Last week, the Pakistani government demanded that Washington end drone strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's tribal areas and drastically scale back CIA operations. This followed a drone attack in North Waziristan that killed more than 40 civilians on the very day after* Pakistan released contracted CIA operative Raymond Davis, who had been arrested for killing two Pakistanis in Lahore. The Davis affair caused intense anger among ordinary Pakistanis. Americans, meanwhile, are furious at Pakistan for sheltering the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, who are fighting U.S. forces and the Kabul government in Afghanistan. Given this explosive situation, is it really possible for the United States and Pakistan to go on working together against terrorism?
The answer is complicated, but basically it is yes. The Davis affair has damaged the relationship between Washington and the Pakistani Army and military intelligence, but it is very unlikely to end it. Hard as it may be to swallow, the United States must go on cooperating with the Pakistani state, military, and intelligence services against terrorism directed against the West and not allow this relationship to be destroyed by Pakistan's sheltering of the Afghan Taliban. In fact, the United States should accept and even welcome continued Pakistani military links to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the terrorist group alleged to be behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks, while holding to the absolute condition that the Pakistani military uses these connections successfully to prevent further LeT attacks on India and, above all, the United States.
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Although Pakistan's protection of the Afghan Taliban has certainly been unacceptable, on other questions the Pakistanis do have a point. Some U.S. officials -- especially in the State Department -- themselves recognize that what happened to Davis is strong evidence that it is not, in fact, a good idea to have hundreds of Special Forces types, wired to the max but inadequately trained for intelligence work, wandering around Pakistan. The Davis case was bad enough; future incidents could be much, much worse. Equally, there is considerable private disagreement in Washington as to whether the killing of Taliban commanders by drone strikes is really worth the Pakistani anger caused by the killing of civilians.
Above all, though the Pakistani establishment and the United States differ greatly on Afghanistan, they are basically at one when it comes to preventing international terrorism against the West. This is in part because the Pakistani elites shop in the West, send their children to study in the West, and to a large extent actually live in the West. On any given day, a bomb in Harrods in London would be very likely to claim a Pakistani elite family among its victims.
More importantly, the Pakistani government and military know that a successful terrorist attack on the United States by a Pakistan-based group would inevitably lead to a U.S. response that would be extremely damaging to Pakistan. If the attack were carried out by members of one of the groups linked to the Pakistani military, such a response could be on a scale that would lead to the collapse of the Pakistani state.
There is therefore no reason to doubt the basic goodwill of the Pakistani state and military on this issue; indeed, British and U.S. intelligence officials have attested to the very important help that Pakistan has given against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Where this has been limited, it has been because of Pakistani incompetence and bitter divisions among Pakistan's different intelligence and police agencies, not because of support for terrorists.
Pakistani authorities, however, have also given shelter to the top leadership of the Afghan Taliban and have allowed free passage to volunteers fighting the war against Western forces in Afghanistan. The Pakistani security establishment continues to calculate (in a somewhat paranoid fashion) that the festering Afghan civil war will continue to develop as the United States withdraws, pulling in India on the side of anti-Pakistani forces -- basically the former Northern Alliance. Therefore Pakistan must keep strengthening its links to the Afghan Taliban, its only potential allies against India in the imminent proxy war.
This official policy takes place against a background of overwhelming sympathy for the Afghan Taliban among ordinary Pakistanis, at least to judge by my hundreds of interviews on the street in all four provinces over the past four years, including this March in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pakistanis do not necessarily support the Taliban's ideological and revolutionary program. Rather, they see the Taliban's fight against the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's administration as a legitimate national resistance struggle, just like the war of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets and their Afghan communist allies in the 1980s.
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