Strange bedfellows
The stark fact that emerges from Bob Woodward’s tell-all book on Obama’s Afghan war, Obama’s Wars, is that the US administration does not have a credible plan of action except to throw more money at Pakistan to buttress its civilian and military programmes. Indeed, there is little point in President Barack Obama’s pious homily to President Asif Ali Zardari in the Oval Office, quoted in the book, “…we do not want to be part of arming you against India, so let me be clear about that”.
The answer was given by Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, to a senior American official, who asked what it would take Islamabad to focus on US concerns: “…We are a nation of rug merchants… So our side now, we’ve asked for the moon but will get something. We are getting our stuff. We’ll get the helicopters, which the Army needs to go into North Waziristan”. Pakistan, he suggested, needed more economic aid and military capability. And “give us a little bit of self-respect. Don’t humiliate us publicly”.
Woodward’s trademark fly-on-the-wall account of intense discussions in the White House and elsewhere in the administration on US policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan is revealing in how anguished the internal debates were and how helpless the President and his team felt in devising new methods to prod Islamabad to come clean. At one stage, the then director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, berated American policy because “it was based entirely on carrots. There were no sticks”.
The Pakistanis had a ready answer, Blair revealed, adding, “The Pakistani leadership has claimed their government was so weak that it might collapse if the US used any sticks. They were basically saying, ‘You don’t want us falling apart, do you? Because then all hell will break loose’”.
Indeed, the amazing part of the revelations in the book is the vast amount of intelligence various US agencies have gathered on Pakistan and much clear-eyed analysis. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst brought in to lead the early 2009 review of the AfPak strategy, tells the President that he had to focus on the central threat, Pakistan. He hypothesises, “…Pakistan attacks India again, either directly or indirectly. Mumbai redux. What are we going to say to the Indians this time? We admire your Gandhi-like self-restraint? I think we have probably reached the threshold in India. The next attack will get a military response. And that means you’re talking about the potential for nuclear war”.
In a sense, President Obama’s desire to get India to extend the olive branch to Pakistan is a default position because his experts feel that Islamabad has simply too much leverage on the US in authorising drone strikes and keeping the supply lines open, whose importance was recently underscored by Pakistan temporarily closing them. According to the President, “Changing the Pakistan calculus is key to achieving our core goals”. And one way of doing so is, “We need to move aggressively on India-Pakistan issues in order to try to reduce the tensions between the two countries”. But President Obama does recognise that India is on a different trajectory to Pakistan’s in the international ranking.
Woodward’s account is laced with the internal tensions that exist in any bureaucracy, enhanced in the Obama administration by the political consequences of the two wars he inherited. The author reveals, “It was well into the Obama presidency that (Richard) Holbrooke (special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan) learned definitively how much the President didn’t care for him”. General David Petraeus, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, was lampooned in the administration’s inner circles as being addicted to self-promotion.
As has already been revealed in news reports, Washington remains suspicious of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s motives and state of mind. US intelligence describes him as “increasingly delusional and paranoid”. He is quoted as telling former US ambassador Karl Eikenberry, “You guys are opposing me. It’s a British-American plot”. But US vice-president Joseph Biden tells a high-level inter-agency meeting, “My hunch is that the Pakistanis have concluded that we cannot afford to leave Afghanistan right now”. Apparently, General Petraeus shares this view, believing that the President’s advisers had factored in the Afghan war overlapping Obama’s re-election bid in 2012.
US policymakers in Washington and the field have few illusions about the state of affairs in Pakistan. The US ambassador in Islamabad, Anne Patterson, told Washington,“I worry all of this is going to blow up. Zardari doesn’t know anything about governing. He will never get out from being Mr Benazir Bhutto, but he is basically on our side”. On his part, the Pakistani President gives expression to his own fears. He hypothesised that Pakistani Taliban attacks inside his country was a plot to destabilise his country “so that the US could invade and seize its nuclear weapons”.
Biden has his own take. He suggested that American policy reinforces Pakistani hedging in a self-defeating cycle, causing Pakistan to aid the insurgency the US is trying to beat. The ISI chief General Ahmed Shuja Pasha told Holbrooke that he was “explicitly opposed to having more American troops in Afghanistan”. According to the CIA chief, Leon Panetta, the command and control for the Taliban was in the Pakistani city of Quetta — bombs were made there and taken across the border for “blowing up Americans”. The CIA had a secret base in Quetta as well but Pakistanis “tried to keep the CIA people on the base”.
Indeed, President Karzai believes that the ISI played a dominant role in managing the Taliban and could deliver the leader Mullah Omar immediately if it wanted to. The author quotes US intelligence as saying that Zakir Rehman Lakhvi was not being adequately interrogated for masterminding the Mumbai attacks and “continues to direct LeT (Lashkar-e-Tayyaba) operations from his detention centre”. Pakistan Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani tells his American interlocutors, “I’ll be the first to admit, I’m India-centric”. General Pasha, in fact, told the US that the Mumbai attacks were the work of rogue elements in the ISI. And Holbrooke’s assurance to the Pakistani ambassador about his brief was, “I shall deal with India by not pretending to deal with India”.
Comments
Moreover, not everything the
ReaderX
03 Nov 2010 - 05:05
Moreover, not everything the US and Pakistan do has something to do with India. If you want to be a useful ally to the US, take a few thousand boots out of kashmir and give them to David Petraeus, sign interoperablility agreement with the US and get off the hedge.
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