You Must Incentivize Posted by Patrick Barry

Last night, I wrote about how the loose time frame the administration has announced for the mission in Afghanistan reflects an understanding that the promise of disengagement can leverage better, more constructive involvement from Afghanistan's neighbors - particularly Pakistan, but Iran, China, and others as well.  Matt Yglesias highlights why this is so important by pointing out that right now, the U.S. doesn't have much leverage over Pakistan, particularly when it comes to things like maintaining civilian rule.

Especially given the administration’s just-made commitment to send more troops, more civilians, and more money to Afghanistan do we really believe that if there’s a coup next week the Obama administration is going to cut Pakistan off? This strikes me as on a par with the problematic “no blank check” for Karzai part of the speech. If you want to make American commitment to something conditional (on good-faith anti-corruption efforts by the Afghan government, or on the Pakistan military’s willingness to stay out of politics) then you need to define the rationale for engagement in terms that make the conditionality seem credible.

Frankly, I don't see an easy way out of this dilemma in the short-term.  The best way for the U.S. to make conditionality more credible would be to reduce dependency.  And sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (troops that will be supplied via transit routes running through Pakistan) doesn't accomplish that. 

So what is there for the U.S. to do, if imposing conditions lacks oomph? Anticipating the blogosphere's interest in this question last month while testifying on the Hill, Christine Fair suggested that "[n]egative inducements alone will not succeed: Washington must also consider new positive inducements." Well wait a minute! Didn't we just give Pakistan like a bajillion dollars? And didn't they raise a big stink about it? Well Fair's oral testimony went into more detail, describing how basic military and civilian assistance hasn't really worked to change behavior, and recommending that the U.S. consider things like security guarantees and trade agreements as alternative vehicles to generate cooperation. I'm not going to wade through the precise details of how an arrangement like that would work.  Instead I'll end by observing that U.S. foreign policy thinking generally seems preoccupied with coercion and conditions, but not nearly as concerned with incentives\inducements.

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