How Do You Solve A Problem Like Pakistan? Posted by Michael Cohen

Last week, departing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen publicly stated what is perhaps the single greatest open secret about the US war in Afghanistan - that it has become a proxy war between the US and Pakistan over the future of Afghanistan.

For much of the previous two years - and well before - the Pakistani government has not only been providing safe haven to Taliban insurgents, but if Mullen is to be believed (and I think he should) the Haqqani network is a "veritable arm" of Pakistan's ISI. This would of course also mean that elements in the Pakistani military were responsible for an attack on the US embassy in Kabul. None of this should come as a surprise. It's a well-known fact that Pakistan is both directly and indirectly supporting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan . . . no matter how many times the Pakistani government expresses shock, shock that anyone would lodge such an accusation against it.

The fact that Mullen was the one making these comments - an individual who is probably the person closest to the Pakistanis in the United States military - speaks volumes. But it also demonstrates the strategic "grabbing for straws" that defines US policy in the region today. After all, we know that US officials have been privately browbeating Pakistani officials for two years to end their support for Taliban insurgents - and we know that the Pakistanis have basically been telling the United States that it's not going to happen. Why does the US think that this time a public accusation of complicity with the insurgency will push the Pakistanis into action (considering the normal domestic reaction in Pakistan to US efforts to cajole Islamabad one can imagine that it will have the exact opposite effect).

While it's possible that the Pakistanis will suddenly shift course now that the US has publicly called them out it's hard to see why they would. Instead, Pakistan's reaction to Mullen's comments was to publicly reject them and claim that the ISI has no links to Haqqani - a reaction that was nothing if not completely predictable.  And it all begs the question: what if the Pakistani government doesn't end its support for the Haqqanis? Are we going to send troops across the border to go after them the next time they target US targets or send a suicide assault mission into Kabul? Are we going to risk war with Pakistan to punish the Haqqanis?

If we aren't willing to take that step - and I seriously doubt we will - then all we're doing is throwing out some public charges that we aren't willing to back up with concrete action. Of course, it also bears noting that we have escalated US-Pakistani relations at a time when our leverage over Pakistan is on the decline as we are beginning to walk away from a failing strategy in Afghanistan. Is it really worth causing a fundamental break with Pakistan over Afghanistan?

What makes this even worse is that ultimately the US relationship with Pakistan is actually far more important to long-term US interests -- on issues like nuclear non-proliferation and counter-terrorism -- than the US relationship with Afghanistan. Our focus should be on trying to repair the former, rather than salvaging the latter.

Now to be sure this isn't intended to take Pakistan off the hook. Their behavior in regard to Afghanistan has become deeply schizophrenic - on the one hand at least publicly supporting the notion of political reconciliation while on the other lending support to insurgent groups like the Haqqanis that are making the achievement of such political goals basically impossible. Of course, this is reflective of the various power centers that exist inside the Pakistani government and its military. But in defense of US officials this has put them in an almost impossible bind. Unless the Pakistanis want to be responsible for sparking a civil war in Afghanistan after we leave or significantly harming relations with their superpower ally (and a provider of billions in foreign assistance) they might want to figure out a cohesive policy or at the very least rein in those groups undercutting the efforts toward finding a political resolution to the conflict.

But then again if one is looking for political consistency or even rational strategic behavior Islamabad probably isn't the first place you're going to look. 

Ultimately, while Pakistan's policy in Afghanistan is a source of enormous and understandable frustration to the United States the one lesson that US policymakers should have learned over the last ten years is that its ability to affect Pakistani behavior is quite limited. Pakistan will do what it wants - and neither carrots nor sticks seem able to get them to change their approach in regard to Afghanistan. 

In the proxy conflict over Afghanistan's future, President Obama's decision to pull the plug on the war is an indication that Pakistan has won - and we lost. Rather than trying to re-litigate the war by ramping up our rhetoric now we'd be better off recognizing Pakistani interests - and folding them into our policy in Afghanistan - then trying to coax Pakistan to adopt a position that they almost certainly consider to be in opposition to their strategic calculus regarding Afghanistan.

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This article is really interesting. It really shows how complex the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the problem won't be solved until the US does consider noting Pakistani interest and bringing this thought to the negotiating table.

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I agree that Pakistan will serve the US interest better in the long run. And most of the movements of the Taliban and those who inherited its cause are active because of Pakistan. It's hard to separate both due to the long history and connection between these nations.

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The problem with all this is that it just does not make sense. Why has it taken Mullen so long to say this? The only obvious reason is that the US military has realized that it simply can not win in Afghanistan and that seems to be quite a setback considering that troops of around 40 nations are there to support the US war effort. These are not just UN peace keeping type of forces from third world countries but from countries having the most sophisticated weapons. The military hierarchy therefore needs a scapegoat to blame for their failure to win a war in a small country which is perhaps the poorest and most backward in the world. The best thing to do is therefore to blame Pakistan for this massive failure of judgment. There can be no arguing with the fact that Pakistan has suffered the most at the hands of these brutes calling themselves the Taliban etc. The world has to recognize this and appreciate our efforts rather than what we are getting. Once again the US is making the mistake of seeking short term goals at the risk of further alienating the people of Pakistan.

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