by Shuja Nawaz
Next, Kayani spoke about a perennial issue: when would Pakistan move to clear all the FATA of militants, especially in North Waziristan, which remained a hideout for the Haqqanis and a pathway for Punjabi Taliban sympathizers to enter the fray inside Afghanistan. ‘The question is not “if” but “when” and “how” to tackle it militarily.’ This was a sentence he used frequently in discussions of this topic, with Admiral Mullen, and other official and think tank visitors (including me).
The army had already moved into South Waziristan in force, but many militants escaped into Afghanistan or into North Waziristan and other agencies of FATA. Kayani spoke about the fact that the Pakistan Army was ‘stretched’ in FATA and also by relief efforts for the floods that had ravaged Pakistan. He cited logistical issues in moving into North Waziristan via South Waziristan, where displaced persons had yet to be resettled and roads were under construction. He also cited the conflicting demands of closing the border with Afghanistan and controlling the population centres inside the agencies of FATA. All this required help on the economic front as well as filling ‘deficiencies in critical capability i.e. transport/attack helicopters and Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) etc.’ The US never really delivered what Pakistan needed on this front. Its military aid was slow and stingy. And Pakistani leadership, especially in the military, continued to delay and dissemble in the search or Al-Qaeda and other terrorists inside Pakistani territory . . .
The India Factor
A surging economic and military India and fears of its hegemonic designs in the Greater South Asian region, that encompassed also Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, guided Pakistani political and military doctrine and strategy. In an earlier conversation with me, Kayani had taken umbrage at what he called a partial quotation of his views leaked to Bob Woodward by NSC officials in the Obama White House. ‘I am India-centric’ is how he had been portrayed in the book Obama’s Wars. 13 In one of his closed-door sessions with me in his GHQ office, Kayani had told me that he had gone beyond that stark statement to explain to his White House interlocutors that no Pakistani Army chief could ignore India and its huge army and air force deployments on Pakistan’s eastern border (three strike corps and three dozen airfields, according to Pakistani calculations). Ignoring the huge Indian military presence on the eastern border would be dereliction of duty. So, he had to be India-centric in preparing to defend Pakistan against a country that had been continuously hostile towards Pakistan since Independence in 1947. When India could leverage its numerical strength against Pakistan, it did, as was the case with East Pakistan to create the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971. Kayani had seen action in that war as a freshly commissioned second lieutenant, his course at the PMA having been released earlier than scheduled in 1971 to allow the young cadets to join their regiments and prepare for the impending battle with India of December that year. That experience left a deep imprint on his mind and generation.
But Kayani took a different tack in this note for Obama in order to create some cognitive dissonance and then some eventual resonance in his American readers’ minds. ‘India is an important neighbor,’ he wrote, using boldface type to highlight his argument, but slipped in the Pakistani expectation that the US would ‘facilitate a rapprochement, despite the limits of its leverage over India’. He extolled the need for ‘peaceful coexistence’ with India and wrote that Pakistan could ‘not afford to be in a perpetual state of confrontation and competition with India’. Yet he recognized the need to ‘strike a balance between defence and development’ while stating that ‘we cannot, however, remain oblivious to our basic defence needs’. He felt that India needed to play a ‘more positive and accommodating role in understanding and responding to Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns, without defining them’. And he spelled out Pakistan’s desire that India should exhibit ‘strategic altruism’ 14 and keep in mind Pakistan’s self-respect, sovereignty and the aspirations of its people. He recognized that Pakistan should not expect to compare the India–US relationship with the Pakistan–US relationship, but warned that the people of Pakistan would continue to see the US relations with India as yardstick. He threw in Pakistan’s expectation of a ‘mutually beneficial relationship with India’, but skipped over details of the various opportunities that had been lost on trade with India, transit trade for both Afghanistan and India and resolving the low-hanging fruits of past conflicts involving water in the north and disputed territory around Sir Creek in the south of the country.
The Bottom Line
All of Kayani’s self-described ‘logical’ argument led to a recitation of Pakistan’s concerns, nay complaints (the bold face is from the original document):
US is disregardful (sic) of Pakistan’s efforts and its support. It takes Pakistan for granted.
The US ‘is reluctant to help Pakistan resolve its disputes with India’. It discusses rather than delivers.
‘Pakistan is not important for US’ and hence it gets a ‘raw deal’ whenever it cooperates with the United States.
‘US is hesitant to crystallize the end state and decisively move towards that end.’ (He did not define the meaning of the ‘end state’ and whether it referred solely to Afghanistan or to Pakistan too. But he also mentioned that the notion of ‘victory’ was affecting US strategy.)
Pakistan is being made a scapegoat.
He then blamed the US for maintaining a ‘transitional relationship with Pakistan’ though it was unclear if this was seen as a synonym for ‘temporary’ or ‘transactional’.
Finally he accused the US of being ‘intrusive’ and ‘overbearing’ and ‘causing and maintaining a controlled chaos in Pakistan’ with the ‘real aim’ being to ‘de-nuclearize Pakistan’.
Kayani tried to end on a more positive note, having shared his innermost thoughts in the final concerns about the US relationship. He praised the ‘Strategic Relationship’ with the US as ‘a very important initiative of President Obama’. But emphasized the need for it to be a relationship based on a better understanding of each other’s ‘frames of references’ between the people of the two countries and to develop favourable public opinion on both sides. He decried constant US pressure on Pakistan ‘to do more’, especially since ‘Pakistan feels that it is being pushed in a different direction than the one US itself is likely to ultimately take.’
He ended with Pakistan’s bottom line: ‘Pakistan would like to remain a part of the solution and not the problem. At the end of the day, we would like to be standing in the right corner of the room.’
The Delayed US Response
It took the US almost three months before it finalized a response to Kayani’s short and pithy missive. There was no established centre of gravity for decision making in Washington DC. Especially on the Af–Pak theatre. The CIA, DOD, State and the NSC at the White House, each had its own preferences and methods of operating. There were long discussions about who should reply. ‘There was a conversation about Mullen staff preparing to respond because they were the Pakistani military’s counterparts in a sense and had a relationship, but eventually, the responsibility fell to NSC because it [the Kayani document] was literally given to the president,’ recalled Shamila Chaudhary, the Pakistani–American director responsible for Pakistan at the NSC. Chaudhary had started at the NSC in April 2010. She left the NSC in June 2011. The first set of replies from other agencies that came to the NSC were found wanting so Doug Lute put his own team, led by Chaudhary, to come up with a comprehensive answer to Kayani. Lute recalls working on the final draft at home in Arlington, VA, while trying to keep track of a Washington Redskins football game one weekend.
While Kayani and his team remained in charge of decision making on India and Afghanistan and the relationship with the US on the Pakistani side, and despite their clear differences with their own civilian government on many issues related to India and Afghanistan, they had a clear notion of what they wanted. And they had continuity. The US bureaucracy, on the other hand, suffered
from a routine transfer of staff across the board. Because of security concerns, Pakistan was a short-term posting for many staff. State also had a parallel set of changes, though some changes did allow old Pakistan or regional hands to occupy key slots at State and thus continue dealing with Pakistan. The same transfer syndrome afflicted the NSC and DOD. And often, all these changes in the different agencies would occur roughly at the same time, creating issues of continuity in building relationships and of faulty or missing institutional memory. Finding new staff who had the experience and knowledge needed to hit the ground running was a major problem. 15 Lute at NSC was the constant. So he took on the central role for the Americans to respond to Kayani.
Chaudhary’s approach to her task at crafting a reply was clear-cut. ‘My strategy was to write something in the same voice as the Pakistani letter was written. The Kayani voice was very straightforward and direct, and he didn’t mince words, nor did he try to be very showy. He wasn’t trying to write a fancy letter with a lot of flowery language. He was just trying to tell us what their perspective was . . . This message from Kayani was the first time someone in the Pakistani government had actually admitted to us that the Haqqani Network was part of Pakistan’s strategic national security interest, that the way they looked at these groups was part of their strategic approach to national security. We had never gotten that before.’ She thought the Kayani message was a milestone and was ‘something to work with actually because he wants to have a real conversation about it’. 16
The end result was a US document that was long and therefore may not have been totally effective in responding to Kayani or getting the attention of his titular civilian bosses with their famously short attention spans. Some 5000-plus words long, the US perspective that was issued as a White Paper in February 2011 ran on to eighteen pages of a single-spaced document and attempted to capture all the different points from other US agencies. However, it failed to highlight two underlying and explicit fears reflected prominently in Kayani’s paper, treating them inside the paper as ancillary functions. First, it tried to downplay the India factor and any US role, either public or behind the scenes, to broker better relations between India and Pakistan. There were good reasons from the American side to do this, since this would have involved a long inter-agency debate. Second, it did not address prominently the Pakistani plea to be treated with respect and trust and not to have the persistent fear that the US had ulterior motives for being in the region, including the defanging of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. While reiterating the US’s views on nuclear safety and safeguards and stating that the US had no desire to denuclearize Pakistan, the reply did not create a clearer path forward other than continuing the Strategic Dialogue that was destined to meet its demise in the wake of the tumult of 2011.
Kayani seemed pleased with the fact that he had received the answer from Secretary Clinton during her February 2011 visit to Pakistan, even as the US and Pakistan were dealing with the effects of the Raymond Davis affair. He recalled that the US quoted his own ideas back at him and tried to respond to some of them. A real dialogue seemed to be brewing.
In restating Pakistan’s key perspectives, the US reply focused largely on Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan and the prosecution of the war in that country and how that affected relations with the US. And it appeared to agree with the points made by Kayani in that regard, while continuing the dialogue on all these issues, as well as other issues of mutual concern. Of course, most of the drafters were not part of the Inner Circle at the White House and the CIA which was already zeroing in on the lair of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad during that period. It suggested sustaining during 2011 the momentum built in the Strategic Dialogue in 2010, exhibiting, in hindsight, the ignorance of the drafters about the events that were en train in the US and that would derail the relationship irrevocably.
The US recognized Pakistan’s fight, not only for itself but also for the world. But it also acknowledged that Pakistan’s fears about India’s hostile intentions prevented it from moving more forces to the Afghan border or to deal with internal militancy. Yet, the US appeared ready to expand support against domestic extremist networks and those that threatened Afghanistan and the US. On the nuclear issue, the US statement assured Pakistan that it did not aim to control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons directly or via the proposed Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty, but it continued to express US concerns about Pakistani nuclear materials getting into the hands of terrorists who might use them against the US and its allies.
It then turned to what Kayani had termed in his paper for Obama as the ‘transitional’ US relationship with Pakistan. It read ‘transitional’ as meaning transactional and said that Pakistan appeared to the US as only interested in doing the minimum necessary on CT cooperation to continue to receive US aid. It then cited reports of Pakistan’s clandestine support to militants who targeted Afghanistan or the US.
Citing the need to change the relationship between the US and Pakistan, the US document raised the issue of America’s broad interests in the region, including with India and Afghanistan. The US wished to create a similar long-term relationship with Pakistan based on a shared vision via the ongoing Strategic Dialogue scheduled for a meeting in April 2011. Clearly, the authors were not aware of the Abbottabad Raid plan that was then reaching its final stage.
Turning to Afghanistan, the document agreed with Kayani that Afghan forces would not be self-sufficient by the time of the proposed drawdown of US forces in 2014, and that is why the US and NATO had committed to a long-term partnership. This was in accord with what the National Training Mission Afghanistan (NTMA), headed at one time by Kayani’s Fort Leavenworth coursemate, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, believed to be the case. Caldwell had taken over the NTMA in 2009 and also spent time at Kayani’s invitation visiting Pakistani training establishments. Kayani made sure he spent time looking at the COIN training being imparted to Pakistani troops prior to their injection into the fight in the western borderlands. In a meeting of an NTMA team with us at the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council, when I asked at the end of our discussions about the size of the Afghan security forces that could go into battle autonomously, the reply I got was ‘5,000’. They were aiming to create a total force of 350,000, but were constantly stymied by high attrition rates and an imbalance in the ethnic mix, especially in the ANA officer corps.
The American document was in line with Kayani on one major issue. There was no purely military solution for Afghanistan. (Something that successive Pakistani prime ministers, especially Imran Khan, also stipulated over the years.) It was critical to get the reconcilable Afghan insurgents into a durable political process to ensure the stability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It also recognized the supremacy of the people of Afghanistan in deciding the final outcome, and noted that Pakistan had strategic interests in Afghanistan. Therefore, it suggested that the end result needed to take into account Pakistan’s legitimate interests. Interestingly, a similar sentiment was expressed by Pakistan’s bête noire Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan intelligence chief, at a CENTCOM conference on the region that I attended in Tampa, Florida. But his comment was lost in his obligatory broader diatribe against Pakistani intelligence meddling in Afghanistan.
The Americans warned of a real threat to Pakistan if the Taliban won the war in Afghanistan, and noted that no major change had been visible in the ability of groups like the Haqqanis to operate from Pakistani territory. Saving the most blunt rebuttal for the last, the US disputed Kayani’s statement that Pakistan’s ISI ‘broke all contacts with “mujahideen” after September 11, 2001’. In the US view, senior Afghan leaders continued to find refuge not only in the borderlands but also in major cities, including Quetta and Karachi. The Americans also warned of the shared interests and goals of the various local and foreign terrorist networks operating inside Pakistan. They recognized the danger of blowback from actions in North Waziristan, but offered to help the broader economic and political development and
improved governance of FATA.
On India, the US understood Pakistan’s concerns and Kayani’s hope that India and Pakistan needed to understand and respond to each other’s legitimate security concerns. But, it challenged the notion that the Pakistani people measured the US relationship in light of its relationship with Pakistan’s arch-rival, India. The Americans tried to allay Pakistani concerns by not portraying the relationship as zero-sum. But America demurred on its ability to broker confidence-building between the two arch-rivals unless they themselves accepted the US role. And it suggested India and Pakistan needed to define a road map to reduce tensions before the US would consider a role in the process. It pointed out the need to act against the accused in the Mumbai attacks and to recognize that both India and Pakistan had legitimate strategic interests in Afghanistan. Concluding by citing Kayani’s own final statement that had expressed a desire on Pakistan’s part to stand in the right corner, the US response to Kayani said that they ought to stand together in the same corner of the room that Kayani had described.
That togetherness did not materialize, as the earth-shaking events of 2011 inside Pakistan took the erstwhile and aspiring ‘allies’ into a deep well of hurt and disappointment for both. US aid to Pakistan declined steadily. The Strategic Dialogue collapsed. Both sides continued to talk past each other or to resort to half-truths or outright lies, for tactical advantage. Ambassador Olson captured the nature of this dialogue in his exit interview with DG-ISI Rizwan Akhtar in the latter’s camp office in the Chaklala section of Rawalpindi. During an unusually frank conversation, Akhtar told a long story, according to Olson. ‘It was about how in South Asian culture, his essential message . . . done through parable and anecdote, [was] that when a South Asian lies to you, he defends that lie to the death. He will never admit that he was lying. He will just keep piling lie on top of lie.’ 17 This frank admission captured the difficulty of a dialogue where both sides were talking but had difficulty hearing each other.