As a civilian, Petraeus will soldier on, in Pakistan
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U.S.-Pakistani relations, under redoubled strain after the May raid on Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound, are only getting worse. This week, the Obama administration announced it would withhold $800 million in military aid to Pakistan, more than a third of Washington's annual allotment. The proximate cause of this reprimand was the apparent betrayal by Pakistani officials of plans to attack Afghan Taliban bomb-making sites inside Pakistan -- the bomb-makers, who undoubtedly have the blood of many U.S. soldiers on their hands, escaped.
Meanwhile, the security outlook in Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan has darkened. In retaliation for the blocked U.S. aid, Pakistan's defense minister threatened to withdraw some of his soldiers from the badlands, including over 1,100 border checkpoints. This would come on top of a previous decision to throw out over 100 U.S. Special Forces soldiers who had been training the Frontier Corps. As it attempts to scare U.S. officials by threatening to cede territory to the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani government didn't hesitate to take action against its own insurgents -- over the past six weeks, the Pakistan army has fired over 760 rockets and artillery shells into three Afghan provinces, killing at least 60 people.
The decision to finally impose a penalty on Islamabad for the duplicity of some of its officials will no doubt further worsen the relationship in the short-run. Policymakers in Washington will have to assess whether the relationship is a viable candidate for a "reset."
If not, the United States will have to tally up its options for expanded unilateral action against militants in the region. If it comes to that, President Barack Obama will undoubtedly turn to his incoming CIA director Gen. David Petraeus to implement more quasi-military operations. The CIA has had a covert presence in Pakistan for decades, a presence that has taken on a wide variety of forms as circumstances have changed. A continued downward spiral in the U.S-Pakistani relationship will cause the covert CIA presence to evolve again, or at least intensify in its present form. As a marker of what may be to come, the night of May 11 witnessed one of the heaviest drone bombardments of Pakistan, with four separate strikes killing over 50 people.
Petraeus will shed his Army uniform before he reports for work in Langley. But he will still be a battlefield commander, in charge of a robotic air force and a small army of U.S. and Afghan paramilitaries, many of whom are former special operations soldiers. Under U.S. law, Petraeus's campaign in Pakistan will be a civilian-led covert action, authorized under Title 50 of the United State Code. To Pakistan, it will look a lot like war.
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