Here is a sad, sad statistic for you: a grand total of 6 percent of Pakistanis aged 18 to 29 believe that their country is "heading in the right direction." Four years ago, the figure was 14 percent. The next generation of Pakistanis, in short, is sinking into despair. But it's not just sad, the way it would be if 94 percent of Somalis or Congolese had given up on their future. It's also extremely dangerous, because Pakistan has 185 million people, a large nuclear stockpile, and an array of violent Islamist groups who are terrorizing the country's own people and its neighbors.
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There is something viscerally satisfying about the prospect of leaving Pakistan to stew in its own juices. Americans are feeling betrayed by a country they once viewed as a staunch ally in the war on terror. Even Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an extremely patient interlocutor with Pakistan's leadership class, testified in 2011 that the brutal Haqqani network of the Afghan Taliban was "a veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence and added that the country would never be a "respected and prosperous nation" unless it mended its ways. And now, with America's endless military engagement in Afghanistan scheduled to draw to a close in 2014, the United States has the chance to disengage from Pakistan as well. But the truth is that we can't actually afford to indulge that impulse.
Pakistan is the example par excellence of the hopeless predicaments that Barack Obama inherited from George W. Bush. My personal shorthand for these snarled knots is: "You have to, but you can't." You have to persuade Iran to end its nuclear program through blandishments and threats; you have to leave behind a government and an army that the Afghan people can believe in; you have to convince Pakistan's military and intelligence leaders that the Afghan Taliban is their enemy, not their instrument. But you can't. So you come up with a decent-sounding-if-not-terribly-persuasive plan and send it off with a prayer. This degree-of-difficulty problem is why I've always been more sympathetic to Obama than many of his critics on both the left and right.
Bush never had a vision of U.S.-Pakistan relations much beyond, "You're with us or against us." Obama has tried to do better, through a combination of development assistance, democracy support, and the intensely focused diplomacy of Richard Holbrooke, the late special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The "strategic partnership" that Holbrooke forged was supposed to demonstrate a deep and abiding commitment which would not only improve Pakistan's economic and security capacity but flatter the country's leaders into greater compliance with U.S. objectives. That didn't happen. Holbrooke hoped that U.S. aid, channeled through Pakistani institutions, would help bolster the civilian government, and improve America's standing. That didn't happen either. The relationship cratered in 2011, either because Holbrooke died in late 2010 or, more likely, because of popular fury when U.S. forces crossed into Pakistani territory to kill Osama bin Laden, and later killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the border. The policy failed because it couldn't succeed.
In recent days, I've been talking with current and former administration officials who deal with the region, and several things have become clear. First, the deep freeze is over. U.S. military and intelligence officials are now meeting regularly with their opposite number. The Pakistanis have slightly opened the spigot on diplomatic visas, which they choke off at moments of pique. Bilateral working groups on the economy, security, education and defense have been meeting, and issuing soothing press releases. The United States, as one intelligence official I spoke to confirmed, has significantly slowed the pace of drone attacks; the Pakistani side has lowered the rhetoric. It does not hurt that Pakistan is preoccupied with national elections now scheduled for May 11.
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