Daniel S Markey
Page 17
lived up to its strategic promise. It has cost Pakistan dearly but delivered little.
The origins of this perspective can be traced to America’s “abandonments” of
Pakistan in 1965 and again at the close of the Cold War. Pakistani nationalists
have developed an entire narrative of relations with the United States centered
upon America as a fair-weather friend.
Finally, the 1980s – and especially Washington’s support to the Afghan
mujahedeen – fueled the rise of the most violent anti-Americanism of the
jihadists. This strand is founded upon a rejection not merely of U.S. poli-
cies and strategies but of American principles and ideals. Pakistan’s Islamist
extremists are not unified; fortunately their internal divisions keep them at war
3 According to a 2012 survey, 80 percent of Pakistanis hold an unfavorable view of the United States, and 74 percent of Pakistanis viewed the United States as an enemy. Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 27, 2012, http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/27/pakistani-public-opinion-ever-more-critical-of-u-s/.
4 Professor Mohammad Waseem of the Lahore University of Management Sciences provides an outstanding scholarly treatment of similar issues in his symposium paper, “Perceptions about America in Pakistan,” Aziya Kenkyu, 50, no. 2 (April 2004).
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No Exit from Pakistan
with one another in ways that undermine their prospects for seizing power over
the state. They are dangerous nonetheless, and their ideas find sympathy, or
stoke fears, among a much larger segment of the society.
Together, the history of these strands of anti-Americanism offers a win-
dow into the overall history of the relationship between the United States and
Pakistan. Unfortunately, the post-9/11 decade has added new layers of frustra-
tion, grievances, and complications.
the anti-americanism of pakistan’s leftists and liberals
In January 1955, John Foster Dulles was named Time’s Man of the Year.
The magazine’s editors lauded President Eisenhower’s secretary of state for
his energetic diplomacy, noting that Dulles spent 1954 in a “ceaseless round
of travel, logging 101,521 miles.” True to his reputation as one of America’s
foremost cold warriors, Dulles’s primary mission in foreign capitals was “to
develop the cohesion and strength that would make Communist aggression less
likely.”5
Eisenhower came into office committed to reducing U.S. military expendi-
tures without opening vulnerabilities to Moscow.6 To achieve this goal on the
military front, he adopted the controversial strategy of “massive retaliation,”
which Dulles unveiled in a famously provocative speech to the Council on
Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954.7 By threatening a devastating nuclear
response, the administration believed it could deter Moscow from aggression
even though the Soviet Union was believed to have a stronger conventional
military than the United States.
In the diplomatic arena, Dulles set to work building a web of new formal
and informal alliances to extend U.S. influence worldwide without having to
pay for, or deploy, U.S. troops at every point of possible communist expan-
sion. The Korean War had convinced the administration of the extreme costs
of the alternative. Because “massive atomic and thermonuclear retaliation is
not the kind of power which could most usefully be evoked under all circum-
stances,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “security for the free world depends . . .
upon the development of collective security and community power rather than
upon purely national potentials.”8 Dulles fit Pakistan – and a good many
other states – into his sweeping vision of the Cold War conflict, even though
5 “Man of the Year,” Time, January 3, 1955.
6 On Eisenhower’s “New Look” strategy, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, (Oxford: Oxford University, 1982), pp. 127–197; also Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington: SR Books, 1999), p. 50.
7 Samuel F. Wells, “The Origins of Massive Retaliation,” Political Science Quarterly, 96, no. 1
(Spring 1981), p. 34.
8 John Foster Dulles, “Policy for Security and Peace,” Foreign Affairs, 32, no. 3 (April 1954).
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Why Do They Hate Us?
75
there were good reasons from the start to fear that the fit was not a good
one.9
Dulles believed that Pakistan, along with other states of the “Northern
tier” – Turkey, Iran, and Iraq – could be pulled together to defend a fraying
Middle East and its essential oil fields from Soviet invasion. He thought that
the Northern Tier, if properly trained and equipped, could blunt a Soviet
move against the Persian Gulf long enough for the United States to muster a
counterstrike. After its own assessments, the Pentagon endorsed Dulles’s plan
for Pakistan, based on a similar logic of regional defense.
In retrospect, the strategy behind the U.S. military alliance with Pakistan
looks, as historian Robert J. McMahon puts it, “curiously imprecise and
inchoate.”10 McMahon and others have raised doubts about whether Pakistan
could ever have provided a defensive platform for the Middle East anything
like what Dulles had in mind, at any realistic price. They also observe that
building up a relatively weak Pakistani ally soured relations with much larger
India. Indeed, New Delhi’s prickly Jawaharlal Nehru railed against U.S. plans
to assist Pakistan’s military. He contended, correctly, that whatever Pakistan’s
anti-communist rhetoric might be, U.S. assistance to Pakistan would more
likely be directed against India than against a Soviet invasion.
Dulles, for his part, was confident in his approach and angered by Nehru’s
argument, being deeply skeptical that neutralist India would help the United
States in its Cold War struggle under any circumstances. Dulles’s view pre-
vailed. Eight months after Dulles’s trip to Karachi, President Eisenhower agreed
to provide Pakistan with military aid. In May 1954, the United States and Pak-
istan formally signed a mutual assistance agreement.
The scale of the assistance package would be a source of contentious nego-
tiations over the next two years. Washington’s initial aid proposals of roughly
$30 million shocked Pakistan’s leaders; they had expected a more generous
offer.11 When General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s top military officer and later its
first military autocrat, heard Washington’s proposal he complained to the U.S.
consul general in Lahore, “I’ve stuck my neck out for the Americans. But now I
can’t go on doing it, because you’ve gone back on your word.”12 Ayub’s frustra-
tion was not confined to closed-door diplomacy. Through multiple channels,
9 On the general Cold War strategy of establishing regional groupings to r
esist Soviet aggression and Pakistan’s place in that approach, see James Spain, “Military Assistance for Pakistan,”
American Political Science Review, 48, no. 3 (September 1954), p. 749. Dulles’s predecessors in the Truman administration had also appreciated that logic, but not to the extent of seeking a formal alliance with Pakistan. George Lerski argues this point in “The Pakistan-American Alliance: A Reevaluation of the Past Decade,” Asian Survey, 8, no. 5 (May 1968), p. 402.
10 McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery, p. 274.
11 See the conversation with Pakistan’s prime minister as recounted by U.S. State Department officials in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Vol. 11, pp. 1868–9, http://images
.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/EFacs2/1952-54v11p2/reference/frus.frus195254v11p2.i0007.pdf.
12 McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery, pp. 200–205, esp. p. 204.
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No Exit from Pakistan
including timely leaks to the media, Pakistan skillfully lobbied Washington.
Eventually the Eisenhower administration agreed to arm and equip five-and-
a-half Pakistani army divisions at a huge total cost of over $500 million from
1956 through December 1959.13 Sustaining the force in subsequent years was
projected to cost billions more. Pakistan’s own weak economy meant that
Washington would foot the bill with no end in sight.
After the fact, Eisenhower harbored grave doubts about the decision to assist
Pakistan. The president had always been concerned that by arming Pakistan
Washington was also alienating India. He became increasingly worried about
the spiraling costs to Washington of building a Pakistani military that was well
beyond the means of Pakistan’s own developing economy. At a meeting of the
National Security Council on January 3, 1957, he lamented the “terrible error”
of committing to military investments in such a weak ally. But at that stage the
president concluded there was no easy way out of the mess, since Washington
had made a commitment and breaking it “might have severe repercussions on
our relations with Pakistan, and might even destroy the Baghdad Pact.”14
On the Pakistani side, cracks in public support for partnership with the
United States appeared almost as soon as the two countries signed their
1954 mutual assistance agreement. The main problem was the instability of
Pakistan’s own political system. Pakistan’s weak and increasingly undemocratic
governing institutions could not manage the country’s rolling political and eco-
nomic crises. The more fragile Pakistan’s ruling clique felt, the more it turned
to Washington for support. And Washington, fearing the downfall of its Pak-
istani partners, especially those in the military, grudgingly stuck with them even
when they lacked popular legitimacy. The United States watched throughout
the 1950s as its partners in Pakistan’s military and civilian bureaucracy grad-
ually edged out the vestiges of parliamentary democracy. U.S. officials never
took firm action to defend electoral democracy in Pakistan, even if they did fear
the consequences of its failure.15 Pakistan’s first attempt at elected government
ended in 1958 when General Ayub Khan placed the country under army rule.
This, in turn, reinforced popular resentment toward the United States.16
The perceptive Pakistani professor of political science, Mohammad Waseem,
observes that the protest movement that ousted Ayub in 1969 dubbed him
and his colleagues “American stooges.”17 Pakistani opponents of military rule
13 The assistance figures are in 1950s dollars. See McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery, p. 206.
14 U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957: South Asia, p. 27.
15 Kux recounts that the U.S. embassy in Pakistan was under instruction to counsel Pakistani leaders against the anti-democratic 1958 coup, but that advice went unheeded, perhaps because there was nothing backing it up. See Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, p. 99
where he cites “State Department telegram to Embassy Karachi,” October 6, 1958, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1968–60, Vol. 15, pp. 666–7.
16 See McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery, pp. 209–10.
17 Waseem, “Perceptions about America in Pakistan,” p. 36.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
77
reprised similar themes – that military dictators were in power only by the grace
of the United States – during the Zia (1977–88) and Musharraf (1999–2008)
eras. But it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who most effectively combined his anti-
Americanism with his political agenda. Bhutto’s populist leadership in the early
1970s “cultivated a mass perception that American intervention had worked
against democracy in favor of the military establishment.”18
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Bhutto was born to an elite landowning family in Pakistan’s Sindh province.
His hometown was not far from the ruined city of Mohenjo-daro, constructed
well over 4,000 years ago as part of a majestic Indus valley civilization that
reached its heights during the time of Egypt’s Old Kingdom.19 For millennia,
Bhutto’s home region of Larkhana was extremely fertile, unlike much of the
rest of the province. That fertility translated into vast wealth for the Bhuttos,
who ruled over huge tracts of farmland in a style that can only be described as
feudal. Sadly, much of Sindh is ruled in a similar manner to this day.20
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto enjoyed the privileges of that wealth and the unusual
opportunities it offered. His undergraduate years at the University of California
at Berkeley exposed him to political science, history, and a heavy dose of the
American “high life” that was easily afforded by the well-heeled playboy. It also
proved that greater familiarity with America does not always inspire greater
affection.21
Upon his return to Pakistan, Bhutto’s family connections and political acu-
men earned the young politician a spot in Ayub’s cabinet practically overnight.
By the 1960s, Bhutto’s anti-Western diatribes and his pro-Beijing attitude irri-
tated Washington, which at the time considered Mao’s communist China a
dangerous, revolutionary state.22 Bhutto was perfectly happy to be the Pak-
istani government’s most outspoken “Yankee hater,” a role he played most
prominently when he served as Ayub’s foreign minister from 1963 to 1966.23
18 Waseem, “Perceptions about America in Pakistan,” p. 36.
19 For more on Mohenjo-daro, see Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
20 On the present state of Sindh’s feudals, see William Dalrymple, “A New Deal in Pakistan,” New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/03/
a-new-deal-in-pakistan; also Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), pp. 329–38.
21 The wellsprings of Bhutto’s own
anti-Americanism are not entirely clear. Later in his career, he identified American imperialism in South Asia and, in particular, Washington’s hypocritical and imbalanced dealings with India and Pakistan, as the source of his disillusionment, and it is possible that this was his perspective even during his days as a student in California. See Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, The Myth of Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
22 For a revealing exchange between Bhutto and President Lyndon Johnson, see Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, pp. 147–8.
23 Bhutto used these words himself when he met with President Nixon in 1971. See Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, p. 204.
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No Exit from Pakistan
At various points in his political career, Bhutto moderated his anti-Western
rhetoric, but he never surrendered his basic suspicions of the United States.
Ayub broke with Bhutto in 1966. By some accounts, Ayub finally acceded to
Washington’s demand that Bhutto be ditched in the aftermath of the 1965 war
with India.24 The Pakistanis started that war in an attempt to seize the contested
territory of Kashmir. Failing at that mission and facing a costly stalemate
or worse, Ayub grudgingly accepted a settlement brokered by the Soviets in
Tashkent that delivered a cease-fire but no Indian concessions on Kashmir.
Because the Ayub regime had so stoked anti-Indian war hysteria at home and
raised expectations of imminent territorial conquest, Tashkent was politically
radioactive. Bhutto, Ayub’s foreign minister at the time, later claimed that he
opposed Tashkent and offered his resignation over it several times but was
at first refused by Ayub.25 Whatever the case, Bhutto was out of a job and
thoroughly alienated from Ayub.
In the political wilderness, Bhutto founded the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP),
“an anti-Ayub political movement that espoused populist economic policies
and a pro-China, anti-U.S., and anti-India foreign policy.”26 Bhutto appealed
to the masses like none other, promising “roti, kapra, makaan,” or food,