“Trust, but verify” and Pakistan: III
[ by Charles Cameron — third of three parts ]
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David Ronfeldt said something in a recent comment here on strategy that to my mind maps very nicely — like one of those zooms in films from a very long view of a New York cityscape right in through the window of a brownstone onto a particular book on a certain someone’s bedside table or desk – onto this week’s questions about Pakistan:
as others have noted better than i, strategic relationships may involve competition in one area, collaboration in another, and a potential for serious conflict in yet another.
Bingo.
That seems to be pretty much the attitude of the ISI retiree Michael Wahid Hanna described on the Afpak channel two days ago:
“As for duplicity, I would say that diplomacy is not single tracked. We all follow many different tracks; sometimes, apparently, working against each other,” a retired senior official from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) told me and my colleagues during a private gathering in Islamabad in July 2010 that was organized as part of The Century Foundation’s International Task Force on Afghanistan. “Double games or triple games are part of the big game.”
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Time magazine gives the argument from both the “they must have known” and “honest, we didn’t” sides:
The most damaging accusation against the Pakistani military, of course, is that it must have known bin Laden’s was hiding in the small garrison town where army personnel at frequent checkpoints demand identification. “They knew. They knew he was there,” wrote Dawn columnist Cyril Almeida, echoing the suspicion of many Pakistanis. Kayani had driven past bin-Laden’s bolt-hole literally a week earlier, on his way to tell a gathering at the military academy that the “Pakistan army is fully aware of internal and external threats.”
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Kayani was adamant that the Pakistanis had no idea that bin-Laden was hiding in Abottabad. “We had no clear, actionable information on Osama bin-Laden,” he told the journalists. “If we had it, we would have acted ourselves. No one would have questioned our performance for ten years. It would have raised our international prestige.”
That’s fair and balanced with, if you’ll excuse the pun, a great deal hanging in the balance…
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Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis, accordingly, tries to weight the the US and Pakistan in terms of their respective affordances to each other…
Let’s see… What does Pakistan do for the US? … Pakistan’s military keeps it’s existing and future nuclear capability out of the larger world game. As has been discussed at SST many times, Pakistan either has or will soon have the real world CAPABILITY of ranging Israel’s target set. They have around 100 fully engineered and manufactured deliverable nuclear weapons. They have aircraft and missiles (Shahiin 2 improved) that would do the job. The missile launchers are fully mobile. The US has zero control over this nuclear strike force. Logically, the willingness of the Pakistan military to keep this “piece” off the chess board is a major boon to the US. We do not want to see that willingness change to something else.
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On the other hand … The Pakistani security services support many of our worst opponents in Afghanistan. This is so well documented that I won’t bother to do so again.
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Are you dizzy yet?
Lawrence Wright at the New Yorker – he wrote The Looming Tower, simply *the* book about AQ’s road to 9-11 – drops one of those tidbits that just might be the exact detail we need to pursue, in one of those long shot zooms in through the window I was talking about. He tells us:
Within the I.S.I., there is a secret organization known as the S Wing, which is largely composed of supposedly retired military and I.S.I. officers. “It doesn’t exist on paper,” a source close to the I.S.I. told me. The S Wing handles relations with radical elements. “If something happens, then they have deniability,” the source explained. If any group within the Pakistani military helped hide bin Laden, it was likely S Wing.
So.
Are we getting closer to that starkly phrased remark of Zen’s that I quoted at the outset of this three post series, “Osama bin Laden was caught and killed in an ISI safe house in Abbottabad” ?
I trust Lawrence Wright quite a bit — but I would like to verify…
May 8th, 2011 at 11:25 pm
I wrote the following over at CBz too:
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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
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.)
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
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.
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!