Pakistan truly seems in danger of creating such a backlash in the United States that even though it remains an important component for Washington in the war in Afghanistan and the war on terror it is on the verge of exploding as a political campaign issue. The latest self-inflicted blow to its worsening image here: an official says Pakistan could simply decide to pull its troops back from the Afghanistan border due to U.S. aid cuts.
Pakistan could pull back troops fighting Islamist militants near the Afghan border if the United States cuts off aid, the defense minister said on Tuesday in an interview with Pakistani media.
The United States Monday said it would hold back $800 million — a third of nearly $2 billion in security aid to Pakistan — in a show of displeasure over Pakistan’s removal of U.S. military trainers, limits on visas for U.S. personnel and other bilateral irritants.
“If at all things become difficult, we will just get all our forces back,” Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said in an interview with the Express 24/7 television to be aired later on Tuesday.
The television aired excerpts of the interview Tuesday.
“If Americans refuse to give us money, then okay,” he said. “I think the next step is that the government or the armed forces will be moving from the border areas. We cannot afford to keep military out in the mountains for such a long period.”
In Pakistan, the defense minister is relatively powerless. Real defense and military policy is made by the powerful Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and the head of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
Monday, the military said it could do without U.S. assistance by depending on its own resources or turning to “all-weather friend” China.
Mukhtar later told Reuters Pakistan wanted the money spent on the maintenance of the army in the tribal areas. “This is what we are demanding,” he said. “It is our own money.”
And Pakistan is indeed now turning to China for military assistance due to its complex relationship with the United States:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q948UfTuTg&feature=player_embedded
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf calls the suspension of aid “disastrous”:
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf says he regrets the U.S. decision to stop $800 million in military aid to Pakistan.
Musharraf called the move “disastrous” on Monday, telling an audience at Rice University in Houston, Texas that the aid cut-off is not in the best interest of the United States because it will weaken Pakistan’s ability to fight terrorism.
The problem with that argument is that Pakistan’s actions on several fronts now call into question whether it is truly fighting terrorism or its intelligence and (rogue or not) military officials are picking and choosing and enabling some terrorists — if not in effect collaborating with them by protecting them.
Musharraf’s argument may fly with some of the more serious members of Congress, but Pakistan is now creating for itself the image of a country that barely fits the image of an authentic U.S. ally. The word “barely” must be used because it does cooperate with the United States in many areas. The Washington Post notes this in an editorial addressing the issue of whether this “squeeze” on Pakistan will work:
Yet Pakistani cooperation with the United States has not ceased: The CIA was given access to bin Laden’s compound, and dozens of new visas recently were issued to its personnel. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the outgoing U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told the Times in an interview published Monday that after a pause, cooperation in dealing with militant groups along the Afghan-Pakistani border has resumed.
The administration seems to be calculating that further aid to Pakistan will be wasted — and impossible to justify to Congress — unless it can be seen to get results. Yet its practice of making its demands in public raises questions. Anti-
American sentiment is already running high in Pakistan, and leaders who favor cooperation with the United States are under siege. Announcing that funds will be held back “unless and until we see certain steps taken,” as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it in congressional testimony last month, may only intensify the resistance.Pakistani leaders have long suspected that the United States aims only at a transactional relationship with their nuclear-armed state, rather than a true partnership. The administration’s new tack will probably strengthen Islamabad’s cynics while further undercutting what’s left of the pro-American faction. The deteriorating relationship, meanwhile, offers further cause for doubt about President Obama’s plan for an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan. If Pakistan’s government and army can’t be counted on to cooperate against the extremist forces based in the country, the United States will need a presence in Afghanistan, and a stable Afghan government, more than ever.
As I’ve noted here repeatedly, Indian officials have been watching the deterioration of U.S. Pakistan relations and Pakistan’s self-destruction of its image in the United States with fascination and a degree of controlled glee. Even when I worked as an intern on The Hindustan Times in New Delhi from January 1972 through May 1972 and when I returned to India to write for papers and be the highly prolific stringer correspondent for The Chicago Daily News from September 1973 through May 1975 there was a perception that no matter how close India felt to the United States the U.S. would “tilt” to Pakistan for strategical reasons. In those days, India made overtures to the Soviet Union when it felt jilted by the U.S. Now Pakistan is making overtures to China.
So it’s not surprising that Indian officials have welcome the suspension in aid:
The news about US suspending military aid worth $800 million to Pakistan was greeted with understandable excitement in India with foreign minister S M Krishna saying that New Delhi welcomed this development. Krishna suggested that arming Pakistan further could only disturb the “equilibrium” in the region.
“With reference to the special circumstances between India and Pakistan and how India has consistently taken the view that it is not desirable that this region had to be heavily armed by the US which will upset the equilibrium in the region itself. To that extent India welcomes this step,” Krishna said.Krishna was quick to add though that the US should also take note of the fact that India was doing all it could to normalize relations with Pakistan. “Simultaneously, the US must take note of the fact that we are working in a very committed manner to normalise our relations with Pakistan to reduce trust deficit, and efforts are on,” he added.
The suspended aid, which is about one-third of the $2.7 billion in annual US military assistance to Pakistan, includes about $300 million meant to reimburse Pakistan for some of the costs incurred for deploying more than 100,000 soldiers along the Afghan border to combat terrorism. It also comprises millions of dollars in training assistance and military hardware.
The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons characterizes current U.S.-Pakistan relations as the “worst co-dependency.”
Barack Obama is beginning a long process of beginning to pull troops out of Afghanistan — but as long as the US maintains a large military footprint there, we have less leverage than otherwise with Pakistan, which controls many vital choke-points that the US depends on in waging war in Afghanistan. A key to diminishing Pakistan’s leverage over the US and changing the equation in the relationship is to ‘shrink’ the US presence in Afghanistan and minimize dependence on Pakistan.
Some inside Pakistan did applaud the killing of Osama bin Laden; some even helped behind the scenes provide intelligence that eventually led to the storming of his compound. But the people that mattered, who are in the news, who are running the national security, diplomatic and intelligence ministries and agencies did not come out and say “We would have killed bin Laden had we found him.”
They are not saying that — and are instead condemning the US for its covert Seal Team Six operation — because they are fearful of their own angry, armed religious radicals. To secure legitimacy in Pakistan right now, one must be allied with the Taliban in Afghanistan and overtly anti-American, at least in public.
Unfortunately, the raw truth is that America has no real choice but to remain engaged with Pakistan — but this can’t be a binary arrangement in which Pakistan extorts and the US turns a blind eye to Pakistan’s role empowering rogue regimes and animating some of the world’s worst transnational terrorists.
Slow disengagement, a decrease in financial support (as the US has just done) — though not a full suspension — some arm-twisting of its patrons like China and Saudi Arabia and some strategic clarity in the Obama administration on what the real prize here is — which is a less psychotic Pakistan — rather than plodding along in the debilitating Afghanistan quagmire could move things, eventually, to a less dangerous course.
Pakistan has not yet thrown down the gauntlet — but Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar has made it clear he’s holding it up and poised to throw it.
Will the U.S. try to catch it or write it off as something that is worn out and if broken can’t be adequately repaired?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.