Afghan and Pakistani representatives sign trade agreement (AP)
"[T]he larger part of the strategic dialogue between the United States and Pakistan, of course, is the attempt to use this strategic engagement to help strengthen civilian, democratic forces in Pakistan, and wean the country away from its patronage relationships with terrorist groups. And that’s a process that’s going to take time."You recently wrote that ‘Pakistan is our most important ally in the fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and our most difficult ally.’ What did you mean by that?
Pakistan is our most important ally because, after all, that is where most of the terrorists are. Pakistan is the epicenter of the global Islamic jihadist terrorist movement today. Not just Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which attacked Mumbai two years ago, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban. More Al Qaeda operatives have been killed or captured in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world.
But Pakistan is also our most difficult ally, because over the last three decades it has nurtured many of these terrorist groups. And the Pakistani army and its intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, has been a patron for many of these groups and continues to have very close contacts with some of them, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. The 91,000 or so documents recently leaked to the New York Times underscore the history and extent of ISI’s connections to the Taliban, and the former head of Afghan intelligence has also recently confirmed that the senior Taliban leadership is based in Karachi. So, for the United States, Pakistan is a very complex partner: important without question, but sometimes very difficult to deal with.
What is the administration doing to address this contradiction and what other things could it do?
The administration has engaged on a process of intense engagement in Pakistan. It is supporting the democratically elected civilian government, which is a major change from our traditional posture of backing military dictators. This is Pakistan’s fourth attempt at establishing a democratic government; all have failed in the past due to army coups. It’s trying to strengthen that civilian government with a very large infusion of economic assistance—$1.5 billion dollars a year with a five year commitment. It is also trying to give it the military resources it needs to fight counterinsurgency against those parts of the jihadist Frankenstein that have turned on the Pakistani state. And it’s trying to cajole, coerce and convince the Pakistani establishment, particularly the army, to end its patronage relationship with terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and like the Afghan Taliban.
One of the things it probably should do more of is trade rather than aid. Foreign assistance is a positive player, but foreign trade would do actually far more for Pakistan. If we reduced tariffs on Pakistani textiles to much closer to what the norm is for U.S. textile tariffs that would probably do more in the long run to build up a Pakistani economy and build up a Pakistani middle class than all the foreign assistance projects in the world.
And what is the main challenge to moving in that direction?
American domestic politics. The textile industry in the United States is not looking for any more competitors than it already has, and making the case for allowing in more Pakistani textiles would be politically very difficult in domestic terms.
Congress did pass the Kerry-Luger-Berman bill, which was intended to shift focus from just a military relationship to a broader government-to-government or people-to-people relationship, though the bill wasn’t greeted very well in Pakistan. Secretary Clinton in Pakistan just announced a lot of projects that would be funded with that money. Is there any success on that front?
I think it is fair to say that there’s modest success. On this visit, she laid out a half a billion dollars’ worth in concrete projects that are going to move forward. Pakistanis were very unhappy with some of the language in the bill, which criticized Pakistan for past misdeeds like the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation episodes, but as a practical matter the money is flowing forward and that’s a positive step in the right direction.
Clinton’s visit was also connected to the strategic dialogue that was launched in March. What is the overall goal of this dialogue in terms of things you’ve spoken about and has there been any impact? What has happened so far with it?
It has several goals. One goal is to try to improve cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan on fighting extremism on their border. And here, I think, the secretary can point to some concrete steps. When this strategic dialogue—tri-lateral dialogue—between Pakistan, Afghanistan and America started in February of 2009, chaired by the secretary, the Afghans and Pakistanis were barely talking to each other. The lack of trust on both sides was palpable, close to anger. Now, there is regular dialogue between Kabul and Islamabad. They’ve just signed a new agreement on transit rights and trade between them, which is a very important step toward economic interaction between the two.
But the larger part of the strategic dialogue between the United States and Pakistan, of course, is the attempt to use this strategic engagement to help strengthen civilian, democratic forces in Pakistan, and wean the country away from its patronage relationships with terrorist groups. And that’s a process that’s going to take time. It’s going to take time for many reasons, not the least of which is that Pakistanis have a great distrust of the United States. Pakistani polls show that Pakistanis believe that the United States is not a reliable partner, that the United States may, in fact, in the eyes of many Pakistanis, be a greater threat to their country than any other nation in the world, including India. And any time you out-poll India as the bad guy in Pakistan, you’ve got a very serious problem. It’s interesting to compare the secretary’s recent trip to her first, when those anti-American feelings were very raw and very visible. I don’t think they’ve gone away, but they were a little less visible this time. And that, I think, is a modest step in the right direction.
What is your assessment of how far the civilian government has gone in terms of becoming more effective or more stable?
Bear in mind that Pakistan has had a history of failed and corrupt civilian governments being replaced by corrupt military dictators. That pattern, we hope, is being broken. The government that Pakistan has now may be on course to be the first ever to actually serve out a full term in office between elections. It has also undergone a very significant change in the last six months; Pakistan has changed its constitution to move most executive power out of the hands of the president’s office and into the hands of the prime minister’s office. And that’s important because the prime minister is elected directly by the people. So, the directly elected prime minister now has much more power than at any previous time in Pakistani history, and that change has come about largely through a national consensus supported by all the major political parties and tacitly supported by the army, at a time when Pakistan is undergoing unprecedented levels of civil violence and terrorism across the country. It’s very volatile. There’s no assurance that the democratic experiment will work, but one should also not underestimate how strong the desire for democracy and for a more stable civilian-led government is in Pakistan today.
Part of what you’re talking about is the 18th Amendment. What has been the effect of the 18th amendment, how effective has it been, and what is the status of federal-provincial relations?
In the past, whenever the army came to the conclusion that it didn’t like the current civilian government, the president or the judicial process, they sacked them. We had a series of these procedures in the 1990s when Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif rotated the office of the prime minister four times—each time not through the ballot box so much as through this amendment process. It’s very early to tell whether it will stick, I mean, they’ve just done it. But the way it was done by a national consensus, I think, is impressive and gives some modest reason for hope that Pakistan is on the right direction, in spite of all the problems that it faces: political violence, terrorism, an anemic economy, living next door to the Afghan war and Indian rivals, which is a very cold relationship today, shortages of water and electricity. You put all of Pakistan’s problems together and they frequently look like they’re hopeless. But, Pakistan is still fighting on.
You mentioned in the article that I cited earlier that if the Pakistani military is found to have been involved in the Mumbai bombings there should be a thorough house cleaning. Do you think that the current Pakistani government has the clout to impose something like that?
I think this is the ticking time bomb in South Asia today and in Pakistan in particular. The master spy, or the spy master, of the Mumbai operation—a Pakistani-American, David Headley—is now confessing, after having been indicted and convicted of being a conspirator in the Mumbai bombing, that the Pakistani intelligence service was directly involved. We can’t take his word at face value; after all, he’s confessed to being a participant in an act of mass murder. But his charges are very worrisome and raise very serious questions about the involvement of the Pakistani Army at a very high level in the Mumbai operation.
It’s an open question whether the Pakistani civilian government would be able to survive a crisis over Headley’s charges. If push comes to shove, this may be the straw that pushes the Pakistani army back into political power. The government has just extended the term of Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parviz Kayani for an unprecedented three years because replacing him could upset the balance of power in Islamabad, which illustrates the fragility of civil-military relations in Pakistan.
The stakes here are enormous for the United States. It’s not just the survival of a civilian government, it’s the question of whether Pakistan is going to make that fundamental break with being a patron of terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and it’s a question of war and peace on the Indian subcontinent between two nuclear-armed powers.
There had been a defrosting of relations between Pakistan and India, but that seems to have re-frozen over after the Mumbai attacks; do you see any positive direction that the relations could go in at this stage?
Immediately before Secretary Clinton arrived in Islamabad, her Indian counterpart, the foreign minister, had arrived in Islamabad for the first real high-level discussions between the two countries since Mumbai. This was an attempt to try to get beyond the Mumbai attack, and it didn’t go very well. The reason it didn’t go very well was the Headley confessions. Because here, really for the first time, the Indians had solid proof—maybe not 100 percent solid—but fairly solid proof, of what they’ve suspected from the day those ten terrorists arrived in Mumbai in November 2008—that the Pakistani intelligence service was behind the attacks itself. These confessions by Headley, which have now been leaked to the Indian press—that the terrorists were trained by Pakistani naval commandos, that the Pakistani intelligence service bought the boat that brought them there, and that the whole operation was run through Lashkar-e-Taiba but controlled by the ISI—has raised a firestorm in India. The foreign minister’s visit was largely overshadowed by that.
This is terribly important for the United States. We need these two countries to reduce tensions, not increase tensions. It’s an open question: if there’s another Mumbai-level mass-casualty terrorist attack in India, would India exercise the same restraint that it did in 2008? Or will this be the straw that broke the camel’s back of Indian restraint, and would we see the two countries go to war?
Turning to Afghanistan, what do you think is the significance of the trade agreement signed between Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Afghanistan is a land-locked country and it’s only real outlet to the sea has always been through Pakistan, and really only through the port of Karachi. Anything that makes it easier for goods traveling from Afghanistan to be exported abroad or for imports coming into Afghanistan through Pakistan is a positive thing, and it will decrease tensions and frictions between the two countries. It’s also good for the United States and NATO mission in Afghanistan because the vast bulk of the supplies for our forces and NATO forces in Afghanistan have to arrive through Karachi as well. This transit agreement makes trade and movement back and forth across the border simpler and easier than it has been in the past.
You spoke also about the defrosting in relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. What do closer relations between those two countries mean for the United States in our effort to stabilize Afghanistan and fight Al Qaeda?
What we would like to see is for Pakistan to no longer be the safe haven for the Afghan Taliban. The Afghan Taliban have operated from Pakistan for the last six or seven years rather openly. The leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, resides in Pakistan. Mrs. Clinton said that during her trip. This past winter, we saw a brief Pakistani crackdown on the Afghan Taliban; Mullah Omar’s number two was arrested in the port of Karachi. But it hasn’t been sustained; it turned out to be a one-off. And what we need is a sustained Pakistani move against the Afghan Taliban. More cooperation between the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan is in our national interests—it’s something we’ve been fostering from the beginning of this administration.
One practical place where that can become manifest in the next few months is not just arresting Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan. The Pakistanis may be able to convince some of them to enter into the political process that President Karzai has been talking about, which was a feature of the Kabul conference this week. Pakistan, because it is the safe haven for the Taliban, has significant leverage over them. What I think Karzai is hoping, is that Pakistan will use that leverage in a more positive way now.
All of this, however, raises great fears and stokes conspiracy theories that somehow Karzai is about to make a deal with the Taliban that sells out Afghan women or that makes Afghanistan more of a Pakistan client state. I think many of those fears are overstated at this point, but they reflect deep concerns about what Pakistan’s real objectives are and the deep concerns that many in Afghanistan, India and the rest of the region have about the Pakistani Army’s continuing relationship with parts of the jihadist Frankenstein monster that it helped to create.
You led the president’s Afghanistan and Pakistan policy review when the administration first came into office. What is your assessment of the policy after a year and a half?
That’s a very complicated question. My report to Obama had twenty major policy recommendations and around 180 specific action items, so summarizing its implementation is complex. I think that the effort to engage Pakistan, which lies at the heart of the president’s strategy, has shown some modest signs of improvement. We’ve talked about the Afghan-Pakistan transit agreement; we’ve talked about the survival of the civilian government in Pakistan, which was very much in doubt a year and a half ago; we’ve continued to enjoy very broad international support for the mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the heart of the effort—which is the war in Afghanistan—is very much a work in progress. I don’t think we will really know until some time next year—July 2011—whether the counterinsurgency strategy that General David Petraeus is now leading is succeeding or not. With an insurgency like this, you have to be very patient. It’s easy to see signs of failure, and it can be equally misleading to see signs of success. I think it’ll take at least a year before we can judge whether that counterinsurgency part of the overall strategy is working or not. NATO commanders tell me that the effort to strengthen and expand the Afghan army is doing well, so that is good news. It is a mistake to give in to defeatism about Afghanistan.
