Pakistan-US Relations Are Upside Down
I think the headline “U.S. Presses Visiting Pakistani Leader on Taliban Threat” pretty much sums up what’s gone wrong in the US-Pakistan relationship. The Pakistani Taliban are waging a war whose aim is to overthrow the government of Pakistan. And yet somewhere we’re the ones pressing the Pakistanis about the need to focus on the threat? It’s weird:
The Obama administration sought Wednesday to ratchet up pressure on the Pakistani government to crack down on the Taliban in the western part of the country, as congressional leaders and administration officials expressed increased concern over the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, where insurgents have taken over territory just 60 miles from the capital.
This is backwards. Or upside-down. It should be that the Pakistan government is very concerned about the Taliban and asking us for aid and support in fighting them. In order to persuade us to do that, Pakistani officials should be explaining that the threat to Pakistan is also a threat to the United States. The current dynamic is perverse. I don’t know exactly what the issue is, but it doesn’t make sense for the American government to be acting as if this is a bigger deal for us than it is for the Pakistanis.
26 Responses to “Pakistan-US Relations Are Upside Down”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
May 6th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I guess it’s nor a bigger deal for the US if the current Pakistani leaders are thrown in jail by the new Taliban government, but it is a bigger deal for the US if 1) the Taliban gets some nuclear weapons material and maybe even if 2) the Taliban hangs around adding more square miles where al Qaeda can work with impunity. But yeah, this is an interesting and curious way of thinking about the situation.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Well, just imagine the political inertia in this country if you tried to get them to go after an increasingly popular Christian militia that had infiltrated your military, been supported by your intelligence services, and all this just a few years after a military dictatorship.
You won’t have to imagine very hard.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Maybe Pakistan’s leaders are tired of being the government, and want to give someone else a chance. If they are deposed they can always abscond to Washington, set up a lobbying group, raise abundant funds from various establishment types, make the rounds of the talk shows and think tanks, patter idly and half-heartedly about returning to power some day — hopefully sans the Benazir Bhutto-like outcome — and dine on sumptuous Georgetown fare … with maybe an occasional half-smoke thrown in.
Probably beats living in freaking Pakistan.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Please start reading John Cole’s Informed Comment. It is exceedingly unlikely, really impossible that the Taliban will take over Pakistan or topple the government. They have very little popular support. They can run military ops of some little sophistication in rugged rural areas. That’s it. They can harass the government and disrupt it. They will never take it over.
The entire meme that Pakistan is on the verge of failure has a strong element if disinformation behind it.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
The Pakistani ambassador was interviewed yesterday on NPR (I think) and made several comments along the lines that Pakistan would be able to focus on the taliban threat if only that pesky neighbor to the east would stop making trouble for them.
The Pakistani military really is completely invested in the dispute with India.
Somewhat analagous to the Bush administration being completely invested in fighting Iraq and having little interest in the taliban.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Tell me again – why the phuck are we at war in the middle east?
- disarm Saddam of his (nonexistent)WMDs
- prevent Iraq civil war
- fight Iraq insurgents
- rebuild Iraq into a “democracy”
- find Bin Laden
- fight Taliban
- rebuild Afganistan into a “democracy”
- protect Pakistan?
Why, oh why?
May 6th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Agreed with rapier. The simple explanation is, they don’t have anything to worry about! The Pakistani government could (apparently) care less who rules the tribal areas. They get no tax revenue from those areas anyway, they are a pain to police, and they are ethnically different from the rest of the country. It is the US that cares who rules there, because they don’t want Al Qaeda to have freedom to operate.
The idea that the Pashtun Taliban is about to start running the show in Punjab or Sindh is a fantasy, and the idea that the Pujab-dominated military would ever let it happen is also a fantasy. But, it is a fantasy that is useful for pressuring the US to give Pakistan more military aid that they can redirect towards preparing to fight India or enriching the military brass. Every story you read about the Taliban getting its hands on Pakistani nukes is a fantasy along these same lines, benefitting only the Pakistani military and those in the US interested in maintaining a climate of fear. In the words of the Daily Show, it’s shit that’s never going to happen!
May 6th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
I agree that it is unlikely that the Taliban will take over Pakistan, but they are in a much better position to take over than Iranian Islamists were in 1974. It might be that Pakistan merely has to avoid doing everything wrong, and fails anyway.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Last night’s Daily Show had on Fareed “ZacoWhaterver” and he said just about the same thing.
The US has been bribing the Pakistan Military for years and years and all they have done is build up for poptential war with India (that they DON’T want to fight anyway but want to ssem like they are trying to protect their people.
THEY DON’T WANT to fight the Taliban because they MIGHT lose, they essentially have been taking bribes from the US so that they will “TRY” to protect their country from threats only to lie and take care of their own self interests.
To have to bribe a country’s military to protect their country is just FUBAR!!!!
May 6th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Or upside-down. It should be that the Pakistan government is very concerned about the Taliban and asking us for aid and support in fighting them.
Maybe Islamabad doesn’t think there’s a very realistic chance the Taliban could actually take power. It’s one thing to gain control of some rural districts. It’s another to subjugate a nation of 165 million. I have no idea if this is plausible or not — maybe it is — but you’d think the Taliban would need substantial, widespread support to pull off this feat. Could they manage it?
May 6th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Re: It’s one thing to gain control of some rural districts. It’s another to subjugate a nation of 165 million
You realize that this exactly what the complacent Czarist secret police said about Lenin and his boys?
May 6th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Don’t you think the ISI’s support of extremists may figure into the dynamic?
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=89802
What’s even more bizarre is that our officials haven’t made any sort of full-court press on “our good friend” to purge its own security services of people who are plotting and funding attacks on US and Indian interests. You would think a “War on Terror” would involve cracking down on those elements that, you know, support terror. A dysfunctional relationship, indeed.
May 6th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Rapier,
You’re on drugs with the following comment:
If you read Informed Comment: Global Affairs, you’ll see that it’s actually quite likely. And popular support? How do you think the Taliban got a strong foothold in the major urban cities? It is exceedingly obvious that a large part of the elites within Pakistan support Taliban for both tactical and strategic purposes.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
As a reader of Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment”, and other Middle Eastern sources, I also believe that the danger to Pakistan is great. Significant evidence exists that the Taliban was created by Pakistani intelligence and their military. The military is very reluctant to make war against their Muslim brothers and the Pakistani military if full of supporters of the Taliban. They have almost total information about activities of the Pakistani military and the Pakistani military gets significant amounts of their limited intelligence on the Taliban from the U.S.A. That U.S. intelligence gets promptly passed to the Taliban so that the Taliban knows what we know and can then figure out how to change and shut down that source.
Pakistan has essentially dismantled its public schools in many areas and allowed fundamentalist Muslim Madrassas to educate their children. A recent Newsweek article describes at least 20% of the children in these Madrassas in Karachi, the largest city and financial capital of Pakistan as future Jihadis.
There are currently more that enough zealots who sympathize with the Taliban in Pakistan to overcome the majority that doesn’t like them. The Taliban supporters are receiving guns and financial support from Afghanistan the the Gulf states. With the military already compromised, the underpinnings of the future Taliban theocracy in Pakistan is appearing almost inevitable to me.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Juan Cole? Isn’t he the blogger who covered the Huge Crushing Victory by al Sadr in Basra over al Maliki, the Iraqi army, and US forces. The fellow who reported, using his ’special’ contacts that nobody else has that Iraq was now at the mercy of Iranian dealmakers and the Mehdi Army was in the drivers seat. Yes, it was that Juan Cole. The same one who was considered for a faculty position at Yale and turned down as too much of an embarrassment — epic Fail.
Yeah I read him occasionally. Many call him Moron of the Middle East, but I understand he has his fans among those to whom facts are optional.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
So DaMav are you in Near Eastern Civilizations or Islamic Studies at Yale?
May 6th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
[...] Yglesias nails it: I don’t know exactly what the issue is, but it doesn’t make sense for the American [...]
May 6th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
They have more than the government. And they have more guns than those who side with the government.
The core of government supporters are the westernized, affluent elite in Punjab and Sindh. There is a 30-million strong middle class, but it doesn’t make up as much of the army as the more conservative, rural areas do.
It’s not clear that the army’s loyalty is solid. If the army splits into pro-Taliban and pro-government factions, there won’t be enough of the pro-government side to protect their own kind from the Taliban.
The reason the Taliban was able to take over Swat and Buner is that it’s seen as a better law-and-order option than the government in those places. Also, the Taliban kills its opponents, while the government appeases theirs. Unless you’re a die-hard government fanatic, you’ll either join the Taliban or, more likely, just stay out of the way as they ride into the capital.
May 6th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
From the Pakistani paper Dawn on a an anti-Taliban political protest:
Men who are Mr. Zahoor’s age are making great strides as Taliban commanders. If you were a poor farmer, on whom would you put your money?
May 6th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I agree that it’s unlikely the Pakistani Taliban can actually take over the country. At worst what will happen is that they will eventually gain control of a large pro-Islamic political party and manage to gain sufficient seats in the government that they can influence the overall trend of Pakistan’s foreign policy.
But that’s essentially the same situation as today – Pakistan doesn’t want to support Afghanistan being independent of them, Pakistan hates India, and everybody in Pakistan hates the United States. So not much will change, since the Taliban have no other agenda except to impose Sharia Law on Pakistan. They have no foreign agenda.
And they don’t have enough interest in Al Qaeda to go through what the Afghan Taliban went through by allowing Al Qaeda to conduct strikes against the US and ended up being invaded. And even if they did, the US can deal with that without having to invade Pakistan, just as it could have dealt with Al Qaeda without having to invade Afghanistan.
Really, if you aren’t reading Asia Times coverage of the events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, you really have no clue what is going on.
The more the US tries to control what is going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the more the US is going to make things worse. This is a guarantee. There is absolutely NO chance the US can influence things for the better in either country. It’s their problem – they have to handle it.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
We’re the only pale-asses in the room
An old joke, from the late 60s, might explain why it isn’t weird at all that the govt of Pakistan seems “weirdly” complacent in the face of what we think of as a threat from the Taliban.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by a war-band of mounted Sioux, whooping and firing as their circle draws ever closer to our heroes. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “Well, Tonto, it looks like those savage redskins have us surrounded!”
To which Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘us’, pale-ass?”.
Why, exactly, is any Arab or Muslim regime supposed to see us as any less extremist, less ruthless, or less principled than the Taliban? Do you think that our aims are more closely aligned with theirs than theirs with the Taliban? Are they supposed to side with us because we are less powerful, therefore, less of a threat to them, than the Taliban? Or is it that they are supposed to see us as walking softly with that big stick we have, a modest, retiring power that can be relied on to not use its big stick indiscriminately?
It’s sort of like that class warfare that the Republicans keep seeing themselves as the victims of, despite the fact that their side has been firing all the shots in that war for thirty years. Sooner or later the victims of their class warfare are going to quit being their shock troops and turn on them. We’ve been firing almost all the shots in what sure looks like a “clash of civilizations” type war against Islam for the past 60 years. Sooner or later Muslims are going to stop heeding the call to keep shooting at all those “savage redskins” who have “us” surrounded.
May 7th, 2009 at 6:57 am
Reports are that Pakistan is going all out to ramp up nuclear weapons production at a time when the risk of capture by fundamentalists is increasing. They have to be told to cease and desist.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Wouldn’t that be a good thing? If they’re part of the political process, they’re playing the game.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
[...] Yglesias discusses the absurdity of the U.S. having to persuade Pakistan’s government to take seriously the [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Yes, it would be better than a violent revolution but from the US perspective it would be considered the same thing since Pakistan would turn more anti-American and support for the war in Afghanistan would be completely over – except to the degree the Pakistani military still wanted all those billions for the “anti-terror” campaign from the US.
There’s no good ending for this for the US, no matter what the US wants.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
I’m surprised that coverage of the Pakistan problem isn’t looking at India’s point of view more often. India can’t be wanting a Taliban victory in Pakistan, and the fear of one should motivate them to downscale their military posture toward Pakistan, thereby giving Pakistan more confidence to move troops west. Pakistan is in no position to be invading India anytime soon anyway.
I hope Hillary’s working on this, though I’d understand if she doesn’t want to advertise it.