The Davis case infuriated the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's spy agency, not only because Davis was operating on his own but because he was targeting Lashkar-i-Taiba, a terrorist group that the ISI has used to carry out attacks on India. And Kayani first raised the idea of restricting drone strikes in reaction not to the Davis case but to a strike against another tribal ally, the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group of the Tehrik-e-Taliban. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has ramped up the drone strikes because the Pakistan Army has refused to go after Taliban groups that are intent on attacking U.S. troops in Afghanistan; the Army hasn't taken the fight to those militants because they don't threaten Pakistan and because they are useful in the perpetual effort to establish "strategic depth" against India, the enemy Pakistan is really worried about.
This is, at bottom, what's so uniquely strange about the U.S.-Pakistan relationship: It consists largely of efforts to finesse the fundamental and apparently unalterable fact that the enemy of one side is the ally of the other. This leads the United States to conduct unilateral operations such as the one Davis was carrying out, and it leads Pakistan's leaders to gin up public opinion against an American presence that it cannot really do without. For the U.S. side, the stakes are only getting higher because Pakistan's repeated intransigence has given the Afghan Taliban a sanctuary that virtually ensures the failure of the current massive counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. What we may be seeing, in other words, is not simply another episode in a stale drama, but the growing difficulty of finessing the underlying problem.
A divorce would be satisfying; but Pakistan needs U.S. aid, equipment, and training, and Washington is too afraid of what Pakistan might become to let it go. Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert at Georgetown University, is convinced that Islamabad has the upper hand in the confrontation and thus notes that U.S. officials will swallow their ire and make real concessions on drones and perhaps also on the presence of special operations forces. "We're in it for the kids," as she puts it waggishly.
But in Pakistan, as in Afghanistan, the time has come to lower expectations. The United States will have a significant presence in both countries, civilian as well as military, for a long time to come, and over the long run may help foster stability and decent governance in both places. But things will not get better in the short term. Last week, the White House released a report that included the startlingly blunt, if unarguable, assertion that Pakistan's complete failure to follow up its military efforts against the Taliban with even a semblance of efforts to "hold" or "build" cleared areas -- the civilian side of any counterinsurgency program -- meant that "there remains no clear path toward defeating the insurgency in Pakistan." That is, even in those places that Pakistan deems crucial to its own security, a feckless state has undermined an ambitious and often courageous military effort. The stark language may have been intended to shock the Pakistanis into action, but the only effect it seems to have produced is Kayani's edict on the drones.
As a recent government audit of U.S. aid efforts shows, the billions of dollars the United States has poured into economic development and governance in Pakistan haven't made much of a dent yet. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has set out to change the habits and policies of a deeply refractory place -- a prescription for frustration and failure.
I'm not saying the United States should stop sending aid to Pakistan; it may eventually do some good and earn at least a little bit of goodwill. But Obama would be wise to bring the war in Afghanistan to a quicker end than he now plans, to expect less and demand less of Pakistan, and to turn his attentions toward the kind of problems the United States can actually do something about, at home and abroad.
SUBJECTS:
(15)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE