Pakistan's Dangerous Games

After the resolution of the current India-Pakistan crisis, it will be past time to impose severe costs on the Pakistani Army and its leaders for their continued use of terrorist organizations as an arm of Islamabad’s foreign policy. It is probably not a coincidence that a week before the horrific terrorist attack in Kashmir, during which militants massacred over two dozen tourists, the Pakistani Chief of Staff General Asim Munir called Kashmir Pakistan’s “jugular vein.”

This account of my conversation with General Munir’s predecessor General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) is relevant to understanding how Pakistan consistently tries to evade responsibility for attacks while continuing to support terrorist organizations.

Despite our deep frustrations with each other, meetings between U.S. and Pakistani officers evinced a sense of mutual respect based on experience in the profession of arms. [U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan David] Hale and I met with Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of army, and Gen. Naveed Mukhtar, director general of ISI. I had spoken with Naveed at his request two weeks earlier; we shared a background in tanks and mechanized warfare. Having learned of his interest in the history of the American Civil War, I had sent him a copy of Williamson Murray’s book, A Savage War. Naveed, having learned of my daughter’s upcoming wedding, sent a beautiful hand-knotted carpet, which, because its expense far exceeded what would be appropriate to accept, went directly to a government warehouse. Naveed developed his interest in the American Civil War during his attendance at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. In his 2011 War College thesis, “Afghanistan—Alternative Futures and their Implications,” he wrote:

“Establishing a viable context for Afghan stability and security involves key regional and global stakeholders. Towards that end, the United States needs to employ major diplomatic measures designed to ease regional tensions and prevent external players from derailing the strategy.”

He was right, but he might also have written that the United States should try to solve the problem that Pakistan was creating. Naveed and other Pakistan Army officers often sounded like they were diagnosing the situation in South Asia as dispassionate outside observers even as they drove much of the instability and violence that was the subject of their analysis. I opened the meeting with condolences for the more than eight thousand soldiers who had lost their lives to terrorist groups since 9/11 and the more than twenty thousand Pakistani civilians whom terrorists had killed across those years. Having studied their army’s recent adaptation to the demands of counterinsurgency, I expressed admiration for their soldiers’ courage, especially given that their families were also at risk. I told them that Americans were deeply saddened by the attack on the Peshawar Army Public School. I intended these opening remarks, in part, to expose the confounding contradiction of the Pakistan Army’s asking its soldiers to sacrifice in battle against terrorist groups while a wing of the army nurtured terrorist organizations with connections to those same groups. I told the generals that Ambassador Hale and I wanted first to listen so we might learn from their perspective and apply what we learned to the new administration’s policy toward Pakistan and South Asia.

General Bajwa took full advantage of the opportunity to orient a member of a new U.S. administration to his worldview. Qamar Javed Bajwa, born in Karachi to a Punjabi military family, joined the Pakistan Army in 1978. He received training at the Pakistan Military Academy, National Defense University, Canadian Army Command and Staff College, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His comments seemed crafted to preempt what he expected to hear from me: exhortations to “do more” against the Taliban and the Haqqani network and hopeful expressions that we could, finally, work together to end the violence in Afghanistan. Like his predecessor, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Bajwa wanted me to accept the fundamental contradiction between denials that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations enjoyed support from Pakistan and assurances that the Pakistani Army could do more against these safe havens with sustained U.S. support.

The conversation with Bajwa and Naveed followed a recurring pattern I had witnessed over the years since September 11, 2001. Pakistani military leaders, army commanders and heads of ISI, were brilliant at manipulating earnest American counterparts. As always, the conversation began with a litany of grievances from the Pakistan Army perspective. The first was the U.S. “abandonment” of Pakistan after the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Then there was the temporary suspension of all U.S. military and developmental assistance in 1979 and again in 1990, after the evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program could no longer be denied. From there, the conversation shifted to the portrayal of Pakistan as a victim: a victim of the massive influx of refugees as Afghans fled the Soviet occupation, the Afghan Civil War, and the brutality of the Taliban; a victim of sanctions imposed by the United States due to its nuclear program; a victim of what the Pakistani generals portrayed as a “U.S. war on terrorism” in which Pakistan had been a dutiful ally whose sacrifices exceeded those of the United States and all Coalition armies in Afghanistan combined; and finally, always, a victim of Indian aggression in pursuit of recidivist objectives in Kashmir and the encirclement of Pakistan through the establishment of an India-friendly Afghanistan.

The Pakistan-as-victim gambit then shifted to a narrative of weakness and beleaguerment. Pakistan was strained economically and overcommitted militarily. If only the United States were more patient and provided more assistance, Pakistan would gradually extend security to the regions in which the Taliban and various terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaeda, were based. Ignoring the implicit admission of the existence of safe havens on its territory, offers to do more in the future were interspersed with flat denials of support for the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and key facilitators of their operations such as the Haqqani network. For those Americans who remained skeptical, Pakistani officers would whisper the possibility that rogue or retired ISI officers might, out of habit and long-standing relationships, continue to advise some terrorist groups without the command’s knowledge, even though the ISI is vertically integrated into the

army’s chain of command. The clincher was a play to the ego of the visiting U.S. official. That official, Pakistani leaders intimated, would be the one to convince them to do more to pursue the Taliban, Haqqani network, and Al-Qaeda leaders. The United States would just need to be patient and share more information and provide more assistance.

The typical reaction from U.S. leaders was to believe that their Pakistani counterparts were sympathetic to U.S. positions but were simply powerless to effect change, especially on the timeline Americans expected. Those Americans often flew home and parroted the Pakistan Army’s main talking point: Pakistan needed more time and more money. And so, the United States wrote more checks and provided more weapons and supplies to those who were sustaining and helping orchestrate a war against them and their allies. It was serial gullibility as new U.S. officials rotated into military intelligence and diplomatic positions and Pakistani officials repeated their lines. Hale and I joked that the relationship had become almost farcical, but the joke was on us. A fundamental shift in policy was overdue, one that incentivized Pakistani leaders to change their behavior and, over time, tried to convince them that it was in their interest to end their support for terrorist organizations that had inflicted so much suffering not only in South and Central Asia and across the Middle East, but also around the world from Libya to France to the Philippines. And while the United States and other nations should continue to encourage a strong Pakistani civilian leadership, a realistic policy must acknowledge that the Pakistan Army makes the important decisions and holds the reins of power.

I tried to break out of the typical pattern by not using the talking points Bajwa and Naveed expected. I told the generals that the new administration would pay far more attention to deeds than words and explained that President Trump, as a businessman, would see funding our enemies indirectly through aid to Pakistan as a bad return on investment. To address General Bajwa’s complaint that the United States was always asking Pakistan to do more, underappreciating Pakistani sacrifices and the limits of Pakistan’s control over its far frontier, I assured him that we would stop asking him to do more. We would instead ask him and especially General Naveed to do less—provide less support to organizations that were killing Afghan and U.S. soldiers and murdering Afghan civilians. I hoped to at least convince him of our determination not to repeat mistakes of the past. I observed that U.S. administrations’ relations with Pakistan tended to go through a cycle that began with conversations like the one we were having. U.S. officials’ expectations rose after hearing Pakistani promises of real cooperation. The cycle always ended in abject disappointment. I said that I intended to stay at abject disappointment until there was a demonstrable change in behavior.

Hale and I discussed the sad pattern of U.S. policy toward Pakistan since 9/11, a pattern consistent with the definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Many diplomats and senior military officers, despite decades of experience to the contrary, continued to assume that the Pakistan Army would be honest with them and became a true partner in the fight against jihadist terrorists. As I met with our team to prepare for the final leg in New Delhi, it was increasingly clear that we needed a strategy that kept in mind long-term implications. I thought of how U.S. support for Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who in 1977 deposed and later killed the first elected prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Zia’s eleven years in power left a damning legacy on the army and the country, one from which Pakistan has not recovered. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States had unintentionally helped Zia, who believed that he was on “a mission, given by God, to bring Islamic order to Pakistan,” transform Pakistan into a global nexus of jihadist terrorism. I also remembered how, after 9/11, U.S. support for Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf, a former commander of the Pakistan Army who had internalized the army’s hatred for India as well as Zia’s affinity for Islamist militants, bolstered Pakistan’s ability to use terrorism not only in Afghanistan, but also against India.

As we boarded the plane bound for New Delhi, it was clear that from the Pakistan Army’s perspective, everything was ultimately about India. A friendly government in Afghanistan would give Pakistan “strategic depth” in case of another war with India. And the ISI’s support for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was dependent on the Pakistan Army’s vast terrorist infrastructure, built to sustain groups that it uses as an arm of its foreign policy toward India. One such group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), was founded in 1987 as a joint venture between the ISI and terrorists later involved in the founding of Al-Qaeda. LET’s leader, Hafiz Saeed, made clear that LET’s mission was to “fight against the evil trio, America, Israel, and India.”

As the Trump ‘47 Administration surpasses its first one-hundred days, there is no shortage of crises demanding its attention. The prospect of war between two nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, demands high priority. In recent years, Pakistan and its sponsor, the People’s Republic of China have attached or sponsored attacks on India’s frontier. U.S. assurances and support for India in this moment will strengthen relations between the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracies.

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For more on Pakistan and its use of terrorist organizations as an arm of its foreign policy, see: At War With Ourselves, pages 170-172 and Battlegrounds, pages 201-207.

For more on the importance of India-U.S. relations, see At War With Ourselves, pages 118-121, and Battlegrounds, pages 207-213.

See also this discussion with former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Hussein Haqqani.