A False Choice in Pakistan

Daniel Markey

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007

Summary:  Americans are increasingly frustrated with Pakistan's counterterrorism efforts, but the United States should resist the urge to threaten President Pervez Musharraf or demand a quick democratic transition. Getting Islamabad to play a more effective role in the war on terrorism will require that Washington strike a careful balance: pushing for political reform but without jeopardizing the military's core interests.

Daniel Markey, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, served on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff from 2003 to 2007.

BUSH AND THE GENERAL

By the fall of 2001, the influence of Islamist sympathizers in Pakistan's army, intelligence services, and government had reached a dangerously high level. Pakistan's support for jihadists in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's nuclear black market, the steady growth of extremist mosques and madrasahs -- all were distressing signs that the country risked slipping into state failure or Islamist rule.

After 9/11, Musharraf made a momentous decision to join the war on terrorism. But this did not mean an immediate U-turn on all support to militant groups in Pakistan. As the White House correctly recognized, even if Musharraf was personally committed to this decision, he faced hard-line skeptics within his own army. The skeptics doubted the United States' staying power, lamented the costs of turning against longtime jihadi associates, and questioned the wisdom of picking fights with global terrorist outfits. Accordingly, Musharraf needed to calibrate his actions in order to avoid alienating a powerful and all-important constituency. And he needed U.S. assistance to bolster his political allies and win over the remaining fence sitters.

In order to build trust with the Musharraf regime, the Bush administration launched a robust engagement strategy, with total assistance to Pakistan estimated at more than $10 billion since 9/11. (Counting covert assistance, the overall figure could be far higher.) The vast majority of this assistance has gone to Pakistan's military. Washington has also worked through international financial institutions to ease Pakistan's debt burden, opening the door for economic growth of just under six percent for the past four years. And in June 2006, the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to sell up to 36 F-16 jets and associated high-tech weapons systems to Pakistan, a major reversal of U.S. policy dating from 1990, when such transactions fell victim to sanctions over Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. On the diplomatic side, meanwhile, top members of President George W. Bush's national security team have turned Pakistan into a regular destination, and the president himself made an unprecedented overnight stop in Islamabad last year. In 2005, the administration named Pakistan a "major non-NATO ally."

Washington's post-9/11 engagement with Islamabad has achieved notable successes. A number of al Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured in Pakistan, including Abu Zubaydah (2002), Ramzi bin al-Shibh (2002), Khalid Sheik Mohammad (2003), Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan (2004), and Abu Faraj al-Libbi (2005). Such achievements would not have been possible without extensive cooperation between Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agencies; they also netted extensive information on al Qaeda's tactics and future plans. The strategy of engagement has also paid dividends on Pakistan's eastern border with India. Following the almost nuclear "Twin Peaks" crisis of 2001-2, Washington's friendly ties with India and Pakistan and steady support for Indo-Pakistani rapprochement have helped ease the way toward dialogue, a cease-fire, and confidence building between the two countries.

But such successes must be qualified by the fact that the Taliban are still present in southern Afghanistan and in Pakistani's FATA and Baluchistan region and that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri apparently remain ensconced in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. Compounding these problems, Washington has focused too narrowly on Musharraf and his army as the United States' sole partners in Pakistan. So far, the administration has avoided the worst of nightmare scenarios in Pakistan -- state collapse or an Islamist takeover -- but failed to achieve its first-order goals in the war on terrorism or to bolster civilian governance.

Over the past year especially, a growing number of observers have begun to question whether Pakistan is "doing enough" on its side of the border to assist U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Afghans have long blamed Pakistan for providing sanctuary to Taliban fighters. Now, NATO and U.S. commanders in Afghanistan are saying the same thing. Indeed, by the start of 2007, prevailing U.S. opinion (at least outside of the administration) had settled on the idea that Islamabad needed to do more to crack down on militants. Congressional Democrats, frustrated with Pakistan's seemingly weak commitment to the war on terrorism, have proposed that U.S. military assistance be conditioned on demonstrable progress not only on counterterrorism but also on democratic reforms. Some of these critics have charged that Musharraf's army and intelligence services, given their long-standing ties to Islamist parties and jihadi groups, were never serious about fighting terrorism in the first place.

THE MULLAH-MILITARY CONDOMINIUM

It is true that Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan have long enjoyed close ties with the Pakistani military. As former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto pointed out in a recent Washington Post op-ed, "Pakistan's military and intelligence services have, for decades, used religious parties for recruits." In the 1971 conflict between the central government and what was then East Pakistan, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan called on Islamist groups to help put down East Pakistan's nationalists. And in the mid-1980s, the mullah-military condominium reached new heights under the rule of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, as massive military assistance to Afghanistan's anti-Soviet mujahideen flowed from the United States and Saudi Arabia through Pakistan's ISI. Pakistan pursued a similar model in Kashmir, funding and training "freedom fighters" for operations against Indian targets. As a general in the field, Musharraf was an enthusiastic supporter of this working arrangement as a means to wrest Kashmir away from New Delhi, and there is little doubt that certain ISI-jihadi connections remained firmly intact after his 1999 coup.

For a while after 9/11, by most accounts, the crackdown by Musharraf's government along the Afghan border differentiated between the Taliban (who are mostly ethnic Pashtuns) and foreign militants (Arabs and Central Asians). The Taliban often got a pass because some members of the military still viewed them as potentially valuable assets for projecting Pakistani influence into Afghanistan and because their long history of a close working relationship made it hard to cut ties overnight.