Magnificent Delusions (56 page)

During the first year of the Obama administration some US officials had already reached the conclusion that the United States could not achieve its goals in Afghanistan as long as Pakistan continued to support the Taliban with “weapons and logistical support.” There were calls for cutting off military aid and reimbursements under the Coalition Support Funds program as a substitute for trying “to buy off Islamabad with more economic aid.”
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Clinton and Holbrooke were largely responsible for preventing that from happening. Congress approved $828 million for aid to Pakistan in 2009. That same year an international conference in Tokyo pledged $5.5
billion to be provided by various international donors. But for Pakistanis, the money was never enough. Every now and then Pakistani officials showed up with charts to illustrate the presumed economic loss the country suffered because of terrorism and the war against it. They asked the United States to compensate Pakistan for lost investment, lost revenue, and lost economic opportunities. Americans considered the aid they were already giving to be a huge amount of money and did not accept that US taxpayers should bear even greater cost for Pakistan's sake. No one in Washington believed that Pakistan's problems were America's responsibility and that they were caused exclusively by the country's role in the anti-Soviet Jihad and the war after 9/11 against terrorism. US officials were often too polite to say so directly, but in their view, successive Pakistani leaders had made a series of wrong choices, and blaming the United States was just a way of refusing to take responsibility for those Pakistani decisions.

In May Zardari and Obama had their first meeting as presidents. Obama had hosted a trilateral meeting that also included Karzai. Likewise, he invited Zardari to the White House for a direct conversation. Obama said that “the average U.S. Congressman” wanted to help Pakistan in beating back terrorism, but US aid was being used “to bolster conventional arms against India.” “We do not begrudge your concerns about India,” he stated. “But we do not want to be part of arming you against India.”

Obama also said that the United States did not believe that India wanted to attack or threaten Pakistan any longer. He said he knew history and realized that at some point Pakistan may have been justified in its fears of India. “But I want you to hear it from me,” he went on, “that they are focused on economic development.” Zardari summed up his talking points about why Pakistan still viewed India as a threat, and then added, “We are trying to change our worldview. But it's not going to happen overnight.”

That summer Pakistani troops moved against the Taliban in the Swat Valley after they had come relatively close to the Pakistani capital. The pretext of a lack of national consensus vanished as cable news stations “suddenly” discovered videos of Taliban atrocities. TV commentators
and newspaper editorialists changed their stance; instead of describing the war against terrorists as an American war, as they had done so far, they finally spoke of the threat to Pakistan from terrorism.

“Finally, the mind-set has changed,” the
Washington Post
quoted a retired security official as saying. The paper described him as someone “who often reflects military thinking.” His next quote was: “There is a realization that the threat to Pakistan in modern times is not Indian divisions and tanks, it is a teenaged boy wearing a jacket full of explosives.”
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The prospect of Pakistani seriousness in counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations heartened US officials.

In response, the United States mobilized a sizeable relief effort for those displaced by the fighting. Once the fighting was over, the Pakistan army received favorable press in the United States. Soon, requests for military equipment followed, and a few months later the momentum dissipated when domestic politics and a long-drawn battle with Pakistan's Supreme Court distracted the civilian government. The army returned to its previous debate about whether terrorism had replaced India as the new existential threat to Pakistan.

In the fall Clinton arrived in Pakistan for a three-day visit. Her well-choreographed visit included many public events, including town hall meetings with students, civil society leaders, women, and Pashtun elders. She answered tough questions from Pakistani journalists and asked some difficult ones herself.
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Clinton's visit was the second effort from a senior US official to confront the myths and conspiracy theories that had fed anti-Americanism in the country; her husband, Bill, had made the first through his televised address to the Pakistani people during his five-hour visit in 2000. She expressed surprise that no one in Pakistan knew Osama bin Laden's whereabouts.

Clinton described the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid as a demonstration of American “goodwill towards the people of Pakistan,” noting that “it does not help when we do something like this, and people question our motives.”
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She asked the government to “do more to shut down Al Qaeda,” but she also spoke of the need to broaden the relationship.

Soon after Clinton's visit Jones, the national security adviser, brought a letter from Obama to Zardari, offering that Pakistan and the United States become “long-term strategic partners.” The letter laid out ele
ments of the “grand bargain” that Biden had spoken of a few days before Obama's presidential term began. The letter even hinted at addressing Pakistan's oft-stated desire for a settlement of the Kashmir dispute.

Obama wrote that the United States would tell countries of the region that “the old ways of doing business are no longer acceptable.” He acknowledged that “some countries”—a reference to India—had used “unresolved disputes to leave open bilateral wounds for years or decades. They must find ways to come together.” But in an allusion to Pakistan he said, “Some countries have turned to proxy groups to do their fighting instead of choosing a path of peace and security. The tolerance or support of such proxies cannot continue.”

“I am committed to working with your government,” said the US president, “to ensure the security of the Pakistani state and to address threats to your security in a constructive way.” He asked for cooperation in “defeating Al Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Lashkar e Taiba, the Haqqani network, the Afghan Taliban and the assorted other militant groups that threaten security.” Obama then wrote of his “vision for South Asia,” which involved “new patterns of cooperation between and among India, Afghanistan and Pakistan to counter those who seek to create permanent tension and conflict on the subcontinent.”
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My interpretation of Obama's letter was that it presented an opportunity for Pakistan to overcome past misgivings and build a real alliance with the United States. Since the 1950s Pakistan had wanted an American role in South Asia. Now it was being offered one. In the end Pakistan would have to negotiate the Kashmir issue directly with India. But at least now the American president was saying that he would nudge the Indians toward those negotiations. Pakistan could finally be a strategic US ally rather than an occasional transactional partner.

But the view from Islamabad was different. In his meetings in Islamabad Jones had remarked that “US strategic interests lay East of Afghanistan.” He meant to assure his hosts of Pakistan's centrality to US policy. The Obama administration was in the middle of its review of US policy in Afghanistan. Jones had hinted that Pakistan was the epicenter of that review and had also stated that the main issues relating to Al-Qaeda, extremism and terrorism, were in Pakistan. The Foreign Office asked me to convey Pakistan's concern that it was being treated “as the problem.”

In a meeting with me after his visit, Jones stressed that he had wanted to reassure Pakistanis that any perception that the United States was leaving the region was simply wrong. “Pakistan's success is fundamental to America's success in the region,” he told me. “The US is, therefore, counting on Pakistan in its efforts to eliminate the terrorist threat.” Jones said that if Pakistan was ready to make “a strategic commitment to common objectives,” the United States was ready to be “a partner for the twenty-first century.”

The Obama administration had asked for “fundamental readjustments” before the two countries could be “partners for a long time to come.” But Islamabad was not ready for them. When Zardari's reply arrived, it had clearly been drafted by a committee of Foreign Office and ISI bureaucrats, repeating old clichés about Afghanistan and the threat to Pakistan from India.

Kayani had given Jones his own more-than-fifty-page-long thesis on Pakistan's strategic threats and interests. I was allowed to read it in Islamabad, but no Pakistani civilian was provided a copy to keep. As I read it, it felt familiar; I wondered where I had read it before. Then I realized that its contents were remarkably similar to the paper President Ayub Khan had given President Eisenhower in 1959. Obviously, for Pakistan's permanent institutions of state, nothing had changed in half a century. Pakistan had missed the opening for defining its partnership with the world's sole superpower on more favorable terms than ever before.

According to Bob Woodward, Obama told his confidante Tom Donilon in November that he saw the “cancer” of terrorism as being in Pakistan. “The reason we are doing the target, train and transfer in Afghanistan is so the cancer doesn't spread there,” the US president reportedly said. “We also need to excise the cancer in Pakistan.”
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The
New York Times
reported Obama's view that “it did not matter how many troops were sent to Afghanistan if Pakistan remained a haven.”
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Other reports cited Biden as describing Pakistan as the “greater danger” over Taliban control of the Afghan countryside.
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In 2010 Obama deployed several thousand more troops into Afghanistan in what was described as a “troop surge,” committing the United States to spending an additional $30 billion annually on enhancing its
military presence there. The United States would thus make a serious effort to defeat the Taliban insurgency. Efforts for “a lasting partnership with Pakistan” would continue. Obama wanted to go down in history as a strong US president who did not hesitate to hunt terrorists in farther lands in pursuit of US national interests.

After the surge was announced Holbrooke persisted with his diplomatic efforts to find an Afghan endgame. The Strategic Dialog also continued, as did the flow of US economic assistance and Coalition Support funds. Terrorist attacks inside Pakistan or involving Pakistanis abroad also remained a constant. The most significant of these was the attempt to set off a truck bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1, 2010. Although the bomb did not go off, if it had, it could have killed a large number of people.

For Americans this was a reminder of their vulnerability to attacks resembling 9/11. The FBI identified Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-year-old Pakistani-American as the man responsible for the plot. Shahzad told the FBI that he had trained in bomb making in Pakistan's Waziristan region.
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For Americans already wary of Pakistan, this was further proof that Pakistan's failure to deal with terrorists was a direct threat to US security.

During a meeting at the White House Jones told me that the Americans considered the Times Square attempted bombing as “a successful plot.” It was foiled by luck, not intelligence or law enforcement activity. “Neither American nor Pakistani intelligence could intercept it,” he remarked. US intelligence had reported that other similar plots were underway “involving several overlapping and interconnected groups.” Pakistan had been helpful in investigating Shahzad and his connections, but the United States wanted Pakistan to help preempt attacks, not just investigate them after the fact.

Jones also visited Islamabad, where he conveyed a message from Obama to Zardari and Kayani. “The President wanted everyone in Pakistan to understand,” he declared, “that in case of a successful attack in the US, there are some things even he would not be able to stop.” Jones turned the Pakistani refrain about political compulsions on his hosts: “Just as there are political realities in Pakistan, there are political realities in the US,” he said.

The national security adviser wanted Pakistanis to “understand clearly the message” that if a plot succeeds and its origins were traced to Pakistan, “no one will be able to stop the response and consequences.” In a matter-of-fact tone he also added that what he had said was not a threat—it was “just a statement of political fact.”

Jones listed four specific actions the United States sought from Pakistan. First, the ISI needed to share “all intelligence with us and we will share intelligence with you.” Second, there should be immediate sharing of passenger data of flights originating from Pakistan. Third, counterterrorism cooperation should be enhanced. Fourth and finally, there should be an end to holding up visas for American intelligence and law enforcement personnel, “which is holding up our ability to protect against the terrorists.”

The ISI claimed that it was already sharing all possible intelligence. Pakistan's Ministry of Defense refused to share flights' passenger data, offering only to examine the data itself, which it was presumably doing anyway. The rationale for not allowing Americans to process the data directly was a familiar one: “The Americans might monitor the movements of Pakistan's nuclear scientists,” Defense Secretary Lieutenant General Athar Ali told me. When US officials offered to let Pakistanis withhold some of the data while sharing the rest, the answer was still “No.”