U.S. Must Accommodate Pakistan's Interests in Afghanistan

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U.S. Must Accommodate Pakistan's Interests in Afghanistan
Michael A. Cohen | Bio | 14 Jan 2011


At the heart of the U.S. war in Afghanistan lies a striking and unresolved contradiction. While the U.S. has sent approximately 100,000 troops to this impoverished, landlocked country to combat a fearsome local insurgency, the actual focal point of U.S. policy in the region largely revolves around protecting and stabilizing a country just across Afghanistan's eastern border: Pakistan.

It's an ironic but not altogether surprising strategy. After all, Pakistan remains home to Osama bin Laden, his key lieutenants and other terrorist organizations intent on striking American targets. The country maintains a significant nuclear capability, and its ongoing conflict with India has the potential to spark a regional conflagration.

Yet, for a policy that is so apparently solicitous of Pakistani needs, it is quite disconnected from actual Pakistani interests, particularly with regard to Afghanistan. In fact, the campaign to coax the Pakistani military into turning against its Afghan Taliban allies as well as the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan that seeks to defeat the Taliban and strengthen the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai undermines rather than furthers Pakistan's interests. In essence, U.S. policy consists of political and diplomatic efforts to convince Pakistan to act against its perceived interests. Instead, the United States needs to more seriously address Pakistani concerns about Afghanistan's future.

To be sure, it can be difficult to decipher Pakistan's true intentions because the country has so many discrete power centers -- the civilian leadership, the military and of course the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, which has long played an active and forward role in Afghan strategic planning. But if there is one area of consensus among Pakistani policymakers, it is the inclination to view the country's national-security challenges through the prism of its longstanding enmity with India.

That perspective explains why Islamabad has long supported jihadist groups that provide Pakistan with shock troops to use in a proxy war against India. It explains the reluctance to divert the military's focus from India by sending the Pakistani army into North Waziristan. And, above all, it explains why Pakistan actively supports Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan and provides safe haven to them on Pakistani soil, a policy that allows Islamabad to further its geopolitical interests in Afghanistan while countering Indian influence there.

One can certainly argue that Pakistan's obsessive strategic focus on India borders on the irrational, and that jihadist terrorist groups in Pakistan's midst pose a more-pressing threat to the country's future. This certainly seems to be the dominant view among U.S. policymakers. President Barack Obama, for one, noted in his 2009 West Point speech that "there is no doubt that the United States and Pakistan share a common enemy."

But this perception appears to more accurately reflect a U.S. view of what Pakistan's national-security orientation should be, rather than Pakistan's actual view of its strategic reality. For Pakistan's leaders, the real perceived threat still comes from India. And the key for U.S. policymakers intent on improving ties with Pakistan is to accept this reality and respond accordingly.

Yet, more than nine years after Sept. 11, this still is not happening. According to a recent Washington Post report detailing Obama administration efforts to improve relations with Pakistan, "the strategy . . . amounts to an intensifying of existing efforts to overcome widespread suspicion and anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, and build trust and stability."

The problem is that building trust with Pakistan will not change Islamabad's essential strategic calculus, and it almost certainly will not convince Pakistan to turn against its Afghan Taliban proxies. Making matters worse, the U.S. military strategy of seeking to defeat the Taliban insurgency, strengthening the Karzai government and, for now, rejecting high-level political reconciliation that would provide the Taliban with a role in Afghanistan's political future will have the practical impact of encouraging Pakistan to be more -- not less -- supportive of the Afghan insurgents.

Trying to convince Pakistan that it should crack down on the various Afghan Taliban that find safe haven in their country -- at the same time that the U.S. is actively seeking to marginalize the Taliban's role in Afghanistan's political future -- makes virtually no sense from a Pakistani perspective, no matter how obvious it might seem in Washington.

It is small wonder that, despite years of American cajoling and demands that Pakistan break ties with the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistanis refuse to do so. Why should they? There is no incentive for them to take the steps that the U.S. wants them to, especially since they can be fairly confident that the United States will not cut off aid to Pakistan anytime soon. After all, considering how many NATO supply trucks wind their way across the Pakistani border to Afghanistan, the U.S. needs Pakistan just as much as Pakistan needs the U.S. And since the Pakistanis are no doubt aware that at some point in the near future the United States and NATO will leave Afghanistan, they have even less reason to be compliant with U.S. demands.

So what would be a better approach? It begins with recognizing that, to be effective, U.S. policy in Afghanistan must work in concert with and not in opposition to Pakistan's interests. Instead of seeking to marginalize or even eliminate the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United States and NATO should adopt a political strategy that ensures that the Taliban -- and in turn Pakistan -- have a political voice in Afghanistan's future. This is not necessarily an ideal solution, but it's certainly a more realistic one. Adopting such an approach, might also pay dividends for the U.S. in getting Islamabad to devote resources to taking on jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani network and, of course, remnants of al-Qaida. Continuing the current strategy will only ensure that U.S. and Pakistani policymakers will remain at loggerheads, and that progress in Afghanistan will remain uncertain.

Back in December 2009, Obama said that the U.S. needed "a strategy that works on both sides of the border." Increasingly, it seems that the U.S. has neither.

Michael Cohen is a senior fellow at the American Security Project and blogs on Afghanistan at Democracy Arsenal.

WPR Article | U.S. Must Accommodate Pakistan's Interests in Afghanistan