Matt Yglesias

Pakistan Military Growing Wary of United States?

Husain Haqqani

Traditionally the United States has had a strong relationship with Pakistan’s military. And Pakistan’s military has had a proclivity for overthrowing the civilian government, and for operating itself autonomously even while civilians are formally in charge. And their strong relationship with the US was part and parcel of how that works. More recently, the US has been trying to turn over a new leaf and build a broader relationship with Pakistan aimed at improving ordinary Pakistanis’ view of the United States and bolstering civilian governance.

Meanwhile, via Jason Zengerle, Farah Stockman writes that Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington hasn’t been home in eight months because he’s afraid of being targeted by physical violence aimed at charging him with being too pro-American:

Samina Ahmed, an Islamabad-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the attacks on Haqqani were carefully orchestrated by the military to weaken the government he represents. She predicted more will come.

“These are the first rumblings of the storm,” she said. “This is the beginning of the military trying to take down this civilian government.”

If I were the Pakistani military I would, official statements to the contrary aside, be skeptical that American policymakers would actually follow through on threats to seriously oppose a coup.

The Final Frontier

Today in The National I have a new article out arguing that the fear of safe havens doesn’t make a great deal of sense and is part of a lack of strategic priority setting. After all, the truth about Afghanistan is that it’s not so much “the graveyard of empires” as it is simply a place empires eventually realize isn’t very important.

What the piece doesn’t deal with is the idea that a large American military deployment in Afghanistan is necessary for the stability of Pakistan and a broader South Asian security context. I’m not sure whether I think that argument is right or not, but for what it’s worth it strikes me as a much more plausible idea. Which is to say that if it’s true that our efforts in Afghanistan are playing a crucial stabilizing role in Pakistan, then that definitely seems like the kind of thing we should be pouring a lot of resources into. My colleague Brian Katulis has a smart recent take on Pakistan, but it doesn’t really delve into the Afghanistan connection.

Counterterrorism Through Air Power

(RAF Photo)

Interesting early precedent for the recent drone campaign waged by US forces in South Asia from the Royal Air Force’s history:

March – May 1925- Outrages by Mahsud tribesmen in Waziristan, India, see the RAF involved in its first independent air action. Aircraft from Nos. 5, 27 and 60 Squadrons, commanded by Wing Commander RCM Pink, bomb and strafe mountain strongholds in a successful attempt to crush the rebellion. On 1 May, the rebel leaders seek an honourable peace, and the short campaign known as “Pink’s War” came to a close. A campaign in 1919 had proved inconclusive after causing 1,329 casualties; this latest action results in the loss of just 2 men.

We generally call them “Mehsud” tribesmen now, and notwithstanding the ’success’ the RAF had in putting down the rebellion it continues to be the case that the central governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan have little effective authrority over them. These days, though, the Pakistani military is working with one Mehsud faction (the Abdullah Mehsud group) against the faction led first by the late Baitullah Mehsud and now by Hakimullah Mehsud.

Pakistan in Denial

Via Spencer Ackerman, Jane Perlez writes that Pakistani security officials are concerned that anti-Indian extremist groups they’ve nurtured are building ties with al-Qaeda but they don’t know how to admit this:

The senior personnel in the security forces seem to understand the gravity of the militants’ strength and the durability of their network, Mr. Saleem said. But they cannot bring themselves to say publicly that those whom they created are coming back to bite them, he said.

The problem arguably runs even deeper than this. IRI’s May 2009 survey of Pakistani public opinion asked the following question: “Terrorists recently attacked the city of Mumbia, killing 164 people. The news is reporting that the attacks were planned in Pakistan and carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Do you believe this is true.” 78 percent said no. Just seven percent said yes. By contrast slightly over eight percent of Americans claim to have personally witnessed an alien spaceship. In other words, it’s not just that Pakistanis don’t believe the anti-Indian terrorist groups their government has been nurturing are a threat to them, in Pakistan belief that anti-Indian terrorist groups are perpetrating attacks against India is a bit of a fringe idea.

So who do Pakistanis think was responsible?

India!

I bring this up not to rag on the population of Pakistan, but simply to point out that a lot of American commentary on Pakistani behavior seems to me to not seriously engage with the Pakistani epistemic situation. In our narrative about ourselves, Pakistan is threatened by trans-border Taliban operations and we’re working with our partners in Afghanistan to help stabilize the situation. The Pakistani view is that the Karzai government is a hostile, pro-Indian entity. The American view is that Pakistani security forces are playing a dangerous double game with lethal anti-Indian terrorists. The Pakistani view is, I guess, that terrorist attacks perpetrated in India are false flag operations designed to discredit them.

Today in Wild Overstatements

To may a long story short about a bad way to make the case for war in Afghanistan, if you take any situation (say the war in Afghanistan) then you assume that failing to apply maximum effort will lead to the worst possible consequences, then you assume the worst possible next stage consequences, and then you assume the worst possible next stage after that, then you easily generate an argument for maximum effort. But this is a serious fallacy. You could also do the same worst-case scenario mongering for other possible courses of action. Benjamin Friedman shows that we’ve got a lot of this fallacy running loose:

[Richard] Cohen calls Obama soft for letting McChrystal run amok, ignoring the fact that both the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser publicly rebuked him. Cohen approvingly cites Obama’s foolish claim that Afghanistan is a war of necessity. One can’t say enough that this is senseless; even wars of pure self-defense aren’t strictly necessary, and Afghanistan, at this point, isn’t that. He then drops the dominos. Should we leave, he says, the Taliban will take over Afghanistan and then Pakistan, grabbing nukes. India then invades Pakistan, and we get 1947, but nuclear. He doesn’t say how the Taliban columns advancing on Kabul will suppress our airpower. The widespread Afghan and Pakistani hostility to the Taliban — especially among the non-Pashtuns who support and dominate both governments — doesn’t impress him. He doesn’t mention the fact that the Pakistani military keeps close hold on its nukes, no matter who is officially in power. One could go on, but suffice it to say that there is an equally plausible worst-case scenario that results from following Cohen’s advice and expanding the war.

To be fair though, Cohen is a clear-eyed realist compared to Daniel Twining, who writes for Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog. Twining sees the war in Afghanistan as a means to keep Russia in a box, China down, India up, world trade humming, and the current international order, whatever that is, intact. I’m not going to bother to explain how all this works, but I picture the causal diagram as somewhat psychedelic. It’s almost like a parody of Jack Synder’ work on imperial myths, like he missed the part of the story where it says these aren’t theories you copy but BS people use to sell wars.

The fact of the matter is that in the modern world everything is sort of connected to a bunch of other stuff and it all, in the end, kind of links together. So you can start anywhere on the chain and start speculating about falling dominoes. It’s really true that an India-Pakistan nuclear war might start. And the fact of the matter is that a variety of different scenarios in some sense “could” lead to that happening. On another level, such a war would always be unlikely to result under any scenario since it would be suicidal. But the only reliable way to fundamentally mitigate India-Pakistan nuclear war risk would be to work on the fundamental issue of the India/Pakistan conflict. Beyond that there’s no real reason to think that Taliban military successes in Afghanistan makes an India-Pakistan nuclear war more likely.

You can spin a scenario in which a total victory for Karzai constitutes a strategic win for India and makes Pakistan feel vulnerable, leading them to increase support for anti-India radical groups leading to a war and staggering numbers of casualties. It’s just an inherently dangerous region of the world.

Does Helping Hamid Karzai Conquer Afghanistan Stabilize Pakistan?

There’s a lot going on in David Brooks’ brief for an ambitious campaign in Afghanistan but there’s one piece that I think really needs to be taken apart, namely his contention that “A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.” Justin Logan retorts:

This is really cranking it up to 11 on the hyperbole meter. We may recall that in the 1990s when the Taliban was running Afghanistan, Pakistan was arguably more stable than it is today.

I think this deserves a more detailed treatment. It seems to me that one of our big issues in Afghanistan is that it’s not clear that the Pakistan government wants our side—i.e., Hamid Karzai—to win the war at all. Back before 9/11, they wanted the Taliban to run Afghanistan and saw the Northern Alliance as too tied in with Russia and India to serve Pakistani interests. Robert Kaplan wrote about a year ago:

The Karzai government has openly and brazenly strengthened its ties with India, and allowed Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif. It has kept alive the possibility of inviting India to help train the new Afghan army, and to help in dam construction in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, abutting Pakistan. All this has driven the ISI wild with fear and anger.

[…] In the mind of the ISI, India uses its new consulates in Afghanistan to back rebels in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is only a few hours’ drive from Kandahar. When India talks of building dams in Kunar, the ISI thinks that India wants to help Afghanistan steal Pakistan’s water. Karzai’s open alliance with India is nearly a casus belli for the ISI. So elements of the ISI have responded in kind; they likely helped in the recent assassination attempt against the Afghan president.

A lot of this reaction seems like ISI paranoia. But the main point is just about the alignment of forces. If Brooks wants us to believe that ensuring a Karzai victory is necessary for the stability of the Pakistan government, he needs to offer some explanation of why the government of Pakistan doesn’t see it that way. Ehsan Ahrari wrote a good primer on this problem in 2006. For a more up-to-date look at this, I highly recommend the Wall Street Journal’s “India Befriends Afghanistan, Irking Pakistan.” Just note that by “Afghanistan” they mean “Hamid Karzai’s government.” Pakistan, “irked,” doesn’t want to see a pro-Indian regime secure control of southern Afghanistan.

The “Af-Pak” linkage is real, but that’s the direction it runs—Pakistan’s regional concerns about India and Russia undermine our efforts to create a united “pro-American” front against Islamist radicalism in the area. That’s a real issue, but it’s totally different from the alleged theory that Taliban wins against northern-based warlords undermine Pakistan’s stability.

Successes in Pakistan

Eli Lake reports that we’re managing to kill al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan faster than they can gain new recruits. It’s hard for me to assess whether or not that’s true, but for it to be true what you need is basically very accurate intelligence—you need to kill the people you want to kill, but not be blowing so much stuff up that your actions prove counterproductive:

Mr. Munoz, who is now an analyst at the Rand Corporation, added that one reason for the success of the attacks has been the CIA’s recruitment of local sources in the Pashtun border area.

“The reason why the Predator strikes are so precise is in part the technological means of espionage, but also the informants on the ground,” he said. “It is the combination of the two that allows us to do the Predator strikes, which is one of the most effective things we have done. We have decimated their leadership. It is the result of a systematic continuous campaign.”

Again, I don’t really know whether this is true or not. But if it is true, it seems to me to seriously cast doubt on the assertion that protecting the United States from al-Qaeda—or protecting the Pakistani state from collapse—requires us to establish effective physical control over 100 percent of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Pakistani officials appear to have captured one of the key Taliban figures in the Swat Valley. The moral of the Swat Valley story, it seems to me, is that insofar as the Pakistani state is motivated to take on radicals—as the incursion into Swat seems to have made them—it has the ability to beat them. But Pakistan’s perception of what Pakistani interests requires just doesn’t happen to be the same as what our perception of our interests requires.

Meanwhile, Senate Armed Forces Carl Levin is joining Nancy Pelosi in expressing serious skepticism about the wisdom of deploying more forces to Afghanistan. Pelosi never seems to get any credit from anyone over this, but before she was Speaker she was Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee and thus, like Levin, has the kind of background that normally gets you taken seriously as a national security policy thinker on the Hill. The problem, of course, is that both Levin and Pelosi have a record of taking “unserious” stands like “we shouldn’t invade Iraq.”

Good News on Al-Qaeda

Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian say AQ Central in Pakistan is actually not in such hot shape:

Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organisation.

Speaking to the Guardian in advance of tomorrow’s eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, western counter-terrorism officials and specialists in the Muslim world said the organisation faced a crisis that was severely affecting its ability to find, inspire and train willing fighters.

Its activity is increasingly dispersed to “affiliates” or “franchises” in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the centre are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.

That’s via Andrew Exum, who highlights the fact that contrary to some skepticism that he and I share about the drone attacks, that the article says they’ve played a role in this. I’ll take the overall picture they paint as evidence that we need to avoid doing anything too panicky in the region and certainly that we shouldn’t take too seriously the idea that somehow the Taliban is one step away from taking over in Islamabad. But as long as the Pakistani government actually wants to clamp down on radical groups, which has been the case in recent months, then it seems that we can help them be reasonably effective in doing so.

Defining “Victory” in Afghanistan

(DOD photo)

As Ezra Klein says “It would be nice if Anthony Cordesman definied the word ‘victory’ in this piece.” Or, again, it would have been nice if one of the editors of the Washington Post opinion section had made that observation before running the piece rather than waiting for one of their bloggers to notice it. But it really does make the specific claims he offers about what we ought to do in order to achieve victory hard to evaluate. His failure to do so is part of the annoying trend toward defining Afghanistan strategy debates in incredibly stark, binary terms. Either we need to commit maxim resources to a maximalist strategy, or else we’re going to admit “defeat” and cut and run. Realistically, though, there’s a broad middle ground of options between “eliminate all US support for Afghan government and let the Taliban run amok” and “engage in decades-long effort to remark all of Afghan politics and society.”

Another note I would offer on the Cordesman piece is that he defines the problems we need to confront in the region as including not only the Taliban, but also the government of Afghanistan (”Bush administration . . . did not react to the growing corruption of Hamid Karzai’s government”) and the government of Pakistan (”Bush administration . . . treated Pakistan as an ally when it was clear to U.S. experts on the scene that the Pakistani military and intelligence service . . . still try to manipulate Afghan Pashtuns to Pakistan’s advantage.”) This of course raises the question of on whose behalf this fighting is happening? The stability of Pakistan is often offered as the reason we need to be fighting the Taliban, but if it’s folly to be treating Pakistan as an ally then how much sense does this make? And if Karzai is part of the problem, too, then who’s side are we on?

Last but by no means least, it seems ridiculous to premise strategy on the idea that we need to somehow get Pakistan to stop trying to manipulate Afghan Pashtuns to Pakistan’s advantage. Are they supposed to manipulate them to Pakistan’s disadvantage? Is Pakistan supposed to become more indifferent to events in an adjacent country than the United States is? As long as Pakistan is stronger than Afghanistan—and it’s much, much stronger—then of course it will try to manipulate the situation there to its advantage.

Doubting the Af/Pak Link

(dod photo)

Bernard Finel has a number of excellent questions about our Afghanistan policy. This one is probably the best:

What precisely is the nature of the risk a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would pose to the stability of Pakistan? From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and yet by most indications, Pakistan was under less threat from Islamist radicals then than now. What has changed to make Afghanistan now the lynchpin on which the stability of Pakistan rests?

Now we can understand part of the story here. The rise of the “Pakistani Taliban” is certainly a new and important factor. At the same time, it’s not only the case that previous Taliban rule of Afghanistan didn’t threaten Pakistani stability, Taliban rule of Afghanistan was encouraged by Pakistan. Pakistan changed its attitude toward this under pressure from the United States which, in turn, has the consequence of changing the Taliban’s attitude toward the Pakistani government. But it’s really unclear how promoting a Tajik-dominated Afghan government that Pakistan perceives as contrary to its interests helps advance Pakistani stability. And one of America’s major adversaries in Afghanistan, the Haqqani network, seems straightforwardly in bed with the Pakistanis.

Drone Strike Kills 12 in Pakistan

The capacity to drop bombs on terrorists from unpiloted planes is clearly valuable and something the United States of America will want to do on occasion. But I think we need to be much, much, much more careful because this sort of thing is incredibly harmful:

An early morning drone attack Friday on a village near the Afghan border in North Waziristan killed 12 people, Pakistani security officials said. The village, Dande Darpa Khel, is part of the stronghold of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan fighter and senior Taliban member.

The missiles hit a compound near an Islamic school that Mr. Haqqani had set up, and women and children were among the dead, according to Pakistani officials, who spoke in return anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

The case against this stuff is well made in CNAS’s “Triage” report on regional strategy:

Despite these advantages, the costs of drone attacks against non-al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan outweigh the benefits and they are, on balance, harmful to U.S. and allied interests. The drone war has created a siege mentality among the Pashtun population in northwest Pakistan. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006 when similar strikes were employed against the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). While the strikes killed individual militants, public anger solidified the extremists’ power. The UIC’s popularity rose and it became more extreme [...]

They point out that the missile campaign turns Pakistani opinion away from the “we and the United States are on the same side against the great threat of al-Qaeda” point of view:

Not smart. Ultimately, the government of Pakistan has the Taliban easily outgunned with or without US missile strikes. What it doesn’t necessarily have is legitimacy or the support of the Pakistani people. Actions that undermine those qualities are very harmful.

Don’t Overestimate the Taliban

Taliban religious police beating a woman in Kabul in 2001 (wikimedia)

One of the worst habits of national security thinking is to look at a troubling situation, then ask what would happen if you assume the worst. And then having done that, you ask what would happen if you assume the worst next set of knock-on consequences. Suddenly your initial situation has gone from troubling to “alarming” and nobody notices that the same logic could induce panic if applied to anything. For example, via Michael Cohen, Jari Lindholm writes:

After years of jihad alongside al-Qaeda and other international militants, they would not merely allow terrorist organisations to use Afghanistan as a base; they would encourage it. Naturally, toppling the Pakistani government by supporting their Pashtun brethren would be high on the Taleban to-do list, as they would want to see a friendly, ISI-backed general return to power in Islamabad. In turn, they would gladly help in providing him with the terrorist cannon fodder he would need for his covert operations in India.

And maybe for their next act, they’ll team up with Chechens and invade Russia in the winter!

Seriously, however high “toppling the Pakistani government” may be on the Taliban to-do list, it’s still, you know, hard. Indeed, it’s worth emphasizing that on both sides of the border there are actual human beings living and fighting against the Taliban who would continue to resist Taliban domination of their countries even if the United States didn’t lift a finger to help them. It’s important not to confuse the difficulty the U.S., Karzai, Pakistan, etc. have with dislodging the Pakistan from their home base with the idea that the Taliban is some kind of all-powerful super-army capable of easily overrunning Islamabad or the Panjshir Valley.

Helping Where We’re Not Wanted

Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs Judith McHale (official photo)

The administration has some pretty exciting ideas about increasing American assistance to Pakistan and rebalancing much more toward the civilian side of things and away from our traditional reliance on military strongmen as our key friends over there. I think it’s a good idea and on a number of levels it seems to hold a lot of promise. What’s more, the strategic goal strikes me as fairly clear—a legitimate, effective Pakistani state would serve our interests, and the costs involved in even a “big” aid program are pretty low in the scheme of things.

My one doubt about this all is, however, a pretty serious one. By all anecdotal accounts I’ve ever heard from Pakistanis or Pakistani-Americans, the United States is really really hated in Pakistan. And the polling from Pew and others bears that out. Helene Cooper has a good piece about this in The New York Times:

Judith A. McHale was expecting a contentious session with Ansar Abbasi, a Pakistani journalist known for his harsh criticism of American foreign policy, when she sat down for a one-on-one meeting with him in a hotel conference room in Islamabad on Monday. She got that, and a little bit more. [...] “‘You should know that we hate all Americans,’” Ms. McHale said Mr. Abbasi told her. “‘From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.’”

Beyond the continuation of the battle against militants along the Pakistani-Afghan border, a big part of President Obama’s strategy for the region involves trying to broaden America’s involvement in the country to include nonmilitary areas like infrastructure development, trade, energy, schools and jobs — all aimed at convincing the Pakistani people that the United States is their friend. But as Ms. McHale and other American officials discovered this week, during a visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, making that case was not going to be easy.

On the one hand, this could be said to underscore the vital need for a big reboot of US commitment to Pakistan. On the other hand, how effective can anything we try to do to help Pakistan be under situations where people really don’t seem to want our help? It’s also noteworthy that if you look around the countries where we’re most disliked tend to be our “friends” like Pakistan and Egypt while in countries we don’t “help” like Iran we’re see much more positively.

India and Pakistan in Afghanistan

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article about India’s extensive aid projects in Afghanistan and the discomfiture said projects cause Pakistan. And I think Justin Logan is absolutely right to suggest that COIN enthusiasts have an unfortunately tendency to neglect these kind of state-vs-state dynamics in their analysis of the situation.

The United States will, at some point, either decide we “won” “the war” in Afghanistan and then leave or else that we “lost” “the war” in Afghanistan and then leave. Pakistan and India can’t leave. And they never really win or lose definitively. The centrality of the India-Pakistan conflict in shaping conflict throughout the region isn’t really anything anyone involved in the “Afpak” debate denies, but it’s as if the issue is too hard so people decide they’d really rather not seriously incorporate it into their analysis.

It Depends Where You Start the Clock…

One interesting thing about the past few decades of world history is that essentially the exact same events can be read as having precisely opposite implications. Here, for example, is Peter Bergen arguing for more forceful American military intervention in Afghanistan:

The implication of Walt’s objection to the ramped-up Obama strategy in Afghanistan is that the U.S. should either do less in Afghanistan, or even just get out altogether. But America has already gone down this road. Twice. In 1989 the U.S. closed its embassy in Kabul and then effectively zeroed out aid to one of the poorest countries in the world; meanwhile Afghanistan was racked by a civil war, which spawned the Taliban who then gave safe haven to al Qaeda.

Then in the winter of 2001 the Bush administration overthrew the Taliban, and because of its aversion to nation-building rebuilt the country on the cheap and quickly got distracted by the war in Iraq. Into the resulting vacuum stepped a resurgent Taliban. This time the movement of religious warriors was much more closely aligned with al Qaeda.

There is, of course, something very arbitrary about starting this clock in 1989. One could just as easily note that in 1980 the United States decided that it would serve our interests to deliberately destabilize Afghanistan by trying to foster a series of links between Saudi financing, Pakistani intelligence, and Afghan religio-nationalist militants and that we’ve spent much of the past ten years coping with the unintended consequences of this activity.

Which I think it’s why it’s worth being above-board about the fact that people really come to this discussion with some pretty strong ideological priors. I think there’s a view of the world out there which looks at the American military as a kind of balloon that ought to expand to fill every vacuum that arises in the world. There’s another view which finds this trend in our recent foreign policy alarming. I’m much more in the latter camp. And I think that what Bergen is really showing here is that we have no practical ability to actually fill these voids on a sustained basis and that, therefore, the practical results of vacuum-filling enterprises are dominated by the unintended consequences.

Afghanistan Reading Assignment

I’ve resolved to try to start following the Afghanistan debate more closely now and asked Spencer Ackerman for some reading recommendations. He gave me:

— Rory Stewart, “The Irresistible Illusion” The London Review of Books.

— Gilles Dorronsoro, “The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan” for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

— Andrew Exum and Nathaniel Fick, “Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

— David Kilcullen’s February congressional testimony.

I’ve read the Stewart and am now working on Dorronsoro.

One question I’m looking at somewhat hazily is this. If you read accounts of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, people generally always seem to think that American and Saudi and Pakistani support for the Mujahedeen was an important factor. I don’t see anyone saying “it was all a big waste of time and the same stuff would have happened anyway.” The Taliban has, as best as anyone knows, nothing remotely resembling that level of external support. So why isn’t that making more of a difference? Is our side actually much less effective than the Soviets were when you control for the change in external support?

Putting the “Pak” Back in Afpak

I switched out from the climate change panel to a panel on Afghanistan featuring Spencer Ackerman, Heather Hurlburt, Robert Greenwald, Anne Richard, and Richard Smith. At one point soon after I entered the room, Hurlburt observed that everyone on the panel kept acknowledging that Pakistan is really the more important half of this equation and yet all the talk had been about Afghanistan. So she got her panelists to briefly address Pakistan. But then with that done the discussion shifted again, as if by force of gravity, back to Afghanistan.

That’s reflected my general experience of how these discussions go, and I think it’s a real problem. It’s genuinely true that the situation in Pakistan matters more and that the Afghanistan situation is worrying primarily because if its possible implications for Pakistan. That means we really do need to be talking about Pakistan.

Sympathy for the Taliban

Well, okay, I don’t really think people should sympathize with the Taliban. They’re vicious killers. But via Neil Sinhababu an interesting article tries to take the Pashto agenda seriously on its own terms, rather than merely as a thorn in the side of the United States or Hamid Karzai or the government of Pakistan.

It’s a reminder that it is worth trying to walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes. Suppose you were a member of an ethnic group with a distinctive language and set of cultural practices. This ethnic group lives in a fairly large and yet geographically compact area basically along a mountain range. But instead of there being a state dominated by your people and their values, a line has been drawn straight through the heart of your territory, many decades ago, by imperial powers whose explicit agenda was to undermine the political power of local actors. Consequently, your people find themselves as a large minority in one state on one side of the border, and a rather small minority in the other state on the other side of the border.

Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet lies the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Its population dwarfs yours. Its economic might dwarfs yours even more. It heads a military alliance whose members include virtually every other wealthy and powerful country. It accounts for half of global defense spending. And it insists on viewing success of your group’s military organizations as constituting a direct threat to its interests. I wouldn’t be thrilled about the situation.

Pakistan’s NIMBY Approach to the Taliban

The Obama administration’s efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to be hamstrung by some pretty fundamental disagreements about what’s important here:

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

As long as Pakistan’s thinking about its national interest is dominated by India and the quest to gain control over Kashmir, it’s very hard to imagine them and us ending up eye-to-eye on how to think about Afghanistan.

A Winnable War in Afghanistan

(US Army photo by Sgt. Matthew Moeller)

Back during the great Iraq debate of winter 2006-2007, one point I made was that by gambling on the “surge” we were also gambling on the total collapse of our strategy in Afghanistan. It’s a point Barack Obama also made. And then as he prepared to take over the government of the United States in the winter of 2008-2009 he basically went about implementing the kind of strategy that Iraq War critics had been urging two years earlier. But by the time that actually happened, I began to be beset by the nagging worry that two years later was too late; that our endeavor in Afghanistan had actually slipped below the horizon line of viability. And I know, especially as I’ve been doing some student-heavy speaking engagements this summer, that a lot of other progressives are worried about this too.

If you’re looking to be a bit cheered up about Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, then you couldn’t do much better than to read Peter Bergan’s new article in The Washington Monthly where he argues that success is more achievable than people realize and that Obama’s strategy is sound. I have some doubts about the Pakistan portion of his argument, but I find it pretty convincing.

Pakistan Adding to Its Nuclear Arsenal

More evidence that the Pakistani security establishment doesn’t see eye-to-eye with American priorities:

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Talk about “diverting” funds strikes me as misleading in this context—the money is necessarily going to be fungible. It’s not as if in the absence of American aid, the Pakistani military would just let the Taliban seize the capital. The underlying issue is that our excessively transactional relationship with Pakistan isn’t producing the kind of bilateral relationship we want.

At any rate, I also think it’s worth noting that nowhere in a story about the new Indian government’s priorities do you see “secret plan to conquer Pakistan.” They’re trying to cope with the global recession, with hundreds of millions of impoverished citizens, etc.

The Trouble With Air Strikes in Pakistan

Via Robert Farley, a good concise explanation from David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum about the problem with these drone strikes against targets in Pakistan:

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

In my mind, this is one of the big problems with using the phrase “war on terror.” It gets people in a frame of mind where they’re thinking of analogies like “what would I do to a Nazi tank column?” rather than “what would I do to a crime-plagued neighborhood?” And when trying to figure out the right approach here, the right thing to do isn’t to ask yourself whether international terrorism is “really” a kind of warfare or “really” a kind of crime. The right thing to do is to ask yourself what kind of strategic goals you have and what kind of tactics are likely to achieve them. What we want is for Muslim communities around the world to cooperate with various governments around the world to smoke out and apprehend would-be violent extremists. That’s more like a crime-fighting mission.

Train in Vain

Spencer Ackerman notes an expanded US training mission in Pakistan. I always get queasy when people start talking about training missions. In part, because that’s how we slipped down the slope in Vietnam. But more broadly, there often seems to be a lack of conceptual clarity around what we’re doing and why.

Thinking about the conflict between the Pakistan military and the Taliban, for example, how plausible does it strike you that the main issue is that the military isn’t well-trained? The Taliban didn’t have benefit of external training assistance? You could imagine scenarios in which a lack of training on the US-favored side of a conflict really was that side’s important problem but it doesn’t seem to me that the shoe fits in this case.

How Much Space Do You Need to Plot?

All else being equal, I feel better when Islamic militants control less territory rather than more territory. That said, when I read this from Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt I wonder about the logic:

It remains unlikely that Islamic militants could seize power in Pakistan, given the strength of Pakistan’s military, according to American intelligence analysts. But a senior American intelligence official expressed concern that recent successes by the Taliban in extending territorial gains could foreshadow the creation of “mini-Afghanistans” around Pakistan that would allow militants even more freedom to plot attacks.

I’m not sure I understand the relationship between “territorial gains” and “freedom to plot attacks.” You need a lot of territory to raise cattle or build a parking lot. But plotting doesn’t strike me as a particularly space-intensive activity. When the ThinkProgress team gets together to plot, we usually do it in a small confined space. More generally, the entire safe haven concept strikes me as overrated. The 9/11 attacks were primarily plotted in Hamburg. A terrorist in the Swat Valley is, by definition, not in a position to blow something up in a western city.

Heard it All Before

This is a really excellent article by Manan Ahmed exploring the long tradition of pronouncing Pakistan to be on the bring of collapse. His point is that the American establishment has a marked tendency toward discomfort with any civilian government in Pakistan, leading to a cycle of proclamations of failure followed by coups that does little to solve anything.