Let us grant the Obama administration, and the late special representative, at least some of this credit. But first the Raymond Davis affair, in which a CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis, and then the raid on Abbottabad put an end to this brief era of semi-comity. Or maybe those were just accidents waiting to happen: A more plausible hypothesis is that no substantive relationship between two countries whose fundamental interests are so deeply in conflict could have survived for long. One side -- the United States -- believes that the enemy is violent extremists; the other side believes that the enemy is India, and the United States itself. Even Nasr concedes that "the strategic partnership has been scuttled." We are back in the grudging world of the transactional relationship; I recently heard a senior American diplomat say that Holbrooke had been far too optimistic about progress with Pakistan.
So where do we go from here? The transactional response is: The United States can still get what it needs from Pakistan -- tacit permission to launch drone strikes, as well as the use of the Khyber Pass to transport supplies into Afghanistan. There will be more crises, and more emergency diplomatic interventions, and more Pakistani hyperventilation about violations of national sovereignty. We're the grown-ups here; we can live with it. America may wish that it could do without Pakistan, but it can't. So keep the military and civilian funds flowing.
To which I would say, "Yes, but." The U.S. role in Pakistan plays into, and amplifies, the country's gross pathologies, and it always has. For 60 years, Pakistan's leaders have offered themselves to the West as a bulwark against encroaching evil -- first the Soviet Union, now terrorism. They have, as the scholar Stephen Cohen has put it, held a gun to their own heads. And the United States has bought the argument, with an intermission or two, underwriting a national security state in which the generals allow civilians to pretend to rule, and the civilians prove so feckless as to justify ongoing military control. And all the while, the country's hinterland remains firmly in the grip of feudal landlords, who dominate politics as well.
The Bush administration made no effort to help Pakistan confront its underlying problems; the Obama administration, through the strategic partnership and the $1.5 billion a year made available by the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, has. But it won't help. Pakistan's civilian government has resisted calls for reform as effectively as the security apparatus has, despite threats by the International Monetary Fund to withhold loans if the country doesn't begin to collect taxes from more than 2 percent of the population, as it does now. Civilian assistance won't serve as a lever for reform, won't make Pakistanis like America more, and won't make them more compliant on security issues -- which is why the current legislation to tie aid to progress on security is more an expression of pique than a rational strategy.
I don't think the United States should end the civilian program, if only because doing so would empower the most anti-American elements -- though I do think that, as a recent report by the Center for Global Development proposes, the United States can do Pakistan far more good by opening its markets to Pakistani products than we can by sending aid. If anything, I would take the opposite view from the transactionalists: More engagement with civilians, less with the military and intelligence apparatus. Let's stop fighting over visas for U.S. Special Forces and intelligence agents. Let's quietly, without pique, reduce transfer payments to the Pakistani military. Let's put an end to the Pakistani psychodrama over sovereignty and American neocolonialism. Will the military respond by demanding an end to the drone strikes? I hope not; but it could loose that sword of Damocles whether or not the United States reduces military support. And Pakistan's leaders may be happier to see the United States kill the Taliban by remote control than they're prepared to publicly admit.
If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that the United States has far less power to shape good outcomes in troubled places than we thought. On the contrary: The looming U.S. presence offers itself to autocrats and military leaders as a perfect distraction from painful home truths. The Pakistanis must save themselves, as people in the Arab world are now trying to do. If the country is ever to have its own revolutionary moment, America can help best by getting out of the way.
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