“Trust, but verify” and Pakistan: III

onparkstreet:

May 8th, 2011 at 11:25 pm

I wrote the following over at CBz too:

My initial read is that the American political and policy community is utterly confused – and a bit terrified. Over the years it has lied to itself and to the American people over the true nature of the regime running Pakistan. There are no rogue elements, unless you want to count the true democracy activists and human rights activists. It is a state expressly set up for the benefit of the feudals and the military and to allow non-state actors to develop so-called asymmetric capabilities. And the West provided intellectual cover for many years, initially because of its existential war with the Soviets. This initial engagement morphed and mission-creeped in various ways: poking back at the Soviet-friendly Indians, opening up relations with China, attempting to leverage Pakistan within the context of the Saudis and Iran (and now, again, a “different” China), “help” with Afghanistan, and so on and so forth. One of the reasons solving Kashmir became a US State department hobby-horse – and a standard of the DC think tank community – is because we were trying to placate a NATO member (the UK) that has its own problems with radicalization and a large immigrant population from Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
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The United States won’t cut aid even though aid has been misused and propped up the most corrupt elements of the state. Aid is fungible and it has traditionally made things worse, not better. Money spent on the civil sector (or to train the police) means more money for the military and ISI. We are afraid, however, of the very nuclear weapons that the West’s money – and Chinese and Saudi aid – has helped to purchase ending up in terrorist hands or being gifted to the Saudis. And we still need to hunt down more people in that region and will pay almost any bribe to do it.
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So here we are: “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” – Sun Tzu.
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A theory: Our foreign policy community is confused within the context of “Afpak” because our traditional DC foreign policy mandarins never came to terms with the repercussions of fighting tyranny in one part of the globe by explicitly ignoring versions of it in another. I mean, in terms of what this does to your own institutions long-term, what it does to your military and State department bureaucracies, and to think tanks and a generation of South Asia analysts. In this, our attempts to nation-build in Afghanistan are highly laudable but unworkable (witness the recent furor over the allegations regarding Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” charity). Yes, yes, I know that sometimes you have to hold your nose and work with people you don’t want to for a greater good and that greater good is continuing some version of our counterterrorism or counterinsurgency work within the region. But you shouldn’t lie to yourself or lie to the people you are meant to serve. It’s time for Washington to face facts. There are no rogue elements. There is a state vision and a state plan to carry out that vision.To those who say, “well, we never really supported the civil sector in Pakistan in the past”: How do you do that effectively when the military colonizes the economy? When it owns large tracts of land and businesses? Once again, aid is fungible and the State department and its Western development theories (building civilian governmental capacities; in other words, social engineering abroad) has a rocky track record, at best. So now what?

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It is interesting that I am essentially saying the same thing, and yet, using a different sort of rhetoric.
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The foreign policy community of the West has had every possible engagement with the country in the past sixty years. The trajectory has been one way….
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This, I think, our FP mandarins cannot let themselves accept. They have had a hand in it.
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Just as certain members of the Pakistani security establishment thought they could handle their own pet jihadis, we thought the same.
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We thought we could "handle" the moderates and manipulate the game to our outcome. This thinking is, and has been, dangerous to many innocent Pakistanis, Afghans, Indians, and Americans among others.
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– Madhu

onparkstreet:

May 8th, 2011 at 11:31 pm

Charles, I seem to have messed up that extract from my blog post at CBz. Might you be able to fix it, if you have time? If not, I totally understand.
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I am such a bad proofreader.
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One more point: The key factor is not duplicity, or complicity, but that the system is set up to grow non-state actors. No one can reliably control them and no one is interested in trying to round up all groups.
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I spend a lot of time reading about the region on online think tank websites and open source American military journals.
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It was a great conceptual error to concede that a weaker state needed violent jihadi actors as balance to a larger state next door. The jihadi virus grows and mutates and kills.
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Shame on the American think tank and intellectual foriegn policy community that allowed such nonsense to become the status quo thinking. Shame on those in the Washington defense community that thought over the years they could game the system to their advantage.
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That is my initial impression which may not be entirely fair.
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– Madhu
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(How do we really know that our attempts at engagement are keeping the nuclear arsenal in relatively safe hands? How do we really know? I contend that we don’t.)

onparkstreet:

May 8th, 2011 at 11:37 pm

I love to comment in threes. Will stop after this 🙂
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By conceptual error, I mean that I’ve been trying, in my very imperfect and layperson’s way, to take a very small intellectual history of the strange relationship the US and the UK and others have had with Islamabad. It’s been a strange, self-deceptive trip.
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We need to examine all policy options – for intellectual thoroughness – and we need to take a hard intellectual history of our past engagements and disengagements. We’ve tried pretty much everything except for making it clear that there will be a NO tolerance policy for non-state actors running amuck.
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– Madhu

Gold Dagger:

May 9th, 2011 at 1:27 am

The CIA had known for quite some time bin Laden was in Pakistan and never told the Pakistan government. Obviously, like the dog that doesn’t bark, the fact that the US intelligence agency and military attacked inside Pakistan without informing them means they were well aware who they were dealing with. But the evidence also suggests that bin Laden was hiding without the knowledge of the Pakistan government. He was hiding out practically all by himself, with a couple of trusted couriers. There’s no evidence bin Laden trusted anyone in the Pakistan military. Unless they find something in all the documents recovered from his compound. 

zen:

May 9th, 2011 at 2:18 am

Heh. The defense of Pakistan/ISI in regard to complicity with Bin Laden/AQ seems to share much of the same logic as the defense of Alger Hiss. 🙂
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Excellent series of posts, Charles!