The Pakistan Dilemma

Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

Reading List

What to Read on Pakistani Politics

Aqil Shah

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Pakistani politics.

Essay

Getting the Military Out of Pakistani Politics

Aqil Shah

Pakistan is unlikely to collapse anytime soon, but the imbalance of power between its civilian and military branches needs to be addressed if it is to become an effective modern state. Washington must stop coddling Pakistan's military and instead work patiently to support the country's civilian authorities.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement yesterday about Osama bin Laden’s death in Abbottabad, Pakistan raises questions about the health of the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Pakistan seems to have helped the United States track down bin Laden’s lair, as Obama acknowledged. But it is unclear whether Pakistan was involved in planning the mission that brought U.S. Special Forces on helicopters from Afghanistan to deep within Pakistani territory to kill him. If it was not, the raid was yet one more example of the deep distrust between the United States and Pakistan and may reflect poorly on Pakistan’s ability to defend its air space against such intrusions -- something that would surely hurt its standing in the eyes of the Pakistani public.

In the United States, Obama’s announcement has been met with a flood of questions about the location of bin Laden’s hideout -- it was near a military academy and an army cantonment -- and what it means about the Pakistani military’s relationship with bin Laden. Proximity, of course, does not establish a direct association. But if evidence does surface that Pakistani authorizes were complicit in creating the hideout, then all bets are off. The U.S.-Pakistani friendship is in serious trouble.

Of course, the U.S.-Pakistani relationship had seemed to be spiraling downward for some time. On March 17, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, condemned an early March U.S. drone attack in the town of Datta Khel, in the North Waziristan tribal region, that is reported to have killed 41. In his public remarks, Kayani said that “such aggression against [the] people of Pakistan is unjustified and intolerable under any circumstances.” Privately, he warned U.S. interlocutors not to force him "to react" again, hinting at the possibility that Pakistan might start shooting down drones in its territory. At the same time, he announced that he would cut whole categories of U.S. personnel posted in Pakistan, although he did not say which ones.

Then, in mid-April, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, visited CIA Director Leon Panetta, reportedly to discuss the ISI’s demands for more control over U.S. spy programs in Pakistan. It remains unclear if he pushed for a written agreement on reining in U.S. activities or one on intelligence cooperation, since neither outcome was announced.

The rift comes at a bad time for both countries. The United States needs Pakistani help to stabilize Afghanistan before its planned exit scheduled to begin this July. Moreover, without Pakistani cooperation, it will be impossible to dismantle the Taliban’s safe havens in northwestern Pakistan, or continue to use the land routes over the Afghan-Pakistani border to supply U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan.

Pakistan also needs the United States -- mostly for financial support. The Coalition Support Fund, which the United States set up after 9/11 to reimburse allied countries for their assistance in the war on terror, still covers a large proportion of Pakistan’s military expenditures for counterinsurgency efforts -- some $9 billion since the fund was established. Since 2001, the United States has also paid Pakistan $13 billion in military aid and $6.6 billion in economic assistance, with more to come.

Still, the Pakistani military is galled by the general sense that it has been reduced to an army for hire, and many of the generals now argue that the United States is treating the country as a client state, not as an ally. As Kayani’s remarks indicated, the CIA drone strikes in Pakistani territory deeply anger both the Pakistani military and public. It is unclear, however, whether Pakistan will actually refuse to cooperate with the United States, or even could if it wanted to. Behind Kayani’s and Pasha’s tough talk, there is no real consensus between the civilian government and the military on how Pakistan should deal with the United States.

For years, Pakistan’s civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, has stoked popular resentment against the drone program by ritualistically denouncing it as an infringement on national sovereignty. (Pakistan's previous government, that of President Pervez Musharraf, also followed that strategy.) In November 2010, however, WikiLeaks revealed that the Zardari administration had been providing intelligence to the CIA for the program all the while. Now, the civilian government is in an awkward position: it wants the drone attacks to continue on the Pakistani Taliban, which it considers a threat to its rule, but it cannot be caught supporting them again. The Pakistani role in bin Laden's capture and death will only add to public sentiment against the government. 

The civilian government also wants to improve its overall relationship with the United States. Zardari and Gilani’s standing in Pakistan is precarious, and they see the Obama administration as a key pillar of support for their continued rule, even though the United States has often gone directly to the Pakistani military when it wanted something done quickly. Still, in a March 2011 quest to resume the U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, which the Zardari administration hoped to use as a venue for bringing together the Pakistani military and civilian government with the U.S. government to improve economic, political, and military ties, Zardari sent his foreign secretary to Washington. And now, Zardari is preparing for his own friendly visit to Washington later this spring.