Talking Tough to Pakistan
How to End Islamabad's Defiance
By Stephen D. Krasner
November 29, 2011
Cuts or increases in U.S. civilian and military aid will not alter Islamabad's political
calculus -- and Washington should stop expecting them to. Nevertheless, it should stay
engaged with the country if only to protect its major regional strategic interests.
On September 22, 2011, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, made his last official appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. In
his speech, he bluntly criticized Pakistan, telling the committee that "extremist
organizations serving as proxies for the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan
troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers." The Haqqani network, he said, "is, in many
ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency [ISI]." In 2011
alone, Mullen continued, the network had been responsible for a June attack on the
Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, a September truck-bomb attack in Wardak Province that
wounded 77 U.S. soldiers, and a September attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
These observations did not, however, lead Mullen to the obvious conclusion: Pakistan
should be treated as a hostile power. And within days, military officials began walking
back his remarks, claiming that Mullen had meant to say only that Islamabad gives broad
support to the Haqqani network, not that it gives specific direction. Meanwhile, unnamed
U.S. government officials asserted that he had overstated the case. Mullen's testimony,
for all the attention it received, did not signify a new U.S. strategy toward Pakistan.
Yet such a shift is badly needed. For decades, the United States has sought to buy
Pakistani cooperation with aid: $20 billion worth since 9/11 alone. This money has been
matched with plenty of praise. At his first press conference in Islamabad following his
2007 appointment as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mullen called Pakistan "a steadfast and
historic ally." In 2008, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice even said that she
"fully believed" that Pakistan "does not in any way want to be associated with terrorist
elements and is indeed fighting to root them out wherever [Pakistani officials] find
them." Meanwhile, U.S. leaders have spent an outsized amount of face time with their
Pakistani counterparts. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has made four trips to
Pakistan, compared with two to India and three to Japan. Mullen made more than 20 visits
to Pakistan.
To be sure, Mullen was not the first U.S. official to publicly point the finger at
Islamabad, nor will he be the last. In 2008, the CIA blamed Pakistan's ISI for aiding the
bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. In July 2011, two months after U.S. Navy SEALS
raided Osama bin Laden's compound near the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy, Admiral
James Winnefeld, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee,
"Pakistan is a very, very difficult partner, and we all know that." And in an October
press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Clinton noted that the Obama
administration intended to "push the Pakistanis very hard," adding, "they can either be
helping or hindering."
Washington's tactic -- criticism coupled with continued assistance -- has not been
effectual. Threats and censure go unheeded in Pakistan because Islamabad's leaders do not
fear the United States. This is because the United States has so often demonstrated a fear
of Pakistan, believing that although Pakistan's policies have been unhelpful, they could
get much worse. Washington seems to have concluded that if it actually disengaged and as a
result Islamabad halted all its cooperation in Afghanistan, then U.S. counterinsurgency
efforts there would be doomed. Even more problematic, the thinking goes, without external
support, the already shaky Pakistani state would falter. A total collapse could
precipitate a radical Islamist takeover, worsening Pakistani relations with the
U.S.-backed Karzai regime in Afghanistan and escalating tensions, perhaps even
precipitating a nuclear war, between Pakistan and India.
WEIGHING OF DEEDS
The U.S.-Pakistani relationship has produced a few modest successes. Pakistan has
generally allowed NATO to transport supplies through its territory to Afghanistan. It has
helped capture some senior al Qaeda officials, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the 9/11
mastermind. It has permitted the United States to launch drone strikes from bases in
Baluchistan.
Yet these accomplishments pale in comparison to the ways in which Pakistan has proved
uncooperative. The country is the world's worst nuclear proliferator, having sold
technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea through the A. Q. Khan network. Although
Islamabad has attacked those terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban,
that target its institutions, it actively supports others, such as the Haqqani network,
the Afghan Taliban, and Hezb-i-Islami, that attack coalition troops and Afghan officials
or conspire against India. Pakistan also hampers U.S. efforts to deal with those groups;
although many Pakistani officials privately support the drone program, for example, they
publicly exaggerate the resulting civilian deaths. Meanwhile, they refuse to give the
United States permission to conduct commando raids in Pakistan, swearing that they will
defend Pakistani sovereignty at all costs.
A case in point was the raid that killed bin Laden. Rather than embrace the move,
Pakistani officials reacted with fury. The police arrested a group of Pakistani citizens
who were suspected of having helped the United States collect intelligence prior to the
operation and delayed U.S. interrogations of bin Laden's three wives for more than a week.
Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of the ISI, condemned the U.S. raid before a
special session of parliament, and the government passed a resolution pledging to revisit
its relationship with the United States. Of course, the operation was embarrassing for the
Pakistani military, since it showed the armed forces to be either complicit in harboring
bin Laden or so incompetent that they could not find him under their own noses. But
Pakistan could easily have saved face by publicly depicting the operation as a cooperative
venture.
The fact that Pakistan distanced itself from the raid speaks to another major problem in
the relationship: despite the billions of dollars the United States has given Pakistan,
public opinion there remains adamantly anti-American. In a 2010 Pew survey of 21
countries, those Pakistanis polled had among the lowest favorability ratings of the United
States: 17 percent. The next year, another Pew survey found that 63 percent of the
population disapproved of the raid that killed bin Laden, and 55 percent thought it was a
bad thing that he had died.
Washington's current strategy toward Islamabad, in short, is not working. Any gains the
United States has bought with its aid and engagement have come at an extremely high price
and have been more than offset by Pakistan's nuclear proliferation and its support for the
groups that attack Americans, Afghans, Indians, and others.
RATIONAL CHOICE
It is tempting to believe that Pakistan's lack of cooperation results from its weakness as
a state. One version of this argument is that much of Pakistan's civilian and military
leadership might actually want to be more aligned with the United States but is prevented
from being so by powerful hard-line Islamist factions. Its advocates point to the fact
that pubic officials shrank from condemning the bodyguard who in January 2011 shot Salman
Taseer, the governor of Punjab, who had spoken out against Pakistan's blasphemy law.
Similar silence followed the March assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, the minorities
minister and only Christian in the cabinet, who had also urged reforming the law.
Presumably, the politicians held their tongues out of fear of reprisal. Another
explanation of the weakness of the Pakistani state is that the extremists in the
government and the military who support militants offer that support despite their
superiors' objections. For example, the May 2011 terrorist attack on Pakistan's naval air
base Mehran, which the top military brass condemned, was later suspected to have been
conducted with help from someone on the inside.
Still, there is a much more straightforward explanation for Pakistan's behavior. Its
policies are a fully rational response to the conception of the country's national
interest held by its leaders, especially those in the military. Pakistan's fundamental
goal is to defend itself against its rival, India. Islamabad deliberately uses nuclear
proliferation and deterrence, terrorism, and its prickly relationship with the United
States to achieve this objective.
Pakistan's nuclear strategy is to project a credible threat of first use against India.
The country has a growing nuclear arsenal, a stockpile of short-range missiles to carry
warheads, and plans for rapid weapons dispersion should India invade. So far, the strategy
has worked; although Pakistan has supported numerous attacks on Indian soil, India has not
retaliated.
Transnational terrorism, Pakistanis believe, has also served to constrain and humiliate
India. As early as the 1960s, Pakistani strategists concluded that terrorism could help
offset India's superior conventional military strength. They were right. Pakistani
militant activity in Kashmir has led India to send hundreds of thousands of troops into
the province -- as many as 500,000 during a particularly tense moment with Pakistan in
2002. Better that India sends its troops to battle terrorists on its own territory, the
Pakistani thinking goes, than march them across the border. Further, the 2008 Mumbai
attack, which penetrated the heart of India, was a particularly embarrassing episode; the
failure to prevent it, and the feeble response to it, demonstrated the ineffectuality of
India's security forces.
Pakistan's double game with the United States has been effective, too. After 9/11,
Pakistan's leaders could hardly resist pressure from Washington to cooperate. But they
were also loath to lose influence with the insurgents in Afghanistan, which they believed
gave Pakistan strategic depth against India. So Islamabad decided to have things both
ways: cooperating with Washington enough to make itself useful but obstructing the
coalition's plans enough to make it nearly impossible to end the Afghan insurgency. This
has been an impressive accomplishment.
CARING BY NEGLECTING
As Mullen's comments attest, U.S. officials do recognize the flaws in their country's
current approach to Pakistan. Yet instead of making radical changes to that policy,
Washington continues to muddle through, working with Pakistan where possible, attempting
to convince its leaders that they should focus on internal, rather than external, threats,
and hoping for the best. For their part, commentators mostly call for marginal changes,
such as engaging the Pakistani military more closely on the drone program and making the
program more transparent, opening U.S. textile markets to Pakistani trade, helping
Pakistan address its energy deficit, focusing on a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir
dispute, and developing closer ties to civilian officials. Many of these suggestions seem
to be based on the idea that if millions of dollars in U.S. aid has not been enough to buy
Pakistani support, perhaps extra deal sweeteners will be.
The one significant policy change since 2008 has been the retargeting of aid to civilians.
Under the Obama administration, total assistance has increased by 48 percent, and a much
higher percentage of it is economic rather than security related: 45 percent in 2010 as
opposed to 24 percent in 2008. The Enhanced Partnership With Pakistan Act of 2009, which
committed $7.5 billion to Pakistan over five years, conditioned disbursements on
Pakistan's behavior, including cooperation on counterterrorism and the holding of
democratic elections.
Despite Pakistan's ongoing problematic behavior, however, aid has continued to flow.
Clinton even certified in March 2011 that Pakistan had made a "sustained commitment" to
combating terrorist groups. Actions such as this have undermined American credibility when
it comes to pressuring Pakistan to live up to its side of the bargain. The United States
has shown that the sticks that come with its carrots are hollow.
The only way the United States can actually get what it wants out of Pakistan is to make
credible threats to retaliate if Pakistan does not comply with U.S. demands and offer
rewards only in return for cooperative actions taken. U.S. officials should tell their
Pakistani counterparts in no uncertain terms that they must start playing ball or face
malign neglect at best and, if necessary, active isolation. Malign neglect would mean
ending all U.S. assistance, military and civilian; severing intelligence cooperation;
continuing and possibly escalating U.S. drone strikes; initiating cross-border special
operations raids; and strengthening U.S. ties with India. Active isolation would include,
in addition, declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, imposing sanctions, and
pressuring China and Saudi Arabia to cut off their support, as well.
Of course, the United States' new "redlines" would be believable only if it is clear to
Pakistan that the United States would be better off acting on them than backing down. (And
the more believable they are, the less likely the United State will have to carry them
out.) So what would make the threats credible?
First, the United States must make clear that if it ended its assistance to Pakistan,
Pakistan would not be able to retaliate. The United States could continue its drone
strikes, perhaps using the stealth versions of them that it is currently developing. It
could suppress Pakistani air defenses, possibly with electronic jammers, so as to limit
military deaths and collateral damage. And even if Pakistan shot down some drones, it
could not destroy them all. The United States might even be able to conduct some Special
Forces raids, which would be of such short duration and against such specific targets that
Pakistan would not be able to retaliate with conventional forces. Pakistan might attempt
to launch strikes against NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan, but its military would
risk embarrassing defeat if those campaigns did not go well. Pakistan might threaten to
cut off its intelligence cooperation, but that cooperation has never really extended to
sharing information on the Afghan Taliban, one of the United States' main concerns in
Afghanistan. Moreover, if Pakistan started tolerating or abetting al Qaeda on its own
soil, the country would be even more at risk. Al Qaeda could turn against the state and
attempt to unseat the government. And the United States would surely begin striking
Pakistan even more aggressively if al Qaeda found haven there.
Second, the United States must show that it can neutralize one of Pakistan's trump cards:
its role in the war in Afghanistan. Washington must therefore develop a strategy for
Afghanistan that works without Pakistan's help. That means a plan that does not require
transporting personnel or materiel through Pakistan. Nearly 60 percent of the NATO
supplies sent into Afghanistan are already routed through the north, through Russia and
Central Asia. The U.S. military is hoping to increase that number to 75 percent. Without
Pakistan, therefore, the coalition could still support a substantial force in Afghanistan,
but not one as big as the current one of 131,000 troops. The basic objective of that force
would necessarily be counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency. Counterterrorism is less
personnel- and resource-intensive because it aims only to prevent the country from
becoming a haven for Islamist extremists, not to transform it into a well-functioning
democracy. Given the Obama administration's current plans to withdraw 24,000 U.S. troops
by the summer of 2012, with many more to follow, such a strategy is already inescapable.
Finally, Washington must shed its fear that its withdrawal of aid or open antagonism could
lead to the Pakistani state's collapse, a radical Islamist takeover, or nuclear war.
Pakistanis, not Americans, have always determined their political future. Even substantial
U.S. investments in the civilian state and the economy, for example, have not led to their
improvement or to gains in stability. With or without U.S. aid to Pakistan, the Pakistani
military will remain the most respected institution in the country. In a 2011 Pew poll of
Pakistanis, 79 percent of respondents said that the military was having a good influence
on the country's direction, compared with 20 percent who said that the national government
was.
As for the possibility of an Islamist takeover, the country's current power centers have a
strong interest in maintaining control and so will do whatever they can to keep it --
whatever Washington's policy is. It is worth remembering that Pakistan has already proved
itself able to take out the terrorist networks that threaten its own institutions, as it
did in the Swat Valley and the district of Buner in 2009. Moreover, government by radical
Islamists has not proved to be a popular choice among Pakistanis. In the last general
election, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a coalition of Islamist parties, won only seven out
of 340 seats in the National Assembly.
The possibility that nuclear weapons could wind up in the hands of terrorists is a serious
risk, of course, but not one that the United States could easily mitigate whatever its
policy in the region. Pakistan's nuclear posture, which involves rapid dispersion, a
first-strike capability, and the use of tactical weapons, increases the chances of the
central government's losing control. Even so, Pakistan will not alter that posture because
it is so effective in deterring India. Meanwhile, previous U.S. efforts to help tighten
Pakistan's command-and-control systems have been hampered by mutual distrust. Any new such
efforts would be, too. Finally, since India has both a first- and a second-strike
capability, Pakistan would not likely strike India first in the event of a crisis. In any
case, even if things did escalate, there is not much that the United States, or anyone
else, could do -- good relations or not.
From a U.S. perspective, then, there is no reason to think that malign neglect or active
isolation would make Pakistan's behavior or problems any worse.
HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE
Even as the United States threatens disengagement, it should emphasize that it would still
prefer a productive relationship. But it should also make clear that the choice is
Pakistan's: if the country ends its support for terrorism; works in earnest with the
United States to degrade al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Haqqani network; and stops its
subversion in Afghanistan, the United States will offer generous rewards. It could provide
larger assistance programs, both civilian and military; open U.S. markets to Pakistani
exports; and support political arrangements in Kabul that would reduce Islamabad's fear of
India's influence. In other words, it is only after Pakistan complies with its demands
that the United States should offer many of the policy proposals now on the table. And
even then, these rewards should not necessarily be targeted toward changing Pakistan's
regional calculus; they should be offered purely as payment for Pakistan's cooperation on
the United States' most important policies in the region.
A combination of credible threats and future promises offers the best hope of convincing
Islamabad that it would be better off cooperating with the United States. In essence,
Pakistan would be offered a choice between the situation of Iran and that of Indonesia,
two large Islamic states that have chosen very different paths. It could be either a
pariah state surrounded by hostile neighbors and with dim economic prospects or a country
with access to international markets, support from the United States and Europe, and some
possibility of détente with its neighbors. The Indonesian path would lead to increased
economic growth, an empowered middle class, strengthened civil-society groups, and a
stronger economic and social foundation for a more robust democracy at some point in the
future. Since it would not directly threaten the military's position, the Indonesian model
should appeal to both pillars of the Pakistani state. And even if Islamabad's cooperation
is not forthcoming, the United States is better off treating Pakistan as a hostile power
than continuing to spend and get nothing in return.
Implicit in the remarks Mullen made to the Senate was the argument that Washington must
get tough with Pakistan. He was right. A whole variety of gentle forms of persuasion have
been tried and failed. The only option left is a drastic one. The irony is that this
approach won't benefit just the United States: the whole region, including Pakistan, could
quickly find itself better off.
