at
Georgetown University's Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is the author The Madrassah
Challenge in Pakistan (2008), co-editor of Political Islam and Governance in
Bangladesh (2010) and Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations
in Sacred Spaces.
NEXT: Derek Reveron, Afghanistan
and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy
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