The AfPak PuzzleThe good news: Obama understands what's wrong in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The bad news: He can't fix it.
Posted Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 6:58 PM ET
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StumbleUponIn short, we can send Pakistanis money, arms, handbooks, and the like. But we can't make them do what they say they're going to do or even effectively monitor whether they're doing it. Bush sent $10 billion to then-President Pervez Musharraf, who pledged that he would use the aid to go after the terrorists. For the most part, he didn't.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani military has little desire to improve its counterinsurgency skills. Many officers are more loyal to the Taliban than to the central government. And though the army is beginning to crack down on Taliban fighters in the Swat and Buner districts, it is still the case that 80 percent or 90 percent of Pakistani troops are stationed on the border with India, which most officers still see as the country's greatest threat. This perception is no mere idiosyncrasy; it is integral to the Pakistani worldview, dating back to the founding of the nation and the partition from India in 1947. It has been reinforced by three wars between the two nations, in '47, '65, and '71, as well as a war or two that nearly broke out in the past decade, and has been hammered home further by the fact that both counties have nuclear weapons.
Maybe this time the Pakistani military is really getting serious. Certainly the population is less enamored of Islamist terrorists than it used to be. Those who say they support suicide bombing under certain circumstances has plummeted from 40 percent in 2004 to just 5 percent in 2008, according to a Pew survey released this past March. (Then again, 34 percent of Pakistanis still say they have confidence in Osama bin Laden, down from 50 percent.)
Pakistan's political and military leaders are doing a horrible job of exploiting this shift in public opinion. They're finally going after the Taliban—a move that is potentially more popular than it would have been a few years ago—but they're doing it by dropping bombs, firing rockets, and launching artillery shells, techniques guaranteed to kill at least as many civilians as insurgents. The recent fighting in Swat and Buner has forced a half-million people to flee their homes. The onslaught of refugees has created a massive humanitarian crisis, and it has made many people as bitter toward the government as toward the Taliban. They simply want peace and don't care much who brings it about.
To calm this crisis and reduce the chance of a total breakdown of authority in Pakistan, the Obama administration will have to get a lot bolder a lot more quickly. Neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan can be stabilized by the United States alone, and NATO is not terribly effective or popular, either. For months now, President Obama and others have said this is a regional crisis that must be solved by all interested parties in the region. Now it's time to get this effort going.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was recently in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. AfPak was on the agenda; it's unclear whether any accord was reached. It's also time to reach out to China and Russia and make some kind of deal with Iran as well. This is no fantasy. Iran is very leery of seeing radical Sunnis, such as the Taliban or al-Qaida, destabilize or take power in Afghanistan or Pakistan. After Sept. 11, 2001, midlevel U.S. and Iranian officials held talks about cooperating against the Taliban. These talks ended in January 2002, after Bush tagged Iran as a member of the "axis of evil."
Meanwhile, is anyone trying to persuade India to take steps to ease tensions on its border with Pakistan? This is a precondition to getting the Pakistani military to take its threat from within more seriously. The fact that it's difficult doesn't make it any less necessary. Everything that needs to be done—and done fairly soon—is difficult, and none of it can be done by the United States alone.
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