Over the years, Pakistani officials had taken good advantage of incoherent and inconsistent U.S. strategies. On September 12, 2001, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called the head of Pakistan’s ISI, Gen. Ahmed Mahmud to deliver the message that Pakistan “faces a stark choice: either it is with us or it is not.” Mahmud stated that he wanted to “dispel the misconception” of Pakistan’s “being in bed” with terrorist organizations and promised his and President Pervez Musharraf’s full, “unqualified support.”18 It was the beginning of a sustained campaign of deception and subterfuge. Three U.S. administrations fell for it. Pakistani leaders proved particularly adept at using Americans’ vanity and naïveté against them. Hale and I agreed that previous approaches to Pakistan suffered from a bad combination of superficial understanding and overintellectualization of the regional dimension of the jihadist terrorist problem.
Understanding was superficial because Americans often skipped over the base motivations, goals, and strategies of the Taliban and other terrorist organizations as well as the Pakistani ISI. Overintellectualization occurred when key officials in the Obama administration developed a flawed logic that underpinned a self-defeating strategy. That logic was: because Pakistan is more important than Afghanistan (as Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation with more than 212 million people), U.S. policy should prioritize the relationship with Pakistan over the outcome of the war in Afghanistan.19 The consequences of failure in Pakistan would be far greater than a failure in Afghanistan, the logic went. If security in Pakistan collapsed or if Pakistan became completely estranged from the West, the jihadist terrorist problem would increase by orders of magnitude. An isolated and desperate Pakistan might initiate another war with India, a war that could lead to nuclear devastation in one of the world’s most populous regions. The best strategy, therefore, would be to prioritize good relations with Pakistan to prevent the worst possible outcome.
But that approach to Pakistan rested on wishful thinking and the dubious assumption that the Pakistan Army and ISI were willing to reduce their support for the Taliban and the Haqqani network. Pakistani leaders used these groups to coerce the Afghan government and prevent a Pashtun nationalist call to adjust the border. The ISI also wanted control of at least portions of Afghanistan to provide the “strategic depth” necessary, in their minds, to prevent India from encircling Pakistan with an Afghan government friendly to New Delhi.
U.S. prioritization of the relationship with Pakistan even at the expense of stability in Afghanistan overlooked the interconnected nature of security in both places and encouraged the Pakistani military to continue its self-destructive support of terrorist organizations. It was, of course, a terrorist safe haven in Afghanistan, enabled by the Pakistan-supported Taliban government, that led to the mass murder of 2,977 innocents on September 11, 2001.20 Insecurity and violence in Afghanistan blows back into Pakistan, creating the very problem that downgrading the priority of security in Afghanistan was meant to avoid. When the Obama administration removed the Taliban as a designated enemy, Pakistani leaders concluded that their American counterparts were easily duped. How seriously should the Pakistanis take American appeals to do more to fight the Taliban and the Haqqani network in their own country when the United States had already announced its timetable to withdraw and seemed desperate to accommodate at least some of the Taliban’s demands?
* * *
PAKISTANI POLICE cleared the route for our motorcade as we made the short drive to the government section of the city. To those unfamiliar with South Asian cities, Islamabad might seem chaotic as cars, motorbikes, and the ornately decorated jingle trucks vie for advantage in its jam-packed boulevards. But Islamabad is orderly compared to other cities in the region. Built in the 1960s, Islamabad enjoyed a name and an ambitious construction plan that reflected Pakistan’s aspiration to be the second Medina, an Islamic state analogous to the city to which the Prophet Muhammad migrated in AD 622. The capital was also meant to express unity in a country that encompassed diverse territories and peoples, including Punjabis, Pashtuns, and Sindhis.
When we arrived at the prime minister’s office, I sat opposite Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The sun shone brightly through the large windows overlooking the garden. He was serving his third nonconsecutive term at the time. Sharif had previously been prime minister from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1997 until the former army chief Pervez Musharraf unseated him in a bloodless coup in 1999. Sharif was a political survivor, but he was under constant pressure from the army and his political opponents. He seemed sympathetic to our main point that the United States could no longer bear the fundamental contradiction in our relationship in which a supposed ally supported our enemies, perpetuated violence, and was therefore at least partially responsible for the deaths of Coalition soldiers and innocent civilians. I told the prime minister that patience was running out and soon we might no longer be able to provide economic and military aid. The United States had recognized that we were essentially funding our enemies through a middleman—U.S. assistance allowed the Pakistan Army to allocate more money to recruiting, training, equipping, and sustaining the Taliban and other terrorist organizations.
As we walked past the manicured lawn and then drove away down the tree-lined drive, the contrast between the trappings of power in the prime minister’s office and the actual powerlessness of that place and those who occupied it was striking. Despite U.S., British, and other nations’ efforts over many years to reinforce the civilian government of Pakistan, army headquarters remained the place of power and authority. The sympathetic hearing from Sharif was inconsequential. He and his finance minister would soon be indicted on corruption charges related to the Panama Papers leaks and removed from office, but members of Sharif’s party attributed the charges to pressure from the military.21 In 2018, the army’s choice for prime minister, Imran Khan, a former world-renowned cricket player and playboy with a visceral dislike for the United States, took office. It was clear that the U.S. approach to Pakistan had to be based on the reality that while most countries have an army, Pakistan’s army has a country. To move from strategic narcissism to strategic empathy, we would have to pay attention to the emotions, ideology, and worldview of the Pakistan Army leaders.
* * *
SINCE THE Pakistani state’s inception in 1947, the army defined itself by the threat from its vast neighbor India. Pakistan fought and lost four wars, including its Civil War (also known as the Bangladesh Liberation War), in 1971, during which Pakistan ceded 55 percent of its population and 15 percent of its territory to newly independent Bangladesh. Territorial disputes remained. In the northwestern Indian subcontinent region of Kashmir, Indian and Pakistani troops engage in high-altitude and high-stakes skirmishes. Conflicts have often escalated to even the threat of nuclear weapons use, as happened in the summer of 2002. Kashmir was the Pakistan Army’s early proving ground for using jihadist terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and it remains a flashpoint for conflict between Pakistan and India. India’s contentious move in 2019 to remove the semiautonomous status the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir had enjoyed for the last sixty-five years could stoke indigenous militancy in the region, much like flawed 1987 state elections did there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.22
American flag officers (generals and admirals) have been at times susceptible to the charms of Pakistani officers, who’ve shared the manners and comportment of a Western army. Their landscaped posts would make any U.S. Army command sergeant major envious. Many of their officers were educated at the British Army’s training ground at Sandhurst. Others attended U.S. Army schools at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. They spoke the Queen’s English, played polo, studied the American Civil War, and drank good whiskey. But they grew up in an organization that saw itself as the arbiter of national interest and the protector of Pakistan’s Islamic identity. The army had veto power over foreign and economic policy.23 And Pakistan’s generals would not let g
o of what they believed was one of their most effective tools: terrorist organizations and militias that allowed them to use violence while denying responsibility.
The Pakistan Army got its start in jihad in 1947 and never stopped. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. support for Islamist groups fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan flowed through Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, the ISI. The ISI-run resistance to Soviet occupation set conditions for the Taliban’s rise and foreclosed on any chance of a moderate political evolution in Afghanistan. ISI involvement in the Afghan drug trade provided covert funding for Pakistan’s use of terrorist proxies and the development of nuclear weapons.
But the ISI’s Frankenstein’s monsters, and the sons of Frankenstein they spawned, groups like Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and ISIS-Khorasan, turned on their masters. Attacks like the massive bombing of the Islamabad Marriott hotel in September 2008 and the Pearl-Continental Hotel in Peshawar in June 2009 are examples of Pakistan’s project to promote terrorism against its neighbors badly backfiring on the Pakistani state.24 These groups also killed Pakistani civilians and, increasingly, attacked religious minorities such as Shia or Sufi Muslims, risking the kind of destructive sectarian conflict that had engulfed the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys. By the 2010s, attacks were no longer limited to Pakistan’s far frontier as terrorists began to operate in Swat and Buner Districts. They even extended their murderous campaign beyond the Pakistan Army and began to target their families.
In a particularly egregious attack in December 2014, seven terrorists armed with suicide vests and guns burst into the Peshawar Army Public School in the northwest of Pakistan. The toll was heart-rending: 141 dead, 132 of them children ranging in age from eight to eighteen. The attack demonstrated the interconnected nature of these groups. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the primary driver of antistate violence in Pakistan since 2007, took responsibility. The fact that the perpetrators included a Chechen, three Arabs, and two Afghans demonstrated the international dimension of the problem and the folly of believing that these groups could easily be contained geographically.25
In response to the attack, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, stated, “All Taliban are bad Taliban. Extremism of any kind—of thought, action, religious, or political extremism—is bad. We have to eliminate them wherever we find them.”26 He also vowed to regulate religious education. If there were to be an incident that convinced the Pakistan Army to stop using terrorist organizations as an arm of its foreign policy and to pursue all terrorist organizations on its soil, that should have been it. It was not. That is why Ambassador Hale and I believed that any strategy in South Asia should begin with the assumption that the Pakistan Army would not change its behavior.
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DESPITE OUR deep frustrations with each other, meetings between U.S. and Pakistani officers evinced a sense of mutual respect based on experience in the profession of arms. Hale and I met with Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of army, and Gen. Naveed Mukhtar, director general of ISI. I had spoken with Naveed at his request two weeks earlier; we shared a background in tanks and mechanized warfare. Having learned of his interest in the history of the American Civil War, I had sent him a copy of Williamson Murray’s book, A Savage War. Naveed, having learned of my daughter’s upcoming wedding, sent a beautiful hand-knotted carpet, which, because its expense far exceeded what would be appropriate to accept, went directly to a government warehouse. Naveed developed his interest in the American Civil War during his attendance at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. In his 2011 War College thesis, “Afghanistan—Alternative Futures and their Implications,” he wrote:
Establishing a viable context for Afghan stability and security involves key regional and global stakeholders. Towards that end, the United States needs to employ major diplomatic measures designed to ease regional tensions and prevent external players from derailing the strategy.27
He was right, but he might also have written that the United States should try to solve the problem that Pakistan was creating. Naveed and other Pakistan Army officers often sounded like they were diagnosing the situation in South Asia as dispassionate outside observers even as they drove much of the instability and violence that was the subject of their analysis.
I opened the meeting with condolences for the more than eight thousand soldiers who had lost their lives to terrorist groups since 9/11 and the more than twenty thousand Pakistani civilians whom terrorists had killed across those years.28 Having studied their army’s recent adaptation to the demands of counterinsurgency, I expressed admiration for their soldiers’ courage, especially given that their families were also at risk. I told them that Americans were deeply saddened by the attack on the Peshawar Army Public School. I intended these opening remarks, in part, to expose the confounding contradiction of the Pakistan Army’s asking its soldiers to sacrifice in battle against terrorist groups while a wing of the army nurtured terrorist organizations with connections to those same groups. I told the generals that Ambassador Hale and I wanted first to listen so we might learn from their perspective and apply what we learned to the new administration’s policy toward Pakistan and South Asia.
General Bajwa took full advantage of the opportunity to orient a member of a new U.S. administration to his worldview. Qamar Javed Bajwa, born in Karachi to a Punjabi military family, joined the Pakistan Army in 1978. He received training at the Pakistan Military Academy, National Defense University, Canadian Army Command and Staff College, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His comments seemed crafted to preempt what he expected to hear from me: exhortations to “do more” against the Taliban and the Haqqani network and hopeful expressions that we could, finally, work together to end the violence in Afghanistan. Like his predecessor, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Bajwa wanted me to accept the fundamental contradiction between denials that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations enjoyed safe havens in Pakistan and assurances that the Pakistani Army could do more against these safe havens with sustained U.S. support.
The conversation with Bajwa and Naveed followed a recurring pattern I had witnessed over the years since September 11, 2001. Pakistani military leaders, army commanders and heads of ISI, were brilliant at manipulating earnest American counterparts. As always, the conversation began with a litany of grievances from the Pakistan Army perspective. The first was the U.S. “abandonment” of Pakistan after the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Then there was the temporary suspension of all U.S. military and developmental assistance in 1979 and again in 1990, after the evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program could no longer be denied.29 From there, the conversation shifted to the portrayal of Pakistan as a victim: a victim of the massive influx of refugees as Afghans fled the Soviet occupation, the Afghan Civil War, and the brutality of the Taliban; a victim of sanctions imposed by the United States due to its nuclear program; a victim of what the Pakistani generals portrayed as a “U.S. war on terrorism” in which Pakistan had been a dutiful ally whose sacrifices exceeded those of the United States and all Coalition armies in Afghanistan combined; and finally, always, a victim of Indian aggression in pursuit of recidivist objectives in Kashmir and the encirclement of Pakistan through the establishment of an India-friendly Afghanistan.30
The Pakistan-as-victim gambit then shifted to a narrative of weakness and beleaguerment. Pakistan was strained economically and overcommitted militarily. If only the United States were more patient and provided more assistance, Pakistan would gradually extend security to the regions in which the Taliban and various terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaeda, were based. Ignoring the implicit admission of the existence of safe havens on its territory, offers to do more in the future were interspersed with flat denials of support for the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and key facilitators of their operations such as the Haqqani network. For those Americans who remained skeptical, Pakistani o
fficers would whisper the possibility that rogue or retired ISI officers might, out of habit and long-standing relationships, continue to advise some terrorist groups without the command’s knowledge, even though the ISI is vertically integrated into the army’s chain of command. The clincher was a play to the ego of the visiting U.S. official. That official, Pakistani leaders intimated, would be the one to convince them to do more to pursue Taliban, Haqqani network, and Al-Qaeda leaders. The United States would just need to be patient and share more information and provide more assistance.
The typical reaction from U.S. leaders was to believe that their Pakistani counterparts were sympathetic to U.S. positions but were simply powerless to effect change, especially on the time line Americans expected. Those Americans often flew home and parroted the Pakistan Army’s main talking point: Pakistan needed more time and more money. And so, the United States wrote more checks and provided more weapons and supplies to those who were sustaining and helping orchestrate a war against them and their allies. It was serial gullibility as new U.S. officials rotated into military, intelligence, and diplomatic positions, and Pakistani officials repeated their lines. Hale and I joked that the relationship had become almost farcical, but the joke was on us. A fundamental shift in policy was overdue, one that incentivized Pakistani leaders to change their behavior and, over time, tried to convince them that it was in their interest to end their support for terrorist organizations that had inflicted so much suffering not only in South and Central Asia and across the Middle East, but also around the world from Libya to France to the Philippines. And while the United States and other nations should continue to encourage a strong Pakistani civilian leadership, a realistic policy must acknowledge that the Pakistan Army makes the important decisions and holds the reins of power.
Battlegrounds Page 21