I accompanied Sen. John Kerry on a trip to Pakistan two weeks after the killing of Osama bin Laden. Outrage over the revelation that bin Laden had been hiding in plain sight not far from Islamabad had prompted pundits and congressmen to call for an end to funding this supremely problematic ally. Kerry told me what he told Pakistan's military and civilian leaders: His colleagues were "overwhelmingly negative about aspects of the relationship" and "needed to see which way Pakistan was really going to go." The Pakistanis heard him out respectfully and promised a stepped-up commitment. Kerry was followed to Islamabad by a parade of senior American officials who offered a similar mix of blandishments and threats. And then -- surprise! -- the Pakistanis changed their minds. Or maybe they had never meant it.
The last straw came in mid-June, when U.S. officials asked the Pakistanis to close down factories making bombs to be used against NATO forces in Afghanistan -- and CIA drones then captured images of militants fleeing with their equipment. The Pakistani soldiers arrived on the scene only when the targets were long gone. Barack Obama's administration, pushed beyond all patience, suspended $800 million in payments, both for counterterrorism operations and for training troops, which in any case had become moot because Pakistan was refusing to issue visas for the trainers, drawn from the U.S. Special Forces. And Kerry's colleagues, as he predicted, have thrown down the gauntlet, in the form of House of Representatives legislation that would suspend virtually all civilian assistance should Pakistan fail to comply with a series of security-related demands.
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Cutting off civilian aid would almost certainly do more harm than good. But so, too, does the endless drama of American demands and outraged Pakistani responses. The time has come to ask less of Pakistan, to expect less, and to offer less.
In Afghanistan, too, the United States has run up sharply against the limits of its influence, despite spending $120 billion a year, not to mention the presence of 100,000 troops. The Obama administration's effort to bring good governance to Afghanistan -- central to its counterinsurgency strategy -- has failed, and the White House has largely stopped trying, and stopped lecturing Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the subject. That's in part because the United States has concluded that Afghanistan no longer poses a grave threat to its national security. Pakistan, however, does. The bulk of the extremists allied with al Qaeda live on the Pakistani side of the border. And Pakistan is a giant, turbulent country with 180 million people -- and nuclear weapons. The relationship is thus governed by the premise that the United States can't walk away. Pakistan has a gift for making itself appear indispensable.
Until now, Obama has favored the carrot over the stick. With the fierce prodding of Richard Holbrooke, the United States' late special representative for the region, the "transactional relationship" maintained under President George W. Bush -- we pay you to let us kill bad guys on your soil -- was promoted to a "special partnership" bringing senior officials from both sides together to discuss the wide range of issues shared by actual allies: economic development, regional diplomacy, energy policy, and the like.
I had always assumed that the special partnership was elaborate window dressing designed to flatter the Pakistanis into complying with American security goals. But Vali Nasr, who served as a senior advisor to Holbrooke before leaving office this year, argues persuasively that it offered the Pakistanis real benefits, which in turn induced very modest acts of compliance with American goals. The talks produced a commercial treaty with Afghanistan, plans for a Central Asian gas pipeline, and enhanced assistance during last year's terrible floods. In return, Nasr told me, the Pakistanis offered "sufficient cooperation for us to nab bin Laden," issuing visas for CIA agents and allowing them to operate inside the country. Nasr also believes that the strategic partnership "moved the needle" of public hostility toward the United States "by 5 or 10 degrees" in the right direction, and in turn produced a measurably, if modestly, greater willingness to take on the Taliban. The relationship, he says, "made manageable what otherwise would have been unmanageable."
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