Alexander Thier, an expert on the region who now works at the U.S. Agency for International Development, uses the electricity sector as an example of the problem. He says, "You can build power plants until you're blue in the face," but unless you can deal with the country's "insufficient revenue collection," you won't be able to make much headway. In any case, he points out, $7.5 billion does not go very far in a country as big as Pakistan. Nevertheless, Thier thinks the United States and other donors can use aid to "leverage good governance and reform." Thier also says that the Strategic Dialogue bringing together officials in a dozen areas has "allowed us to encourage the Pakistanis at the national and provincial levels to actually go through the exercise of acknowledging the problems and prioritizing them."
True, there are modest grounds for hope. Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center and a harsh critic of the Pakistani state, says that Zardari has installed a highly competent financial team in Islamabad. But Pakistan's problems are political, not technocratic, and so long as the country continues to be lead by urbanized feudals who stash their wealth in Dubai and London, the deep problems will not be acknowledged and prioritized where it counts. Think how weak U.S. leverage in Afghanistan still remains, despite 100,000 troops and billions in aid, in cases where President Hamid Karzai believes that his essential interests are being threatened. The same is all too likely to prove true in Pakistan. The White House has, of course, already encountered these sharp limits on the military side: Kayani has refused to send his soldiers to fight the Taliban in North Waziristan because those militants are willing to leave Pakistan alone.
Where does this leave U.S. policy? The central lesson that the Bush administration took from 9/11 is that the United States is now menaced more by weak states than by strong ones and thus must find a way to reach inside those places and make them better. Bush's answer to this problem was the Millennium Challenge Account in relatively nonproblematic regions, and the promotion of democracy in the danger zone of the Middle East. The conspicuous failure of democracy promotion has seriously chastened his successor in the White House, but the premise that the United States must build up weak states, above all in the Islamic world, remains central to U.S. national security policy.
The Obama administration has in some ways replaced democracy promotion with counterinsurgency and, more broadly, with a doctrine that focuses on economic and social development as well as the nurturing of democracy. That strategy, as Biden and others predicted, hasn't worked in Afghanistan; the place is just too inhospitable. Indeed, in recent years, idealistically inclined folk -- like me -- have been forced to absorb one painful lesson after another on the limits of America's ability to shape a better world. What if Pakistan is yet another example?
My own answer would be: patience. U.S. aid, advice, and leverage can help bend the trajectory upward in Pakistan, and even in Afghanistan. But it will do so only slowly. Shah Mahmood Qureshi will be long gone by the time Pakistan has a civilian government that is capable and legitimate. The metabolism of state-building or "enhanced partnership" is thus wholly unsuited to the urgency of preventing terrorist attacks. Nor do I think that the sight of U.S. helicopters rescuing Pakistanis from floodwaters will make ordinary people more sympathetic to the U.S. counterterrorism agenda or to the drone strikes along the border. Only a change in policy will do that.
It turns out, alas, that the weak countries that pose a threat to U.S. national security interests are also refractory places disinclined to accommodate U.S. interests. Policymakers should view them as long-term projects and lower their expectations for short-term progress.
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