by Shuja Nawaz
One of the co-authors of a World Bank study of the earthquake relief 7 concluded:
The Pakistanis who received aid didn’t believe there were any strategic motives at play: People overwhelmingly believed that this was assistance offered in the spirit of humanity, rather than a transaction intended to buy hearts and minds. Had the recipients sensed more cynical motives, their positive opinions of foreigners might have been dampened—if not reversed. 8
The authors of the study concluded that this assistance had a lasting impact on the recipients and their views about those who helped them.
The results suggest Pakistan’s ‘trust deficit’ is less caused by deep-rooted beliefs and preferences, non-local events such as drone attacks on the Afghan border, or US policy toward Israel. It’s human interactions that change attitudes, and their effects are long term [emphasis added].
LeFever’s experience in Pakistan during the earthquake relief operation fortified that view, though he recognizes that not enough was done to publicize the aid effort. In fact, from a spike in approval rating to 27 per cent in 2006, the US plummeted to 15 per cent shortly after the relief effort ended. 9 Pakistan also was keen to send the Americans packing as soon as possible since it was detracting from their own efforts.
But it appreciated the American aid during the floods and handed out the highest civil award of Hilal-e-Pakistan (Crescent of Pakistan) to Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Admiral LeFever received the Hilal-e-Quaid-i-Azam (Crescent of the Great Leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah). The rest of the team got the appropriately named Sitara-e-Eisaar (Star of Altruism). Admiral Mike Mullen was Chief of Naval Operations at the time. LeFever sought his permission to wear his Pakistani decoration. Mullen’s comment was, ‘Hey, we’re going to use this sometime in the future.’
Little was LeFever to know that a few years later, after he had earned his second star as a rear admiral, he would be told by the same Admiral Mullen, ‘Pack your bags. You are going back to Pakistan.’ This time the mission was not humanitarian, but as Head of the Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan (ODRP), LeFever was part of a new US strategic policy in the region where Pakistan was to play a key role as an ally in an emerging new approach to the war in Afghanistan under a new American president.
Obama’s New Af–Pak Approach
Afghanistan loomed large over the new president Barack Obama’s policy discussions soon after he took over in January 2009. He had been thinking about the country and the region during his campaign for the presidency. One report that influenced his thinking was prepared by a team from the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council, a bipartisan think tank in Washington DC. 10 The Strategic Advisory Group was co-chaired by the Atlantic Council’s chairman, Gen. James L. Jones, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), and Kristin Krohn Devold, former Norwegian Minister of Defence.
Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan [emphasis added]. 11 Unless this reality is understood and action is taken promptly, the future of Afghanistan is bleak, with regional and global impact. The purpose of this paper is to sound the alarm and to propose specific actions that must be taken now if Afghanistan is to succeed in becoming a secure, safe and functioning state. On the security side, a stalemate of sorts has taken hold. NATO and Afghan forces cannot be beaten by the insurgency or by the Taliban. Neither can our forces eliminate the Taliban by military means as long as they have sanctuary in Pakistan. Hence, the future of Afghanistan will be determined by progress or failure in the civil sector. 12
These were the opening words of a remarkable thirteen-page report that came out in March 2008 under the lead of the Atlantic Council Chairman, Gen. Jones. (This analysis remained valid a decade later, when President Trump faced a decision on the future US role in the region.) It then presented a succinct analysis of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and offered practicable ideas for changing the situation. Had it been a voluminous report, it would have likely met the fate of many other such efforts and been left to gather dust on bookshelves in a busy capital city. But it caught candidate Obama’s attention and, among other things, produced a meeting with Gen. Jones late in the campaign that led eventually to the selection of Jones as the NSA to President Obama.
Jones was not unfamiliar with Afghanistan. He had come to know the region from his role as SACEUR. 13 He recalled his first encounter as SACEUR in 2003 with the nineteen Ambassadors to NATO over a weekly lunch that used to be hosted by a different ambassador every week. He had been told this was just a ‘social event, to get to know you’. After some welcoming remarks, the British ambassador said to him, ‘As host, General, I would like to ask you the first question. And that is, how are you going to get us to Afghanistan?’ Nobody had ever said anything to him about NATO going to Afghanistan. But it certainly forced him to focus on the topic in a hurry. He also recalled an exchange with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he got his SACEUR appointment, and explained to the Secretary that he did not wish to be the person to switch off the lights for NATO. Rumsfeld told him, ‘We may want to re-shape things a bit, but NATO is still very important.’ 14
Against this background, he spent 2003 thinking about Afghanistan and visiting the country, meeting President Hamid Karzai, and working with NATO allies to shape the Coalition presence in Afghanistan. His plan was discussed at the Munich Security Conference in February 2004 with NATO defence ministers. This led to the counter-clockwise deployment in tranches of European national contingents in Afghanistan, starting with the Germans in the north, then others in the south and the west. ‘Ultimately the plan was to link up with the US forces in the East.’
He also transformed the NATO mission in Afghanistan by creating a NATO Response Force in the north, an area that had hitherto been a ‘sleepy little headquarters’, and making the Germans the operational commanders of the NATO mission to Afghanistan. He also visited Pakistan during this period, a country that he had first visited in the early 1980s, as the Marines’ military liaison officer to the Senate with Senator John Tower on a congressional visit. As SACEUR he regularly visited Afghanistan and would arrange tripartite meetings with the Pakistanis as well. This allowed him to get to know the Pakistani military high command as well.
After his retirement in 2007, Jones came back to Washington DC and worked on energy issues with the US Chamber of Commerce and became chairman of the Atlantic Council when, according to him, ‘to my surprise, President Obama asked me to be his national security adviser in January of 2009’. He said he had met Obama ‘may be three times’ and told him, ‘I’m very worried about the direction that Karzai seems to be taking his country and things he is doing. And I’m extremely worried about Pakistan: the Pakistan military’s domination of foreign policy. I had become convinced that the military was running the country, particularly with regard to security, without occupying any position.’ He also briefed Obama about the ‘difficult dialog[ue] we had had in 2006 about the effectiveness of the [Afghanistan] strategy, particularly [because of] the safe havens that were in Pakistan.’
He recalled that it ‘reminded me a little bit about my initial impressions in Vietnam when I was a young second lieutenant infantry officer. Couldn’t go north, couldn’t go to the west, couldn’t go into Laos, couldn’t go into Cambodia, couldn’t take the fight to the enemy. One of my cardinal rules is that, if you’re battling an insurgency you can’t give them safe haven. You can’t do that.’
Jones saw ‘a different replay of the US now going into Pakistan and trying to convince the Pakistan Army that it’s in their interest to help us. I left with an uneasy feeling that there was a game being played here that was not in Pakistan’s long-term interest, either politically or economically . . . One of the first things we did in the White House in terms of reassessing the Af–Pak strategy, was meeting with the leadership of both countries separately but giving assurances that the US was going to do transformational things in both countries, if in fact, we all agreed on what our re
spective goals are.’
Easier said than done. Though each side had a vision of what it wished to achieve from this Odd Couple pairing of Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries that had never seen eye-to-eye since the birth of Pakistan in 1947, they pretended to go along in order to benefit from the massive US economic and military assistance that was expected to head their way. In order to keep that aid flow continuing, leaders in the region continued to dissemble and do their own thing, even as the unlikely alliance crumbled over time.
The Af–Pak approach had a rough birthing. President Obama brought in Bruce Riedel, a retired CIA analyst and Brookings Institution scholar who had been his South Asia policy adviser during the presidential campaign, to conduct a fresh review of the Afghanistan war with a view to coming up with a clearer vision. His co-chairs were supposed to be Gen. David Petraeus, the new CENTCOM commander, Michelle Flournoy from the Department of Defense (DoD) and Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s favourite troubleshooter, who had successfully shaped the Dayton Accord that ended the three-and-a-half year-long war in Bosnia. Holbrooke had been on the Clinton campaign team when she ran against Obama for the Democratic Party nomination for president. Petraeus had made a name for himself in Iraq, among other things, for reshaping the COIN doctrine of the US Army and for his ability to work well with politicians in Iraq as well as in the US. 15 Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute recalls that his White House team at the NSC was offered to Riedel as administrative support. They convened the group a week after Riedel’s arrival in the Eisenhower Old Executive Office Building next to the White House.
Getting this unlikely team to work together was one of the first challenges of the new Obama White House. Defining the remit was an initial issue. Quite rightly, the president wanted a regional approach to the issue, and when the idea of a special representative was first broached, it was seen as one for South Asia as a whole. Holbrooke also preferred the wider remit.
However, India did not wish to be drawn into this circle with Pakistan and opposed the idea successfully. Hence emerged the office of the SRAP that was emulated by the US’s allies in the Afghanistan war. The sequencing of those country names created its own dynamic, with the focus being primarily on Afghanistan, and Pakistan seen as secondary to the main effort in Afghanistan. This flawed thought process haunted the relationship for the entire Obama term.
Riedel had been thinking about Afghanistan and Pakistan for some time and had strong views on what needed to be done. In the White House, he was faced with a holdover from the Bush presidency in Lute, who had handled the Iraq and Afghanistan portfolio and had prepared his own report on Afghanistan as part of the transition planning. Lute told me that President Bush asked him to do a report in the summer of 2008 that was presented to the outgoing president in October 2008. 16 Lute was asked to stay on in the NSC by the new president. According to Lute, Riedel told the White House meeting on the review that he would produce his draft for discussion within a week or so. Lute thought the final report had been produced without any visit to the region and it ‘looked a lot like the last chapters of his Brooking’s monograph [sic]’. 17 Meanwhile Petraeus had his own review in progress (done largely by H.R. McMaster, a legendary officer and strategist, who later became a short-lived NSA to President Donald J. Trump) that came into the White House in January 2009. Another review had been done by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Admiral Mike Mullen.
In Riedel’s view, ‘Lute’s study was by far the most candid in saying things weren’t going well. The two military studies would approach questions like, “Are we losing?” by saying, “We are not scoring a decisive success.” [Lute was also famously the author of the ‘10 Wars’ PowerPoint slide deck that reflected the fractured approach to the Afghanistan campaign.]
‘But they all were basically on the same wavelength, that we were in deep, deep trouble and really we’d had seven years under the [George W.] Bush administration of giving no priority to Afghanistan, and therefore, everything was being done on the cheap.’
Compounding the difficulty of producing a coherent and cohesive narrative and policy were other factors. As he described this ‘cumbersome’ situation, Riedel said, ‘In fact, there was what I would call a Potemkin Village South Asia team, and then a real South Asia team. But we went through these elaborate charades of getting everyone’s input. One of the issues that had separated Senator Obama from Senator Clinton was that he had early on said, “If I get actionable intelligence that there is an Al-Qaeda target I will go after it with or without the support of the government of Pakistan.” That was a very thought-through posture, not just something he said off the top of his head. And the “Clintonistas” had pounced on it as an example of his inexperience and rashness.’
Riedel’s view of the genesis of the new Af–Pak policy is concise and stark: ‘The [Obama] campaign made big of the argument that the war in Afghanistan was failing, and that, in particular, Al Qaeda had revived dangerously in the Afghanistan–Pakistan border region. What I think happened is that once . . . they got into office, they actually found out that they were not only right, but it was much worse than anything they [had] said. And that the situation particularly with those two elements, the stability of the Afghan government in a war and the rise of Al Qaeda, was much, much more in an advanced stage of falling apart than their campaign rhetoric had made it appear. Many of the holdovers from the Bush administration, particularly in the military and in the intelligence community who were professional people not political people, impressed on them, “We’re at a crisis stage. Normal reaction won’t work.” I think that’s when the president’s team said, “Who’s running the show?”’
Riedel recalled, ‘In theory, it was the special representative for Afghanistan–Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke. But, the president had lost confidence in Richard Holbrooke in their first meeting. He came across as very arrogant. He [Holbrooke] made it clear he thought he was smarter than the president. But when pressed, he didn’t seem to know very much about South Asia. So there’s this kind of combination of two storms. [The] problem really is deteriorating rapidly, and we’re not confident we have the right guy in charge. So what’s the backup plan? And I think that’s when they asked me to come in and do the review.’ 18 General Jones also confirmed in a later email exchange with me that President Obama wanted to fire Holbrooke but Hillary Clinton did not agree to do that.
Holbrooke had convened his own briefing session in New York at the Asia Society, where I was invited, among others, to give him a quick update on key elements of the situation in the region. I recall stressing to him the importance of the military intelligence complex in Pakistan since it had established itself as the principal policymaker ever since the formation of the Afghanistan Cell in the period of the Afghan Jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I also gave him a copy of my newly published book on Pakistan and its army, Crossed Swords. Holbrooke had also begun assembling a team of experts from across government and academia, including, among others, Dan Feldman, Vali Nasr, Vikram Singh, Mary-Beth Goodman and Barnett Rubin. Some of them had first-hand experience of working in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Others were subject-matter experts on economics, COIN, etc.
Holbrooke himself had served in Vietnam in his early days as a Foreign Service officer, and that experience had imprinted itself on his brain. He evoked great loyalty among his team and carried their ideas to the highest levels in government. In return, most of them revered him. He also had a reputation as a larger-than-life figure who could break bureaucratic barriers. In some ways, he was ideally suited to coordinate activities by demolishing, or at least trying to demolish, the well-fortified silos of the US governmental agencies. But he did not own an official cheque book and had to rely on other sources of funding. He managed to use his considerable diplomatic skills to cajole and coerce others to fund his activities and favourite projects. And in the process, he antagonized others, including the White House staff, who felt it was their primary respon
sibility to present policy options to the new president. If Holbrooke had been given the pro-counsel role that he thought had earmarked resources, he could well have broken through the mistrust of the Pakistanis. But this was not the case. And he faced a tough and well-established team at the White House that jealously guarded its turf.
Lute maintains that one of the contributing problems was the fact that Holbrooke’s ‘Terms of Reference were never put in writing. Richard worked a broad mandate, including Iran and Central Asia. It was not a best-defined effort. His presumption was that he’d run the inter-agency process, which is the NSC’s job.’ Lute told me that he thought it was Gen. Jones’s job to demand the definition of responsibilities and that Secretary Clinton ought to have issued the Terms of Reference after an inter-agency review. As Vali Nasr, a Holbrooke adviser and supporter, put it, the SRAP was ‘an experiment in what Holbrooke called the “whole of government approach to solving big problems”, by which he meant doing the job of the government inside the government but despite the government—an idea that for obvious reasons did not sit well with the bureaucracy’. 19 That never crystallized, nor was a Terms of Reference produced, and the result, according to Lute was a ‘stormy relationship’.
The Bush NSC review ‘tried to be balanced between Afghanistan and Pakistan and concluded that US vital interests lay in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Over the years we had been fixated on Afghanistan when in fact we should have paid more attention to Pakistan,’ said Lute. That review called for a COIN approach: no set number of troops, and a cross-governmental approach. It asked USAID on its priorities and execution rates for its projects. ‘The numbers were bad,’ said Lute. On the military side, the action had shifted to Kandahar and Helmand from the east. Lute felt there were some ‘10 wars being fought in Afghanistan’ in 2009, including, among others, separate efforts by the US, NATO, the Afghan Army and Afghan Police, and White and Black Special Operations forces. All without much coordination. ‘This didn’t get fixed for another two or three years, till 2010 when Secretary [Robert] Gates rationalized the system under [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal.’ 20 In brief, Lute thought the military effort ‘became the shiny object’ that drew all the attention, leading to a missed opportunity to take advantage of the political side. For example, ‘we were not ready to approach Pakistan on the Taliban’. The lack of a centre of gravity in decision making in the war in Afghanistan affected how Pakistan viewed the situation and its own relations with different elements of the US government.
