The Pakistan-US mis-alliance
Various threats from our Congress to cut off aid to Pakistan are likely to come to nothing in the short-term. Medium term will depend on what comes of U.S. Afghanistan policy. The discussion, however, has produced some interesting facts and factoids about other of Pakistan’s alliances. Here are samples of the discussion.
Tom (the world’s not so flat as I once thought) Friedman has this in his May 11 column
Lawrence Wright looks at the history of U.S. aid to Pakistan in this weeks New Yorker.
Pat Lang has a diverse set of comments on the issue.
Elizabeth Rubin in the NYRB.
One possible conclusion from all of this is that the U.S. is actually funding everybody: the Pakistani military and security, the Taliban, and the insurgents in Pakistan as well as all the factions in Afghanistan.
I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, out of the country, and away from computers, papers, and such, so I may have missed something. But didn’t I see a story, a couple of days or so after the raid, in which the Pakistani chief of staff said that in view of the violation of Pakistani sovereignty, the military was going to have to rethink its ties to the US, perhaps drastically cutting back on the number of US soldiers there? What if we took him up on it, pointing out, of course, the concomitant cutback of US aid to his forces?
And what will happen if, on all those seized computers, disks, etc. etc., the names of a few high-placed Pakistani officials swim to the surface? Just a little misunderstanding, no doubt.
“One possible conclusion from all of this is that the U.S. is actually funding everybody: the Pakistani military and security, the Taliban, and the insurgents in Pakistan as well as all the factions in Afghanistan.”
Maybe Obama is using stimulus money! ;-)
“One possible conclusion from all of this is that the U.S. is actually funding everybody: the Pakistani military and security, the Taliban, and the insurgents in Pakistan as well as all the factions in Afghanistan.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if this proved true. The regional warlord model in Afghanistan hasn’t changed much since the U.S. military’s presence there, and many of the warlords are as despotic as the Taliban leaders, likely siphoning millions (billions?) in U.S. aid money. I also think that western powers like the U.S. and Britain are at a distinct disadvantage on the Asian subcontinent–long supply lines when it comes to military excursions, and relative ignorance about the nuances of societies and cultures that are millenia old, and, in the case of Afghanistan at least, lack any ingrained democratic structures. It’s sad to say, but does anyone really think that Afghanistan will move towards popular governance once the U.S. leaves? The Taliban are merely in hibernation, the Karzai government can barely govern Kabul, the Afghani army is a paper tiger, and the warlords have used the U.S. presence (and largesse) to consolidate their power even further.
William C – your very good points about Afghanistan would seem to argue for the scaled-down (and less expensive, in both blood and treasure) approach that VP Biden was advocating when the President was going through his formal decision-making process last year about what to do about Afghanistan.
Should not be saber rattling until the facts are known. I read that the Drones attacks which have been dramatically stepped up have killed a lot of civilians and made mistakes. Plus the drone attacks are in fact being conducted in Pakistan near the Afghan border with the permission of Pakistan.
Their people are getting upset and pressing the government.
It seems to me that the vast majority of the population are pretty much neutral to negative as far as the US. I saw one news report where a good looking, 30 something young woman, dressed in modern clothes and healthy responded to a reporter concerning the death of bin laden and how he was a menace, and she said that is your story, we see it differently and then she just grinned with a nice smile. I thought – wow. If that is representative the US has a lot of work to do as far as changing hearts and minds.
I think Obama has a really good opportunity to reshape the mid-east and contribute, on behalf of the US, positively.
Be patient, go slow, stay engaged.
Pakistani politics is very factionalized and like many modern democracies (including ours), many of the people who are not in control think that their basic human rights are being violated. The regions are only loosely tied to the center and the army and intelligence services are more independent than ours are. The best the US can do is support its own “interests”, which can often shift. We have seen a shift, for example, in our support of the Islamist elements that used to support the Afghan Islamists against the Soviets. Later, we changed our minds, but I am sure that the CIA kept up many of its original contacts against the people we now publicly say are against us.
What we can’t do is say that there are “good” countries and “bad” countries. We can say that there are countries that are more in line or less in line with our interests at the time. Pakistan is a difficult balancing act for us, but on the whole, it is the US that has changed its interests over time, not Pakistan.