The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (15 page)

I remember meeting high-ranking members of the administration right after those calls. Everyone asked, as if it had been a topic of discussion in the Situation Room, “What is our leverage with Pakistan?” I did not need to think hard to answer that one. “None,” I responded. We had worked hard at not having much leverage. We had cut back our aid and all but ended the programs that were meant to build bilateral ties, and we had taken off the table the promise of a long-term strategic relationship. We had assumed that threats and pressure would do what aid and diplomacy had achieved in the past. America’s strategy with Pakistan was not “three cups of tea,” but “three bangs on the table.” The Pakistani view was that you cannot threaten to take away a relationship that is not there—and threats of military action against Pakistan were just not credible, not when we were barely keeping our head above water in Afghanistan and, what’s more, had declared loud and clear that we were on our way out.

In return, I asked those who wondered about our leverage, “What do you think is Pakistan’s leverage on us?” Several levers came to my mind: We relied on Pakistan to supply our troops in Afghanistan with everything from fuel to drinking water; we needed Pakistan’s cooperation to
gather the intelligence necessary to make drone strikes effective; and above all we needed Pakistan to make our Afghanistan strategy work. Given these dependencies, we had done ourselves a disservice by taking an ax to the relationship. Bullying wasn’t going to pay.

With no apology forthcoming the situation got tenser. Pakistan closed its border to trucks carrying supplies for American troops in Afghanistan, threatened to openly break with America on intelligence cooperation, and shunned international conferences on the future of Afghanistan. The relationship was in tatters.

With the Pakistan border closed, the U.S. military was paying an additional $100 million a month to supply its troops in Afghanistan (by May 2012 the total cost was close to $700 million). Without Pakistani roads, the U.S. military would not be able to get its heavy equipment out of Afghanistan on time or on budget once the time came to leave. If Pakistan remained off-limits, the United States would have to rethink its entire exit strategy from Afghanistan. Another arrow in Pakistan’s quiver was that it could also close its airspace to U.S. planes flying between the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. The next escalation in this conflict would put the United States, not Pakistan, in the pincer.

Clinton all along thought we should say “Sorry” and move on. Now, as months had passed, Clinton told the White House that enough was enough; she was taking charge. She gave a simple direction to her top deputy at the State Department, Tom Nides: “I want you to fix this.” Nides flew to Islamabad to negotiate with General Kayani a tepid U.S. apology in exchange for Pakistan opening the border—and hence preventing the relationship from going over the cliff.

The White House acquiesced to Clinton salvaging the relationship. Not only had their Pakistan policy failed, but Obama also realized that Putin was the main beneficiary of Pakistan’s spat with Washington. The alternatives to Pakistan’s supply routes were Central Asian and Russian land and air routes, which gave Putin leverage. Obama decided he preferred apologizing to Pakistan to depending on Putin. It was a critical realization for the White House that the real menace to America comes not from states like Pakistan but powers like Russia. But the relationship is not out of the woods yet. Pakistan is still intent on protecting its ties to
the Haqqani network and the Taliban—looking past America to protecting its position in the future Afghanistan. The relationship may still give way to more confrontation.

Seldom has the loss of one statesman proved as consequential as the death of Richard Holbrooke. Without his wisdom and experience, America’s Pakistan policy went off the rails and there will be long-run costs. What happens to Pakistan will always matter to America for several reasons, not least among them the presence of nuclear weapons. We should want more and not less influence in Pakistan, and Pakistan’s stability is not the only factor. There is also the matter of China.

When the Obama administration came to power, there was a genuine sense that Pakistan was on the edge of national collapse. That is much less the case today. But as our relations with the country soured, the business community and affluent middle classes started to write off America. The anger at American hubris became much easier to afford as burgeoning trade with China started to make up for reduced business with America. Fewer American businesses deal with Pakistan, but hotels in Islamabad or Lahore are filled with Chinese businessmen carrying on a brisk trade in commodities, manufacturing, and even software services.

The Chinese option buffers Pakistan from U.S. pressure, but in the long run it will also chart a different future for Pakistan. Beijing is unhappy over America’s strategic partnership with India, and especially dislikes the jewel in that partnership’s crown: the civilian nuclear deal struck by George W. Bush that will upgrade India’s nuclear capabilities. There is even more consternation in Beijing at the idea of a U.S.-Indian effort to contain and countervail China’s growing influence in Asia and the Indian Ocean region.

In this great-power rivalry, Pakistan is a strategic asset to China—a thorn in India’s side, a useful balancer that occupies many of India’s military and diplomatic resources and distracts India from focusing on China. By effectively conceding Pakistan to China, we have set ourselves back in the far more important rivalry with Beijing.

And Pakistan is not out of the woods. American pressure of late has in particular targeted the Pakistani military. We have always drawn a distinction between the civilian government and the military in Pakistan. There have been times when civilian politicians irked us and we saw our salvation in the military. It used to be that we relied on the military to get things done and keep the place going. We faulted the generals’ authoritarian tendencies, but it had become the custom in Washington to pinch our nostrils with one hand and bless the soldiers’ political meddling with the other. Otherwise Pakistan would surely sink under rising tides of corruption, misrule, and violent conflict. We did not like the military’s rattling of sabers at India, but thought that the men in khaki alone could safeguard the country’s nuclear arsenal, keep jihadis at bay, and help the West against the threat of extremism. The Pakistani military created problems and seemed to be the only solution to them at the same time. It was nice work if you could get it.

Humiliating and weakening a military that is choking democracy is not a bad thing. That is the only way to change the balance of power in favor of civilians and give democracy a chance. But Pakistan is not Spain or Argentina. The combination of ethnic tensions, extremist revolt, a sagging economy, and political gridlock with a war next door and no real institutional alternatives means that weakening Pakistan’s military could mean opening the door to the unknown. It is possible to envisage the gradual growth of democracy as the military’s control over politics fades—Turkey has seen a process of this sort unfold over the past two decades. But that delicate transition needs stability, time, and positive U.S. involvement. None of these are at hand in Pakistan. Whatever its shortcomings, the military remains the one functioning institution in Pakistan—the skeleton that keeps its state upright. One may well ask whether in the haste to get “deliverables” on short-run “asks” Washington was now jumping from the frying pan into the fire, jeopardizing Pakistan to America’s own detriment. America’s pressure strategy is just as likely to produce the Pakistan of our worst nightmares as it is to bend the country’s will to our counterterrorism demands. A Pakistan that bends is likely to be a weaker and more vulnerable state, a larger, more dangerous South Asian Yemen.

Much eludes America in its singular focus on drones and the Taliban.
Pakistan is a democracy with a vibrant civil society, a rambunctious free press, an independent judiciary, and a sizable middle class and private sector that are eroding the military’s grip on power, deepening democracy, and pushing for economic ties with India. But to get to a better place Pakistan needs stability and support—which, again, are not on the American agenda right now.

There is also much to worry about in Pakistan. The country suffers from severe electricity shortages. It is now common for large urban centers like Lahore to go without electricity for as long as sixteen hours. Factories shut down, workers are sent home, and in sweltering summer heat tempers flare in the form of protests, riots, and street clashes. What is happening with electricity today will happen with water tomorrow. The hopelessly outdated irrigation system leaks water to no end, and rapid population growth is straining the water supply—which is bound to dwindle as the glaciers melt away.

Urban violence involving criminal gangs and ethnic mafias is on the rise—Karachi’s constant gun battles, assassinations, and street violence bring to mind drug turf battles in Colombia and Mexico, but mixed with ethnic clashes of the sort seen once in Bosnia or Northern Ireland.

Entire populations want out. The Baluch are engaged in a war of liberation, and a bevy of other ethnic groups want recognition, special treatment, and, when possible, their own provinces. The military has kept separatism in check, but for how long and at what price?

The gap between the rich and poor is widening, not just in terms of wealth but also education, health, and access to social services. Pakistan’s massive middle class is as large as 30 million people—a midsized country in its own right—surrounded by five times as many poor slum dwellers and peasants. There is not enough economic growth to improve the lives of those at the bottom rung of the ladder, and even many in the middle class may lose their footing and slide down into economic trouble.

Some think economic pressure of this sort could produce a “Pakistan Spring.” But Pakistan had its spring in 2008 when its lawyers, media, students, and civil society joined hands to send General Musharraf packing. If there is another big nationwide protest movement, it is likely to
be anti-drone and anti-American—the Pakistani equivalent of the Arab demand for dignity seems to be directed at Washington.

From the 1950s, when Pakistan had been counted as an important part of the so-called Northern Tier—allies upon whom America could rely to contain Soviet influence in West Asia—the U.S. and Pakistani militaries enjoyed close ties. The Pentagon thought of Pakistan’s military as an important asset in a troubled region. The Afghan war against the invading Russians brought the two militaries even closer together. After that war, the State Department thought of putting Pakistan on its list of state terror sponsors and of sanctioning it for A. Q. Khan’s nuclear program. But the Pentagon intervened, arranging for Pakistani troops to lend a hand with UN peacekeeping in Somalia, where Pakistan’s Frontier Force Regiment lost twenty-four men in a battle against local clan militias in June 1993 and helped rescue U.S. troops in the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu that October. State Department plans to spank Islamabad were shelved. During Musharraf’s presidency, it was again the Pentagon that lobbied the president hard to view Pakistan in the best light, as a staunch ally in the war on terror.

In the past two years, that pillar of U.S.-Pakistan relations has come crashing down. The Pakistani military has started to view America not as an ally but as a threat. In March 2012, America put a bounty on the head of the Punjabi terrorist Hafiz Saeed, who masterminded the Mumbai attacks that killed 164 people over four days in late November 2008. It was high time that America pressured Pakistan to stop supporting anti-Indian terrorists, but America chose to do this long after the attack on Mumbai and as another signal of getting tough with Pakistan. In Islamabad, this was seen as a significant expansion of America’s war on terror into Pakistan proper. The United States and Pakistan had their disagreements, but Pakistan’s military had never before seen America as a country to be on guard against. Did the U.S. military now think a war with Pakistan might be in the offing? Pakistan was not ruling it out.

Nothing symbolized this dismal turn of events better than Admiral Mullen’s testimony. Mullen had been friendly with General Kayani. Their personal rapport had symbolized the close historical ties between the Pentagon and the GHQ (Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi).
The personal friendship was over, and so were the strategic ties between the two militaries.

In time we will ask, “Who lost Pakistan?” We will also have to ask why. Holbrooke understood that Pakistan would change its foreign policy only if something more than America’s immediate counterterrorism needs bound us together. But after the U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue finally got going, Holbrooke passed away and, following the first crisis of 2011, Washington quickly froze the talks. Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman, told an incredulous Pakistani press that America was looking for a “transactional relationship.” We have no common interests, he told his Pakistani counterparts, just common objectives. The Pakistanis read that as code for “American objectives, which Pakistan is expected to fulfill.”

Pakistan was always going to be a hard case, a difficult problem. My point is that we made it harder than it had to be. We failed when it came to strategic vision and imagination, and we failed in our commitment to diplomacy. We further destabilized the world’s so-called most dangerous place—in effect compounding our own headaches. We have less influence in Pakistan in 2012 after a year of confrontation than we had in 2011 after two years of friendship. We acted as if we could walk away from Pakistan—which of course we cannot and will not do, and they knew it all along. Ours was not just an empty bluff, it was worse than that—it was folly we believed in and crafted our policy on, and all Pakistan had to do was wait for reality to set in.

We could have managed Pakistan better. We did not have to break the relationship and put Pakistan’s stability at risk. That course of action has not gotten us any further than the more prudent course of greater engagement—in fact, it’s gotten us a lot less. We have not realized our immediate security goals there and have put our long-run strategic interests in jeopardy. Pakistan is a failure of American policy, a failure of the sort that comes from the president handing foreign policy over to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.