The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  The Bush administration was oblivious to all this until near its own end. For much of Bush’s time in office, from 2002 to 2008, Afghanistan had been stable, and American troops there saw their mission as keeping order and cleaning up the remnants of the insurgency while the new Afghan state took form. Washington was certainly concerned with what al-Qaeda was doing in Pakistan, but it did not see the Taliban through the lens of Pakistan, and hence did not treat Islamabad as integral to the solution in Afghanistan. It is arguable that for much of its time in office, the Bush administration did not even think that it had to come up with a solution to Afghanistan. The mission had been accomplished. The Taliban had been chased out of Kabul and out of the country altogether while Afghanistan’s George Washington, Hamid Karzai, was building a city on a hill. Any evidence that Pakistan was not on board with America’s plans for Afghanistan Washington either dismissed as coming from Afghans looking for convenient excuses for their own failings,10 or blamed on so-called rogue elements of the ISI, which, with our support, Musharraf would eventually bring to heel. Then a particularly gruesome bombing attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 was traced back to the ISI. That, and undeniable evidence of a Taliban surge in southern Afghanistan, blew a big hole in Washington’s happy Pakistan narrative.

  What the Bush administration had failed to fully appreciate was that Musharraf was far more willing to help with the fight against al-Qaeda than he was to raise a hand against the Taliban (and, to be fair, Washington was not really asking him to target the Taliban). Under Musharraf, Pakistan had made a merely tactical withdrawal from Afghanistan and was only waiting for the right time to go back. Afghanistan was simply too important to Pakistan’s sense of its own security and to its strategic ambitions for it to stop meddling in its neighbor’s affairs on America’s say-so.

  By 2009, Pakistani complicity in the Taliban resurgence was undeniable. Now Pakistan was the staple of every explanation given to President Obama for why violence in Afghanistan was on the rise and American troops were facing an energized insurgency. Many on the right, in Congress and in the media, still thought that all this was happening only because Musharraf had been forced out of office in 2008. As one high-level Bush administration official who had worked on Pakistan put it to me: “The only problem with Pakistan is that Musharraf is no longer there.” In reality, Musharraf had been the architect of the Taliban revival. The Taliban surge of 2008 and 2009 would never have been possible without preparations, recruiting, training, and capability-building activities that the Taliban undertook in Pakistan or with Pakistani help and that went back several years—to the time when Musharraf was in charge.

  The problem did not have much to do with Musharraf as an individual. It was structural. The fact was that Pakistan had strategic objectives in Afghanistan, and it was pursuing them with us there and despite its own budding partnership with us.

  When the Iraq war began to wind down following the 2007 troop surge, drones and Special Forces were moved east, and American intelligence turned its attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The closer we looked, the less we liked what we saw. The CIA got a proper gauge of its leaky partnership with Pakistan’s ISI, seeing firsthand that its targets were adapting with uncanny speed to the agency’s tracking methods. The most likely explanation was that the very ISI agents who were working alongside CIA operatives to hunt down terrorists and insurgents were also teaching these enemies how to avoid being killed or captured. Once, shortly after the CIA shared information with the ISI regarding an insurgent explosives factory, satellite images captured trucks pulling up to the factory to ferry its contents somewhere else.

  There was ample evidence that Pakistan provided critical support to the Taliban, and worse yet, to its most vicious and lethal branch, the Haqqani network (which the United States formally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in September 2012).11 The New York Times reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped and held hostage by the Haqqanis for seven months between 2008 and 2009, told Holbrooke’s team at the State Department soon after his release from captivity that the clan operated out in the open and in view of Pakistani troops in the border town of Miramshah. On one occasion, a member of the Haqqani clan drove Rohde to a location for a video shoot. When they came across Pakistani troops on the way, the driver would simply pull down the scarf covering his face and they would be waved through. Rohde spent much of his captivity within walking distance of a Pakistan military garrison.12 Indeed, and perhaps to underline the double nature of so much that goes on in Pakistan, the Pakistan Army also played a critical role in Rohde’s liberation: after he and a companion escaped from the compound where they were being held, they managed to find an army scout who took them to the Frontier Corps base where they were airlifted to freedom.

  As further evidence of Pakistan’s less than good intentions, in 2010 the number of roadside bombs in Afghanistan grew to a shocking 14,661.13 The nitrate used to build these devices came from Pakistan’s fertilizer factories. America has pushed to get Pakistan to curb the trade in nitrates, but with scant success. Its conclusion was that there was plenty of double-dealing afoot in Pakistan.14 But the problem was not to prove what Pakistan was up to—that was easy—but how to get Pakistan to transform its ways.

  There is one constant in Pakistan: fear and envy of India. The rivalry with its larger neighbor has so consumed Pakistan that the country pretty much defines itself as the Muslim “anti-India.” Thus it should come as no surprise that Pakistan would see Afghanistan only through the prism of the Indian challenge.

  Except for the dozen years between the Soviet retreat and 9/11—a stretch of time when, for the most part, the Taliban were ruling in Kabul—Pakistan has had a rocky relationship with Afghanistan.15 Afghans have never recognized their border with Pakistan—the famous Durand Line. The real border, think many leading Afghans as well as ordinary ones, should be the Indus River, far to the south and east of Sir Mortimer Durand’s line, which divides the Pashtun northwest from the fertile plains of the Punjab. Pashtun nationalists have always claimed Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (the NWFP, or, as it is now officially styled, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and the FATA, the notorious “agencies” along the Durand Line where al-Qaeda set up shop after 9/11, for Afghanistan. Some 40 percent of Afghans and 15 percent of Pakistanis are Pashtun. Given Pakistan’s much larger population, this means that there are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. Pakistan lives in constant fear of a secession-minded, India-backed “Pashtundesh” (rhyming with Bangladesh, which in 1971 separated from Pakistan with India’s help and humiliated Pakistan militarily in the bargain). Aggressive Pashtun nationalism to the north is a danger to Pakistan, especially when New Delhi is lending the irredentists a hand.

  It is clearly better for Pakistan to have Pashtuns thinking of Islam and fighting to the north against Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan and Central Asia than to have Pashtuns dreaming of nationalism and looking south and east with visions of a homeland crafted in no small part out of Pakistani territory. Pakistan has thus forged deep ties to the Taliban since these “students” first appeared in Afghanistan in 1994 and proved effective in radicalizing young men and imposing local rule. With Pakistani help, they soon controlled large swaths of Afghanistan. The official story was that the peace they imposed on Afghanistan, which had been caught up in civil war since the Soviet departure, would help secure the building of roads and gas and oil pipelines that Pakistan needed in order to make itself a key conduit for trade between Central Asia and the Indian Ocean basin. The crucial reality was that the Taliban helped Pakistan face down India in the contest over Afghanistan.

  It did not worry Pakistan that the Taliban were laying waste to Afghanistan, destroying the priceless giant Buddhas of Bamayan, closing schools, brutally punishing people for owning TV sets or having insufficiently long beards, nurturing a drug economy, and sheltering al-Qaeda. These “Islamic students” were serving a larger purpose by keeping Pashtuns busy and India out.
At the height of the Taliban’s power, Pakistani generals spoke confidently of the “strategic depth” that proxy control over Afghanistan gave Pakistan in the great game against India.

  It is little wonder, then, that the generals seem to have so little real enthusiasm for shutting down the Taliban. Nor is it a mystery why Islamabad remains so suspicious of the independent Afghan state that America stood up after toppling the Taliban in late 2001 and early 2002. In the Indian-educated and pro-Delhi president Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun of the southern Durrani clan, the Pakistanis see the specter of Pashtun nationalism.

  Countries can do dangerous things in pursuit of national interest, and in Pakistan’s case, unsupervised generals were allowed to decide what the national interest was. By 9/11, Pakistan was deeply tied to the Taliban and jihadi fighters even as they and their al-Qaeda allies were about to bring down untold wrath from America. And, worse, backing the Taliban in Afghanistan inevitably meant more tolerance for extremism at home.16 Pakistan could sustain its jihad in Afghanistan only by nurturing the infrastructure required for recruiting, indoctrinating, training, and managing jihadi fighters.17 That meant cultivating radical madrassas and extremist parties, creating financial networks and training camps, carving out plenty of space to gather and swarm fighters on its borders, and maintaining close ties among jihadis and their ISI handlers. Years after 9/11, that infrastructure remains and is the bedrock of a persistent extremist menace in Pakistan.

  Indeed, Pakistan was the first among Afghanistan’s neighbors to suffer blowback from the fires that it had stoked in Afghanistan. By 2008, Pakistani versions of the Taliban had coalesced around Baitullah Mehsud’s militia, Tehrik-I-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and established emirates of terror in mountainous pockets of northwestern Pakistan. In 2009, the TTP led its confederation of Taliban look-alikes to take over territory in Pakistan proper, establishing draconian control amid the alpine scenery of the Swat Valley.18 The government’s effort to dislodge them from this perch sparked a brutal terror campaign against the government and people of Pakistan that in 2009 alone claimed the lives of 3,318 Pakistanis (up from 164 in 2003). On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the tally of Pakistanis killed by terrorists and in suicide bombings over that decade stood at about 35,000.19

  Was it not time for Pakistan to abandon its carelessness regarding extremism, understand the cost that the country was paying by playing with fire, and once and for all renounce extremism as a tool of foreign policy? We could now argue to Islamabad that the chickens had come home to roost; our problems in Afghanistan—extremism, the Taliban, suicide bombings, and instability—were now their problems, too. But in fact the explosion of extremist violence, though it made Pakistan’s leaders more vulnerable, also made them more impervious to pressure. In the peculiar calculus of Pakistan, the more the military was threatened by a Frankenstein’s monster that it had helped create, the less leverage we seemed to have to argue for serious change—especially since the Pakistani people appeared intent on blaming America rather than their own government for the violence and instability.

  Pakistanis did not blame their terrible predicament on their own reckless investment in extremism, but rather on American counterterrorism efforts stirring the hornets’ nest of terrorism in their backyard.20 Musharraf was willing to go along with this. But the more Pakistanis came to blame America for the terror in their streets, the less impressed they were with the rewards that Musharraf had negotiated as recompense for their cooperation. Pakistan got $20.7 billion in assistance from the United States in the decade after 9/11. Pakistanis did the math and decided America was in the red. Zardari’s AIG analogy reflects the deep sense of injustice that Pakistanis felt over what they regarded as their disproportionate sacrifices in the war on terror. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress and the U.S. media complained about all the “free” money “given away” to Pakistanis who did little in return. Together, those perspectives reveal the gulf of misunderstanding dividing the two countries.

  The Obama administration came to office with eyes wide open. America had finally fully understood that controlling Afghanistan was a fundamental Pakistani strategic objective, and that the Taliban were Pakistan’s weapon of choice for realizing that goal. To solve the Afghan perplex, America had to first deal with the Pakistani complex. The question now was how.

  The Bush administration had treated Afghanistan and Pakistan as if they were on two different continents. At the White House, Afghanistan and Iraq were managed out of the same office while Pakistan was bundled with India and the rest of South Asia. The Obama administration changed that. Afghanistan and Pakistan belonged together: they were in fact one policy area—AfPak—managed first by SRAP at the State Department and, after Holbrooke died, by General Lute at the White House.

  Pakistanis and Afghans did not like the shorthand, mostly because they don’t like each other. But seeing Afghanistan and Pakistan through a single policy lens made sense. Richard Holbrooke had coined the AfPak term even before he was tapped to run the policy area. This was not just an effort to save five syllables. It was an attempt to drive home awareness of the reality that there is a single theater of war straddling an ill-defined border.21

  Holbrooke became more convinced of this imperative after he started working on the problem. The problem with Afghanistan was Pakistan, and without a solution to Afghanistan, Pakistan would explode into an even bigger problem than al-Qaeda and the Taliban combined. If the Pakistani state was brought to its knees—which in 2009 was a serious worry in Washington, especially after TTP extremists in the Swat Valley started pushing toward Islamabad—then Afghanistan would be unsalvageable; and if Afghanistan collapsed into chaos and extremism, then Pakistan would be imperiled. America would have to pour in ten times more resources to protect that much bigger—and nuclear—country. That was how Holbrooke explained “AfPak” to anybody who asked.

  The wisdom of the argument was clear, but the war was being fought in Afghanistan; that was where our troops were risking life and limb, so that is where our focus remained and where we spent our money. We proceeded to look for victory on the battlefield. Obama was convinced that is where we would find it when he sent 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan shortly after taking office.

  But he was putting the cart before the horse. The key to ending the war was to change Pakistan. Pakistan was the sanctuary the Taliban insurgency used as a launching pad and as a place to escape American retaliation. We knew by then that Pakistan allowed it and we knew why. It was Pakistan’s strategic calculus that we had to change, not troop numbers in Afghanistan.

  That was Holbrooke’s argument. More troops in Afghanistan would be useful if they could put pressure on Pakistan, sending Islamabad a signal that we were determined, and that it would be futile to persist in supporting an insurgency in an effort to control Afghanistan. Conversely, Holbrooke felt that it would not be wise to dispatch more soldiers simply to duke it out toe to toe with the Taliban. But to convince Pakistan that we meant business, we had to first prove that we were going to stay. The Pakistanis never believed that American intervention was more than just a bump in the road, and they did not have to wait long to be proven right. Holbrooke thought that we had a shot at changing Pakistan’s strategic calculus, or at least at convincing them that they did not need the Taliban to realize some of their strategic objectives. They could work with us and the Karzai government. It was a long shot, and it had to begin with putting much more effort into fixing our relations with Pakistan. Even if we did not convince Pakistan of the wisdom of change, keeping them engaged around this discussion might pay us the dividend of more time and space to change things in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, not keeping them engaged is what they had come to expect.

  Pakistan’s double-dealing was in part a symptom of its bitterness over having been abandoned and then treated as a rogue state after a previous Afghan war, against the Soviets, had been won and the Soviets driven out in 1989. Pakistan was also deeply insecure about India’s meteoric rise and gr
owing strategic value to the West. Pakistanis were playing things very close to the vest. We had to get them to open up. Could we convince them that our plans for Afghanistan would address their strategic interests in the country? If we could, perhaps in time they might reassess their strategic interests in a way that was more favorable to ours.

  Holbrooke argued that we had important interests in Afghanistan but vital interests in Pakistan, and that we had far more opportunity to realize our strategic goals in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. If we did that, it would be better for us and for the world. We will live to regret our insouciance, he warned, and the consequent loss of an opportunity to set things on the right track. If we don’t set Pakistan on a different course, he would say, in twenty years the place will be a vast 300-million-person Gaza: out of energy, out of water, radical, and nuclear-armed to boot. It reminded me of what a senior CIA official once told me: “We will be concerned with Pakistan for a long time … my grandchildren will be waking up in the middle of the night worried about Pakistan.” It was easy to convince people in Washington that Pakistan was a looming disaster. It was harder to convince them we should do something about it.

  Holbrooke understood that the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA wanted Pakistan to cut ties with the Taliban and do more to fight terrorism. But that would never happen without at least some semblance of a normal relationship between the two countries. Holbrooke favored an iceberg metaphor: “There is an above-water part to the relationship,” he would say, “and a below-water part.” The part below the water was the intelligence and security cooperation that we craved, while the part above water was the aid and assistance that we gave Pakistan. This is where the iceberg metaphor broke down. With countries, unlike floating chunks of ice, making the above-water part bigger will make the whole situation more stable—at least that is what Holbrooke was arguing. In 2011, after he was gone, it simply sank to the bottom.