Talking Tough to Pakistan
How to End Islamabad's Defiance
Article Summary and Author Biography
The United States gives Pakistan billions of dollars in aid each year. Pakistan returns the favor by harboring terrorists, spreading anti-Americanism, and selling nuclear technology abroad. The bribes and the begging aren't working: only threats and the determination to act on them will do the job. Washington must tell Islamabad to start cooperating or lose its aid and face outright isolation.
STEPHEN D. KRASNER is Professor of International Relations at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and at the Hoover Institution. He was Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department in 2005–7.
Snapshot
Cuts or increases in U.S. civilian and military aid will not alter Islamabad's political calculus -- and Washington should stop expecting them to. Nevertheless, it should stay engaged with the country if only to protect its major regional strategic interests.
Response
The United States has tried cracking down on Pakistan before. It did not work then, and it will not work now, writes Alexander Evans. The difference, counters Stephen Krasner, is that this time the United States has real leverage.
Late last month, after a NATO engagement in Pakistan went wrong and left 25 Pakistani troops dead, the West scrambled to get its story straight. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO's secretary-general, quickly called the battle a “tragic unintended accident.” The White House waffled; President Barack Obama later expressed regret over the incident but did not apologize. Islamabad, meanwhile, castigated the United States for violating its sovereignty, closed the Torkham border crossing, and announced it would sit out the recent Bonn conference on Afghanistan.
Whether the attack was entirely unintended or a pointed provocation, the Pakistani reaction offered yet further proof that current U.S. policy toward Pakistan has failed.
On November 28, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney noted that the relationship with Pakistan “continues to be an important cooperative relationship” but added that it “is also very complicated.” In fact, the relationship is not cooperative, and U.S. policy is not complicated. It is incoherent. As I recently wrote in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs (below), Pakistan does not heed even overt U.S. threats and censure, because Washington has time and again backed down from them, believing that Pakistan's policies, though unhelpful, could get much worse.
Only by credibly threatening to end all assistance to Islamabad can Washington convince Pakistan’s leaders that genuine cooperation is in their best interest.
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On September 22, 2011, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his last official appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. In his speech, he bluntly criticized Pakistan, telling the committee that "extremist organizations serving as proxies for the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers." The Haqqani network, he said, "is, in many ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency [ISI]." In 2011 alone, Mullen continued, the network had been responsible for a June attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, a September truck-bomb attack in Wardak Province that wounded 77 U.S. soldiers, and a September attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul...
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