managed to forge friendly, constructive relationships with Pakistan’s people,
government, or military.
11 “US Equipment Vacated from Shamsi Air Base,” Geo News, December 9, 2011, http://www
.geo.tv/GeoDetail.aspx?ID=28257.
12 President Clinton’s televised critique of Pakistan’s trajectory during his visit to Islamabad provides a good example of public criticism, recounted in Chapter 6.
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It is possible that some, maybe many, of these failings were unavoidable.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations have routinely identified Pakistan as
one of the most difficult foreign policy challenges in the world. At times, these
U.S. administrations acted in ways they knew would expose them to harsh
criticism but preferred that outcome to other even less pleasant alternatives.
More often than not, U.S. policies amounted to picking the “least bad” option
from an unappetizing menu. That is the policymaker’s tragic responsibility; it
is what separates him from the idealist or the pundit.
That said, there were also times that Washington simply made bad choices.
There are lessons to be learned from these mistakes and what they say about
America’s ability to act with purpose in the world. Those lessons may help us
better manage future relations with Pakistan and, perhaps, with other countries
as well.
Just One Damned Thing after Another
The fact that relations between the United States and Pakistan came full circle
in the post-9/11 decade suggests a grand, tragic narrative. But for many of those
who lived the history, it usually felt more like a series of barely manageable
crises separated by brief periods of deceptive calm. As former Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice describes in her memoir of the Bush administration,
“I once described [Pakistan] as taking care of a critically ill patient; you got
up every day and dealt with the symptom of the moment, hoping over time to
cure the underlying disease of extremism.”13 A few U.S. officials acted upon
that hope, especially during the exhilarating period of political transition in
2008 and 2009, when leadership changed in both Islamabad and Washington.
Most U.S. officials, however, tended to find that emergency triage was more
than enough of a challenge to keep them occupied, particularly when other
troubles, like Iraq, loomed large.
Some members of the early Bush administration simply held out less hope
than Rice that history would ever amount to more than one damned thing after
another. In other words, success in dealing with the challenges of the day was
about the best you could expect to do. This perspective dominated the thinking
of Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage. There
is something deeply realistic, even humble, about such a worldview. At the
time it represented a stark contrast to the more ambitious perspectives of other
administration officials who believed that the United States had the power to
change the world in fundamental ways, and the responsibility to act in order
to realize those changes.
For Powell and Armitage, major changes in the world were possible yet diffi-
cult to engineer and, more often than not, unpredictable. Some have described
13 Rice, No Higher Honor (New York: Crown, 2011), p. 128.
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110
No Exit from Pakistan
their differences with other members of the Bush administration in academic
jargon, drawing contrasts between the “neoconservatives” and the “realists.”
And it is true that Powell and Armitage (along with Powell’s Director of Policy
“Powell Doctrine,” for instance, sets firm limits on when and how the United
States should go to war.
Powell and Armitage also seemed to share a very different temperament
from that of most other members of the administration’s national security
team. Powell’s memoir describes his passion for fixing beat-up old Volvos.14
He would drag dead ones home on a rope, then toil away until they were up
and running. Here was a man who took pleasure in putting things in their
proper place, not someone who craved building something new from scratch.
At the State Department, where Powell and Armitage worked so closely with
one another that they could “mind meld,” both tended to be fixers more than
conceptualizers. Among Bush’s national security team, they were arguably bet-
ter than anyone at actually getting things done in the world, but less persuasive
when it came to determining what ought to be done in the first place. Their
inability to steer the president away from the Iraq war is the most widely cited
example of that fact, but it was hardly the only one.
Securing Pakistan’s Partial U-Turn
All of this mattered a great deal to relations between the United States and Pak-
istan because President George W. Bush entrusted Powell and Armitage to man-
age South Asia policy at critical junctures in the early post-9/11 period. From
2001 to 2005, they took the lead in shifting that relationship from estrange-
ment to partially effective, if narrowly defined, cooperation. They established
a pattern of interaction with Pakistani President Musharraf and the Pakistani
military that persisted for nearly three years after they had retired from public
office. In the process they helped to avert at least one major war between India
and Pakistan.
These were no mean feats. Yet they were not transformative. Washington
got the relationship with Pakistan up and running again like one of Powell’s
old Volvos. There was no expectation that it would end up looking or driving
like a Porsche. The question is whether they could have aimed higher.
Born in 1945, Richard Armitage is no longer the fearless young man who
volunteered to stalk the jungles of Vietnam as an “ambush adviser” to a South
Vietnamese unit, or who led a convoy of ships loaded with over 20,000 South
Vietnamese to safety in the Philippines in 1975.15 Even so, this hard-charging
14 Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 212, 293–4, 392.
15 Armitage claims he was not a part of the CIA’s Phoenix program, despite claims by close friends and associates from the period. For more on his service in Vietnam, see James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 37–8, 44–52.
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U-Turn to Drift
111
power-lifter is by far the most intimidating presence I have met in government
service. Bald an
d seemingly as wide and deep as he is tall, Armitage uses
his heft to political advantage. His gravelly voice and direct manner can be
terrifying. If he decides, as one of his State Department staffers used to say,
to “wirebrush” you, you won’t forget it. Yet because he fills a room so easily,
his graciousness and extreme capacity for politeness in diplomatic settings can
also be shockingly disarming. Armitage is also an inveterate gossip who has
had brushes with political scandal, most recently in the case of outed Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Valerie Plame. Above all, however, he is a
gifted leader. He commands remarkable loyalty from a network of foreign
policy professionals in Washington and throughout the world.
During a visit to Pakistan with Armitage in February 2010 as part of a
Council on Foreign Relations project, I watched as Pakistanis of all stripes
treated him like returning royalty. But equally he was nearly always asked
whether in the days after 9/11 he had really told Pakistani officials – as reported
in Musharraf’s memoirs – that America would bomb Pakistan “back to the
Stone Age” if Washington did not get full and immediate cooperation in the
fight against al-Qaeda. Armitage vehemently rejects Musharraf’s version of
that history and claims he “never said anything about bombing or the Stone
Age.” The trouble is, when he tells you that, in all his massive, gruff intensity,
you feel like he might just bomb you back to the Stone Age. So it is very easy to imagine Pakistanis hearing – or believing they heard – the same thing, under
the circumstances.16
And what circumstances they were. The United States had been hit hard,
and immediately sought to prepare a major military counterpunch against bin
Laden and his Taliban hosts in remote, landlocked Afghanistan. That required
ground and air access for U.S. planes and troops, preferably through Pakistan’s
ports, roads, and airspace. It also meant an about-face in Pakistan’s supportive
relations with the Taliban regime in Kabul as well as the need for intensive
cooperation between the CIA and ISI in rounding up al-Qaeda operatives on
Pakistani soil. As President Bush writes in his memoir, “Pakistan was the most
pivotal nation” recruited to Washington’s side in the post-9/11 fight.17 In short
order, stemming from Armitage’s blunt request to the Pakistani ambassador,
Maleeha Lodhi, and the head of the ISI, General Mahmoud Ahmad, Washing-
ton had a promise from Musharraf’s government for all that it had requested.18
16 In the official U.S. account of this conversation, Armitage suggests that “Pakistan faces a stark choice: either it is with us or it is not; this was a black-and-white choice, with no grey.” See U.S. Department of State, Cable, “Deputy Secretary Armitage’s Meeting with Pakistan Intel Chief Mahmud: You’re Either With Us or You’re Not,” September 13, 2001, Secret, 9 pp.
[Excised], National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/
doc03-1.pdf.
17 George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), p. 187.
18 Armitage made seven specific requests to Mahmoud in their September 13 meeting, all of which were quickly accepted by Musharraf. See U.S. Department of State, Cable, “Deputy Secretary Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 05 Mar 2019 at 17:33:44, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107053755.004
112
No Exit from Pakistan
America’s demands were urgent, yet in a sense they were also defined quite
narrowly. “History starts today,” stated Armitage, meaning that Pakistan had
to make up its mind whether it would stand with or against the United States.
But it also meant that the Bush administration was willing to brush aside pre-
vious U.S. concerns that had defined relations between Islamabad and Wash-
ington for the better part of a decade, such as Pakistan’s nuclear program or its
undemocratic regime. U.S. sanctions that had been imposed for Musharraf’s
coup and Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests were waived, and the Bush adminis-
tration worked hard to craft a package of assistance that would rival the one
President Reagan had offered General Zia in the 1980s.
The underlying assumption on the part of Washington’s senior leadership
was that in order to get Musharraf on its side, America would have to buy him
some operating space with his army and his people who were not predisposed to
support cooperation with the United States. As Powell explained in a November
5, 2001, memo to President Bush, “Musharraf’s decision to fully cooperate with
the US in the wake of 9/11, at considerable political risk, abruptly turned our
stalled relationship around.”19 Powell clearly believed that to push Musharraf
too hard or too fast might send him over the edge.
Critics at the time, and since, have wondered whether Musharraf was quite
so fragile, and whether the deal could have been conditioned from the outset
in ways that would have offered Washington persistent sources of leverage in
the relationship. That these critics did not win the day in the traumatic period
shortly after al-Qaeda’s attacks makes sense. The Bush administration was
playing a catch-up game in Afghanistan and hardly looking for more trouble
with Pakistan. Yet the post-9/11 deal with Islamabad established a pattern of
U.S. generosity that would prove difficult to escape even as its faults became
more apparent.
Washington quickly cancelled $1 billion in Pakistani debts to the United
States, deferred the payment of billions more, and directed international finan-
cial institutions to support Pakistan in other ways as well.20 In June 2003,
President Bush met with President Musharraf at Camp David and pledged a
five-year aid package of $3 billion, split evenly between military and civilian
Armitage’s Meeting with General Mahmud: Actions and Support Expected of Pakistan in
Fight against Terrorism,” September 14, 2001, Secret, 5 pp. [Excised], http://www.gwu.edu/
∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/doc05.pdf; U.S. Embassy (Islamabad), Cable, “Musharraf
Accepts the Seven Points” September 14, 2001, Secret, 4 pp. [Excised], http://www.gwu.edu/
∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/doc05.pdf.
19 U.S. Department of State, Memorandum, From Secretary of State Colin Powell to U.S. President George W. Bush, “Your Meeting with Pakistani President Musharraf,” November 5, 2001,
Secret, 2 pp. [Excised], http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/doc21.pdf.
20 “US Formally Forgives $1B in Pakistani Loans,” Voice of America, April 5, 2003, http://
www.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-a-2003-04-05-1-US-66849252.html; “Economy on the
Mend?” Dawn, August 26, 2002, http://archives.dawn.com/2002/08/26/ed.htm.
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U-Turn to Drift
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pots.21 By the end of fiscal year 2004, Washington had provided Pakistan with
$4 billion in assistance.22
By later that summer, the terms of that new arrangement were set and
&nbs
p; shielded from additional review even though there were already reasons to
wonder whether the arrangement might be recalibrated to better serve U.S.
interests. Senior administration officials considered the package more like a
reward for wartime services Pakistan had already rendered than as a point
of leverage for new negotiations. The administration chose to focus on what
Pakistan had provided – from high level arrests of al-Qaeda operatives to
logistical support for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan – and not on what
Pakistan had failed to do, like taking a decisive stance against the Taliban
fighters who fled from Afghan battlefields.
Along with the aid deal, Washington also agreed to reimburse Pakistan
for military expenditures related to the war in Afghanistan. Those “coalition
support funds” sent a billion dollars per year into Pakistani coffers. They were
only loosely based on verifiable Pakistani costs. Even more sensitive types of
aid were provided without public fanfare. To help secure Pakistan’s nuclear
arsenal, Washington granted the Pakistani military’s Strategic Plans Division at
least $100 million, along with technical information and training.23 Although
there is no publicly available record, it is widely accepted that the United States
also provided hundreds of millions of dollars or more to the ISI to encourage
its cooperation and improve its ability to help find and kill terrorists. It is
rumored that the new ISI headquarters in Islamabad was built with American
funds.24
At the center of this arrangement was a quiet gentleman’s agreement by
President Bush not to take steps that might politically undermine his Pakistani
counterpart. A month after the al-Qaeda attacks, Bush met with Musharraf in
New York City and, in response to a question about whether the United States
might again “abandon” Pakistan as it had at the end of the Cold War, Bush
replied, “You tell your people that the President looked you in the eye and told
you that he would stick with you.”25
21 David E. Sanger, “Bush Offers Pakistan Aid, but No F-16s,” New York Times, June 25, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/world/bush-offers-pakistan-aid-but-no-f-16-s
.html? pagewanted=all&src=pm.
22 Susan B. Epstein and K. Alan Kronstadt, “Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance,” Congressional Research Service, CRS Report 7–5700, June 7, 2011, http://fpc.state.gov/documents/