The BBC is reporting “growing anger in Pakistan over increasingly aggressive US attacks along the border”. The New York Times has quoted Prime Minister Gilani warning, “We will not tolerate any act against our sovereignty and integrity in the name of the war against terrorism.”
The Wall Street Journal reports anger has “flared among Pakistan’s senior (army) ranks after a cross-border raid by US Special Operations Forces”. Meanwhile, this newspaper of record has carried Gen Kayani’s statement rejecting rumours of secret deals: “There is no question of any agreement or understanding with the coalition forces whereby they are allowed to conduct operations on our side of the border.”
All of this happened in September/October. Just not in 2010.
Back in 2008, with the clock winding down on the Bush presidency and attention shifting to the forgotten war in Afghanistan, pressure had begun to mount. The American goal: push the envelope with Pakistan to try and enlarge the operational and tactical space for the Americans to pursue their strategic goals in Af-Pak.
The Americans didn’t get very far. We know this by the simple fact that two years on they are resorting to the same tactics and getting the same, perhaps even more, fierce response from the Pakistani side.
Fact is, in the larger, strategic, scheme of things American pressure of this sort is unlikely to lead to any significant adjustments by Pakistan. Here’s why.
Post 9/11, the strategic relationship between the US and Pakistan changed. The Americans demanded many things of us; we had to acquiesce to some of their demands because the trigger was a cataclysmic event, the events of 9/11. That’s just how relationships between states work in such situations.
What’s crucial is that relatively quickly Pakistan settled on a band within which it was willing to extend cooperation to the US, a band somewhere along the continuum between full cooperation and total non-cooperation.
Pakistan helped the Americans on the periphery of the Afghan war theatre (rounding up Al Qaeda types in Fata and Pakistani cities, and opening supply routes to Afghanistan), while undermining the Americans in the theatre itself (supporting the Afghan Taliban, or at least turning a blind eye to their activities here — a sub-plot calibrated in response to the ebb and flow of American pressure).
Pakistan did this for two reasons. One, the army’s strategic view of the region mandated it. In simplistic terms: the army feared warlordism in a splintered Afghanistan would enhance the space for Indian ‘interference’, creating two ‘hot’ borders which would have to be managed simultaneously — something the army hasn’t been designed to handle.
Two, and this is crucial, the army could get away it.
Writing in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal last July, Tom Friedman, a New York Times columnist and a ‘big-picture’ guy, managed to get to the heart of the problem for the US. Americans, Friedman wrote, “are paying Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise, they would be just one-faced and 100 per cent against us.”
Why do Americans put up with this duplicity? Because they have to. The US has little leverage to break the Pakistan Army’s obsession with India. 9/11 was a cataclysmic event but it was not enough to change the army’s raison d’être — fighting India — and so, by extension, was not enough to make the army abandon its Afghan policy.
The US does, though, fear instability in Pakistan because we are bigger and, potentially, badder than anything Afghanistan has to offer.
As Friedman put it: “After expelling Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, we [the Americans] stayed on to stabilise the place, largely out of fears that instability in Afghanistan could spill into Pakistan and lead to Islamist radicals taking over Islamabad and its nukes.”
Or put another way: “So we pay Pakistan to help us in Afghanistan, even though we know some of that money is killing our own soldiers, because we fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan’s Islamists controlling its bomb.”
Add to this the reality that the American/Nato/Isaf war machine in Afghanistan cannot be sustained without Pakistani supply routes and you’re left with a messy relationship: the Americans take whatever help Pakistan extends, while trying and working around the problems Pakistan creates or exacerbates. That basic configuration, ‘The Great (Double) Game’ in Friedman’s reckoning, has held for the last decade.
So while the latest American cage-rattling has whipped up a fair amount of hysteria, even in the US, the fact is little has happened to change Pakistan’s strategic calculus, or for the US to gain the necessary leverage to force change in Pakistan’s strategic calculus — and both sides know this.
The US knows it can push only so hard at present. If Pakistan feels it is being nudged beyond the band of cooperation it has deemed acceptable, Pakistan will push back. Supply routes will be closed, attacks on convoys will mysteriously step up and cooperation in other areas will slow.
So much like in September 2008, the cross-border raids — presently beyond what is acceptable to Pakistan — will quickly be curtailed. Already the apologies for the Kurram attack have been profuse and many.
Does that mean the level cooperation extended to the Americans is fixed come what may? No. 9/11 impelled the last great leap forward (or backward, from the perspective of some here) in Pakistan’s cooperation with the West. Most likely, then, only another cataclysmic event — the next 9/11 — will impel the next big lurch forward, i.e. the next step in the strategic decoupling from the non-state actors.
Kayani & co can resist helicopter attacks and the like at present, but their objections would be brushed aside in the event of another catastrophic attack in the US or against American interests abroad. Pakistan has been warned publicly enough, from Hillary Clinton downwards and even before under Bush, that a major terrorist attack would be a game-changer.
Indeed, it may be the only realistic game-changer. Short of weaning the Pakistan Army off its India obsession, a major terrorist attack is the only likely scenario in which Pakistan could be induced to make the next major shift in policy.
In all of this, the question for any Pakistani ought to be, how does the army’s strategy make Pakistan and Pakistanis more secure?
The answer: it doesn’t. If you don’t subscribe to the India-centric view of national security, the costs of whatever we have done far outweigh the ‘benefits’ of keeping India at bay.
But like it or not, that’s the policy and it’s not likely to change any time soon. Beware the black swan, though, the next game-changer.
