Colleagues: U.S.-Pakistan relations took a turn for the worse this week, as U.S. officials led by outgoing JCS Chairman Mike Mullen blasted the Paks for supporting terrorist networks, providing safe havens for the Haqqani and other insurgent groups who target U.S. forces, and for the close relationship between Islamabad’s intelligence service—the ISI—and terrorist groups.
None of the accusations are new. What is new is the direct assault the administration has decided to take, with Clinton, Panetta, and Petraeus all delivering the same strong message to their counterparts. Of course, we need the Paks—to hopefully take some action against the terrorist groups based in their country, to serve as a launch area for our drones, to protect and enable our key supply line into Afghanistan, to secure its 150+ nucs, and to work with us on a regional peace settlement. And, the Paks need us, not just for our military aid and generous foreign assistance, but for us to act as a mediator in the Indo-Pak smoldering relationship.
Two good pieces on this today. The first, a NYT op-ed supporting the Administration’s stance and the second, an excellent analysis by Dan Markey writing in Foreign Policy.com on the crisis.
Enjoy, Ty
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NYT, September 23, 2011
The Latest Ugly Truth About Pakistan
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a truth teller. He led the way among senior uniformed officers in urging repeal of the unconscionable “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military and pressed to shift more troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Now, as he prepares to retire next week after a 43-year career, he is telling another hard truth. On Thursday, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Pakistan’s spy agency — Inter-Services Intelligence — played a direct role in supporting insurgents who attacked the American Embassy in Kabul last week, killing 16 people. He also said that with ISI support, the Haqqani network of terrorists planned and conducted an earlier truck bombing on a NATO outpost that killed 5 people and wounded 77 coalition troops, and other recent attacks.
This was a calculated revelation after Admiral Mullen and other top officials made countless pleas and remonstrances to Pakistan trying to get it to sever all support and ties with the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other extremists who are killing American troops and spreading mayhem on both sides of the border.
Pakistan’s military was unapologetic. According to the Pakistani Army’s Web site, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of staff, dismissed the charge as “very unfortunate and not based on facts.” Pakistan’s foreign minister warned that Washington “could lose an ally” if it keeps humiliating Pakistan with unsubstantiated allegations.
The Pentagon hopes public exposure will shame the Pakistanis — who receive billions of dollars in aid — into changing their behavior. That didn’t happen after Osama bin Laden was discovered hiding in plain sight next door to Pakistan’s top military academy. But Washington needs to keep pushing and keep reminding the Pakistanis that the extremists pose a mortal threat to their own country.
We agree with Admiral Mullen and others who say the United States should keep trying to work with Pakistan. It has little choice. The Americans need access and on the ground intelligence to be able to go after Al Qaeda and Taliban forces on both sides of the border. They also need Pakistani routes to deliver military supplies to Afghanistan, although there are less attractive alternatives that may have to be looked at more seriously. And walking away could make the nuclear-armed government even more unstable — a chilling prospect.
But Washington needs to ratchet up the pressure as well. The Obama administration has already suspended or canceled $800 million in military aid this year, and more could be at risk. Without provoking war with Pakistan, the Americans are also going to have go after the Haqqanis whenever and wherever they can.
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US-PAKISTAN RELATIONS: THE GLOVES COME OFF
Dan Markey, Foreign Policy.com
On Sept. 22, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified before Congress that the Haqqani network, the group that launched the Sept. 13 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, is a “veritable arm” of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. Public testimony has been matched by tough talk in private, including in meetings between CIA chief David Petraeus and ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha and between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her counterpart, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.
Washington is launching a full-court press to show that it will no longer sit idly by while terrorist groups, abetted by the ISI, kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. Never before have we seen this sort of high-level, across-the-board pressure from the U.S. government. And never before have U.S. demands on Islamabad to get tough on the Haqqani network been coupled with what — at least implicitly— sound like threats of significantly expanded U.S. unilateral action inside Pakistan.
At surface level, these statements require no explanation at all. If Washington has ample evidence of ISI complicity, then how can it possibly look the other way, much less continue to provide assistance to the Pakistani government and military?
But the reality is that evidence of ISI support for Haqqani operations in Afghanistan is hardly new. Back in July 2008, Washington made similar claims of Pakistani complicity when the Indian Embassy in Kabul was bombed. Since then, however, U.S. military and civilian aid to Pakistan has increased, in part reflecting American hopes that carrots, rather than sticks, will be more likely to shift Pakistan’s behavior.
In the past, Washington always tempered its criticism of Pakistan for fear that pushing too hard might break the relationship in ways that would cause more harm than good. U.S. officials have always known that the major supply lines for American forces in Afghanistan run through Pakistan’s ports, highways, and airspace. U.S. officials have always valued aspects of counterterrorism cooperation that take place in the shadows, away from the glare of the press and the scrutiny of the public. And they have always hoped that by engaging Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders, they would gradually work toward a more effective partnership that could satisfy both American and Pakistani security requirements.
What has changed? There are probably two reasons behind Washington’s newly aggressive posture.
First, U.S. military leverage in the region is a diminishing asset. Washington can make threats now that will be less credible in a year or two. NATO force levels in Afghanistan are at their zenith, so if there is ever going to be a time for credible threats to expand the conflict into the Pakistani tribal areas where the Haqqani network is headquartered, it is now.
Second, Washington believes it has relatively little to lose in its bilateral relationship with Pakistan. To be sure, much is still at stake. Supply routes to Afghanistan and bilateral ties with a nuclear-armed state are nothing to sneeze at. But the calculation has to do with relative losses, not absolute ones. As U.S. officials peer into the future, they see little reason to expect that relations with Islamabad are likely to improve. Indeed, there’s precious little evidence to suggest that the trajectory of the U.S.-Pakistan relations will go anywhere but downhill. If there is already a realistic chance that this relationship will rupture and that the benefits of bilateral cooperation will eventually be lost, why not press Pakistan now while Washington still enjoys some positive leverage and before relations hit rock bottom?
Of course, for Washington’s coercion to work, it has to be credible. Tough talk alone is not about to sway the generals in Islamabad. But today’s threats are already more serious than those of the past because they have been made in public — and because Congress has already signaled that it will make assistance to Pakistan conditional upon action against the Haqqani network. These steps will be hard to undo.
But Pakistan also has cards to play in its escalating bout with the United States. First, Islamabad can cry foul. It is already doing so. Pakistani Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in a statement called Mullen’s remarks “very unfortunate and not based on facts.” And Foreign Minister Khar has cautioned, “You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan; you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people.” But these protests have less weight than they once did — Barack Obama’s administration already knows the risks it is running.
Next, Pakistan is likely to remind Washington that it controls the ground supply routes into Afghanistan, perhaps by halting or delaying entry or by allowing shipments to be destroyed. Both of these steps have been taken in the past. And it could get far, far worse than that. Pakistan could close its airspace to American over flights, end remaining military and intelligence cooperation, deny visas to U.S. officials, enable militant attacks on U.S. Embassy employees and facilities, and shoot down the U.S. drones that still fly over Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Would Washington be willing and able to respond to each of these steps? Perhaps; but it won’t be easy. The United States could take the costly step of shifting ground supply routes to Afghanistan to run through Russia and Central Asia, along the so-called Northern Distribution Network; negotiate new agreements for airborne shipments and personnel; substitute drones with less-discriminating, higher-flying bombers that can evade Pakistani air defenses; and launch commando raids into Pakistan supported by a surged conventional presence on Afghanistan’s eastern border.
These are ugly options. They could get even uglier. But this is now the reality, with Washington having taken such an aggressive, public stance against its erstwhile ally. Quiet, indirect, but still forceful methods were more likely to engineer a shift in Pakistan’s policies at a lower risk. Many of those options, however, have been exhausted.
Faced with such terribly high stakes, the question now is which side will blink first, and when.